Is Knowledge Really Power?
January 26, 2008 by Steve Rosenbaum
Uploaded by :: SL Emerick
Most of formal education is still focused on knowledge acquisition. But there really has been a dramatic change in the last 50 to 100 years which makes this less important. First, there’s been an explosion in knowledge. You can know something about most things but it’s difficult to know a lot about everything. Take the example of medicine. There is now so much to know that a generalist has to turn patients over a specialist because they don’t know enough to treat you and often times diagnose you.
How about music. I remember when most people knew all the popular tunes. There just weren ‘t that many. Now there are almost as many types of music as their were songs. “Name that tune” is a lot harder than it used to be. This goes on subject after subject, topic by topic.
Take the champions on Jeopardy. All you have to do to throw them off is give a lot of questions about popular culture or things out of their generation. You could also take something like history and ask questions from out this country such as Nigerian leaders of the 20th century.
Second in the past, this information wasn’t readily available so if you didn’t learn it, you were out of luck. Now on almost any topic, you have instant access to information. The emphasis switches from knowing to being able to find. So what this suggests is a different paradigm in education.
I know in the corporate world this is a shift from knowing to doing. As your boss, I really don’t care what you know, I care about what you can do. If there isn’t an application of knowledge, it has very little value in this setting.
Knowing has its limitations, but knowledge of the information increases one’s ability to think critically when listening to someone else blather about it.
The ability to find information is important, but it can’t eclipse the importance of knowing information beyond the basics.
http://awaitingtenure.wordpress.com/
I didn’t say that knowledge isn’t important but with the expanding pool of knowledge, even the smartest people really know only a tiny fraction of what their is to know. Here’s the example. In Shakespere’s time the English languages had around 25,000 words. It’s alot to remember but certainly possible. Today, there are over a million words in the English language and growing.
So if you had a huge vocabulary of say 100,000 words, you wouldn’t know 90% of the words. So knowing how to look up the words you don’t know quickly is an important skill.
Also having knowledge doesn’t mean you can do critical thinking. In fact, if you can do critical thinking in one field it doesn’t mean you can do it in another. You might be a good critical thinking in English literature and unable to graps basic concepts in physics.
The point is that as the pool of knowledge grow exponentially, it’s important to rethink what you really want to teach about a subject or even general knowledge.
Seems like this would be similar to my ideas of teaching mastery of skills. Teaching people to find information independently with the requisite skills they possess (or have learned) seems key.
[...] Speed Weblog touches rapidly on the topic of the value of knowledge for its own sake in his post Is Knowledge Really Power? It is a thought-provoking point that many unschooling families have dwelled upon when considering [...]
Well said, Steve, and I appreciate your comment on my post about class sizes.
The great thing today is you can find almost anything you need on the web; the role of education is to give people context so they can think creatively about how to actually USE what they’ve learned.
I like your blog and look forward to checking it out further.
In corporate training and learning we often get asked about the ideal class size. The answer has ranged from 5 to 8 all the way up to 300 or 400. It just depends on what you’re trying to do.
Thanks for the nice comment
i convey my thanks to you. I have faced some difficulty in understanding “Is knowledge is really power”. if you could
explain it in a clear manner ,it will helpful to me
I believe that in today’s world, with its vast amount of information, the important task is in discerning the essential knowledge from the unessential or one might say the important from the unimportant. What is important or essential knowledge may be defined differently by each person. For me, that knowledge would contain the arts, history, world politics, world religions, philosophy, and sociology. And I might think of some more if I thought about it some more. No more time to think. Have to go.