What Do You Think? Knowledge Is Really a Power?

Most of formal education is still focused on knowledge acquisition. But there has been a dramatic alter 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 to treat you and sometimes diagnose you.

Second historically, this information wasn’t readily obtainable so if you didn’t learn it, you were out of luck. Now on 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.

Take the champions on Jeopardy. All you must 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.

How about music? I recall when most people knew all the popular tunes. There weren‘t that lots of. Now there’s as lots of 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.

As I know in the corporate world this is a shift from knowing to doing. As your boss, I don’t care what you know, I care about what you can do. If there isn’t an application of knowledge, it’s tiny value in this setting.