There are a couple of thoughts that I’ve been having and they’re somewhat linked. There was Pupu’s blog-essay on knowledge and then there were a series of recent essays on Suvro da’s blog regarding human beings and their ways, the rise and fall of civilizations, and education, and there have been other essays, a couple of well-written biographies, and some academic articles that I’ve been reading and re-reading, and there was something that was bothering me but I’ve not had the attention required to actually organize my thoughts well but I was wondering and thinking about knowledge again, and in a formal way this time, and within academia.
Over this last year I realise something which took me a very, very long time to realise… although I felt I’d known about it for a long while when I read Pupu's essay on being knowledgeable: It’s not just that people do not know but it’s that people aren’t interested in knowing any longer; that human beings simply aren't seriously interested in anything, and knowing anything that matters. But this thought kept niggling me for this is what is even within formal academia and at higher and higher levels or so it seems to me. Knowledge: the sort of knowledge that I used to and still think and consider to be valuable, and the general mark of being educated seems to be rapidly losing its value. Knowledge of history in its many-layered connections, knowledge about the social world, knowledge of the natural sciences and the natural world, geography and the political and economic conditions of nations, of great people and their works, of philosophy, of humour, psychology, the environment, knowledge regarding works of literature and poetry and religion.....and the ability to meaningfully connect all that one learns, and to share some (not just collecting and reciting disconnected heaps of information or to spout some random bits of reading).... even these seem to matter less and less... Not only is knowledge of this sort being valued less there seems to be an invisible resistance to this sort of knowing…people aren’t even interested in such connected knowing any longer. And I'm not lying but I knew a couple of students - they were class-mates in school - who read more when they were in school and high-school than some of the people who are doing their doctorates. It actually embarrasses me to say this but even I read a wider range of stuff than most people in my department do.
I'm thinking of generalized knowledge and people who gather PhDs. It’s probably bad manners to say this – but it’s a joke. How can it be that a person receives the title of ‘doctor of philosophy’ (no less!) and yet is expected to know almost nothing outside the wee-bitty area of specialization, which is what a PhD has become…? (I won’t get into the questions of how much ‘research’ work is of genuine worth, meaning, and displays some level of originality). Now I don’t think it would be marvelous if all folks had opinions about everything – it’s better sometimes to have no opinions on things because one simply doesn’t know, and to speak only about that which one does know. But mere opinions and informed knowledge and the ability to build bridges amongst bodies of knowledge are not the same things. And I do admire highly focused scientists or workers who know not much about everything but simply focus with passionate intensity on their own area of work. Marie Curie, from the bit that I have read about her, was not interested in expressing her views on anything much, but – before people start thinking of her - scientists, social scientists, and other PhD pass-outs are not budding Marie Curies. So I honestly can’t see how knowing less and less and writing less and less, and being less and less interested about interconnected matters can be a great leap forwards …well, it might be a great leap for sure but into what exactly?
....I often think how professors could use poems, stories, anecdotes from the lives of great men and women, speeches, and quotations within sociology, and meaningfully along with all the regular 'items' that they use...Yet remembering these are not even considered to be particularly valuable any longer within education as a whole, leave alone within a social science discipline. Meaningfully quoting from memory, connecting it to the matter in hand is not really viewed as being something worthy of admiration or respect or of significance. It’s one thing not to know or not to remember – but when we say that it’s no longer even important or worthwhile, and this within an ideal-type portrayal of education (because memorization seems to be bothersome) that’s when I think there is something 'off'. And yet what happens? We also forget that memorization, and at different levels, is possible. And so it’s equally true that some Indian graduate students with their ‘amazing’ memories are sometimes venerated because people, on an average, seem to have forgotten that memorization is indeed something human beings are capable of doing. It doesn’t even matter what some of these students rattle off (sometimes it can be parroting senselessly and without comprehension from a text-book) but others look on with admiring astonishment as though the person were as marvelous as some rare prophet walking on water…
My own prof. who recently retired was exclaiming with somewhat restrained but visible anger and annoyance that sociologists don’t even seem particularly interested in history, and that we had decided at some point that knowing or talking about history was not considered to be relevant within sociological studies….
Even if I take the matter of social psychology – a specialized area …or let me re-frame that: it was considered to be an area of specialization, and with reason once-upon-a-time. Social scientists believed that a discipline that combined the understanding of the internal processes of the human mind and the external structures and processes of society would be a discipline that could draw from the best of both worlds. And now one needs to simply read what the long gone original masters of the discipline – like William James (on the varieties of religious experiences) and Maslow (self-actualization) and Mead (‘I’ and the ‘me’ and the ‘generalized other’) and Cooley (‘looking-glass self’) wrote, and even Erving Goffman (who wouldn’t be considered to be a dinosaur exactly) to what the new social psychologists are writing about, and how. Some of them even imply that James was too ‘broad’ and non-empirical, so now we split up the discipline finer and finer and finer till we have ten million people working on the head of a pin (and ten hundred of them are cited in every paper). So we split up the study of ‘self and identity’ (a sub area, or maybe even a sub-sub area of specialization within social psychology) from the study of emotions from the study of awareness from the study of personality from the study of motivations from the study of deviance…well maybe I should stop right there. Deviance is of course another area of specialization and of course the quantitative experts aren’t on talking terms with the qualitative experts. And one mustn’t even talk about cross-disciplinary flowering. If one starts getting into talking about the ‘self’ in philosophy – the social psychologists and the philosophers are not on communicating terms….in fact even the psychologists working in the field of ‘self and identity’ are not interacting much with sociologists working in the field of ‘self and identity’….
Knowing, remembering, connecting, and sharing are gradually being seen as impossible tasks for the meagre human mind, and so since people who can remember and connect and who do have large bodies of knowledge in their heads are such absolute and utter rarities – we’ve come to the smart conclusion that we do not need to remember ‘lots of stuff’ any longer. That recent study conducted – with some flaws – and the comment by the researcher, that remembering is not as important as building connections, and that 'knowledge workers' these days are somehow more ‘refined’ because they ‘connect’ amongst knowledge bodies (really? - all that connecting falls flat when one doesn't remember history but is teaching a course which requires and demands remembering, at the very least, world history far more than sociological theories of different brands...), that there is always ‘google’ to check up what we don’t know and can’t remember (that there is: I sometimes wonder how many instructors would be out of their temporary jobs without being able to access google), and that we are simply being more ‘sensible’ somehow by knowing ‘where’ to look to find what we can’t remember – that single study is an illustration enough of something more pervasive, and something that has been steadily accumulating over decades. And one can observe and look around, and people doing their PhDs too can look and see what is expected, and indeed admired within their own areas and from their own discipline and from their own disciplinary specialization...
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