Having knowledge vs. knowing
Information is literally at all our fingertips, but we’re knowing less than ever.
It doesn’t matter where you went to school. Most of us went through this same story when it comes to learning.
We’re handed a textbook of carefully organized information about a subject, and at the end of it, we sit a test. The test had one purpose: to measure how much of that information you had retained. The score somehow became the whole point of going to school. Not whether anything in the book surprised, delighted, or left you with more questions. Not whether the ideas changed the way you saw yourself or the world. It’s just: how much information did you absorb?
This was your first experience in “having knowledge”. And from then on, it never really ends.
We’ve learned to treat knowledge as something to possess and accumulate. We speak of people who have a lot of knowledge the way we speak of people who have a lot of money—as though wisdom were a quantity, something you could stack up and display. We want more of it, faster. We want the insight without the reading, the understanding without the confusion, the conclusion without the thinking needed to get there.
However, psychoanalyst Erich Fromm says that “having knowledge” is why many of us end up not actually “knowing”.
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