Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost information? - T.S. Eliot

“Can anyone answer the question?”

When silence greeted him, the professor mentally groaned. He wondered what was wrong with young people these days and whether his class had been the same. “You,” he said, pointing to the young man sitting directly in front of him. The student in question sunk lower in his seat. “You explained this concept perfectly in your essay—the only perfect paper I have ever graded, I might add.” He paused while the class broke out into polite applause and the student nearly disappeared under his desk. “Would you care to reiterate what you wrote for the benefit of your classmates who had difficulty with the assignment?”

“I—” the student began.

“Don’t be shy,” the professor interrupted. “Stand up, there’s a good boy.”

The student rose slowly. “I would explain it, professor, but I—”

“But you what? Speak up so we can all hear you.”

“But I do not remember what I wrote, sir,” he finished lamely.

The professor was startled. “You could not have forgotten everything overnight. You just turned the paper in yesterday.”

“I knew it when I was researching it, sir. I understood it perfectly. It took me almost all night to finish it up. But as soon as I was done …” his voice trailed off.

The professor inwardly sighed. “I understand. But tell me this, if you were just going to forget what you wrote instantly, why did you write it?”

The student shuffled his feet. “It was an assignment, sir.”

“But why did you do the assignment?”

“Because—because you said to, sir.” The class laughed and the student turned bright red as he quickly sat down.

“Is that the only reason?” the professor asked. The student remained silent. “I want you all to listen carefully,” the professor said, now addressing the entire class. “You cannot just bring together a slew of information into an assignment and not absorb any of it. That is not the point of coming to school or doing homework. In fact, there is no point in coming to school, not if you are not going to learn anything. You have to soak up that information and take it to the next level—knowledge. You have all this information—much more than I ever did when I was your age—practically laid at your feet but you are not taking it in. You should be able to know these things off the top of your head.”

“But sir, aren’t knowledge and information basically the same thing?” the male student asked.

“No more than wisdom and knowledge are,” the professor replied. At his students’ blank stares, he hurried to explain. “Information is what you have access to. Knowledge is information that you have made your own. Wisdom is using that knowledge well. Right now, you are all at the information stage.”

“How do we get to the knowledge stage, sir?”

“Pull the trapdoor. Walk onto the next set. Take your pick.” The class sniggered. “But in all seriousness, my opinion? I think some people are too overloaded with information sometimes to be truly knowledgeable. We have so much information that we cannot possibly process it all. We’re not using our knowledge wisely.” He paused. “How many of you have cell phones?” Nearly every member of the class raised his hand. He nodded. “I expected so. How many of your phones have some sort of electrical accessory that you know you really do not need?” Same response. “Is this an appropriate use of technology? Did people really spend decades and millions of dollars to develop these trinkets?” No one dared to answer him. “Is there reasoning, an intelligent motive, behind what society does?”

“Money,” someone called out. The class tittered.

“Yes, money. In my opinion, money is what drove us from wisdom, to settle for knowledge, to information. We just want more, newer and “better,” not really understanding why we want these things. Remember the argumentum ad novitatem. It is not necessarily better just because it is newer. Now, do you think it was worth it to spend years and millions of dollars to develop a pen that could write in outer space when a regular old pencil did the job just as well?” The class remained silent. “In trying to gain more information, we have lost knowledge. More information does not necessarily mean more knowledge because you are at a loss to try to sort it all out. In trying to gain more knowledge, we have lost the wisdom to handle it. We can know but never understand and that might not be enough.” He paused and looked around his class expectantly.

“It is like opening too many pages at once on an Internet browser, is it not, professor?” a female student volunteered suddenly. “Because the computer cannot handle that much information at once?”

He blinked. “I suppose you could think of it that way.”

“Plus, many of those pages are bound to be pop-ups and ads we do not want or need to read anyway,” she continued. “They just distract us from what we are trying to do; they slow us down. We have to sort through all the pages before we can find the ones we are looking for and understand that.”

Her classmates nodded, understanding.

“We cannot just accept information that is given to us, can we, professor? We have to process it and apply it,” the male student interjected. “It is like a grain, a little seed. We can eat it when it is young and never give it a chance to grow into something bigger—then we have information—or we can plant it so that it can develop into knowledge and maybe someday, bear the fruits of wisdom.”

The professor was a little flustered. “That is a valid analogy, I think.”

“When I was really little, my grandmother used to chew up my food for me before I ate it,” another student added. Everyone in the class turned to look at him, not understanding what relevance his comment had to the discussion. The tips of his ears flushed pink but he continued. “But eventually, you have to learn to chow down on your own. Then it becomes knowledge.” The class murmured in agreement.

But the professor did not understand. “The food becomes knowledge?” he questioned uncertainly.

The student laughed, regaining his footing. “Of course not, professor. But if we want everything done for us, we lose that knowledge and we are just left with information. To reach the stage of knowledge, we have to stop letting our grandmothers chew our food for us.”


posted - 5:26 PM