Here’s some food for thought from the issue of Adbusters I received recently.

We used to have an intellectual ideal that we could contain within ourselves the whole of civilization. It was very much an ideal—none of us actually fulfilled it—but there was this senses that, through wide reading and study, you could have a depth of knowledge and could make unique intellectual connections among the pieces of information stored within your memory. [Richard] Foreman [author of The Gods are Pounding My Head] suggests that we might be replacing that model—for both intelligence and culture—with a much more superficial relationship to information in which the connections are made outside of our own minds through search engines and hyperlinks. We’ll become “pancake people” with wide access to information but no intellectual depth, because there’s little need to contain information within our heads when it’s so easy to find with a mouse click or two.
-Nicholas Carr, “Computing the Costs,” The Sun Magazine, www.the sunmagazine.org

I’m sympathetic to many aspects of the argument, and was talking with some folks at the NITLE summer seminars this week about the fact that memorization does, in fact, remain an important though often neglected skill in the modern world.

But in the modern world, how can any one person hope to contain within them the whole of civilization or even the tiniest fraction thereof? At the rate at which human knowledge is advancing and material being produced, what we know today may be obsolete tomorrow. Moreover, who is to sift through it all? And who is to prioritize what is to be learned? Unless we accept some sort of canon and fossilize knowledge, it is perhaps best that we accept that much of it is beyond us, yet to be discovered.
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That said, we do need depth of learning, and I do fear it is being lost. Knowing where to find something is know the same as knowing it and until you know it is doesn’t actually figure into your everyday thinking. Simply knowing where to find something is not the same as having been exposed to it. Having been exposed to it is not the same as having studies it, and that is still a step below having truly learned or internalized it. Oddly enough, when you memorize things or at least learn them very well, you find they come to the fore to enlighten the world or be enlightened by the world at the time when they are the most useful. They simply cannot do that if you have to look them up, even if all the knowledge in the world is at your finger tips.

I am and always have been terrible at memorization, but I wish I had been more drilled in the skill. What will the children of tomorrow think?