DailyPost 1650
JUST BECAUSE WE KNOW SO LITTLE…
Just because we know so little, we don’t know what we are missing out. We might have missed the bus, or might be we have been missing buses on a regular basis and we don’t even know of it. Ignorance is bliss is an old saying, it is difficult to make out that in the present world, it is anything but a very caustic sarcasm. As we move forward in knowledge, skills and expertise based world, the stark difference is right there in the open. But if you know so little, then the non-discerning eye would have missed out even the the deepest valley. More often than not, if one part of the knowledge is known, the complementary and supplementary parts remain unknown.
With some exceptions which prove the rule, what has been our knowledge tradition? The first cardinal principle, though unstated, is that there is a finite amount of knowledge. The second is that it can be mastered through an exam, if you pass the exam you become knowledgeable. The third fact is that once mastered, it would stay with you for all your life. Fourth, whatever people might say, the educated can find their way without making much of an effort. Both research and practice have regularly demonstrated the audacity of these claims. People do stick onto these, doing immense damage to themselves and the ecosystem around them.
The challenge is not with people who know that they know so little and also with the people believed to be not knowledgeable. Our main handicap is from the people, who have the whole of he English alphabet in degrees. The length of the degrees has nothing to do with what you know and even lesser with what you can deliver. This knowledge / expertise class, who were to usher a modern world, over a period of time, have become biggest obstacles. Finding nothing great to do in their area of expertise, they get into every area where they influence decisions, government or otherwise. They are in approval committees, expert committees, university senates, advisors and even commercial consultants. Nobody has ever evaluated their worth and the impact which should have come out of that role.
Degrees and being ignorant about the work you are working on, can happen with anybody. But we should have the capability to learn, assimilate, validate, execute and deliver and move ahead. Take it as, illiteracy afflicts the area you don’t know of. Being frank about their ignorance is something which can never be a part of our DNA. Worse still is pervasive ignorance super inflated ego. This can only be a cocktail to disaster. We have been seeing such results all around. With the knowledge complexity of Digital Immersion Age increasing by the day and equally exponential growth of ignorance / ego model, it has become extremely difficult to understand our future trajectory.
CAN A COUNTRY WHICH CELEBRATES KNOWLEDGE BE SO IGNORANT!