In my home back then, there was this very big encyclopedia, and here if you own one in your house, then your family is definitely enlightened gamilr when having an encyclopedia in your house meant your family was among the enlightened ones. Tody, knowledge is literally in our pockets. Just Google search and see thousands of pages on any topic, not to talk of where a twelve year old YouTube has can explain equilibrium in physics better than some lecturers. Does this mean we are smarter? Are we truly more knowledgeable than our parents and grandparents, who go long distances just to find a single book?
The answer is not that straight forward
There's the access to knowledge, then there's understanding and being able to apply it also, two different things. Back then, knowledge was earned. No PDF, no powerpoint, nothing, then, If someone wanted to learn, they had to put in effort, trek for long, search books manually, no Google or anything to make this easier. Today, everything is at our fingertips, but it’s like the easier it gets, the lazier we become. We search for something, find it and in the next minute its gone, we don't remember again, we watch educational videos and while watching a distracting notification pops up and that's all with the video. Today, there's overload of information, but our ability to retain and really learn Is weak.
Can you take a moment to think about our parents or grandparents, though had limited resources, they made good use of it, you see them recite proverbs, tell historical stories, and do mental calculations faster than many of us who have calculators on our phones. Reason for their wisdom was not just because they ha a knowledge of it but because they very well understood it, they might do or calculate in a different way, but will definitely arrive at the same answer , story or point. And we, of this generation, we struggle to have deep conversations without checking the internet for facts. We only know a little bit about everything, not enough, we jump from one topic to the other without fully understanding the first.
We also don't take time to really learn, even if its a tiktok video, once its over 30secs, we swipe it off. We are too used to quick, fast, and easy information that we struggle to sit down and read a proper book. We really have access to unlimited knowledge, but are we really learning. We can't pick up a book to read and not chat or pick up our phones countless times, and that's even if we finish the book at the end of the day not to talk of a week, our ancestors are not like that.
But, we also have advantages too. We can learn new skills within hours. Someone in a remote village in Nigeria can take an online course from Harvard University without leaving the comfort of his home. We connect across the globe, and a lot of things are available today that helps simplify complex problems. We have great opportunities, now, are we really making good use of those opportunities or we just let them slip off.
I believe knowledge is not just about access, but about effort, the way we think, how we engage and how we apply what was learnt. If we truly want to be smarter than them(our ancestors), we need to stop with just consuming information and start engaging with it. Otherwise, we will just be a generation with all the knowledge with little understanding of them all and nothing to really show for it.