Frequently in life I have found myself consulted by people who wished to have things explained to them, and without having ever studied formally to be a teacher, the task has often fallen to me from my youth to tutor and instruct others in a wide variety of subjects. While seeking to understand material that sought to teach the elements of grammar of English, it struck me that the texts provided were often defective in a major way, and that is that they failed to grasp why it was that people were seeking to learn the subject matter in the first place. Indeed, when we study subjects in formal education, we are presented with material organized in a logical way, one that is consumed with categorization and often rigid memorization of different materials. When we open a text of geography, we are confronted with a detailed discussion of different branches of geography that deal with different subject matter from a different approach. When we seek texts on learning languages, we are given word lists to memorize or lists of verbs with their conjugations, or a discussion of various tenses. When we learn history, we are often subjected to pages where the historian tries to show himself or herself to be the master of the relevant historiography, pronouncing upon the biases or inaccuracies of earlier influential historians. This sort of approach, of seeing a massive body of information to memorize without understanding and seeing education as the process of segmenting and compartmentalizing the search for knowledge into smaller and more mysterious specialties with their own specialized jargon, tends to cut off people from the precise sort of knowledge that they want to find.

This has often puzzled me greatly. What is to account for the massive gulf that exists between the genuine desire and even longing for knowledge that people have and the backwards way that this knowledge is often conceived of and instructed to others? As a young child, I showed an early aptitude for reading maps, and in a family where this skill was highly needed and appreciated, it soon fell to me to engage in a great deal of navigation of maps, often in unfamiliar territory when my family was traveling, and I had to learn how to orient myself in a location and seek routes that went in the direction we wanted to go on, to deal with the inevitable detours and traffic conditions that followed, and to master the art of getting myself and my family from point A to point B in a reasonable time and to find routes, moreover, that allowed us to see the sights that we wanted to along the way. Ever since then I have maintained a high degree of interest in geography, a task that has proven useful in understanding the world around me and how it is that people find themselves following the same sorts of roads and paths and finding history made in the same places on a pretty consistent basis. It has also taught me that not only does the outside world have a terrain that influences us and shapes us, but so too other aspects of the world have space and terrain that we must understand, including our own minds and even the sound palettes of songs, where different musical parts and voices must fit within the frequencies and rhythms of each song to create a pleasing whole.

When we want to know something as people, we often have particular problems in mind. The teenager leaving home to go to university (an American would say college) who wants to learn how to do his laundry and not turn all of his clothing pink or how to cook enough to avoid starvation in between visits home has practical issues to deal with. It does little good to think of the different specialties of being a chef or of learning different categories of dishes. He does not care if he is making soup or a soufflé, but rather wants to know given what ingredients he has in his fridge and pantry, what can he make with them that will satisfy the gnawing hunger in his belly. When people want to learn a language, they are seeking to understand others and to be understood, to be able to work and to live in their own country or another one. Even those who study less immediately practical fields like the classics want to understand the wisdom and learning of the Greek and Latin world, to master the wisdom of an Aristotle or Marcus Aurelius, or laugh with Menander or Aristophanes, or speak like a Demosthenes or Cicero in their native language without the need for a translator in the way. There is some kind of goal in mind, not the study of subject matter as a pure and isolated field, but rather as the means to an end, as a place where one may learn how to use tools to obtain the knowledge that one seeks.

To be sure, there are some people who do enjoy knowledge for its own sake. There are some people whose minds are well-suited to the categorization of facts and the lines that demarcate various fields of inquiry and are able to profitably work within the narrow boundaries of the increasingly small academic domains in which people are able to inhabit in the present world. Perhaps even a few people are able to read papers and technical works in a few different scholarly domains and to know enough (or learn enough) of the lingo to get along and understand what they seek from the inquiries and studies of others. Some students, despite the best efforts of their instructors to present knowledge in the most tedious and boring way possible, find that their childlike love of inquiry and thirst for knowledge remains to them after years and years of formal education. Most people, though, seem to find themselves deeply discouraged by the experience. They ask, with every new subjects that is presented to them by their instructors, what use there is learning such and such a topic, and their teachers know little about practicalities and do not care. They have a syllabus to teach, exams to teach to, and their goal is to move their students along to the next year as efficiently as possible. Who has the time and energy and attention to spare to the longing to understand the world around us and to be understood that drives people to learn in the first place? Most people, after all, learn in a coercive process, because they are forced to by others or because they feel compelled to pass such and such a test or to have such a such a degree in order to make more money or find (or keep) a good job. The thought that areas of study and research came about because people wanted to know more about themselves and others and the universe around them and poked and prodded around in the darkness and struggled to shine a light in it long enough to make out some profitable areas of inquiry and some rough and ready approaches to answer their questions and some rough demarcations between different domains of inquiry never enters anyone’s mind. But it should.