The Unnecessary Atomization of Knowledge

The NYTimes just posted an interesting article tiled, Losing Our Way in the World, an excellent piece on showing how people seemingly lack knowledge on how to integrate discrete nuggets of data into a comprehensive framework as seen by the quote below.

SADLY, we often atomize knowledge into pieces that don’t have a home in a larger conceptual framework. When this happens, we surrender meaning to guardians of knowledge and it loses its personal value.

A number of years ago, the documentary “A Private Universe,” about how we misperceive the world around us, was filmed at Harvard’s commencement. Twenty-three faculty members, alumni and graduating seniors were asked, “Why is it warm in the summer and cold in the winter?” All but two answered incorrectly, saying the Earth was closer to the sun in the summer than in the winter (it’s actually closer in January).

Arguably, the students were drawing on fragments of what they had learned in class somewhere — didn’t Earth’s orbit form an ellipse around the sun? — instead of what they could perceive themselves, as the seasons changed.

One “correct” answer has to do with the tilt of Earth’s rotational axis with respect to its orbit. But a Neolithic farmer might cast his arm in an arc across the sky and explain that the sun was low in the winter and high in the summer. The farmer’s explanation would be perfectly correct, rooted in experience.

Creative people, in this writers's opinion, avoid this subtle trap as synthesizing new ideas necessarily involve integrating the parts into a comprehensive whole dictated by the specific discipline in which the creative act is housed whether it be composing a masterful work like So What or conceptualizing the theory of relativity while riding on a tram, something education should teach the young in this connected age of the web.