Your General Knowledge - a product of your education or your curiosity?

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Do ppl with a good general knowledge owe this gift primarily to their formal education or their curiosity?

― Grandpont Genie, Monday, 16 April 2007 10:48 (nineteen years ago)

I would say curiosity, myself, insofar as if I find I don't know something I will feel bad about it and when I have a spare moment look it up on t'interweb (increasingly, wikipedia). I suppose a lot of ppl, faced with the same situation, would shrug and say "so I don't know about that, tra-la-la, whatevs".

― Grandpont Genie, Monday, 16 April 2007 10:50 (nineteen years ago)

speaking for my mate who is chock full of general knowledge, he's definitely got it by curiosity.

― Ste, Monday, 16 April 2007 10:56 (nineteen years ago)

was thinking the other day that half of every thing i know i learnt from reading comics (prompted by a Weakest Link question about who'd said 'God Is Dead' which i know from Watchmen). bit of a flippant answer though because it's mostly through watching tv 8)

it does all depend on what comics you read and what tv. and whether you leave it there.

― koogs, Monday, 16 April 2007 11:16 (nineteen years ago)

Before t'internet you couldn't look up much beyond dictionary words, uUnless you had a good encyclopedia or were really keen and went to the library. I'd say mine just comes from reading/watching around and general absorption of all media. Not so much from formal education, except maybe for science/mathsy stuff.

― ledge, Monday, 16 April 2007 12:46 (nineteen years ago)

good point - stuff you are taught (after a certain level maybe) tends to be specific knowledge rather than general knowledge.

― koogs, Monday, 16 April 2007 12:53 (nineteen years ago)

neither - is a product of good memory.

― lex pretend, Monday, 16 April 2007 12:54 (nineteen years ago)

Are you sure this is the thread for you lex?

― ledge, Monday, 16 April 2007 12:58 (nineteen years ago)

i have pretty good general knowledge, just not about old pop stars or old film stars!

― lex pretend, Monday, 16 April 2007 13:06 (nineteen years ago)

this thread was actually prompted by me not having 1 x clue what the passive voice was until I clicked on that thread. It struck me that the ppl who *did* know what it was prolly had a better formal education than me, as they knew about the finer points of English grammar, something which doesn't tend to come up in pub quizzes.....

― Grandpont Genie, Monday, 16 April 2007 13:11 (nineteen years ago)

We were taught nothing in school about English grammar, a fact that rankles and confuses me to this day. So everything I know about that certainly comes from curiosity rather than education.

― ledge, Monday, 16 April 2007 13:12 (nineteen years ago)

everything i know about english grammar comes from french and latin lessons

― lex pretend, Monday, 16 April 2007 13:15 (nineteen years ago)

"Are you sure this is the thread for you lex?

-- ledge, Monday, April 16, 2007 3:58 PM (17 minutes ago)"

lol

"i have pretty good general knowledge, just not about old pop stars or old film stars!

-- lex pretend, Monday, April 16, 2007 4:06 PM (9 minutes ago)"

good point -- i mean, why would a music critic need to know about old pop stars eh?

― That one guy that quit, Monday, 16 April 2007 13:17 (nineteen years ago)

i dunno, i think music critics should know more about new pop stars, and hardly any of them bloody do

― lex pretend, Monday, 16 April 2007 13:20 (nineteen years ago)

They/Lex shouldn't per se, if they are able to convey how they feel about the record/artist in question. Music criticism is not so much about knowing the past, more about being able to put into words how you feel about a record. Actually reflecting the taste of the public in an eloquent way) I mean, shit, if knowledge was the parameter all critics would/could be idiots savants knowing more about hits from 1968 then being able to critize the record they reviewed.

― nathalie, Monday, 16 April 2007 13:22 (nineteen years ago)

(THat said, a combination of both is what I like best but that's cause I was/am more *serious* about music and want to know about the past. Most people aren't.)

― nathalie, Monday, 16 April 2007 13:23 (nineteen years ago)

I was getting a haircut the other day, and my stylist -- who I've actually seen for a few years now -- said that she'd gone on a date the night before with this guy, and she didn't think it was going to work out because the dude was like really into politics and was frustrated that she wasn't. I was like, "Oh yeah, those people can be kind of annoying." She said, "I know, he was talking about ... what's Bush's guy, it's like Rogue or Rose or ..." "Rove? Karl Rove?" I interrupted. "Yeah, I guess. He was all exasperated that I didn't know who that was, and I was just like, 'Sorry, dude, I don't follow politics. I know I'm gonna vote for the black guy, but that's it.'"

I had to bite my tongue, because I'm pretty sure I would've acted the same way as her date, and then I tried to figure out how someone could just not know who Karl Rove or Barack Obama is. I mean, I wouldn't consider myself a huge political junkie, but I read the news, magazine articles, threads on ILX -- sometimes because I'm genuinely curious, and sometimes because I feel like there are certain things that I should know as an informed citizen. Notwithstanding the fact that knowing about current events is useful for my job (I'm currently copy-editing an almanac), and not necessary for a hairdresser, I just can't imagine not having this mindset.

― jaymc, Monday, 16 April 2007 13:29 (nineteen years ago)

Neither can I. You get all the best joeks when you know shit! That's enough right there to keep me informed.

Mine is definitely curiosity, as well as a tendency when I was younger to make pretty deep inferences about things and almost always end up being right.

Even when I was wrong (a branch of humans did not, in fact, evolve into dolphins), it was always something interesting enough to spur my mom or grandfather into educating me on the entire subject.

School, on the other hand, was for shit, learning-wise. All grammar, save the names of the parts of speech, had to be learned on my own, including passive voice. I was probably 16, and my friend kept making jokes about it (we were essentially the "cool" nerds), so I had to figure it out.

― en i see kay, Monday, 16 April 2007 13:35 (nineteen years ago)

a mate of mine was telling me yesterday that he was in the pub with someone who not only didn't know that ducks were birds, but couldn't be convinced of this fact.

― Grandpont Genie, Monday, 16 April 2007 13:37 (nineteen years ago)

Yes

― gabbneb, Monday, 16 April 2007 14:03 (nineteen years ago)

My education was a product of my curiosity

― Ms Misery, Monday, 16 April 2007 14:11 (nineteen years ago)

At this point in my life I think more of my general knowledge is from my education, except for a few areas that have really interested me, but I really hope that changes over time, or I will lead a sad sad life!

― Maria, Monday, 16 April 2007 14:13 (nineteen years ago)

My boyfriend is constantly taunting me with "What a waste of $$$ there, college graduate" when I reveal my ignorance about things such as septic systems or how roads are paved. But then I remind him that I can read Latin and studied physical anthropology quite a bit. He's not impressed.

― Ms Misery, Monday, 16 April 2007 14:17 (nineteen years ago)

My general knowledge is a combination of lack of both. THINK WINNER!

― g-kit, Monday, 16 April 2007 14:18 (nineteen years ago)

So long as we're sharing "people are stupid" stories, I am in a history class right now which has had to entertain the following concerns of members of the class:

1) Did the Greeks have contact with South America? (Answer: No. The "Amazons" in this sculptural frieze are the mythical Amazon warrior women.)

2) Could the Greeks really have been all that skillful if the Acropolis looks so beat up? (Answer: Yes. There's this word "ruins" that denotes something that used to look better except it has been ravaged by time.)

3) Did the people of Catal Huyuk live under the ground because it's so hot in Turkey? (Answer: No. We have to dig up ancient cities because they are thousands of years old - not because their citizens lived under the ground.)

(To quote Dave Barry: I am not making this up.)

Given that all these people have high school diplomas, it's probably safe to say that people who learn only from their educations have no general knowledge whatsoever, or so little that it's indistinguishable from total ignorance.

― Doctor Casino, Monday, 16 April 2007 14:19 (nineteen years ago)

I remember having to look up "autodidact".

― onimo, Monday, 16 April 2007 14:22 (nineteen years ago)

I've got pretty good general knowledge up to the middle of the Cs, because that's when my folks stopped buying Britannica

― stet, Monday, 16 April 2007 14:35 (nineteen years ago)

I remember having to look up "autodidact".

-- onimo, Monday, April 16, 2007 7:22 AM (13 minutes ago)

....zing?

― river wolf, Monday, 16 April 2007 14:38 (nineteen years ago)

I remember having to look up "autodidact".

-- onimo

^^^ funny!

haha xpost

― gff, Monday, 16 April 2007 14:39 (nineteen years ago)

in my case it seems to come from being a smartypants knowitall dickwad, according to some

― gff, Monday, 16 April 2007 14:39 (nineteen years ago)

Ms Misery, I still very stupid (and lazy) for not having finished university. Deep down I feel it reveals that I'm a complete moron who also lacks discipline. :-( I think this is why I am forever reading (though at a slow pace hah!) and trying to learn more.

― nathalie, Monday, 16 April 2007 14:41 (nineteen years ago)

My general knowledge comes from watching telly.

I remember my Mam saying recently that she was teaching a group of radiography students and was telling them that x-rays were discovered in 1945. She asked the class what else happened in 1945 and none of them knew. When she expressed amazement that nobody knew the year the Second World War ended, one of the students said "oh, well I didn't do history".

Mind you, I live with someone who has an arts degree in, among other things, philosophy, and did not know what Zoroastrianism was (like, did not know that it was a religion), didn't know and couldn't guess what function pages served in Congress (careful), and had never heard of Geoffrey Chaucer.

In answer to your question, I got all my general knowledge from telly and from playing Trivial Pursuit.

― accentmonkey, Monday, 16 April 2007 14:48 (nineteen years ago)

The story about my Mam and her students wasn't meant to be about how young people are thick or anything, more about how people have different definitions of what constitutes general knowledge.

― accentmonkey, Monday, 16 April 2007 14:50 (nineteen years ago)

xxpost

I think this is similar G.'s problem as he imagines everyone judging him for not being formally educated. It doesn't effect my opinion of him at all and I imagine this is true for most other people. Maybe not. I think I give most people far too much benefit of the doubt when it comes to niceness.

G is very discplined about learning things and has acquired skills and knowledge I never would have managed. I know most of my book learnin' was pretty impractical but I enjoyed it b/c I like collecting useless information.

― Ms Misery, Monday, 16 April 2007 14:50 (nineteen years ago)

er, x-rays were discovered a long time before 1945, by Sanford, possibly, or Roentgen, in the 1880s or 1890s.

― Grandpont Genie, Monday, 16 April 2007 14:52 (nineteen years ago)

David Tennants has slipped waaay down the husband list after naming the capital of Holland as "Bruges"...

― Sarah, Monday, 16 April 2007 14:52 (nineteen years ago)

was that on sleb Weakest Link or summat?

If it had been Dr Who rather than the actor who plays him he could be forgiven if he'd recently spent a lot of time in pre-1829 Netherlands....

― Grandpont Genie, Monday, 16 April 2007 14:53 (nineteen years ago)

David Tennants has slipped waaay down the husband list after naming the capital of Holland as "Bruges"...

but bruges isn't even IN holland!

― lex pretend, Monday, 16 April 2007 14:59 (nineteen years ago)

i mean surely the LANGUAGE would give it away.

― lex pretend, Monday, 16 April 2007 15:00 (nineteen years ago)

er, x-rays were discovered a long time before 1945, by Sanford, possibly, or Roentgen, in the 1880s or 1890s.

Yeah, as soon as I wrote that, I knew I had attached the wrong fact to the year. I will try and remember what exciting milestone in therapy radiography was reached in 1945.

― accentmonkey, Monday, 16 April 2007 15:02 (nineteen years ago)

but bruges isn't even IN holland!

it isn't now....

― Grandpont Genie, Monday, 16 April 2007 15:05 (nineteen years ago)

Yeah, it was Roentgen somewhere between 1893-95. It coincided with the birth of cinema.

― jaymc, Monday, 16 April 2007 15:10 (nineteen years ago)

(Which I know because I wrote a cultural-studies-ish paper about it, ha.)

― jaymc, Monday, 16 April 2007 15:10 (nineteen years ago)

oooh, big can of worms there.

xp

― That one guy that quit, Monday, 16 April 2007 15:11 (nineteen years ago)

in the old days you could type ö and get an 'o' with an umlaut on it....happy days.

― Grandpont Genie, Monday, 16 April 2007 15:11 (nineteen years ago)

oh you can now

*blushes*

you couldn't a couple of weeks ago. i wish ILX will decide whether it likes HTML or not!

― Grandpont Genie, Monday, 16 April 2007 15:12 (nineteen years ago)

I will try and remember what exciting milestone in therapy radiography was reached in 1945.

There was that one experiment in mass radiotherapy in Japan.

― NickB, Monday, 16 April 2007 15:15 (nineteen years ago)

my curiosity. i don't count grad school as "school." it's like an expensive star trek convention with a degree at the end.

― get bent, Monday, 16 April 2007 18:35 (nineteen years ago)

what i think some people are calling "curiosity" is not actually an inborn thing or a fluke - it's a product of early childhood education.

people who are "curious" tend to be people who have received things like preschool or have been rewarded by their parents at a young age for seeking out information (and by reward i mean in the very most general set, like going into your dad's toolbox gets you a mini toolkit as a present, and not the beating of your life)

i work with a lot of students who didn't attend school until age 6 or 7 and spent a lot of their preschool years in front of a television or at a laundromat, without books or toys and so on. the level of intellectual engagement they have with the world is very, very low, but i don't think that's a surprise, because the basic mechanism of "investigation = reward" isn't set up in their heads.

― moonship journey to baja, Monday, 16 April 2007 18:40 (nineteen years ago)

Mine is definitely curiosity, as well as a tendency when I was younger to make pretty deep inferences about things and almost always end up being right.

Even when I was wrong (a branch of humans did not, in fact, evolve into dolphins), it was always something interesting enough to spur my mom or grandfather into educating me on the entire subject.

-- en i see kay, Monday, April 16, 2007 6:35 AM (5 hours ago)

this is an example of what i mean by reward.

you might have parents that just shrug and say "i dunno" when you ask a question like that, but become incredibly animated when they want to show you how something is built. in that case you would develop a completely different relationship to "book knowledge".

― moonship journey to baja, Monday, 16 April 2007 18:50 (nineteen years ago)

also there is a strong causal connection between general knowledge and literacy and growing up with parents who are readers, and by this i mean nothing special, your parents didn't have to be PhDs but there should at least be readers digest lying around the house - and highlights and whatnot too.

a lot of the students i work with might have illiterate parents, or their parents were not english speakers and didn't have spanish language OR english language reading materials around the house (lack of access to the former and lack of understanding of the latter), or they simply weren't as much into books and literature.

growing up WITHOUT general literacy for this reason is a HUGE barrier to what people here are labeling "curiosity". it is not easy to participate in something like ILX or to read wikipedia if you read at middle-school level.

― moonship journey to baja, Monday, 16 April 2007 18:57 (nineteen years ago)

Mine is reading, watching telly and just generally having an interest in stuff that's going on. I also just appear to have the sort of brain that retains an enormous amount of inconsequential rubbish.

btw, David Tennant can go even further down the husband list because it wasn't even Holland that he claimed Bruges to be the capital of, it was Denmark (see above paragraph re. retaining inconsequential rubbish)

― ailsa, Monday, 16 April 2007 20:34 (nineteen years ago)

I have what I refer to as a "PBS level" interest in science. Anything I get curious about, I read up on. So, an autodidact in that sense, but in the sense that it took me three majors and many years to finish college, I am 'generally educated' in a formal way.

― Oilyrags, Monday, 16 April 2007 20:56 (nineteen years ago)

Jaymc I am so jealous of your jobs. I think there is very little more soothing than reading almanacs.

― Abbott, Monday, 16 April 2007 20:59 (nineteen years ago)

Now onto mysef.

I've always learned a lot more from my curiosity, or my own reading etc., than education. A lot from education---my fifth grade teacher was the BEST. Also from PBs shows like Square One, which pretty much held me through to 8th grade algebra.

I've always just read fucktons, asked everyone questions, tried to figure out things on my own. I would know SHIT ALL about very important life matters such as women's health/reproduction if I hadn't done a lot of reading on it: certainly not one whit of it was spoken by teachers, church or my parents. It's helped me a lot.

― Abbott, Monday, 16 April 2007 21:02 (nineteen years ago)

I think I learned far more from my curiosity, but the things I know the most about are probably a result of my education. I mean, I probably rank higher in understanding of the ins and outs of my thesis than I do at anything else.

Of course my education is also directly an extension of my curiosity. Would never have chosen what I do without being curious, etc. etc.

― Teenbeat, Tuesday, 17 April 2007 11:07 (nineteen years ago)

people who are "curious" tend to be people who have received things like preschool or have been rewarded by their parents at a young age for seeking out information

Agreed on this. My parents weren't at all intellectual or even that highly educated but I know prodded me into that; my dad used to give me pocket money tasks like getting the World Book encylclopedias, going to each Year Book and stickering in the cross-reference stickers from it into the main set (does anyone else remember those?). It meant I had to do a lot of reading and looking stuff up at a young age and I really think that helped.

Mind you now I feel kind of dense, but I blame age and laziness.

― Trayce, Tuesday, 17 April 2007 11:55 (nineteen years ago)

Formalized education is a kind of menu of the world. It gives you nomenclature and rough positioning of knowledge, but what you choose to delve into out of that is a question of curiosity and obsessiveness. True master-and-pupil education in the classical era was a full-time, one-on-one proposition which existed in the aristocracy; modern mass education is a poor substitute for that sort of dedication. If you can arrange such a thing, great. Otherwise it comes down to yourself.

I believe in the thinker/doer dichotomy. People have strengths in one area and faults in another. I'm convinced a large part of this is wiring and there are those of us who are predisposed to ordering and comprehending our the world around us, have a gift for memory retention, precise classification, etc. It's in the inquisitiveness of certain children, which is almost a cliche. How that can be teased out is another question.

Anyway, we live in a pragmatic and programmatic world. Knowledge in the broad sense is not that materially useful. It's not, as the Republicans say, incentivized.

― fife, Tuesday, 17 April 2007 12:41 (nineteen years ago)

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