Knowledge, why it isnt always power. Education = Useless?

Knowledge is power.
Well, isnt it?​

Everyone says so, that saying is as old as your mum and your mum's mum. So its old, thus it must be right if it survived the ages right?

Wrong. Well technically, its half wrong.

Knowledge is power if you have the right attitude.

Let me tell you what Einstein replied when he was asked how many yards were in a mile. (I forget the exact question)

Spoiler

"I have no idea."

Wierd? Nahh. This is what he continued with.

Spoiler

"Why would I waste precious memory in my mind for something I can look up in ten seconds in a encyclopedia?"

Think about this, just for a second. One of the genius' of history, is dissing knowledge. Rather, its how you use knowledge that counts.
Similarly, that creator of Ford, Henry Ford the father of the manufacturing line was interviewed with an intelligence test. He didn't attend any great uni/colleges or anything like that. He was asked a series of questions, he knew the answer to none. But impatiently, he replied,

Spoiler

"Yes, but in 5 minutes I can find you 10 people who can. "

So for the sake of a debate, If knowledge is a impotent tool without the ability to think, then is the school system and colleges impotent too? Because heck, school did not teach me to think. Having a cakin' life did, and unless you start throwing kids into poor and harsh upbringings your going to have aloota adults out there who are only half-useful.

 

Dennis, I like this thread I do. School, never taught me anything. I am sliding by my final year before University barely studying. Well I have to now. Knowledge is just to get you in the college because people are like a puppet to their parents.

But I mean in my opinion, it doesn't matter because if you truly had a talent, people will recognize you for that. I'm not a smart person school wise because I have never tried, which is why when I know people call me dumb behind my backs I would just say they don't know what they're talking about.

I guess for me there is more than one kind of smart, school wise, and life wise. And for me I am more keen on advice, life situations, and what not other than trying to solve a physics question I learned last week in class. {Not to mention I know stuff about a lot of other junk that people haven't even heard of}

 

I would say that this applies to useless knowledge, the stuff they try to make you memorize to speed things along or just to be a menace. Knowledge in fact IS power. Of all people I am sure Einstein would agree since he was brilliant and all. But there are ALWAYS classes or professors that try and force you to memorize useless crap you will never use again, stuff like the periodic table. My current professor said he would never make anyone memorize the table, it is a tool to help. Much like conversion factors it is a tool that was not meant to be memorized. Of course if you DID in fact memorize it you would have an advantage to others. So yes, knowledge IS power. And it couldn't hurt you to memorize all the information that you "will never use again" or "won't need".

 

Knowledge depends on the way you use it. I spent much of my elementary/middle school time learning about living things in my spare time, useless trivia at the time. Now, in many of my medical classes at my high school, the things that were useless at the time are put to work..

 

I like this thread but I would have to go against your idea that Education is useless. The reason education is here is because it teaches people how to write , read and do math and you got to admit those are all necessary. Plus it's shown in society that there are white collar jobs and blue collar jobs. Most of the jobs in society today are blue collar jobs, working at a factory, working at Walmart, doing manual labor! Now you might think that working at Walmart isn't bad and lots of advancement. But what happens when you start earning lots of money and you get laid off? Then you're left with nothing except working at some other department store doing minimum wage again.

The point of education is to see how smart you are and how far you can go. The more you learn about a particular career that is high in demand then the more useful and longer you'll have a career and then retire. That's the point of education. Plus without education lots of the young people today would be absolute idiots and be out on welfare....

 

Think about this. If school wasn't there then the 10 people you could find in 5 minutes might not be there. The encyclopedia might not be there. Think about it. If you didn't have school where would your doctors learn medicine? Would you want some guy who didn't go to school to operate on you?

 

You guys are quite amazing, you pulled out some points that was totally left field for me.

LET ME FIRST POINT OUT, these views are not my own and that when were just having a discussion your intellectually challenging my 'idea' (as TheSportsTrainer said), not me Everyone here has been great so far and lets keep this going.

thats true.. very good point, one i find hard to argue against..
but for the sake of keeping the mental sport going, if everyone was taught to THINK instead of just LEARN, then you would still have doctors (maybe a few less..) and ones with much higher qaulity. Ones which have learned to think for themselves, which lives by their own beleifs strongly and thus stimulate higher intelligence and innovation in the medical field. What I'm trying to say is, if we were taught to THINK instead of LEARN, alot of us woulda decided to do things but choice instead of being conditioned to. Leading to much more passion in this world.
Yep, that argument was a strong rebuttle

 

street smarts + connections/networking > knowledge

i think that really sums it up. you can be a complete idiot and know people, and still be successful

 

Knowledge gained through experience is the most valuable type of knowledge there is, mainly because it has a tendency to stay with you throughout your life, engrained in your long term memory. Experience makes knowledge powerful because it prompts us to think rather than plug in some hand-scribed formula to solve pressing issues. I believe that this knowledge is less common in the school-type setting but it is still there.

With regards to your argument about the medical field Dotdenz, I think that a certain degree of learning is needed in order to be able to think things through. I would NOT want anyone operating on me without some sort of base knowledge. That is what separates a surgery from a mere dissection. On the other hand, I would not want someone who knows all the material and is unable to apply it to operate on me either. I guess what I am saying is that there should be some sort of equilibrium between what is learned and the application of that learned material.

 

This topic reminds me of that show, "Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader", because I think that show is really, really stupid. Knowing random tidbits of information does not make you smart, and if anything, that show only displays how irrelevant 99% of everything we learn in school is when you grow up.

 

Ok. True but after spending years in the medical field you take what you have learned from experience and add to what you have learned from school and start to think which one has worked for you, for this patient, this situation, etc.... The schooling is there to start you out, give you a basis on what to go on.

I'm all for schooling what I'm not all for is mandated classes. In my area we HAVE to take the core classes (math, english, science, and history) then we HAVE to take a language and some type of arts (art or music). We also HAVE to take P.E. for two years. Now in my opinion the only one we should have to take is P.E. because americans are fat and unhealthy. Generally speaking. As for the core classes. I'm studying to be a doctor. I've known I wanted to be in the medical field since... well since as long as I can remember. I don't need to know the history of the nazis or the world wars. That doesn't help me in my field of practice. And as for english anything beyond reading, writing, and spelling is not that important. If you can get your point through somehow that's all that matters. For a foreign language. I don't need to know french or spanish. I live in America where the primary language is English. I did horrible in french. But it was mandated I take it. And it reflected on my GPA. They should still offer it but only if your interested in taking it. Besides I can just get a translator if need be. And as for the arts class that's all fine and dandy. Not taking or taking it doesn't affect my knowledge. If I can play an instrument or sing or paint or draw that doesn't make me smarter. It just makes me talented in that area. Those classes shouldn't be mandated either. Because lets face it not everyone is going to be talented in one of those areas. And it will reflect when their grades in those classes aren't good. Now I'm done with my novel.

And for anyone thinking I'm steering towards the medical field because they are "high intelligence" any field can be applied to this. I just happen to know the medical field.

 

Very nice reply nckheinrich. I share a very similar viewpoint with you. I think after you learn the basics of a subject (basic math, how to read, write, etc), almost everything you learn from mandated classes is forgotten later in life, and never used again aside from when you needed it to pass the test in school. I mean, when was the last time you needed to find the angle of a triangle that's embedded in a circle? NEVER. When was the last time it was helpful that you knew what date the Spanish Armada was defeated? NEVER. The whole schooling system in general is flawed, and needs to be reworked; especially since we're very quickly moving into a technological and information era, where knowledge becomes outdated very fast. It's not about knowing facts; it's about knowing how to learn well.

 

My post is basically going to be a combination of previous posts, but hopefully I can expand on these points.

I think that education as it is is entirely useless. Sure, certain people do learn a lot from the system that we have now, but that's due to the time that they put into their education on their own, not the actual setup that we have now. I cannot begin to express my contempt held for the "modern" school system, especially the system where I'm from. The fact that this kind of "education" can happen in a "developed" (okay, okay, I'll stop using air-quotes) country depresses me to no end.
If students weren't forced to memorize useless crap, and then go through the motions of having the ability to use it properly, like some kind of high-tech, heartless animatron, then maybe education would be worth something. I can go to a class and take notes on everything, then re-watch the lecture online to confirm my notes and spend ages solving the textbook problems. But I learn jack all. And how applicable is the knowledge of the various elements of the periodic table, their trends, melting and boiling points, their short forms, their atomic weights, their shoe size, favorite brand of perfume, yadda yadda yadda... Seriously - you can print a periodic table of the internet with all of the relevant information off of it, and it takes about four seconds to find what you're looking for. Learn by doing: once you've used the periodic table enough, then you'll understand why the elements act the way that they do, and then you won't have simply memorized a series of numbers on a page, you'll truly UNDERSTAND.
When you're taking an English litterature class, is there really any point in the teacher telling you "ooooh, this poem is simply mahhhhhvalous, dahling. The juxtaposition of industrialism with the decadence and decay of the party feast in chapter four provides an exquisite background for the prominence of yellow, as demonstrated by that one character's shoes in chapter six?" Because personally, I can't see one. You should be breifed on the basics, and then left to formulate your own definitions for literary techniques. This way, you'll grow to begin to understand the depth of a work, rather than have a completely solid opinion on something that you know nothing about.
Same goes for learning a new language. I took French for 12 years in class, and I learned more in five weeks of living in a French community this summer than I did over the entirety of a semester. There is no point in memorizing verb tables and being able to parrot them back if you can't utilize them in conversation.
I'll leave it at that for now. I have more to say, but I feel that that's a good start.

EDIT: oh, and I do think that knowledge is power. I just think that "knowledge" (dangit, air quotes are back) is misdefined in our society, and that everyone needs to take a faking philosophy course before he or she can go on about what knowledge really is. And no, I'm not saying that I know what it is, but I am saying that I know enough to know what it isn't. And it isn't memorization.

 

I don't think education is useless at all. There may be some specific elements of your eduation that are useless, but overall it's there is power in knowledge. Consider MC's example about the periodic table: I agree that it would be completely pointless to memorize, but someone that does memorize it has a clear advantage in the fact that they don't need to spend the time to take it out and look something up when they need that information.
Now, this might contradict Einstein's quote in the op, but Einstein was a physicist who spent most of his scientific life developing his theory of relativity, where the number of yards in a mile has very little meaning. I would be willing to bet that if he was asked how many kilometers were in a light-year, he could answer in a second.
Back to MC's example, in the real world, time very literally translates to money, and money often to power. Those people that memorize things spend much less time looking up information than applying that information, and therefore make more money. The key is learning things that are relevant to what you want to do, so in essence you must prioritize what you learn. It would be good for an archaeologist to know the timeline of human civilization, but not necessarily to know the Pythagorean theorum. For an engineer, the exact opposite is true.

 

THats pretty much the gist of what I was saying. I agree with Liwi. About reworking the school system. I mean I have known from a young age what I wanted to do in life. All those pointless hours I spent learning stuff I didn't need to use could have been spent learning stuff I would.

Then there is MC's point that ties into Liwis ^^^. Today most of class is spent memorizing. I took a math and also a science coruse were we learned it and then did it. We had projects that incorporated what we learned. So we didn't just learn it we used it in real life (and everyday... well maybe not everyday but you'd use it many times in a lifetime) scenarios. And granted that class was called Math Applications I learned the most from those applications. as for the science class I hated it. It was physics and also it was AP Physics. so BLAH. I would much rather had taken AP BIO (i did and loved it) I meant Anatomy and Physiology. But my school system you had to take AP Bio before AAP and I took Bio in my senior year.

 

Knowledge is power only if you have the knowledge to manipulate it.
Lots of time, you will have no power if you have no sufficient knowledge,
especially nowadays (when information explodes every sec)

 

Knowledge

The statement that "knowledge is power" is definitely misleading. Power is a destructive force that rarely has caused a person much benefit, but rather has the pathway to his personal destruction in store. However, while you can become very powerful in life without a lot of knowledge, knowledge is the only pathway that can grant one happiness.

In ancient Greece, a philosopher known as Socrates who later argued a few truths that later become critical for the understanding of human conditions and how we live:

1. No one desires evil
2. No one does wrongs knowingly
3. All virtue is knowledge
4. Virtue is sufficient for happiness

These truths highlight an important fact regarding the nature of humanity: We naturally are people who desire good, for no man would willingly deny a truth. If we accept as an axiom that all humans would like to increase their time alive to their benefit, then we can logically imply that doing suffering which indirectly results in harm of oneself can't be done out of knowing the effects of their deeds. Rather, what we have is a proof that our suffering comes as a lack of understanding or ignorance.

Through this proven statement, we can now make the assumption that every bit of suffering in the world, directly or not, is caused by a lack of knowledge and the isolation given by ignorance.

So, if ignorance can be identified logically as the source of all human suffering, then the only thing that can be implied is that the only way to save oneself from ignorance is through knowledge. Of course, to say that knowing facts is the only requirement to be filled to be considered "knowledgeable" would be an erroneous claim. "Being knowledgeable", as I define the term, consists of existing in the state in which the following is fulfilled:

1. When one has the ability to logically deduct theorems and postulates given a set of axioms
2. When one understands the fundamental conditions of life (understanding that there is no natural purpose for life, but that humans are self-willing)
3. When one can be empathetic towards other people and see the significance of altruism in aiding the human condition
4. When one can confront reality without resorting to fantasy as an escape for unpleasant facts about reality

So, yes. Knowledge is not to be correlated with power, but it is the most important tool if we ever hope to make life bearable for ourselves and for others around us.

EDIT: I must have clicked the wrong button. I wrote this as a reply to "Knowledge, why it isnt always power. Education = Useless?". Could someone help merge this with that thread? Thanks.

 

Knowledge is Power can be implied for more than one person. The statement applies if your speaking of an entire species or country, if two countries are at war (this holds true certainly 100's of years ago) Knowledge would definitely be power as it would lead to technological advantages and what not.

Plus I think the statement can also imply general intelligence and not factual knowledge, we just like to keep these "sayings" short and concise to make them easy to remember.

 

Power comes from wisdom -_- Not knowledge. It's not how much ammo you have, it's how accurate your gun is.