What departing trains, useless historical dates and images found on the internet have in common
Nothing, sorry. What did you think? –On knowledge organisation
Once I went to the railway station and realised in utter horror that departing trains were for some reason in alphabetic order and not in order of departure time. All the information was completely unintelligible. Archiving and organising knowledge is not really enough–the whole point is how said knowledge will be experienced and accessed.
In the age of Google with a great deal of knowledge accessible in a matter of microseconds and customised feeds with constantly updated information, memorising and accumulating tons of information may not be a good strategy for learning anymore.
When I was in school, I always hated being forced to read and memorise all the dates for historical events in the world or, even worse, as part of someone’s biography. Now more than ever, it seems ludicrous for so much of our kids’ cognitive and focusing ability to just be wasted with a completely pointless task that is never going to help them further comprehend the historical significance of what they are reading about. It didn’t make sense back in my days (oh gosh I am so old) and it doesn’t make sense today. Most dates are readily obtainable within a quick online search, while a general understanding of key historical moments is not. The same goes for memorising vocabulary in another language –none of it will stick if it isn’t seen and reused in context. You can find a word you don’t know in the blink of an eye, while sounding natural to a mother tongue speaker is not that easy1.
I could say the same about poems learnt by heart in school, but as a part-time poet I find a lot of merit in learning poems and scripture (no matter from what religion) by heart. I do take an issue with making everybody study the same poems and lines by heart, though. I think everybody should be encouraged to learn lines that feel relevant to them –but that's another story.2
since my teenager years, I have been constantly haunted from the idea of interesting things and vivid memories accumulating endlessly with me failing to capture and retain them meaningfully. When I was 16 I wrote a poem that explains this anxiety so eloquently that it has become one of my favourites things I wrote of all times. It goes like:
shavings
of things
fly
all over me
and slip away
as if it was nothing3
Like a lot of creative or pseudo-creative people, I have a vast visual archive of things I found aesthetically compelling and provoking. Since owning a smartphone and being on social media, said archive got immensely fattened up by the constant inputting of screenshots of interesting things and photos from exhibitions I visited. The archive always felt overwhelming, and it still does. The bigger it got, the less inspired I was by it.
After curating this archive for many years, during the very first lockdown I started tidying it up and decided to only keep things that meant something to me personally or that were an inspiration for something I could do. So much of the archive kind of disappeared quite swiftly. As for the screenshots and photos, I realised one painful truth: most of them were time-sensitive, and reviewing them a year or two later didn’t make any sense. A lot of things exist the moment we encounter them because of who we are at that moment, and the best thing we can do is to be present to them rather than taking them and setting them aside for future use.
What did I learn from trains in alphabetic order, the year Giosuè Carducci graduated from university and my digital inspiration decluttering? Well, a few things. In order to be relevant, knowledge needs to be:
1) timely processed and not just archived.
2) interacted with and reviewed over time.
3) interconnected (in an unusual manner or according to a theme).4
And that's all, folks.
PS: Last time I asked you not to shoot on retouchers, this week I ask you not to shoot on teachers –they do their best, and they would like their pupils to succeed. Unless they are psychopaths, but that's not the point now.
Although I think that AI will make it progressively easier.
Isn't there always another story? That's why I have a weekly substack!
The original title was “trucioli di cose”.
All the concepts I expanded on top of my own experience and observation have been tidied up by reading this great article by maggie appleton.