10 May

The knowledge pyramid is a famous way of representing how knowledge becomes wisdom. It’s superficially appealing, but is another example I think of how our tools shape how we think. IT people love it because it’s really more of a description of how IT systems work than it is of how knowledge works. At the same time the idea that we live in an era of ‘knowledge explosion’ is also a fantasy, a fantasy that creates a lot of anxiety and also ridiculous ideas about education, such as the one that says education should just be giving students skills to navigate this knowledge explosion.