KNOWLEDGE IS IGNORANCE

It feels good to have some free time and come back to blogging. I am really thankful to all those readers who gave their feedback, suggestions and showed eagerness to read my fuzzy thoughts. I am really grateful to all these ‘responding’ readers who boosts up my morale to share things perceived from 4^th dimension.

Fortunately, last week I got chance to visit Gujarat Knowledge Meet 2013 organized by UNICEF and Government of Gujarat. This meet was organized to draw out strategies for sharing knowledge within government departments and as well as with civil society.  It was really great experience to know that state governments of Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh are consciously thinking over ‘softer’ aspects for social development. While having discussions with government and UNICEF official at knowledge meet I realized certain things about human development which is heavily depended on science and application of science (technology).

Popularly, science is understood as a dark room with black cat and task of scientist is to find that cat and describe it. Science is basically set of methods, it is well ordered and it is rule based. It is fundamentally structured to bring out hard core facts which can be further used for development of science and wellbeing of human kind.

Since ages, development of sciences is taking places from books which are nothing but mere collection of facts and structured perception towards those facts. We often come across books which is heavier than our brain :)  What is happening in field of development is what Stuart Firestein calls ‘piling up of knowledge’.  In 2012, 1.57x 10⁶ Number of research articles are been published. This number is very huge it means that there are 3 new research papers being published every minute.  

The more we know, the more we are ignorant. When we talk with people we talk about things which we don’t know rather than talking about things which we know. Knowing things do not makes experts or scientists. What makes experts or scientists is knowledge about our own ignorance. By ignorance I do not mean stupidity, by ignorance I refer to controlled neglect which happens due to institutionalization of knowledge. For example, most of us have deep interest for science during our 5 to 8 grade (or standard) of schooling. Students in these grades like experiments, science quiz, sci. fairs etc. Once we raise to 11^th to 12^th grade most of us loose out interest in science or take science as social responsibility just because society has perceived us as ‘brilliant’.

I remember G.B.Shaw’s quote which says “science is always wrong, it never solves a problem without creating 10 more” and would also like to quote great philosopher Immanuel Kant who believed that “Every question begets fresh question”. Knowing facts should actually lead to ignorance and ignorance should motivate humans for knowledge. This is most simple and most crucial cycle of knowledge generation. Collection of scientific facts is basically meant for creating ignorance. I came across really funny but actually interesting graph mocking about level of education and level of knowledge. 

What we know is plotted on x axis which ranges from nothing to everything while on y axis ‘quantity’ is plotted which ranges from very littel to a lot.  On top there is under graduate students who knows very little about everything while at bottom there is Ph.D Students who knows a lot about something. As we go higher in our education system we tend to be more ignorant (right now I feel myself most ignorant).

This trend have emerged due to heavy focus on evaluation in education system (we do not have option for this). Most of our evaluation systems are based on testing performance of ability to collect and describe facts in ‘scientific’ manner. Instead of focusing how much we know about something our education systems should focus how much we can ask? Scientific knowledge should focus on creating ignorance and awareness about ignorance which can further leads to development of human kind.