Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge: From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic

by Simon Winchester

The pace of change throughout his life was such, Adams concluded, that no traditional educational system could possibly keep up and provide its charges with the knowledge they required to function in so furious an existence. Hence his criticism of schooling: it was just too slow, too rooted in irrelevance, too little connected to the real world that was happening just outside the schoolroom windows. The only way to keep up, he decided, was to self-educate, to wander, to observe, to read, to ask, to determine an individual path through the ever expanding forest of knowledge.

This, then, was at last the fountainhead of a true education: An encounter with genius. A ceaseless exchange of ideas. Intense revelation through intense friendship, through the realized mutual ambition for common intellectual goals.

With freedom to learn, to find out all that one could know—that was surely how a fully examined life should be lived.

“Knowledge makes humble. Ignorance makes proud.”