Open Doorways

Just unexplored

After a lifetime of somewhat scattered reading, I like to think of it as “wild” reading, I feel like I’ve stumbled onto something.  The compartmentalization of disciplines, as well as the tendency for all of us to “find” connected material, has led to a much greater isolation of ideas than I think we realize. 

Even within supposedly related, or the same field, time of writing isolates generations and while much is rediscovered, or fetishized, many worthy ideas are “lost.”   And across related disciplines, sociology, philosophy, history, anthropology and political science, valuable comparisons and completions are entirely missed. 

Not without wishing for less siloed patterns of scholarship and fewer institutional separations, I wonder if we are at present not on the verge of an era of recovery.  Artificial Intelligence and search engines place at our fingertips potentially valuable associations.  Such discoveries both serve to refresh important insight as well as offer genuine intellectual puzzles to initiate new lines of inquiry. 

Knowing as little as I do about the natural sciences (although my “wild” reading has taken me to such places), I hesitate to suggest the same might be the case, particularly in fields that have such a strong institutional focus on “new” work, patentable, and monetary rewards.  But maybe.

These thoughts lead me, as I find that suggestions for reform do, to the role of education.  Can’t we decentralize reading?  Can’t we encourage wilder thinking, where ideas reach out to each other in adjacent fields?  The world of inquiry is a constellation of possibilities, not a filing cabinet of “facts.” 

And teachers are not clerks.