Knowledge Is Not Understanding
Knowledge Is Not Understanding
By Lawrence Yeo
The pursuit of knowledge is heralded as a virtue, but the attainment of understanding is far more important. To explain what I mean here, we have to first delve into the difference between knowledge and understanding. On its surface, it may seem like a game of semantics, but if you explore this further, you’ll see that the nuances make all the difference.
The first question to address is: How do we attain knowledge?
Well, there are many ways we can approach this question, but a good place to start would be the current educational system.
When you’re given a textbook, you’re effectively given a history of discoveries. It doesn’t matter what the content of that book may be: psychology, math, philosophy, linguistics, whatever. What you have in there is a distillation of theories and findings that other humans have happened upon.
In other words, you have a long recounting of experiences that are not your own. And in order for these experiences to make sense for the everyday student, they need to be compressed into a digestible format. A great textbook plays the game of simplification, not complexity. The more these experiences can be communicated as stories, the greater the likelihood that they’ll be adopted for mass market use.
Textbooks And Making Money
So any textbook you read has the forces of compression and incentives embedded into it. The removal of complexity and the generation of profit guide the distribution of knowledge, however subtly it may be.
What this means is that the way we absorb knowledge is dependent upon what others have deemed valuable. The scholars that put together these textbooks decide what pieces of information to include, and market forces determine which textbooks make it to each school. What the student is left with is the result of this piecemealing and marketing that has disguised itself as truth.
In this form, knowledge is not understanding. It’s merely an abstracted version of someone else’s lived experience; symbols on a page that attempt to summarize the nuances of each discovery.
So this begs the question: What, then, is understanding?
Well, true understanding can only be attained through personal experience. It’s when you viscerally feel the implications of your decisions and actions, and see how they ripple through other human beings. It’s when you realize that the profundity of what you read may not translate properly into the messy sphere of reality.
I was talking to someone the other day and she mentioned the idea of a “dumb smart person,” and I laughed upon hearing it. Essentially, it’s a funny way of articulating the difference between knowledge and understanding.
We all know the person that aced their way through school, got a prestigious job, but can’t hold a substantive conversation to save their lives. Or someone that makes a lot of money but has left behind a trail of broken relationships.
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