But I don't even know Swahili!

[redbird]

Someone over on alt.poly is calling various people who have been disagreeing with her and asking her to share the responsibility for writing understandably (rather than demanding that we read her mind instead of her words) "over-educated". I can't possibly be over-educated: I don't understand quantum mechanics, know almost no African history, and don't know Swahili or Chinese or any of the language of Papua New Guinea. I've never read Proust or Milton, and I don't know the infield-fly rule or how to knit a sweater.

How can anyone since Gutenberg be over-educated, when there's so much to know and so little time to learn it all?

Edit: I strongly recommend the discussion in wild_irises' journal that grew out of this: http://www.livejournal.com/users/wild_irises/3407.html?view=19791#t19791

Comments

[bibliotrope.livejournal.com]

Over-educated is a state of mind. Kind of like Zen, but with more books.

I love that!

It's kind of why I'm alibrarian. While working the reference desk keeps you in touch with all the stuff you don't know, it also makes all the stuff you do know, whether that's learned in an academic setting or elsewhere, useful, or potentially so. And it makes a lot of what you don't know within some kind of reach, if only so you can lead the patron to the books on calculus or Swahili or whatever.

Calculus is one of my "But I don't know ...!" subjects. I barely passed trigonometry and never really had much need for "higher math," being firmly entrenched in the "fuzzy subjects", but I've always wondered about it.

This relates to something I said in supergee's thread about his father, and also to something I said in an e-mail to my nephew last week. He's gone back to college: six years after graduating, he decided to switch majors, and now he's studying math.