Is It Better to Know Useless Things Than To Know Nothing?

Is It Better to Know Useless Things Than To Know Nothing?

Is It Better to Know Useless Things Than To Know Nothing?


  As a high school student I was often made to memorize chunks of information on various disciplines, such as chemistry, biology, phisicis or literature. The time   I was given to absorb such huge amount of material was frequently not adequate to its size and level of difficulty. As a result I often spent sleepless nights swoating rigid formulas and pieces of statements that were not lied clear to me by the teachers. I was thought to replicate the knowledge I acquired through the mere process of repetition. On the test day what was required of me was   to write down   on the piece   of paper the exact same cluster of sentences I had   read and memorized from a particular book that I had on my reading list.
    In his article, Cram, Pass, Forget, Kryzsytof Jendrzejczak is arguing that* education in Poland amounts to little more than rote learning knuckling down to absorb a mass of information that helps students pass the exam but ultimately proves of little further value*. We are treated as unconscious masses, parrots trained from the very young age to repeat   and blindly submit to empty slogans we do not usually understand because undersating is not advanced or promoted. Asking questions about certain problems is generally frowned upon by the teachers who treat the material thez possess   as the only and the ultimate source of almost divine+like knowledge which cant be contradicted or questioned. It is supposed to be learned by heart and blindly repeated. What about the active use of knowledge, exploration, the process of   and critical thinking which is considerd wisdom? As the   old Japanese proverb has it Knowledge without wisdom is a load of books on the back of an ass. Do we really want to be asses loaded with useless material   that is of no use to us and that has no bearing on our life?
    An experiment was carried out wherby an emiment intellectuals   and historian Marcin Krol and a popular writer...