Henry Kissinger, former US foreign secretary, writes in his latest book "World Order" on education in a quite fundamental sense, addressing the risks and the potential of new communication technology.
o In the Internet age, world order has often been equated with the proposition that if people have the ability to freely know and exchange the world’s information, the natural human drive toward freedom will take root and fulfill itself, and history will run on autopilot, as it were. But philosophers and poets have long separated the mind’s purview into three components: information, knowledge, and wisdom. The Internet focuses on the realm of information, whose spread it facilitates exponentially. Ever more complex functions are devised, particularly capable of responding to questions of fact, which are not themselves altered by the passage of time. Search engines are able to handle increasing speed. Yet a surfeit of information may paradoxically inhibit the acquisition of knowledge and push wisdom even further away than it was before. The poet T. S. Eliot captured this in his “Choruses from ‘The Rock’”:
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
o Communication technology threatens to diminish the individual’s capacity for an inward quest by increasing his reliance on technology as a facilitator and mediator of thought. Information at one’s fingertip encourages the mindset of a researcher but may diminish the mindset of a leader.
o Society needs to adapt its education policy to ultimate imperatives in the long-term direction of the country and in the cultivation of its values.
o In the Internet age, world order has often been equated with the proposition that if people have the ability to freely know and exchange the world’s information, the natural human drive toward freedom will take root and fulfill itself, and history will run on autopilot, as it were. But philosophers and poets have long separated the mind’s purview into three components: information, knowledge, and wisdom. The Internet focuses on the realm of information, whose spread it facilitates exponentially. Ever more complex functions are devised, particularly capable of responding to questions of fact, which are not themselves altered by the passage of time. Search engines are able to handle increasing speed. Yet a surfeit of information may paradoxically inhibit the acquisition of knowledge and push wisdom even further away than it was before. The poet T. S. Eliot captured this in his “Choruses from ‘The Rock’”:
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
o Communication technology threatens to diminish the individual’s capacity for an inward quest by increasing his reliance on technology as a facilitator and mediator of thought. Information at one’s fingertip encourages the mindset of a researcher but may diminish the mindset of a leader.
o Society needs to adapt its education policy to ultimate imperatives in the long-term direction of the country and in the cultivation of its values.
