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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jbe who wrote (36923)	5/6/1999 11:14:00 PM
From: The Philosopher	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 108807

Thus you can find two highly "informed" people who can't carry on a conversation with one another because each one is quite ignorant of what the other one knows. You can substitute "educated" for "informed." There are number of colleges now from which you can graduate with a BA or BS without ever having to read a single word of Shakespeare, or Plato, or Aristotle, not to mention Homer, Kant, Descartes, Locke, Austen, and all the other people who I think it is essential for an "educated" person to know. But that's snobbish elitism, I know.

To: jbe who wrote (36923)	5/7/1999 12:14:00 AM
From: Jacques Chitte	Respond to of 108807

> You know, Christopher, I always used to say that it was a damn good thing the Library at Alexandria was burned down. < Oooh. Oooooh! I had the EXACT same thought. (But it was in two sentences.) >I suggest that there may be one more factor contributing to the apparent decrease in general knowledge. It is that, at one time, there was a consensus about what an educated person should know. With the advent of elective courses, etc., that consensus has broken down. Thus you can find two highly "informed" people who can't carry on a conversation with one another because each one is quite ignorant of what the other one knows. < And this also is dead bang onto a thought I've been masticating for the last fifty-or-so posts. Knowledge is up; IQ may be up, but a shared cultural and philosophic (incl. technical) basis is a lost thing. If TV steps up to fill that void, that will be imo an Awful Thing.