The Many Facets of Knowledge

Lindsey Smith, Angie Booher, Taren Manley, Steven Novotny

 

            We decided for our last blog, with the theme of control of knowledge, that we would each write our own first thoughts of the subject, according to what we were each currently experiencing.


Lindsey records observations during a boat trip in Thailand.
Photo: Taren Manley.

Lindsey

            As a wannabe naturalist who loves to bird-watch and identify plants, sometimes I worry about the difference between what I'm seeing and what I should be seeing. On this trip we have had several guidebooks to give us an idea of what we're seeing. I see a plant, I look in a guidebook, and I write down what I'm sure I saw. But it's all completely new to me.   Why should I automatically assume that I am seeing the exact species of plant that someone else saw before and decided to name? I also tend to think that it's hard to find original research in the science world, and that cutting-edge technology is the only way to do something original. I have to remind myself of the falsity of this way of thinking, as there are so many questions left unanswered in this world. As we have traveled to places I have never been, I have tried to look at each place unfamiliar to me as a new frontier so that I could ask all the questions myself. Yet it is amazingly hard to do. It feels like no matter what I want to know, somebody else knows something about it and it's easier to accept what they say as truth, as they have probably studied it longer than I have. I was amazed to read in the Maldives that there is a type of beaked whale that has only been found dead and never seen alive!  I want to see a world still filled with mystery, not one where we think we know something about everything. That world is still there, I just have to break how I've been taught in order to see it.

 Taren

            I must admit that this trip was different from my expectations on how we were going to learn.  I expected a lot more classroom-like learning.  We did have some controlled class room time, but it seemed, to me, we had more uncontrolled learning in every place we were in.  There is only so much a person can know and control in their environment.  That was proved on many occasions, the biggest being our luggage.  We had been given a list and very specific instructions on what to bring.  To say the least, in respect to packing, Denny tried his very hardest to control the amount of things that he thought was necessary.  That didn't work, but all of us learned, some in very expensive ways, that sometimes advice from someone who had traveled as extensively as we would was a good thing.  A major part of the trip that was controlled was when we were in Alaska and Hawai'i.  It was our safe zone, one where we learned how to be a group and also on our own in a controlled environment.  But just as much as this trip had to be controlled there are things about this trip that couldn't be and we had to learn how to handle that too, or completely break down.  Luckily no one did, but there were times where all of us were annoyed, angry, or upset at things that we either had no prior knowledge of or just out of exhaustion.  The best example was our guided tour of the Pyramids of Giza.  We had been promised that we wouldn't end up at a place where they would waste an hour of our time trying to sell something to us.  We, the students, were sure that they wouldn't do that to us.  It was a fact.  Like everything else in the world facts tend to change and so did our tour.  But we dealt with it and moved on; it is now apart of our knowledge about tours in Cairo/Giza.  I guess that what I learned above anything else on this trip is that the environment controls what you learn.  Your environment controls what you learn whether it is in a room or on a mountain or underwater; that it could be anything or anyone; your teacher, friend, a person begging, the stray cat that gets fed every night, a dead and ancient city, or the landscape itself. 

 Angie

            People have always tried to say what we can and cannot know, especially when it comes to science.  We just read the play Copenhagen which talks about the creation of the atomic bomb.  Before the war, it was an international project, but because America was the first to solve the secret, we believe, for the greater good, that we should be the only ones with this knowledge.  No other reason than "it should be this way."  Along the same lines, the all-knowing and indefinable "they" think they can decide what should be learned by us.  Before leaving for this trip, we "learned" what to expect to see, what each biome should look like.  And because we were told to see these things, we did.  We saw the dry, highly eroded, nutrient poor soils of the Mediterranean Scrubland.  But the palm trees we saw didn't seem to belong because we didn't learn about them.  I wanted to reject the idea that they could belong in that biome simply because the preconceived ideas we were told about and we read about didn't include them.  And these notions are formed by people who believe they have the knowledge to determine what we need to know.  But that attitude doesn't allow us to go to an area and discover things.  Everything we see is what we are looking for because we believe it should be there because we were told it would be.  And that search for what is expected makes us miss things we otherwise would have noticed - the unexpected.  It also doesn't take into account what we want to know; what curiosity makes us ask.  Control of the general knowledge base, that which Alexander von Humboldt set out to expand, is resulting in a smaller and smaller pool of information, both because we are not learning it and because we are not discovering it.

Steven

Question: How do you prevent global warming and Biome Destruction?

 

Answer: How can you expect to control the world and global warming if we can't even control ourselves? Knowledge is power. He who controls the knowledge has the power. It's a saying I heard a long time ago and stored away thinking little of but on a twelve week trip around the world with seventeen other people it stood out like a sore thumb coming back to haunt me every time I tried to do something. For example He who knows where the bathroom is, rules all when you really have to go or he who knows the way leads and you have to follow there's countless examples that happen in your everyday life of how little control over you life you have but your so used to it you don’t even see it. When you're taken outside of the little world you live in the loss of control slaps you in the face.

            It was very hard for a lot of us to give up control and admit we knew little and control even less. I guess that’s why we try to learn more but the more we learn the more there seams to be to learn. A crisis has appeared through the destruction of biomes and the heating of the earth through global warming. I guess all I can say to do about this is to admit we don’t really know anything about it and try our best to learn and act on what we do find out. Just as we do in our every day life, there's no set way to answer it


Denny and Katie in a discussion... about the world?
Photo: Angie Booher

Angie Booher, Taren Manley, Steven Novotny and Lindsey Smith
boohera at hiram.edu
last updated 10 April 2008