The Best Teacher: Life
The older I get the more I realize what one learns just from living. As time goes on, the world changes, and whether you want that or not, you must be willing to unlearn or re-learn some pretty big things.
When you’re growing up, you take for granted what you are taught, but only after you become an adult and and then only if you have intellectual curiosity, do you learn that a lot of what you were taught is either incorrect, biased or maybe just limited to what was known at that time in history when you were formally learning. Outdated.
Think of the things that have changed since I was in school. For example, take the myth of the Cowboys and the Indians. When I came home for lunch in elementary school, the Lone Ranger was on the radio. In the evening, Hopalong Cassidy might have been on TV--after 1953.
In the Cowboys and “Indians” myth, as it was taught in schools, the Cowboys were the good guys, and the “Indians” were the marauders and rapists.
The Lone Ranger was a fictional Texas ranger who rode with a native American sidekick named Tonto. Tonto was a “good” Indian.
Now I have learned that it was actually Cowboys who were most often marauders, while “Indians” were the indigenous occupants of the land. Through a series of wars and bad real estate deals the land was stolen from the “Indians,” who are now called the native peoples. This recasting of history turns the entire good v. evil spectrum from my youth on its head. It also explains why Phoenix has an Indian School Road, and a former Indian School, where young native Americans got a proper white man’s education after they were removed from their homes on the reservations.
So much for the looking glass of history.
Then, in science, there’s the Periodic Table. When I was in school, the periodic table was on a large roll down chart on my classroom wall that sometimes obscured the blackboard. It gave me the impression of being a finished object affixed to the front of the science classroom. But in the 70 years since I took chemistry in the 1950s, an entire seventh row of super heavy elements have been discovered and added to the Table. Elements 113, 115 117 and 118 were only formally named in 2016. The “new” elements have been given official names: 113 is nihonium, 115 is moskovium, 117 is tennessine and 118 is organesson. I’m sure their discovery and naming are accompanied by fascinating stories that I don’t know about.
But their discovery made me think about ongoing scientific discoveries and our evolving understanding of atomic structure and properties. Maybe in another post I will write about ongoing discoveries in physics, which I’m also sure has changed, as well as biology, which now includes such changes as genetics. Can you imagine the world of medicine without genetic testing and personalized medicine? That was the world of the 1950s.
Newly discovered information like this makes me aware of how radically incomplete anyone’s education is when they graduate from school, thinking they are “finished“ being educated. No one is ever finished being educated, nor should they be. It’s presumptuous to think you don’t have to learn anything else throughout your life.
If nothing else, you have to learn how to take advantage of artificial intelligence.
With AI we have a real resource we can query to keep up with the world. We can query an app called Perplexity.AI which is (for now) free, and it can fill in the gaps in knowledge between 1958, when I graduated high school, and 2024, where I find myself adrift in the universe full of completely new discoveries and information.
No offense, and no pressure, but if you haven’t played with artificial intelligence, either in the forms of ChatGPT or Perplexity, it’s time to give it a try. It’s hard to live in a world that is constantly changing around you without a reference point, and more than anything ChatGPT is going to be my reference point in the future, as I try to keep up with new knowledge and new information. Try it.