About that pointless GP essay

OK Hui Mun, what is knowledge? (Discuss..)
Minutiae, trivia, isolated facts - surely they aren't knowledge? We find ourselves on this earth and we think - well, what is this? We build up a picture in our minds, a model, of the world, our world, 'our' universe. It gets more complicated as we get older. That's good, isn't it; we wouldn't want our understanding of the world to be the same one that we had in primary school. But it does have to connect to us and to itself, otherwise there is no pattern, complicated or otherwise, and we have fragmented detail, the world of the autistic person, perhaps. So it's important to start from home and extend outwards, but it's dreary to be limited to home, and narrow horizons make for an impoverished life in more than the financial sense.

So along comes good old GP, to help us build up that world picture. If your concept of yourself as a learner is that of a passive victim of 'the system', a mugging and regurgitating machine, then GP is an irritation, because there seems to be a lot of stuff to be learnt and you can't even necessarily get marks for reproducing it. However, if you think of yourself as an active learner, a curious person, a seeker of wisdom and truth, then it is likely you will be able to glean some insights and some facts which significantly extend your personal world picture. Of course they don't do much for "everyday living" - but don't our servants do that part for us [see footnote]? If the limits of my life were "everyday living", I would only feel half alive. (Though sometimes your personal world picture does have practical importance. Those Jews who read the papers and decided to leave Germany after Hitler came to power, were well rewarded for their intellectual curiosity.)

So huge stores of general knowledge are not the point of GP. A coherent picture or model which enables us to organise and see the significance of the huge stores, is the point. We have to distinguish between knowledge on the one hand, and mere information or data on the other.

It is interesting that you favour the rhetoric of the demagogue over objectivity and logic. Does this mean you favour being easily influenced by the rhetoric of a charismatic politician, who will lead you into whatever project his ego has chosen to favour, such as the rule of the Master (Aryan) Race or the Jihad to slaughter the infidel? GP might help you distinguish the rant from the reason, and acquire the judgement and critical awareness not to be swayed by passion-stirring words. I like poetry and music, but I wouldn't like to think that a nationalistic song could overwhelm my reason and make me blindly follow my country, right or wrong.

You prefer a novel to the GP bulletin? Hands up all those who disagree. What, no GP teachers? Fortunately we are not faced with such a choice. We can enjoy and benefit from the widening of our understanding of life which novels give us, and we can improve our English by reading them, but we can also grasp the elements of constructing a convincing argument, with some help from the GP bulletin.

And is the ability to argue coherently, a valuable one? I should say so. There are plenty of people who can't, and who can't understand what makes an argument either more or less convincing. Thabo Mbeki, President of South Africa, doesn't think AIDS is caused by the HIV virus. This means lots more people die than might otherwise. Pity he didn't do GP when his brain was a bit more plastic, so that he could see the implications of agreement among the scientific community on a topic, and the relationship between evidence and the degree of certainty which the evidence supports.

So I would say don't overvalue everyday life. There is a bigger, richer life there too, which makes it more interesting to be a human being than, say, a cow. (Cows have lots of everyday life.) And while constructing arguments may seem tedious, it does mean that one is learning to think coherently, and that is exciting, useful, sometimes painful, but a great human achievement. And don't limit yourself to the Economist - try the Spectator.

Mike Evans, GP teacher

Footnote: This is a reference, but I need a good GP student to tell me where it comes from. It refers to the fact that the princely heroes of classical plays have interesting and complex love lives and even tragedies, but never seem to go shopping or do the washing up. "Living? Our servants will do that for us." (It is ironic in this piece, because we toilers in the field of secondary education don't have servants - though come to think of it, perhaps in Singapore we do.)

Disclaimer: It wouldn't be right to finish without expressing appreciation of your disclaimer. That makes teaching in Singapore - even teaching GP - a lot more bearable. Thank you for that.