Statue of Holmes at Meiringen, Switzerland
This is an excerpt of Sherlock Holmes speaking to Dr. Watson in Chapter 2 of “A Study in Scarlet” by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle:
“You see,” he explained, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now, the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it, there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”
My wife and I went to the rodeo at the National Western Stock Show last week. As we were walking from the parking lot toward the Denver Coliseum, we found there were some railroad tracks we could use as a short cut to get to the front doors. We decided to take the tracks and my wife turned to me and said, “it’s like we’re hobos!”
She then paused and wondered: what’s a hobo? We both knew it was a slang term for a homeless person who rides trains from place to place. But where did “hobo” come from?
I grabbed my iPhone, Googled “hobo” and clicked on the Wikipedia entry that was the second result in the organic search. I learned about the various different theories that try to explain the origin of “hobo.” (No one seems to agree.) It struck me a few days later that I had added the etymology of hobo to my “brain-attic” by the time we were inside the Coliseum and debating whether to get nachos or popcorn for a snack.
As mobile networks and hand-held devices get faster and faster at putting the Internet at your fingertips at the exact moment you have a question, will you cease having to know stuff and just know how to find stuff? Will education become more about teaching you how to think and solve problems, instead of preparing you to be an expert in a specialized field?
Here’s what I mean:
I bet you don’t know what Dr. Watson’s first name is in the Holmes stories. But I also bet with a link to Google, you can find out in under 30 seconds. Ready? Go!
