As I've had a few weeks to prepare I've spent the time getting advice from friends, guidebooks and the internet in the mistaken belief that a little bit of knowledge is a good thing.
One of the philosophic problems that Nāgārjuna raised for epistemology has to do with an alleged regress of justification on the assumption that a pramāṇa is required in order to know and that to identify the source of a bit of knowledge is to certify the proposition embedded.
Some people center their lives around money or status or community or service to God, but this seems to be a learning-centered life, where little bits of practical knowledge are the daily currency, where the main vocation is to be preoccupied with some exciting little project or maybe a dozen.
In other words, bits of disconnected knowledge are meaningless; all knowledge must find some imaginative application to the students' own lives, or else it becomes so much useless trivia, and the students themselves become good at parroting facts but not thinking for themselves.
This is not to say that reading Mary Poppins now, armed with various bits of adult knowledge, is consistently thrilling.
The human memory, unlike that of a computer, has evolved to be associative, which makes it ill-suited to arithmetic, where bits of knowledge must be kept from interfering with one another: if you're trying to retrieve the result of multiplying 7 X 6, the reflex activation of 7 + 6 and 7 X 5 can be disastrous.
A "red pill" is a transformative bit of knowledge that is supposed to subvert left-wing brainwashing.
That all makes sense in the context of academia, where each bit of knowledge must be made to fit snugly within the existing ecosystem of Knowledge.
This time we felt hurried in that PC World kind of way, only this was by someone with a bit of knowledge about what was being sold.
