Yixia Gu: Response to Knowers and Knowing

'Education is learning what you didn’t even know you didn’t know.' (Daniel J. Boorstin).

This phrase is a very interesting one, because how do we acknowledge or realize that we actually don't know something if we haven't been taught to recognize this uncertainty? Once we receive education, we are simultaneously enlightened in our thoughts and how we view the world, and at this point we find that there are actually many things we haven't come across upon in experience. This quotation of Daniel J. Borrstin is suggests that the original, fundamental purpose and existence of Education is simply to open doors of the 'unknown' in a world of the apparent 'known'.

Education as defined, is the power of reasoning and judgment to prepare ourselves for intellectually mature life. This, I believe is a valid point in my view of knowledge: if a person walked through a garden and didn’t know what the bunches of ‘colourful-many petalled-thing on a stalk’ was, he or she wouldn’t be able to appreciate the ‘flowers’ in the garden fully- the apparent ignorance limited their perspective, and only allowed them to see ‘flowers’ as lovely colourful things. Take sports for instance, perhaps playing basketball may seem easy enough; the players dribbling balls and passing them with agility and ease. However, once I actually had a basketball lesson, I realized that I didn’t actually have the knowledge of handling the ball or playing it properly which was reflected during the basketball games. This example ties in quite well with our lives as students. One of the reasons why there were a range of pictures of ‘school knowledge’ was because each us valued the knowledge from school environment differently. We were influenced by our preferences and we are eclectic in learning “what we didn’t know, and the things we appeared on the paper could have been due to their importance in paving the way for greater depth in understanding. Thus, Education to me is also learning to know.