Nice book extract (on education) in the Australian Financial Review.

About a ten-minute read. Click here for article.

Here’s how it starts…

It has never been easier to give the illusion of intelligence. If you know the right people to follow, or the right publications to plunder, you can cut and paste your way to instant academic credibility. I’m doing it right now. This idea isn’t mine, but comes instead from a 2014 New York Times article called “Faking Cultural Literacy”.

The article argues, correctly in my view, that we live in an era where our opinions are increasingly based on very little knowledge.What matters is not knowledge itself, but knowledge of the fact that a thing exists or is happening. Who needs to take time learning about something when we can just skim Twitter? We’re all busy people, after all.