networks of knowing

I like things that are interdisciplinary, and I like finding links between subjects. That's what I love about the academic enterprise. It involves building a network of knowledge, and over time it becomes richer and richer. 

Everything is related in your brain. If you learn about art and you learn about science, those two subjects are connected in your brain because everything is connected in your brain...maybe not directly, but if both things are in there, they will be connected in some way. 

At uni, I did a course about the history of political ideas. Among the texts we read were Hobbes's Leviathan and Locke's Second Treatise of Government. So, I thought of them as thinkers and writers about political ideas. But then, years later, when I was studying education, I came across the same names, and learned that they had had a huge influence in that area. Then, later still, when I was learning about English literature and the relationship between science and poetry, there they were again. And I started to seek them out and reread their work. I came to see them as representative of the age in which they lived. 

And that's one of the joys of learning and study. You learn about something or someone in one context, and then, when you encounter them/ it in a different context, you already know something about them/ it, and now you know more about both the context and the person or issue. There's something really exciting to me about that. It's about real learning and real intellectual engagement. It's about building something. I can learn about John Locke for example, so, when I read the poetry of William Blake and I read a book like Northrop Frye's Fearful Symmetry, which is about how to understand Blake's poetry, and in that book he writes about how Blake had a fundamental disagreement with Locke and his philosophical approach, there's a whole extra dimension for me because I know about Locke for myself, so I can weigh up Blake's view and Northrop Frye's view, and it enriches my understanding of a whole range of things - Blake, Locke, literary criticism, philosophy, science, the 17th century (when Locke lived), the 18th and 19th centuries (when Blake lived). Learning is not a linear thing. It's like you have all of these masterpieces in your head that you've been working on, and when you learn new things, you work on multiple masterpieces at the same time.