Pleasure, Beauty, and Wonder

Educating for the Knowledge Age

By John M. Eger

T.S. Eliot, in his poem "The Rock," asks rhetorically: "Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"

He could not have imagined how we have increased the world’s database of information. According to some reports, the store of facts and data has been doubling almost every year since the turn of the 20th century. Today, given the proliferation of the Internet, the computerization of news archives, and libraries available on the World Wide Web, literally thousands of references are available at the click of a mouse. The challenge today is not acquiring information, it is determining which information is relevant.

Addressing an education conference in late 2006, Dana Gioia , then the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, said that we need "a system that grounds all students in pleasure, beauty, and wonder.” He added: “If we are going to compete productively with the rest of the world, it’s going to be in terms...