Final Exam Post: All I've learned

Looking back at history we clearly see and trace how different formats for the transfer of knowledge, folk, oral, written, and printed, have each contributed to the basis of knowledge available to many today. Despite all of the knowledge that has reached the modern world, many other pieces of knowledge did not make it due to censorship in each time and unique to each medium used to preserve knowledge. Whether on purpose or not each form of knowledge has inherent cracks that can allow even the most valued knowledge to slip through, our problem is to find them and stop them before we lose more. 

See No Evil by Enokson on Flickr

Most people think of censorship as some evil little man in a cubicle in a government building carefully pouring over books with a black pen to redact anything he does not like. Censorship does not necessarily have to look like that. Censorship is any person, group, or method that prevents some form of knowledge from passing to another person. Is there any way that folk knowledge could be censored? Today in class Michael mentioned one, "The new generation chooses whether or not to pass on the knowledge."(From his notes for the final.) In the realm of folk knowledge learning happens person to person, but if the "teacher" refuses to pass on that knowledge then they censor, or limit, the knowledge available to the "student" and any one else they might teach. 

Hear No Evil by Enokson

Although the same logic applies to oral knowledge, your sources for a certain type of knowledge is sometimes limited, the art of rhetoric applies another layer of censorship. Alicia spent some time exploring rhetoric, and today she brought up the point that if a person can use rhetoric to convince you of their truth, then that is the knowledge you pass on. Therefore only knowledge that is known, and that has been termed "truth" by the orator, or teacher, usually passes on. 


For written knowledge think of all the knowledge that is lost because some one forgot/refused to write it down, and those who would benefit from learning of it refuse/cannot listen to the one who knows. I encountered this problem first hand on my trip to the Navajo Nation earlier this semester, "Loren's point was that because of this the older generations are losing touch with their children and grandchildren. The young kids go to school and learn the white man's culture there, and because they don't want to ask to sit and listen to their elders they don't learn their own culture. Loren believes that if his people were to write down more of their culture they could have material to not only teach their children, but others that are curious to know more about them."

Speak No Evil by Enokson

At last we have reached the subject of my paper from a couple of weeks ago, censorship of printed books. There I argued that although some censorship in the aforementioned form did occur, most the writers  had developed a system of ambiguity that prevented censors from throwing works into the fires. 


Printed knowledge has one main censor in modern society, access. Certainly in many first world countries nearly all the citizens have access to printed knowledge from libraries, but what of those that do not have this type of access? They can only learn knowledge conveyed in one of the other forms of knowledge.  The internet, as the latest mode for preserving knowledge, attempts to overcome this barrier. It too finds limitations in access, yet increasingly more people have access to internet than to a solid educational system. The last barrier then is making all of the knowledge we have available through the internet, to those that could use this knowledge.   


Many people only put on their thinking caps when the opportunity to profit from the knowledge presents itself.  For most of these then, common forms of publication lead to the greatest and most direct profits, dollars. On the other hand, the world as a whole might most benefit from knowledge made available in its latest medium, the internet, for free. The other day in class Dr. Burton mentioned an online article that could have helped many more people, who could access it on the internet, if it had been free. If we care at all about progressing the world why do we limit the access of knowledge to the privileged?