Specialized ignorance

A lot of good things have been said about poetry. Samuel Taylor Coleridge called poetry "the best words in the best order". One thing I especially like is what Joseph Warren Beach wrote in his A Romantic View of Poetry from 1963: "Poetry begins with words; and with words begin all the higher satisfactions of human experience."

Sometime, somewhere, something went wrong. People back in the day could do all sorts of things; cultivate a garden, speak different languages, cook various dishes, mend their clothes and homes, handle animals and hunt. I know that not all people could do all these things, but it seems that people generally had a wider range of skills back then. Today the people who have the time and money to actually learn different things don't. They end up being supid on television or just bored. It's sad, really. I'm watchin Jersey Shore right now and well... no comments. It just makes me sad to be a modern human being.

The universities in earlier centuries weren't as specialized as they are today. Knowledge was all about knowing the great philosophers, the great poets, the great scientists, and what they had thought, thought of and thought up. You read the great works and from that your own thoughts evolved. You studied harder as well. I read somewhere that the typical 16th-century university week consisted of five days of intense studies, from 6 A.M. til late evening. No wonder Martin Luther was a fully educated priest and philosopher with knowledge of medicin, Latin and Greek at the age of 22. Today I'm at uni two days a week, four hours a day. And that is called full-time studies. It's ridiculous!
Today everything is much more specialized. People are experts in some areas and completely ignorant in others. I, for example, know that William Caxton set up a printing press in London in 1476, thus helping in the standardization of the language, but I'm completely at a loss when it comes to mending a fuse or patching my jeans. It's a natural evolution but it's not for the good. Sometimes you just wish you had been born in a different age.