When I was six, I practically lived in the Franklin Institute, one of Philadelphia's oldest science museums and the place where my love of science began. I went back there recently, and among the exhibits and displays I noticed a single, and very large, piece of carbon, iron and nickel labeled only "meteorite." No age, no explanation, no synthesis, no comprehension - just a single, barely descriptive and deeply unfulfilling title.
Without the proper framework, or, indeed, any framework, there's no chance to understand that the hunk of black metal is made of the same material as the Earth's core, a revelation which forms the nucleus of our understanding of planetary structure; such a thought is far more interesting than a simple rock. A display, be it of a meteorite, a post-impressionist painting or a cracked bell, becomes nothing more than a thing for people to stare at, say "Oh, that's kind of cool" and then move on to get a sandwich.
This lack of intellectual connectivity is relevant to all of us. Many courses, at Brown and elsewhere often make this same mistake - focusing too much on raw facts without the proper context or background, and calling it learning. As anyone who has ever crammed for an economics or biology exam well knows, rote memorization of formulas and organelles - or any sort of isolated facts - is not nearly the same as true comprehension, and believing the former to be the latter is a waste of time and effort.
So what does this mean, beyond a plea for better diorama placards? Columns at the beginning of the school year often issue "advice," usually unread and unheeded, to entering students. That being said, here's my advice: when picking your classes, look for the courses that can incorporate knowledge, not just facts. Learn as much as you can about models, theories and paradigms - how they work, and what they explain and what they don't. More importantly, by learning why and how things happen the way they do, you'll be able to predict other actions in the future. Evolution, after all, is important not because it has produced really cool T-shirt graphics of monkeys turning into humans, but because it demonstrates the mechanisms that broadly explains the great diversity - and similarities - of the world around us. And while inflation rates alone would make for a stiflingly boring economics class, the fact that supply and demand helps researchers and investors predict human behavior makes the subject worth learning.
Academia is full of such models, which can help bring clarity to what might seem to be only minor curiosity. In your time here, study those that exist, regardless of discipline, and look to your classes, not just for those that cover interesting topics, but to see how those topics relate to one another.
Is it clear at first glance which courses just teach facts, and which teach the context necessary to make those facts worth learning? No. But once you start shopping around, seeing how professors approach material, checking the syllabi and assigned books, you'll get a much better idea.
And you, along with most Brown students past and present, will probably take a course or two that just doesn't fit your needs and interests. But if you can incorporate what you have learned into a larger schema, if you can connect seemingly trivial bits of fact, you'll have a far more complete knowledge base than you would have otherwise thought. Or, at the least, museums will be a whole lot more interesting.
Joey Borson '07 wants to see a post-impressionistic painting of a meteorite.
