Stephen Fry on learning

I recently read The Fry Chronicles and I couldn’t resist copying out this passage where Fry talks about having a thirst for knowledge:

There are young men and women up and down the land who happily (or unhappily) tell anyone who will listen that they don’t have an academic turn of mind, or that they aren’t lucky enough to have been blessed with a good memory, and yet can recite hundreds of pop lyrics and reel off any amount of information about footballers, cars and celebrities. Why? Because they are interested in those things. They are curious. If you are hungry for food you are prepared to hunt high and low for it. If you are hungry for information it is the same. Information is all around us, now more than ever before in human history. You barely have to stir or incommode yourself to find things out. The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care to know. They are incurious. Incuriosity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is.

Picture the world as being a city whose pavements are covered a foot deep in gold coins. You have to wade through them to make progress. Their clinking and rattling fills the air. Imagine that you met a beggar in such a city.

‘Please, give me something. I am penniless.’

‘But look around you,’ you would shout. ‘There is gold enough to last you your whole life. All you have to do is to bend down and pick it up!’

When people complain that they don’t know any literature because it was badly taught at school, or that they missed out on history because on the timetable it was either that or biology, or some such ludicrous excuse, it is hard not to react in the same way.

‘But it’s all around you!’ I want to scream. ‘All you have to do it bend down and pick it up!’ What on earth people think their lack of knowledge of the Hundred Years War, or Socrates, or the colonization of Batavia has to do with school I have no idea. As one who was expelled from any number of educational establishments and never did any work at any of them, I know perfectly well that the fault lay not in the staff but in my self that I was ignorant. Then one day, or over the course of time, I got greedy. Greedy to know things, greedy for understanding, greedy for information

My favourite links #25

The UChannel project is an initiative of Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. They have an excellent collection of one-off public affairs lectures that can be downloaded or streamed. Their idea is to be a global academic forum. Go here for the website.

My favourite links #16

I have already had some university websites and the latest one is Yale University. It has a small selection of course but they are going to have eight new ones this Autumn. The sound quality is excellent, which is not always the case. You can download them onto your MP3 player. The courses include:

 

Modern Poetry

Introduction to Psychology

Fundamentals of Physics

Introduction to Political Philosophy

Frontiers and Controversies in Astrophysics

 

Go to http://oyc.yale.edu/

My Favourite Links #9

In January 2007 the London School of Economics launched its first podcasting channel, Public lectures and events: podcasts. You can access podcasts of a wide selection of LSE’s public lectures. The podcasts can be played directly from that page or downloaded for playing later using your PC or MP3 player. Lectures include:

A Debate about the Definition of ‘Britishness’

Global Financial Regulation: The Essential Guide

Modern Erotics and the Quest for Intimacy

The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What It Means

Trade and Inequality Revisited

The speakers come from a wide range of ideologies; George Soros, Fred Halliday, David Miliband, Jeffrey Sachs, Michelle Bachelet and Tim Harford just to name a few.

Here is the website.

http://www.lse.ac.uk/resources/podcasts/publicLecturesAndEvents.htm

 

My favourite Links #6

HowStuffWorks is a website dedicated to explaining the way many things work. These things could be mobile phones, mortgages, pickpockets or cults. The site uses photos, diagrams, video and animation to explain complex terminology and mechanisms in easy-to-understand language. It was founded by Marshall Brain in 1998 and has has 58 million visitors annually.

www.howstuffworks.com

My Favourite Links #4

The University of California, Berkeley  was founded in 1868 and its motto is Fiat lux or for those of us who didn’t have a classical education Let there be light. Now that light can reach anywhere in the world with access to the internet. They have now posted 100s of courses at their website. These include the following: The Making of Modern Europe: 1453 to the Present, Microeconomics, Shakespeare, The Ancient Mediterranean World, General Psychology, Heidegger…….. the list goes on and on. These courses have been available for a number of years now and you can find them all here. You don’t need to register and they are all free.

http://webcast.berkeley.edu/