Drucker would be deeply saddened ...
... about the troubling state of curiosity ...
In the past, ignorance tended to be a source of shame and motivation. Students were far more likely to be troubled by not-knowing, far more eager to fill such gaps by learning. Today, "it's not that they don't know, it's that they don't care about what they don't know."
Upon graduation, we must devote ever more energy to mastering the floods of information that might help us keep our wobbly jobs. Crunched, we have little time to learn about far-flung subjects.
The narrowcasting of our lives is writ large in our culture. The Internet slices and dices it all into highly specialized niches that provide mountainous details about the slightest molehills.
When people only care about what they care about, their desire to know something more, something new, evaporates like the morning dew.
The notion of an aspirational culture, in which one endeavors to learn what is right, proper and important in order to make something more of himself, is past.
Unfortunately, this new freedom has sucker punched the notion of the educated person. Instead of a mainstream reverence for those who produce or appreciate works that represent the summit of human achievement, we have a corporatized and commodified culture that hypes the latest trend, the next new thing.
Curiously, in a world where everything is worth knowing, nothing is.
