The History of Knowledge

I recently joined my family in New York City to attend the Bar Mitzvah of my sister’s (step)grandson, Sam. The service was held at the wonderful Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, built on such progressive principles as “anyone who takes the pulpit is free to say what they wish.” Among the prominent people who have availed themselves of that freedom are Dr. Martin Luther King, Eleanor Roosevelt, Bishop Desmond Tutu, Justice Louis Brandeis, and Albert Einstein. The congregation is proud of its pioneering history, which includes being the first synagogue with a social service department, among the first synagogues to open a shelter for the homeless, the first synagogue in the United States to install a woman rabbi, and (this last accomplishment seems especially New York to me) the first synagogue to hire a professional Jewish composer as its music director. I was impressed by the many years of posters gracing the synagogue’s hallways for their annual Purim celebrations. Each year, the temple creates an original musical, written in a different musical genre, to tell the Biblical story of Esther. My favorites were the posters for the versions inspired by Nashville and by the Beatles.
My Cuban born colleague Eduardo Aparicio joined us at the Bar Mitzvah service, and he and I were impressed by Sam’s friends, who come from all kinds of different ethnicities, and never seem to wonder “why can’t we all just get along?”. Sam himself is a post-modern kid. His mom is from the Philippines, his dad’s family is European. He lives in a more heterogeneous world than the world I grew up in, or ever imagined as a child.
While we were in New York, my Manhattan-based uncle Leonard took my mother and me through the Dutch Masters collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. You really can’t go too wrong with Rembrandt. My uncle provided us with our own private lecture, and a guard complimented him on his encyclopedic knowledge of the work.
And that got me thinking about knowledge and encyclopedias.
My main sources of knowledge as a child were my grandmother’s encyclopedia The Book of Knowledge (was this the encyclopedia that my father used as a child?), and a 60’s edition of World Book that my mother earned for my sister and me by selling the encyclopedia door to door in our suburban village of Skokie. Our edition included an article on the carpet industry, written by the very same uncle who guided my mother and me through the Dutch Masters exhibit all those years later.
The Book of Knowledge (subtitled “The Children’s Encyclopedia”) was published from1908 through 1964, and was organized as a collage of fairy tales, craft activities, information, beautiful color plates, and sepia toned drawings with art-nouveau borders, arranged not alphabetically, but along broad poetic themes, such as “The Book of Familiar Things”, “The Book of Golden Deeds”, “The Book of All Countries”, and “The Book of Men and Women”. The volume entitled “The Book of Wonders” was organized into a series of inquiry questions, wondering such wonders as “Why do I laugh and cry?”, “Why does the sea taste of salt?”, “Are animals in the zoo contented?”, “Do we see a thing as soon as we look at it?”, and oddly enough, “Who are Lloyd’s of London?” That last question might be explained by the encyclopedia’s British origin. The tone was one of genial didactic liberalism sprinkled with casual doses of racism, sexism, and eugenics. Complete sets of The Book of Knowledge in good condition fetch a nice price these days on eBay.
World Book is based in Chicago, and was first published in 1917. According to its publisher, it is "the number-one selling print encyclopedia in the world,” which serves to justify its name. In 1961, as a gesture of good will, World Book produced a Braille edition, which filled 145 volumes. The production costs were too great to be covered by sales, and all the Braille editions were eventually donated to institutions for the blind. It is hard for me to imagine World Book as pure text, since its core appeal to my childhood self was visual. The edition I grew up with had lots of color plates, printed in a kind of muted Technicolor palette, which formed forever my primary images of plants, animals, period clothing, great paintings, and peoples of the world. My image of other countries was formed by maps with little repeating icons of agricultural products (flax, corn, soybeans, etc.). I thought of knowledge as finite and quantifiable, done and finished, and sealed between hard covers by the experts at World Book. Many of my childhood homework assignments took their language straight from World Book’s pages, not just because that was the path of least resistance, but also because I really believed that World Book WAS the book of knowledge.

I think differently now. I am addicted to Wikipedia, the free on-line encyclopedia "that anyone can edit”, which democratizes the very idea of expertise itself. I know that there are many who question Wikipedia’s accuracy and legitimacy, but I frankly don’t care. I LIKE that the entries are in constant contention and transformation. Knowledge has become for me something shifting and changing, contributed to by every learner, every teacher, every artist I encounter in my work, as they all draw on their own small knowledge to generate collective wisdom together. In an information age, where Sam’s Bar Mitzvah is celebrated by kids with as many different types of knowledge as they have different backgrounds, the idea of “encyclopedic knowledge” returns to its earlier conception of being a cooperative service for the greater good. Here are the post-modern words of the great French Enlightenment thinker Denis Diderot, whose desire for systematizing and organizing was superseded by his desire to see encyclopedias as mechanisms for sharing across space and time:

Indeed, the purpose of an encyclopedia is to collect knowledge disseminated around the globe; to set forth its general system to the men with whom we live, and transmit it to those who will come after us, so that the work of preceding centuries will not become useless to the centuries to come; and so that our offspring, becoming better instructed, will at the same time become more virtuous and happy, and that we should not die without having rendered a service to the human race.

Arnold Aprill
Founding and Creative Director
Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education
www.capeweb.org