Are some types of knowledge more useful than others?

This prompt asks a common question about differentiating and classifying, which we often come across in everyday life, in many variants: “Is knowing Spanish or German better?” or “Is person A smarter than person B?”. In this exhibition, I am going to try to dig deep into the meaning of it and explain my perspective through examples.

My first object is a bike with a duct-taped chain. The bike is a community bike used in my school for biking trips, and the duct tape is an ordinary, everyday tool made for multiple applications such as isolation and in this case, sticking things to one another.

So this particular object was created on a school trip where the chain of the bike broke. While this damage created issues in moving the bike, I and my friends panicked, as we were on the mountain with no cars nearby nor a way to carry a bike. However, our teacher had duct tape with her and she was able to tape the chain to the body of the bike, which enabled the moving of the bike while walking.

While all of us possess completely the same knowledge in taping, our teacher knew when to apply it, while it did not even appear as a possibility in our head. In this case, the knowledge presented is practical knowledge that is acquired by day-to-day experiences. That is we gain it through doing real-life endeavours and tasks (Posthuma-Coelho Theoretical vs practical knowledge).

It was the factor that made her knowledge more valuable than our theoretical knowledge of duct tape. As I previously said we all know that duct tape is used for sticking things together but in this situation that theoretical knowledge was not useful. So, I can say that in this case, practical knowledge of using tape to fix up a bike is more useful than the theoretical knowledge of knowing what duct tape is for.

This is a screenshot of a scanned version of my transcript at the end of the 8 th grade. It is issued by my previous school, located in Banja Luka, Bosnia, and Herzegovina. It was scanned with the purpose of applying to international summer programs. In this object, a mix of grade descriptors in Cyrillic letters and numbers is evident. The Cyrillic script was developed by the Slavic people and is used today across 50 countries (Augustyn Cyrillic alphabet). When I send this document to international summer programs, despite not understanding Cyrillic, they can understand the numbers, which are the same in almost all parts of the world, and by understanding them, they are able to gain some understating of school transcripts of almost all people that sign up for such programs.

So, from this, we can say that knowing a language is important in an evergrowing multilingual world as it can give us an advantage in better understanding certain things like in this case a school transcript that is supposed to be sent to summer programmes (Ckotulak Why you should learn a second language and gain new skills). But to know a different script can also be useful like in my object and example. What is also important in this case is knowing the Arabic numerical system that is used across the whole globe and that almost everyone understands. By knowing the numeral system, the committee for choosing summer programme participants has proper evidence to choose a certain individual.

What can be concluded from this is that having knowledge of a script like Cyrillic and the Arabic numeral system is more useful than knowing just one or the other. In many other daily situations, knowledge of a language would be seen as greater knowledge than knowing how to read 10 Arabic digits. What this helps us understand is the relativity of comparisons between different types of knowledge, as while one knowledge can be very valuable in one particular situation or place, it can be almost worthless in another.

This puppet is my friend’s puppet that she has used for her voluntary child acting back home, and while teaching her sister how to speak. Rod puppets refer to a category of puppets manipulated from below via metal rods that also serve as support (Types of Puppet and Manipulation).

My friend has practised and gained knowledge in puppetry acting, which wasn’t seen at all as valuable knowledge by our community. However, her younger sister at that time had trouble starting to speak: and no speech therapist in the whole region was able to help her overcome that barrier. Then, her sister took it as her obligation and started to practice daily with her sister using her puppetry skills. After less than a month of practising, her sister was finally able to speak, and her knowledge of puppetry became more valuable than the knowledge of a speech therapist which was seen as a more skilful job than puppetry by our community.

The main link of this object to the prompt is the fact that sometimes it’s not at all up to the type of knowledge that an individual possesses, then to a situation, they are involved in, which defines which type of knowledge is more valuable. The emotional connection of the sisters made it possible for the younger one to learn better as an emotion has a strong impact on attention, selectivity of attention as well as motivating action and behaviour (Tyng et al. The influences of emotion on learning and memory). In this case, the situation happened to be such that puppetry was psychologically more beneficial for the learning process of kid. Thus, the person who possessed knowledge in it ended up being seen as having “superior knowledge”, while in some other cases, a speech therapist would be the one whose knowledge is seen as superior.

Augustyn, Adam. “Cyrillic Alphabet.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 2020, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Cyrillic-alphabet.

Ckotulak. “Why You Should Learn a Second Language and Gain New Skills.” Middlebury Language Schools, Middlebury Language Schools, 12 May 2020, https://www.middlebury.edu/language-schools/blog/why-you-should-learn-second-l anguage-and-gain-new-skills.

Posthuma-Coelho, Amanda. “Theoretical vs Practical Knowledge.” Medium, Medium, 25 Nov. 2016, https://medium.com/@amandaposthuma/theoretical-vs-practical-knowledge-86cab 1113abd#:~:text=Practical%20knowledge%20is%20knowledge%20that,techniques %20and%20theory%20of%20knowledge.

Tyng, Chai M., et al. “The Influences of Emotion on Learning and Memory.” Frontiers, Frontiers, 1 Jan. 2001, https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01454/full#:~:text=Emotion %20has%20a%20substantial%20influence,as%20motivating%20action%20and%2 0behavior.

“Types of Puppet and Manipulation.” Rod Puppet, Canadian Museum of History, 2015, https://theatre.historymuseum.ca/narratives/details.php?lvl2=4812&lvl3=4824&lvl4 =5002&language=english.