The first use of the term knowledge economy I came across was when I left teaching around seven or eight years ago. I remember then thinking I wasn’t at all sure what was meant by it, especially since I’d spent two decades working hard to build up my knowledge of language and literature, as well as experience about teaching, children and schools. My scepticism increased soon after when I sat through a presentation on video conferencing in which it was stated that the average man gains more knowledge in one day, than his counterpart did in a lifetime three hundred years ago. I’m sure the guy who made that statement didn’t expect there to be members of his audience who actually knew quite a lot about what people did three hundred years ago, even down to what books they kept in the their libraries, and although I didn’t publicly correct him, I did realise that there was something going badly wrong here.

Last week I saw that issue raise its head again in a meeting during which someone talked very confidently to a younger audience about the wealth of ‘knowledge’ people today have, so much that when they go to see their doctor they know more about the illness than the doctor does. The truth is a little less rosy. I think it’s truly dangerous to conflate knowledge with information, which is what all these various speakers did. American librarians, used to handling a constant flow of internet queries from high school students, talk about inforamuses: kids drowning in barely grasped information that they think they understand because they got it from the net. Information is merely the icing on the knowledge cake, the bit that has, in civilised societies, been crystallized and smoothed out for ease of consumption by people who haven’t the time, skill or expertise to gain the knowledge for themselves.

So having received an invitation to this Royal Institution Knowledge Economy event; having met Martin Westwell several times, and knowing something about his research interests plus the genuine body of knowledge in this field he has built up, I will definitely be accepting it and encouraging colleagues to attend. I’m getting a bit tired of people with little knowledge, reducing education to job seeking.