Knowledge Management: The Death of Wisdom

Chapter 7

How the Baton was Passed

If the past cannot teach the present and the father cannot teach the son, then history need not have bothered to go on, and the world has wasted a great deal of time

––Russell Hoban, U.S. author1

Conceptions are usually one person’s exclusive output, but their development is nearly always organic—the building of one bit of understanding upon another, exactly like the theoretical model of Experiential Learning itself. Even this one.

The genus of the idea, which focuses on how people learn, has its origins in the field of psychology, philosophy, and physiology, not education or industry. In the first half of the 20th century, so-called behaviorialism—a Pavlovian view of human behavior2—dominated ...