A smuggler's view of learning:)

Knowledge as acquired in school-time (attending + holidays; just about until you graduate almost all your time is governed by school) is like an irregular shoreline with islets of trivia learned through curiosity and rotting marshland lost because reasons and never regained. (We congratulate ourselves for not risking malaria, seeing as we are experienced pirates and all.)

And we forget the layout and move inland, because that's where stuff happens. Jobs, relationships, kids, even dead ends are more grownup then the crumbling edge of - nothing definable, 'cause you need a thing to have more than one side to define it, and there's just water, right?

And now I look back and am vaguely surprised that I have never been interested in the science of space exploration or large-scale food production or anything more advanced than early XX century (roughly). We had to cram it into our last year, physics, biology, economic geography, everything. There was more to the problem than just no time to bother understanding, there was no time to hear about it!

And knowledge propagates. Forget natural history museums as educational tools. Forget rewriting textbooks every year, if all the topics stay the same. We need a separate course of 'XX century advances' to teach people what's out there in the mist.