This guide is meant to help you develop your information literacy and research skills in order to strengthen and support your powers of analysis, creativity, and rationality as you seek, find, select, modify, and create knowledge effectively and ethically across your life.
Much of what you find on this guide may also be embedded in library guides and workshops for your coursework, or in a program like the RPG's professional development (PDC), but this learning can also be self-directed and independent.
You can go through the guide sequentially, or in any order that suits your desires and needs.
Enjoy!
"學而時習之，不亦說乎？有朋自遠方來，不亦樂乎 - To learn something and then put it into practice at the right time, is that not a joy? To have friends coming from afar: is that not a delight?"
- 孔子 (Confucius). "學而 1 - Xue Er 1". In The Analects: The Simon Leys Translation, Interpretations. Michael Nylan (ed); Simon Leys (translator). New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014, p. 3.
“For the mind does not require filling like a bottle, but rather, like wood, it only requires kindling to create in it an impulse to think independently and an ardent desire for the truth.“
- Plutarch. "De auditu [On Listening to Lectures]", in Moralia, vol. 1, translated by Frank Babbitt. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1927, p. 259.
"君子不器 - An educated person is not a tool"
孔子 (Confucius), 為政 - Wei Zheng, 12. in Lun Yu 論語 [The Analects] translated by James Legge - https://ctext.org/analects/wei-zheng#n1129
'Izzy, did you ask a good question today?'
- Sheindel Rabi
Isidor Isaac Rabi, Nobel prize winner in Physics in 1944, attributed his becoming a scientist thus: "My mother, made me a scientist without ever intending it. Every other...mother...would ask her child after school: "So, did you learn anything today?" But not my mother. She always asked me a different question. 'Izzy,' she would say, ' did you ask a good question today?'. That difference, asking good questions - made me become a scientist!".
- Sheff, Donald. (January 12, 1988) Letter to the Editor, The New York Times, Section A. p. 26. column 5.
"I can say only this: ideas and their pursuit define our humanity and make us human. Ideas, embodied in data and values, beliefs, principles, and original insights must be pursued because they are the stuff of life."
- A. Bartlett Giamatti (1983). The Earthly Use of a Liberal Education. In: A Free and Ordered Space: The Real World of the University. New York: W.W. Norton, 1988, p. 58-59.
"It is not enough to teach someone* a specialty.
Through it they may become a kind of useful machine but not a harmoniously developed personality. It is essential that a student acquire an understanding of and a lively feeling for values. They must acquire a vivid sense of the beautiful and the morally good. Otherwise, they - with their specialized knowledge - more closely resembles a well-trained dog than a harmoniously developed person. They must learn to understand the motives of human beings, their illusions and their sufferings in order to acquire a proper relationship to individual fellow-people and to the community.
These precious things are conveyed to the younger generation through personal contact with those who teach, not - or at least not in the main - through textbooks. It is this that primarily constitutes and preserves culture. This is what I have in mind when I recommend the "humanities" as important, not just dry specialized knowledge in the fields of history and philosophy.
Overemphasis on the competitive system and premature specialization on the ground of immediate usefulness kill the spirit on which all cultural life depends, specialized knowledge included.
It is also vital to a valuable education that independent critical thinking be developed in the young human being, a development that is greatly jeopardized by overburdening them with too much and with too varied subjects (point system). Overburdening necessarily leads to superficiality. Teaching should be such that what is offered is perceived as a valuable gift and not as a hard duty."
- Albert Einstein, "Education for Independent Thought", in Ideas and Opinions : Based on Mein Weltbild. New York: Crown Publishers, 1954, p 66-67. Originally published in The New York Times, October 5, 1952.
Ask Unanswerable Questions
Knowledge pursues truth, and the crisis of science today is caused, at least partially, by the fact that scientists since the beginning of the modern age, have had to be content with provisional verities which will be challenged tomorrow. Philosophy asks the unanswerable questions of what does it mean that everything is at it is, or why is there anything and not rather nothing, and the many variations of these questions. By distinguishing between thinking and knowing, I do not wish to deny that thinking's quest for meaning and sciences' quest for truth are interconnected.
By asking the unanswerable questions of meaning, people* establish themselves as questions-asking beings. Behind all cognitive questions for which people find answers lurk the unanswerable one which seem entirely idle and have always been denounced as such.
I believe that it is very likely that people, if they should ever lose their ability to wonder and thus cease to ask unanswerable questions, also will lose the faculty of asking the answerable questions upon which every civilization is founded.
In this sense, the need to reason is the a priori condition of the intellect and of cognition. It is the breath of life whose presence, psych-like, is noticed only after it has left its natural abode, the dead body of a civilization which is no more.
- Hannah Arendt (1973). Address to the Advisory Council on Philosophy at Princeton University. In: Thinking without a Banister: Essays in Understanding, 1953-1975. Jerome Kohn (ed.). New York: Schoken books, 2018, p.488.
* Minor edits to make these passages gender neutral
Warning to Children / by Robert Graves
Children, if you dare to think
Of the greatness, rareness, muchness,
Fewness of this precious only
Endless world in which you say
You live, you think of things like this:
Blocks of slate enclosing dappled
Red and green, enclosing tawny
Yellow nets, enclosing white
And black acres of dominoes,
Where a neat brown paper parcel
Tempts you to untie the string.
In the parcel a small island,
On the island a large tree,
On the tree a husky fruit.
Strip the husk and pare the rind off:
In the kernel you will see
Blocks of slate enclosed by dappled
Red and green, enclosed by tawny
Yellow nets, enclosed by white
And black acres of dominoes,
Where the same brown paper parcel -
Children, leave the string alone!
For who dares undo the parcel
Finds himself at once inside it,
On the island, in the fruit,
Blocks of slate about his head,
Finds himself enclosed by dappled
Green and red, enclosed by yellow
Tawny nets, enclosed by black
And white acres of dominoes,
With the same brown paper parcel
Still untied upon his knee.
And, if he then should dare to think
Of the fewness, muchness, rareness,
Greatness of this endless only
Precious world in which he says
He lives - he then unties the string.
-- ‘Warning to Children’ by Robert Graves (fromThe Complete Poems in One Volume, eds. Beryl Graves and Dunstan Ward, 2000) is reprinted by permission of Carcanet Press, UK. © The Robert Graves Copyright Trust.
" I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.”