We’ve Lost More Knowledge Than We’ve Ever Had! -By Martha Zamdai Mamza

According to Webster’s Dictionary, knowledge is “the fact or condition of knowing something with familiarity gained through experience or association“. And it is obvious we enroll in different schools, seminars, trainings organized to actually gain knowledge about certain things as we grow in life.

It is no new information that knowledge is a necessary tool in fulfilling one’s destiny. What you know can either make you or mar you. In essence, the kind of knowledge you seek can either make you a great person or destroy you tomorrow. It could be a positive knowledge that could be of great impact to the society and to the betterment of lives. Or, it could be a negative knowledge that when gained could be of great catastrophe to the lives and properties of individuals around you.

Through the positive impact of new generated knowledge, solutions have being provided to some of these natural and man-made disasters. Such solutions provided includes vaccines generated to fight some deadly diseases, improved quality of communication services (mobile telephone and Internet), development of underserviced markets (geographic, demographic, economic), skills in the application of new technologies, new business models in the fields of schooling and training. All these and more are a product of someone’s initiative out of the knowledge he/she has gathered.

But unfortunately, the bitter-truth is everyone in this present age and time is very reluctant to go through the hustle of discovering new knowledge especially with the inception of technology. The inception of technology has done so much harm to the quest for discovering new knowledge. Years back People work from scratch to bring out new initiatives and innovations such as the discovery of cotton for clothes, tree for papers and many others that help make the lives of people easy. But with the inception of technology, it has made a lot of people comfortable not to work from scratch but to rather build on what is already existing. There are less competitions now in creating or discovering new things as everyone is looking for an easy way around everything.

Taking students in the tertiary institutions as an example, they are expected to develop a research framework or project after their years of learning. But nowadays the quest for revealing new knowledge or discovering certain aspects in the area of their discipline is defeated many students try to just build on areas already discovered, or refine the languages used then, to the present day standards.

Predictable, if this act persists the educational sector will continuously depreciate due to the lack of new advance techniques, theories or models, the economic sector will fail due to no knowledgeable equipped people to help plan the economy, and many other sectors will suffer cause there is no improved technicalities and capable hands thereby making the world revolve around a particular system.

Martha Zamdai Mamza
Mass Communication Department
University Of Maiduguri