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The value of knowledge in the age of instant gratification: rediscovering the lost harmony of education
In 5th-century Athens, a young citizen could not claim to have received a complete education without mastering mousikê—an art that encompassed poetry, song, dance, and mathematical harmony. This holistic view of education, known as paideia, aimed to shape the whole human being. Plato asserted that “music is to the soul what gymnastics is to the body.
Today, this approach seems almost exotic to us. We live in a world where knowledge is compartmentalized, where efficiency takes precedence over training, where instant gratification trumps maturation. How did we arrive at this fragmentation, and what are the consequences for our relationship with knowledge?
For the Greeks, mousikê was at the heart of intellectual and moral education. It served as a bridge between the sensible and intelligible worlds, enabling the learning of mathematical proportions, cosmic harmony, and poetic heritage. The ideal of kalokagathia – “the beautiful and the good” – aimed at perfect harmony between physical, intellectual, and moral development.
The advent of modernity gradually eroded this unified conception. With industrialization, education was reorganized around specialization and productive efficiency. Music, once an educational pillar, found itself relegated to the status of an “extracurricular” activity.
The advent of modernity gradually eroded this unified concept. With industrialization, education was reorganized around specialization and productive efficiency. Music, once an educational pillar, found itself relegated to the status of an “extracurricular” activity. This marginalization symbolizes the abandonment of the humanist ideal in favour of a utilitarian logic.
Our hyperconnected era has amplified this trend. The digital revolution, despite the democratization of information, has created a culture of immediacy that is transforming our relationship with knowledge. Why learn by heart when Google provides instant answers? Why spend years studying when tutorials promise mastery in minutes?
This logic generates a dangerous illusion: that information equals knowledge. However, true mastery requires patient learning that allows for deep internalization. More worryingly, this culture is accompanied by an erasure of common references. Works of heritage are losing their obviousness, depriving generations of the shared cultural foundation that enables dialogue and nourishes creativity.
The growing mistrust of American universities illustrates the dangers of this devaluation of knowledge. This crisis of confidence reveals a disconnect between the intellectual elite and society, but also the consequences of decades of educational disinvestment.
When universities become inaccessible, when they seem disconnected from citizens’ concerns, they lose their social legitimacy. This crisis in the United States also raises questions about our own education systems and the place we give to cultural transmission in our societies.
Faced with these challenges, we must not give in to nostalgia, but rather rethink our relationship with knowledge.
This means restoring the place of art and culture in education, not as embellishments, but as constituent dimensions of human development. We must also resist the dictatorship of urgency in order to preserve spaces for slowness and depth.
We need to reinvent the sanctuaries of knowledge—places where heritage can be transmitted, questioned, and reinterpreted. The challenge is not to freeze the past, but to keep alive humanity’s millennial conversation with itself. In a world in constant acceleration, preserving our collective ability to think by drawing on the richness of our heritage has never been more urgent.
