I used to hate history.
I remember while studying under the international British curriculum in Malaysia (I grew up there), looking at a long list of acronyms written next to a map of the nation. If I remember correctly, it was a list of all the governments and colonial authorities that ruled the region in the past — I remember poorly, because the information seemed completely irrelevant and useless.
However, when I switched to the Canadian curriculum in high school and began studying Canadian history, I had a change of heart. The course spanned history of major events in the 20th century such as the World Wars, the Cold War, Canadian involvement in creating the United Nations Peacekeepers, and cultural changes in the 1970s. I began to understand the context of the Holocaust and the differences between capitalism and communism, issues that continue to be hotly debated today. The course material was relevant.
Another vital element of the curriculum was that it was taught in terms of cause-and-effect. Dates and events ceased to be meaningless points in time: everything was connected by threads of causality, such as the connection between the German Empire’s loss of the First World War to its ignition of the second, or the Cold War’s influence on the wars in Korea and Vietnam. I was — and still am — interested in wars, especially in ending them.
Essentially, history was taught like it was a story; a story of nations and their people, and the events that brought them to their present state.
At the end of the term, I began to investigate the effects of the Second World War in the Pacific, which had been neglected in the course. I began learning about conflicts I had never heard of before, such as the fracture of Yugoslavia and the Yugoslav wars.
Studying Yugoslavia also gave me deeper insight into my country’s political dynamics. Interestingly, during the Bosnian War, Malaysia was the only Asian country to accept Bosnian refugees. This was one analysis I heard: Bosnia (now joined with Herzegovina) was and is the only Muslim country in Europe. The prime minister of Malaysia at the time, Mahatir Mohamad, wanted to increase support from Malaysia’s Muslim population by accepting Bosnian refugees. In contrast, in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, he permitted the police and navy to open fire on Vietnamese refugees coming ashore. Thankfully, this policy was never implemented.
Notice how questioning one thing led to learning about another — this is what I call a line of inquiry. A line of inquiry is a chain of questions about a topic; a question leads to an answer, and the answer spawns additional questions. When learning with lines of inquiry, instead of being told what to learn through a structured curriculum, the learning process is a self-guided search for a holistic understanding of the issue that begins with a single question. There are no restrictions and no limits — all topics may flow into each other. From the Bosnian War, one line of inquiry began with the question, ‘What was Malaysia’s response to the war?’ Another line of inquiry began with, ‘What caused the war in the first place?’ This led to my investigation of Yugoslav history while it was united under the leadership of Josip Broz Tito. It was authoritarian, yet some argue it was ultimately beneficial for the region, which led to yet another question: can benevolent dictators exist?
Lines of inquiry need not be limited to history; they can be used for almost any topic, such as the sciences, physics, engineering, law and human rights, or politics. In fact, I used this method to learn most of what I know about aerospace engineering. A deep interest of mine is ensuring that humans establish a colony on Mars to secure the future of civilisation. During my quest for knowledge, I investigated topics such as nuclear physics, chemistry, biology, thermodynamics, and astrodynamics. All of these are essential to send humans to Mars. My quest was made possible primarily due to the internet, which allows anyone to access anything from basic physics to postgraduate-level analyses of exotic rocket propulsion systems.
Lines of inquiry branch into dozens of other lines of inquiry, which in turn branch into other lines of inquiry. In the end, the knowledge gained spans a vast area.
Ultimately, because the search is driven by interest and not necessarily by external factors (e.g. academic or social obligations), the learning will be with passion and a desire for completeness, rather settling for the bare minimum encouraged by our current blundering education system. Anyone can amass a vast amount of knowledge and wisdom this way. Knowledge retention is also strengthened, because the learner personally knows why it is important and how it affects the other things he or she knows.
Let’s step back.
We now see a vast network connecting points of knowledge, each point held in place by the lines of inquiry leading to and from it. This network is a visualisation of understanding, and helps to interpret new knowledge in a holistic manner. It also shows the connections between seemingly disparate parts of human knowledge. For example, the connection between climate change and the drought that helped ignite the Syrian Civil War, or how automation has taken away manufacturing jobs in the United States, increasing responsiveness to Donald Trump’s promises to bring them back.
By looking at all these connections, we may understand the problems that plague our world more thoroughly, paving the way for more effective, more innovative, and more socially conscious solutions.
Humanity is suffering trying times, but this is the best time to rekindle our love for learning — your love for learning.
