Inquisitiveness - "We Never Guess!"

 

 

 

When I was in the 5th grade, a man came to our class and gave a presentation about how important it was to understand the world around us. He gave us all cheap lapel pins with the slogan, "We Never Guess - We Look It Up!" and also a bunch of literature to take home about World Book Encyclopedias. I think we already owned the set before then; my mother clearly was in the "look it up" camp. I spent many, many hours of my youth following that advice. Years later, I taught the slogan to my children.

When I was in college, my need grew for a more scholarly resource. I used a student loan to purchase a beautiful, padded leather set of the Encyclopedia Brittanica. What a joy it was to have such a great reference set at hand! Other than that, resources in libraries included the infamous "card catalog" where you could start your research on a topic perusing the very limited information cataloged there. But "we look it up" was often an arduous task.

It's been astonishing to watch the transition of times into the Information Age. Digital data storage got smaller and cheaper; electronic processing power got faster and more efficient. More and more was available digitally, efficiently indexed. Then cell phone technology made incremental leaps in bandwidth, miniaturization, and display technology.

Suddenly, "we never guess, we look it up" became as trivial as pulling out my phone and typing a few search terms. In seconds I can access information that would have taken hours or weeks to assemble in my youth! How fun it is to be inquisitive in today's world of miracles. Now I can truly #GiveThanks for the gift of Inquisitiveness and for the technology that makes it so easy.