Urban Myths: Your Sinking Library

I absolutely love this story

Besides the straightforward interpretation (fellow who is supposed to be so smart forgets something blindingly obvious, thus allowing us lesser souls to experience a moment of self-congratulation), another way to view the legend is to see it as a metaphor for the crushing weight of the knowledge students are expected to absorb. Those heavy books become a symbol for expressing the seeming insurmountability of a scholar’s task. (Heck; they sunk a library, didn’t they?)

Yet no matter how old a legend or what it says about students’ fears about being overwhelmed, there is apparently always room for humor:

We had the opposite problem at our college library: we discarded a high number of books with outdated information and the building began to rise!

I hope that people, in however many years, find this story and be able to read through the incredibly irony. I feel that, at least for myself at times, I have entirely failed to be able to read through this heavy symbolic and ironic story. Only now am I able to recognize these features. And I love them all.

The story represents a fundamental discontinuity with our experience of credentialed individuals and the weight of knowledge necessary for those credentials. That weight is heavy! Yet, some of these people are useless boobs! I can attest as I’m in a masters program, and hopefully a doctorate in the future, I will be spending almost ten years of my life dedicated to a focused study. And that only makes me qualified to research it, talk about it, and teach it. That does not make anyone a or top scholar.

The fact that, contrary to any evidence or personal experience, this story continues to be believed and propagated ought to tell us it is very powerful. Though, the story cannot exist in a vacuum. It is the minority of which the credentials are in fact respected. It cannot exist without it!