I am enjoying "A Place for Everything: The History of Alphabetical Order" by Judith Flanders. The book is about the slowly developing idea over centuries that putting words, book on a shelf or your seasonings in alphabetical order might be helpful. Depending on the items in question, it might be inappropriate to order them alphabetically. Sometimes, putting the seasonings that are used often where they can be reached easily makes more sense.
As you may have found, if I alphabetize but use different names for the items than you know them by, my ordering may not be helpful. So, ordering is related to culture we grew up in as well. Modern tools such as search windows speed up searches and can help me search repeatedly with different names and phrases. I am often urging my friends to try Google with puzzles and difficulties.
Reading Flanders today, I came across the phrase that a certain ancient document "was meant for educated readers". As a retired education professor and a holder of a degree in educational research methods, I am curious about what an educated reader knows, what education such a person has had, and 10 or 20 years after leaving school, what such a person retains from the experience of education. It seems to be more of a mystery than you might think.
I have tried to review what I learned in college. I sometimes feel that the main purpose of college is an important side effect of attending: finding a mate. I read years ago that if more intelligent men and women meet on campus and become parents, the society can expect a rise in its general intelligence level. I am not sure if we have seen a wave of smarter people whose parents met at college or not.
It is surprising how confidently people talk about being educated or not being so. For convenience, we talk about levels, years or degrees without really know what any of it actually means. I guess it is not all that usual for us to toss terms around without know just what we mean or what happened. Even just ten years afterwards, years of schooling are too long, too full and too complicated to be completely known, remembered or examined.
