More on what I wrote earlier about teaching...

Last February the scientist and contrarian Freeman Dyson reviewed James Gleick's book The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood in The New York Review of Books. The following quote from the review is guidance to teachers perplexed by the relationship between their profession and the overwhelming quantity and availability of information today. In fact, it is guidance for all creative people:

"The immense size of modern databases gives us a feeling of meaninglessness. Information in such quantities reminds us of Borges's library extending infinitely in all directions. It is our task as humans to bring meaning back into this wasteland. As finite creatures who think and feel, we can create islands of meaning in the sea of information."