Image Source: Vilab India

Education of the present day is dictated by the needs of the industrial revolution. A lot of information is taught to a lot of people for them to produce a specific product or complete a specified task. But now, in the age of computers where information is so abundant and cheap, how well does this system of education hold up?

Students are asked to regurgitate established knowledge and not to solve unsolved questions. Students spend years learning theories and theorems which, let's be honest, they’ll never use in life over learning something new that will benefit human civilization as a whole. As humanity strives to find certainty in an uncertain world, it begs the question, aren’t we mistaking the abundance of information for sufficiency of knowledge?

This is where the process of Lygometry comes into play. Lygometry is quantifying the lack of knowledge. It's the things we know we don’t know. Sounds absurd, doesn’t it? How does one quantify what they don’t know? And you would be right. See the problem here is Lygometry is a new and ongoing process.

My research on this topic led me to the conclusion that there isn’t a lot of information about Lygometry over the internet. Ironically, this means that knowing Lygometry in itself is a Lygometric process *X-Files Theme Plays*.

You might be asking yourself why I’m writing something even I don’t know about. Well, the answer is simple, it’s interesting. And I believe many more people need to know about it. The word ‘Lygometry’ comes from the Latin words ‘Lygo’ meaning dark and ‘Metry’ meaning measurement. So, it's all about measuring the unknown and the dark.

Let’s get this clear, I don’t intend on calling out the education system but, it's the “perfect” knowledge that our educators project us that I find problematic. As a student of science I was taught about gravity, its formulas, its equations but never did a teacher come into the class and tell us students that broadly speaking we don’t know what gravity is. Never did an educator come into class and say, “here is everything we know and don’t know about gravity.” It’s questions like these that Lygometry tries to quantify.

It might seem weird but, even if it’s a relatively new concept, humans are born with an innate ability to do Lygometry. As children, everyone is very good at keeping track of things that don’t make sense to them and they now show shyness to ask questions. But as we grow and get more and more “educated” this ability is slowly taken away from us.

The term ‘Lygometry’ was coined by Amin Toufani. He believes that the extent of knowledge and wisdom should never end at what we know but it's the ability to know what we don’t know that defines us as an intelligent species. After all, even Socrates said,” I know that I am intelligent because I know that I know nothing.”