Do you know anything about Flemish life and artifacts between the 1400s and 1700s? I definitely did not before visiting an exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum over reading week. I am not an artistic person, nor have I really taken a deep dive into art in my free time.
However, I loved the way the exhibits were themed and ended up learning a lot about that time period. Along with admiring the art, I learned that in 1570, cartographer Abraham Ortelius shifted from mapping individual places to a more global view with Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, a collection of 53 maps widely considered the first true atlas, which was on display. In a completely different area of study, I also learned about significant scientific developments made by midwives in the 1500s, as most women gave birth at home and relied heavily on their knowledge.
This article is not meant to give you a full rundown of the exhibit, nor is it a retelling of 300 years of Flemish history. Instead, it is about the fact that there is so much happening outside our ordinary bubble of learning that, even if it is not directly useful in our day-to-day lives, it still opens our eyes to fascinating ideas.
I have always been pretty “nerdy” and I get a lot of joy from constantly learning new things. But I have increasingly found that even though we can ask the internet anything and get an almost instant answer, this apparent abundance can actually feel like our world of information is shrinking.
Most of us wake up and get the same five stories pushed at us, likely fuelled by whatever is trending, to create the most outrage or to keep us scrolling. The internet feels infinite, but what we really see is filtered through algorithms, advertisements and our own search habits.
After all, you cannot Google what you do not know exists. Click on a video about the moon landing, and your feed becomes the moon landing forever. It can be convenient, but also a trap. Your curiosity becomes confined to what the search engine recommends and believes you’ll engage with.
In a museum, you can go in to see dinosaurs and then stumble onto an exhibit about diamond mining. You wander into the interactive science lab and suddenly you are modelling how a virus spreads through a city. You turn a corner and there is a room about a local community you have lived near for many years and never really thought about. You did not search for any of this. It found you.
There has been a stark rise in anti-intellectualism, especially in the form of demonizing education. Along with a lot of online discourse calling university “woke” or only a place for fostering “radical left-wing ideologies,” I vividly remember one moment from our most recent federal election cycle. Leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, Pierre Poilievre, announced as part of the party’s platform that if elected to form government, they would eliminate university degree requirements for most federal public service roles.
This announcement raised two concerns for me. First, when one of Canada’s major political parties downplays the value of education in the public service, it sends the message that education does not really matter. This is particularly troubling because public servants deliver essential programs and services to Canadians, so even if the policy never takes effect, the sentiment is still out there.
Cynically, I cannot help but feel that some politicians prefer their citizens to be less educated on all fronts, so they are less likely to push back against or fully understand the severity of certain government decisions. For a bolder example of this, you can look at President Donald Trump’s attacks on education in the U.S.
Second, it highlights the importance of educational institutions like museums, where you can learn a lot about different subjects without having a degree. Of course, visiting a museum does not compare to the intensity or length of a university education, but it is far more affordable and accessible.
That said, there is also a democratic issue here. When attacks are thrown at institutions like museums and they are treated as optional extras, they become easier to neglect and defund. If we instead understand them as part of how we stay informed, how we remember and how we argue about how we live and who we are, then they are not luxuries. They are the backbone of an informed society. Along with protecting our post-secondary education system, we must also ensure we do not let our guard down when it comes to museums and similar learning institutions.
This argument does not mean we need to reject the internet — it means we must refuse to let it be the only way we learn. You can absolutely read up on an artist before you go to a gallery or look into a scientific concept before you go to a lab, and you deepen both experiences by letting them inform each other.
If we want to be an informed society, we cannot just scroll for answers — sometimes we have to go out of our way, stand in front of the real thing, and let it surprise us.
