In terms of history, geography, politics, current events: I’m a generally ignorant western / global north / anglophone type of person.
I feel like a real jackass sometimes when I meet someone from outside the narrow context I know anything at all about. And I don’t even know if their home country is an island, landlocked, what kind of climate it has, what the basic government is, what are the common languages or religions, what military conflicts it has been in, or anything else.
Trying to remediate that is very overwhelming because there is so much to know. You could spend your life just learning about the narrowest of subjects.
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What do most regular people from around the world know about? Obviously it will be different in the details but if I wanted to be of average knowledge, what would it entail?
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I find the very first part of of the learning curve on a new topic is the most difficult. The information has nothing to hang on in my brain so even if I understand it at the time it kind of washes away. Having even a very loose, vague understanding of european history obtained via pop culture makes it easier to retain new information. Like if something happened during the Reformation, I know when that was, some context about technology and conflicts, what came before and after. But when I read something was during a certain Chinese dynasty, I have no such frame. How to overcome this?
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On the one hand I don’t want to be paralyzed by perfectionism, but on the other hand I don’t want to be learning too much that is flagrantly incorrect. It’s hard to judge when you are totally naive. On the third hand, it’s good to know about common perceptions of things even if they are wrong, because they are important to how people discuss and integrate. For current events equally to history.
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How do you learn geography? I got a shower curtain that’s a world map. So it would be easy to look at regularly. It has made a very modest improvement. I still can’t identify most countries.
Nobody can know everything and it’s okay to be ignorant as long as you’re learning. The two biggest things to help are repetition and purpose. It’s hard to learn when you’re just throwing darts at a board and learning something without an explicit purpose. Using your example, why are you learning about a certain Chinese dynasty? If you aren’t targeting something specific, then you have to learn everything which is hard. But if you look at it like wanting to know more about Mao and the revolution, then you have something to grasp. You start with the Qing dynasty and learn about the conditions that led to revolution. Ask yourself basic questions like the period, find a map of its territories, who was in the government. Then you start asking yourself increasingly specific questions. What was the class structure, who specifically was at the top, who was at the bottom. What groups were involved and who were the members? When did this person die? When were they involved? What were the laws in place that pissed people off? Once you build a reference point for Chinese history then you can look back earlier and have something to compare it to. Now your certain dynasty took place 400 years before the Qing. You answer the same or similar questions and now you can compare details. You have two reference points. Maybe you notice some Japanese imperialism during a period and you can start to dig into Japan’s history the same way. That’s two countries down and several time periods.
Another part is recording what you learn. Writing things down helps you retain it. I use Obsidian to take notes when going through books, pamphlets, essays, or whatever. Take notes on the answers to questions you have or whatever helps you understand the thing you’re studying. Nobody keeps all that in their heads. Once you have it written down, you can always revisit to refresh it in your mind or improve upon it if you find out you were wrong. Writing things down for the sake of writing won’t help you retain it forever, so you need purpose once again. Share what you learn with others through teaching or just conversation. Come post what you learn here. Use what you learn to analyze the present. If you don’t use it, you tend to lose it.
As for geography, idk. I learn what I have to and that results in being able to point to countries on a map. I never really get super granular like mapping out battles or trade routes or migrations. If you refer to a world map in your studies enough it will start to stick.
You’re right that active learning is best. This is how i did it when I approached learning seriously for school. But it was for different subjects and had the structure of a class. I like markdown and obsidian has fancy stuff but I might have to break out the colored pens if I was going to do that.
For school I like having the course outline to keep me on track in terms of learning goals. Left to my own I’ll just be transcribing the whole book/work without guidelines.