Superficial knowledge or ignorance is better?

Superficial knowledge or ignorance is better?

Since the ancient times the educated men encouraged the younger ones that it is preferable to ignore something than to know it superficially. However, nowadays more and more people, actually the vast majority, prefer to have superficial knowledge. Which one is preferable and why?

On one hand, nowadays that the true knowledge demands more effort than ever due to specialization, it is expectable that general erudition is achieved by few people. By general erudition I mean something close to the “homo universalis” of the renaissance era. And almost every young person on this earth believes that we do not need to gain the true knowledge, because as they claim we can find everything on the Internet, thus it is doubtful whether the future generation will have any humans at all that will be willing to have general erudition.

On the other hand many people, usually the older ones and especially the educated, support that it is disastrous to have superficial knowledge. They claim that the future generations will gain less and less general knowledge except for few people who will gain general erudition. Their statement seems to come true gradually now that people do not need to know, for instance, History. All they have to do is search what they are looking for in the Internet and read what they want each time.

In my opinion, superficial knowledge that seems to prevail nowadays will be dangerous for the human civilisation. First of all, we all daily see some people claiming things that are absolute lies, because they never bothered to search about this thing. That’s why, I believe it’s preferable not to talk when you do not now something or you are not sure about it than say something untrue. In addition, when some people are asked about something very important, such as who was Newton or Napoleon the Great or Alexander the Great, say “Why should I know him? Anyway I can find him on the Internet if I want”. I believe that we should not end up not knowing even the most important people from our History. It’s rational that we may not know some every person from our History, but we have to know the most famous. Furthermore, I reckon that we should have a general erudition, not for showing off or for getting good results in some table games that require this kind of knowledge, but for ourselves.