Everyone [in higher education] was what I call drillers of deeper wells. These academics sit at the bottom of a deep well and they look up and see a sliver of the sky. They know everything about that little sliver of sky and nothing else. I scan all my horizons.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the difference between deep specialization and broad understanding.
Vaclav Smil contrasts the narrow focus of academics who study specific topics in depth with the broader perspective of someone who explores many different areas. The metaphor of being at the bottom of a well signifies how specialists can be limited in their view, while those who scan the horizons have a more expansive understanding of the world.
In practice
During a lecture on interdisciplinary studies, this quote can be used to illustrate the importance of a broad approach.
I've read about 80 books a year for the past 50 years. I come from cultural breeding. I don't have a cellphone. When you spend all your time checking your cellphone messages, or updating your Facebook (of course I don't have a Facebook page) then you don't have any time for reading.
Most innovation is not done by research institutes and national laboratories. It comes from manufacturing - from companies that want to extend their product reach, improve their costs, increase their returns. What's very important is in-house research.
America tends to assume Silicon Valley-style innovators can drive quick and transformative changes, but even Silicon Valley's would-be masters of the universe have discovered that energy transitions are subject to time spans and technical constraints that defy their reach.
Most scientific or engineering discoveries would never become successful products without contributions from other scientists or engineers. Every major invention is the child of far-flung parents who may never meet.
I'm old fashioned. I'm not one of these young guys who think they are so smart that they can prescribe what humanity ought to do. Humanity never learns any lessons. Prescriptions don't matter. We already know exactly what to do. We just don't do it.
Economic and technical imperatives - not any preconceived directives - will keep propelling the process of energy transition.
I'm a firm believer that there's no way that a six-year-old should have a helmet on and learn a tackling drill.
Let's teach kids, at the kindergarten level, what the contributions of people of color were to building the United States of America.
The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.
If education is beaten by training, civilization dies.
It's not good enough to give it tender, loving care, to supply it with breakfast foods, to buy it expensive educations. Those things don't mean anything unless this generation has a future. And we're not sure that it does.
But by accident, not by cunning calculation, books, because of their weight and texture, and because of their sweetly token resistance to manipulation, involve our hands and eyes, and then our minds and souls, in a spiritual adventure I would be very sorry for my grandchildren not to know about.
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