Last night I attended a dinner for current and former political activists.

Some were long retired. One man told me how he had lived for the past 84 years in the house where he was born. I wonder if there is or has been anyone else in the UK who has lived in one house for so long, right from Day One.

One lady, a former teacher, told me how things had been in her school in the days after World War Two. In those days books and teaching materials were meagre. So how best to reproduce simple maps and other diagrams for the children each to use?

The answer? A special jelly.

This jelly would be warmed up and spread carefully across a baking tray. When it had set, the teacher would draw the required map outline (for example Australia) on a piece of paper with special ink. The paper would be placed face down on the jelly, then carefully peeled off. This would leave ink in the jelly in the right shape.

Once all that had been done, a blank piece of paper could be laid on top of the jelly and a map-shaped outline would be transferred onto it. This would work some 30 times, giving all the children in the class a map on a piece of paper to work with. Then the jelly would have to be dissolved and the process would start again.

In those days that was the only way to create copies. Then came proper stencils and hand-turned machines for running off many copies. I remember one of those in my father’s office when he was headmaster at a primary school in the 1960s.

Then came electrication of those machines. Then bulky and extremely expensive photocopiers. Then everything we have now.

The point is that once upon a time knowledge was relatively scarce, or at least hard to transmit in bulk. People had two main sources of information: mass-produced printed material (newspapers, magazines and books), plus whatever they carried around in their own heads. That was the main point of schools — to give people knowledge which they could take with them through life.

We’re now in a totally different world. It will not be long before most people on the planet have cheap mobile phones which can access via the Internet most of the knowledge that has ever been known.

What in these transformed circumstances should schools in fact be teaching?

Maybe some of the problems of modern political life stem from the fact that "knowledge" as such has been lost. Why bother to learn anything if you can find out whatever you want, whenever you want?

In this situation is it any surprise that what counts is less and less all about what you know or what you rationally can explain, and more and more all about what you simply feel? And that what counts is not the level of reasoning supporting your feelings, but rather the sheer intensity of those feelings?

In other words, as we move towards infinitely large Knowledge we end up with infinitely small Wisdom. Then we’re surprised that things don’t work too well.