Knowledge transfer and error

Fascinating. From Little Poem, who made thee? by Thomas Pitchford.

A poem written by a contemporary American author is being taught in schools across the United States and England as the work of one of Britain’s most famous scribes. This innocent verse is escaping the detection of experienced educators because an error exists in a lesson plan circulating many web sites, from loosely monitored forums to highly reputed and authoritative resources including some run by government agencies.

Teachers searching the Internet for examples of poetry to use in their instruction are finding a poem entitled “Two Sunflowers Move into the Yellow Room”. A great number of the suggested web sites claim the poem was written by William Blake. Rather than being composed around 200 years ago, it was written by the poet Nancy Willard for her 1981 book A Visit to William Blake’s Inn which won America’s highest award for children’s literature, the Newbery Medal. This book shows Ms Willard’s appreciation for the work of Blake and her poems make many allusions to his verse, in this case “Ah Sunflower, weary of time” from Songs of Innocence and Experience. Ms Willard’s prowess as an author is easily proven from her large amount of published works, collection of awards and career as a teacher of writing, but attributing any work from the 20th century to one of the best known and most studied poets of two centuries previous is a sizeable blunder. So, how did it happen?

The error began in 2001 on Oracle Education Foundation’s web site ThinkQuest, a collection of online educational resources designed by students from around the world. A group of students contributed a project called “Poetry as We See It” which defines certain elements of poetry and gives samples to illustrate those concepts. As stated in their introduction, the boys and girls looked for older poems which would no longer be subject to copyright law. Amongst books with works by Robert Browning, Emily Dickinson and Robert Louis Stevenson, the students found Ms Willard’s homage to Blake. But, as attested to on their bibliography and a page of examples (see following images), they thought the poems were actually written by William Blake.

What is the prevalence of this error? Seems to be perhaps 25%. But the prevalence is not perhaps the most notable thing about it, but rather the pervasiveness. The error is on the web but it is also in classrooms and in research papers. It has passed beyond the ability to easily filter it out.

This is a fascinating gleam into the distributed processes of culture, academia, epistemology, knowledge transfer, etc.