How to learn everything?

If you wanted to learn about everything, where would you start? I don’t mean trying to learn everything about everything – which is no longer possible in today’s world - but just having a reasonable grasp of the basics of everything, enough to go deeper later on if you want to and enough to allow you to make connections between usually disconnected topics. For example, learning enough about cooking to know how to do the basic techniques (boiling, frying, steaming, etc) and to have some idea about flavour combinations, but not the details of every possible technique and cuisine available.

If I landed in a strange city and wanted to find my way around, I would need to have some idea that cities can be represented by maps and how maps can be accessed and read, or I would need to know who to ask and how to ask for directions and have the ability to understand the answer. So, I wonder if what is needed is a “map” of knowledge and some idea how to navigate it. Maybe that is what we should be teaching at schools rather than lots of detail on a few areas that are somehow deemed to be the most important. Maybe then the end result of compulsory education would not be adults who don’t know how to budget, how to cook, how to eat healthily, how the political system works, etc, but instead adults who have basic life skills, a clear picture of the breadth of human knowhow and the ability to find and learn from reliable sources of further information as they either want or need to.

As someone who is a “scanner” by inclination, that is, “someone who frequently has a multiplicity of interests ...” (see Barbara Sher’s book Refuse to Choose), I like the idea of having a map that I can “peg” my different bits of learning onto, but haven’t really been able to find one. I have given some thought to trying to create one for myself and wonder whether all knowledge could be categorised under the broad headings of Arts, Sciences and Skills, with Arts and Sciences including the obvious topics which tend to get taught formally and Skills including things like how to learn, how to play a sport, how to cook – basically active things that you can be taught “how to” do. Having pondered these categories for the last month or so, I haven’t yet thought of anything that wouldn’t fit into one of the three (although I suspect some things may fit into more than one), but since I don’t know what “everything” is yet, I could easily be missing something.