Unfortunately, in terms of learning the same proportions of the total sum of knowledge as the old renaissance men, attaining real renaissance personhood is impossible at current life spans. Boosting learning velocity/capacity/efficieny should help. Why must we replay histroy when teaching? But maybe we are not doing such a good job at consolidating/compressing knowledge as we used to since there is so much. A scaling problem, the entropy per bit of data is decreasing, we are increasing the total number of bits of data in our knowledge at a much higher rate than we are its entropy.

Now it is such that you are a generalist if you have peripheral knowledge of related sub sub fields of your sub field of expertize in some sub section of a topic.