procrastinaters.com

Note: This is the part 1 of 4 of the Education Essay Series to match this month's theme.

In spite of the articles that are written on how Google is making us stupid; in spite of the parents that complain about how their kids' brains and attention span are melting into mush from spending all day on their smart phones; in spite of the teachers that forbid their students from using Wikipedia, one truth still remains: the internet is here to stay.  The internet continues to exist (and, in fact, expand); ubiquitous access and usage of the internet continues to exist (and, in fact, expand); the literally unfathomable amount of information on the internet continues to exist (and, in fact, expand).  Yes, I am stating very obvious facts of life right now, but it's obviousness should only make my next point all the more unavoidable:

Maybe...

JUST maybe...

having every piece of known information available to you...

every second...

everywhere...

always...

just might...

maybe...

affect education.  

No?  Well, I certainly should've thought so.  

But sure enough, teaching as high as college continues to be centered around lectures that rattle off facts; learning as high as college continues to be centered around taking notes of facts and studying those notes to remember them for long enough to prove that at one point in your life you knew those facts; grading--essentially the entirety of determinacy of how worthy of a student you are in a field--as high as college continues to be centered around multiple choices, fill in the blanks and true and falses.  Isn't it disillusioning to realize that getting your college degree with a 3.0 GPA means little more than you were able to guess correctly at 1-in-4 chances with an 80%+ accuracy on questions that represent an infinitesimal sliver of knowable knowledge, while a 14-year-old with just a little bit of search engine savvy and a decent discerning eye for sourcing material can answer all questions in all fields of known knowledge at a 90%+ clip?

I mean, don't get me wrong; I'm entirely certain that there is value in rote knowledge.  Minimizing the amount of time spent referencing manuals on how to change oil in a car, looking up charts of the human anatomy, leafing through lists of the US presidents, etc, will help speed things along in those respective fields. BUT that rote knowledge is simply becoming less and less and less crucial and it's certainly far from being the best measure to use as the sole determinant of who is the most worthy student in a given field.  Think of it like how in the 20th century manual labor, callused hands, handiness with simple tools and the like didn't become completely meaningless...........but it simply became less and less and less crucial and it was certainly far from being the best measure to use as the sole determinant of who was most likely to be successful.  So you probably ought to feel a little ripped off when one of your expensive lectures are dedicated to listing facts about the pre-revolutionary circumstances leading to the French Revolution when, lo-and-behold, this site exists: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_revolution#Pre-revolution.  To continue with the analogy, this is like being a 20th-century, aspiring commercial cropper who spent a week doing leg and core workouts to become better at using a plough, when you could have spent that time learning how to use a tractor.  It wasn't a waste of time because now you have those sweet, supple abs and creamy, worksman thighs, but time could have been much better spent in preparing you with practical intelligence.

Of course, it may seem a little daunting to completely reconsider what we should teach and what we should be taught--if being taught anything is a waste of time because anything is immediately accessible knowledge, then what the hell is there to learn? Simply put, the answer is "a sh1tload": what information you is useful for a given field and what is less important, how the information highlighted relates to the field/material/argument at hand, where you find this information and what tools you use, how you use those tools in the first place and how you use them correctly and discerningly.  

That's just the tip of the iceberg.  When you get into all that there is to be learned on how to think intelligently, how to relate things inter-disciplinarily, how to discern when your own essays/arguments/ramblings/unexpressed thoughts and opinions are faulty/unfounded/fallacies/etc it might start to make you upset that so much potential in education was left unrealized.  

By the time you get into thinking about how your educational history could have been used on exercises for divergent thought, methods to translate that mode of thought into creative output, methods to translate that output into good-hearted and/or profitable and/or effective and/or revolutionary ideas and enactment, fosterings for your unique perspective on the world instead of actually indoctrinating you into the idea that unique is wrong and that this is the way to assess history and that this is the way to classify animals and that this is the way to argue your ideas (holy sh1t, am I using the second person, the first person, a run on sentence, rhetorical question, the sh1t word and a sardonic tone all in one sentence?! Why yes I am.  You know why?  Because it's the most accurate f*cking way to express the ideas I have to express you god-damned imbecile!)......where was I?  Oh yeah, by the time you get into thinking all that, you may've vomitted on yourself.

I'm not sure if I've come off as a creativity-loving, artiste-wannabe hipster or a critical-thinking-loving, intellectual butt sniffer or an intelligence-over-hard-work-believing elitist or what, but there is a bottom line to this.  That bottom line is this: any work that can be done by essentially-free-working drones and machines will be done by essentially-free-working drones and machines (great, now you can add sci-fi-loving, tin-hat-wearing fangeek to the list).  You will not be able to make a career out of being able to recite information that a 14-year-old with basic knowledge of a basic tool can recite.  I guarantee you that there are more people in the world who make a living off of being a Social Media Expert (aka, dude who dicks off on Facebook and Twitter) than there are people who make a living off of being Ken Jennings.  I know, exaggerations and false dichotomies itt, but I think you can start to see the picture I'm painting.  In order to provide value to society/make a career/set yourself apart from your peers in the information age, you get much more value out of being able to form intelligent thoughts and being able to string enough of those together to form intelligent thought systems and being able to come up with things that no one else has thought of and being able to translate that out-there stuff into potentially valuable stuff and being able to implement those ideas in a realistic fashion and so forth than you get from mere knowledge.

From here, I’ll let you all put two and two together on what all this has to do with a site that connects people who feel like working with people don’t feel like working, people who have skills to do certain tasks with people who don’t, people who know and understand certain things with people who don’t . . . 

For the second installment of this series, Making Education and Pleasure Less Mutually Exclusive, go here.