Advent of Google means we must rethink our approach to education | Education | The Observer – I get what he’s driving at, but I still believe that literacy and numeracy are essential to being a good, smart human being. Yes, your phone can do math. But if you can’t make change or calculate a tip without it, I will continue to think you’re an idiot (no matter how well you can search Google). And hey, doesn’t his entire argument assume that you will ALWAYS have access to technology? What happens if you’re stranded in the mountains or a storm knocks out all the power or the zombie apocalypse comes? I’ll be over here using MATH to make my shelter, and you can go “collaborate” in a cave.
M-H
June 17, 2013 — 12:19 pm
I could write a 5000-word essay in response to this. But I won’t! Essentially, he’s not wrong: we do need to think differently about how and what children need to learn. But need for what? Education used to exist so that everyone shared the knowledge that was valued by society (reading, writing, grammar, history, geography), then it become also to get a job (skills). What is it for now? He doesn’t really answer that question. And, yes, what if you don’t have technology – how do you problem-solve then? He’s mixing up information (which is what anyone can get from the web) with knowledge (which is what you build for yourself from the information on offer). People still need to learn how to do that – not like children do (magpies picking up everything), but as thinking adults who know something about the world already, so we know what is important to us and can discriminate among all the mass of information out there. /rant