Change Education
Dvorak is right. Education needs to change. It needs to enter the 21st Century. We should not make kids write multi-page essays in class–by hand! Quick, someone not in academia, name the last time you wrote ANYTHING that weren’t notes by hand.
You don’t. Ever.
Also, when’s the last time you needed to know something and actually remembered it from memory instead of just asking a friend or looking it up online.
You don’t anymore. Ever.
Today kids need to know how to ACCESS information that is already there. My computer science professors taught me how to make a hashtable. Why?! There are dozens of hash-tables written and debugged. I need to know how to FIND them and MANIPULATE them. Re-creating them is time wasted that could be spent doing something actually useful, like learning when to use binary trees and when to use hash-tables for instance. They don’t teach this. As a result, hash-tables are absurdly overused in programming.
The same goes for math. We don’t need to know how to do long division. We need to know how to INSTRUCT our calculator how to do it. The same goes with calculus. If we stopped trying to make every single American re-invent calculus, geometry and algebra, then perhaps we could learn something actually useful: such as INVENT ways to use theories of calculus to do NEW THINGS and TEACH your computer to do the actual grunt work.
Humanities are the same. We spent way too much time making kids regurgitate asinine snippets about terms like “Alexander the Great”, “World War II” and “Philosophy” to make sure they have memorized them. Instead we should teach the kids to LOOK UP those terms in the Wikipedia. As long as they REFERENCE them properly and put them together CREATIVELY, who cares what they can remember? By devoting less resources in our brain to memorization, kids would have far more resources left to learn to LEVERAGE that information in a PRODUCTIVE, ORIGINAL and CREATIVE fashion. I think all history assignments should involve writing or updating a Wikipedia article for instance. This would be doing REAL work that is creative and fun for the author and useful for the rest of society. The problem is that teachers are–as Dvorak mentions–in the stone age who have no idea how to properly CODE and LINK in a Wikipedia entry.
Teachers are still stuck teaching us how to succeed in a society that proceeds at a glacial pace; a society that has great, singular sources of knowledge, works in factories and communicates slowly and deliberately. In other words, the society we lived in decades, centuries and millennia ago. A society that bears no resemblance to the hyper-connected, instant, detached and amplified way we live in America today.