The trend began in the 1980s when hand-held calculators became cheap. According to a certain school of thought, there was no longer any point in teaching children arithmetic when calculators could do it for them. After all, calculator proponents argued, learning times tables, column addition and long division is boring. Not teaching arithmetic would leave more time to be creative.
In the late 1990s, as the internet blossomed, similar thinkers began to question the point of teaching knowledge. They wondered why students need to know anything themselves when they can always get their facts from the internet. If we stopped teaching knowledge, they mused, students would have more time to learn critical thinking.
In this era of ever-advancing information technology, we might wonder what the next step will be. Surely text-to-voice software makes reading redundant. And now that the quality of voice-to-text software is so high, perhaps we could stop teaching children to write as well. Then they could spend more school time working on their wellbeing.
The trend towards outsourcing life to machines is not confined to the education system. During the COVID pandemic, people got used to working from home and interacting with their colleagues on Zoom.
In a few short years, high-quality virtual reality headsets will be cheap enough for just about everyone to afford. Then we might start to wonder why we’d travel to see the Colosseum, the Great Wall of China or the Daintree rainforest when we could enjoy these spectacles from our living rooms, with none of the hassle or expense of international travel.
In 1909, ninety years before home internet became commonplace, English novelist E.M. Forster published a short story called The Machine Stops. The story is set in a future in which human beings live in small underground apartments. They rarely meet in person, instead communicating via screens. All of their bodily and cultural needs are catered for by a vast machine. No doubt you can tell how the story ends from its title.
When it comes to prophetic science fiction, The Machine Stops tops even Jules Verne.
If skills like reading and arithmetic are not learned, creativity is stunted and well-being is compromised. Without knowledge, critical thinking is empty. If young people cease to learn disciplines like history and science, cultural and technological innovation will gradually grind to a halt. Or maybe we’ll just outsource those things to machines as well.
The trend towards outsourcing life to machines is not confined to the education system. During the COVID pandemic, people got used to working from home and interacting with their colleagues on Zoom.
In a few short years, high-quality virtual reality headsets will be cheap enough for just about everyone to afford. Then we might start to wonder why we’d travel to see the Colosseum, the Great Wall of China or the Daintree rainforest when we could enjoy these spectacles from our living rooms, with none of the hassle or expense of international travel.
In 1909, ninety years before home internet became commonplace, English novelist E.M. Forster published a short story called The Machine Stops. The story is set in a future in which human beings live in small underground apartments. They rarely meet in person, instead communicating via screens. All of their bodily and cultural needs are catered for by a vast machine. No doubt you can tell how the story ends from its title.
When it comes to prophetic science fiction, The Machine Stops tops even Jules Verne.
If skills like reading and arithmetic are not learned, creativity is stunted and well-being is compromised. Without knowledge, critical thinking is empty. If young people cease to learn disciplines like history and science, cultural and technological innovation will gradually grind to a halt. Or maybe we’ll just outsource those things to machines as well.
Dr Michael Johnston has held academic positions at Victoria University of Wellington for the past ten years. He holds a PhD in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Melbourne. This article was published HERE
4 comments:
Personally, substituting a calculator for a memory test, in the case of times tables, was no bad thing. But that's where my disagreement with the author ends.
As he so rightly says, what is the point of developing critical thinking if your knowledge base is so low that you have little factual data to base it on. Both should be developed together.
But the "knowledge" taught in schools these days veers so far towards woke propaganda than ever so maybe we should be thankful for small mercies and let the kids work stuff out for themselves.
Either way the future is looking a scary place.
But you've bought into the fiction that children are no longer "pupils" but "students," that is, those who take responsibility for their own learning. Once you do that you abrogate responsibility from teachers. Convenient for them but it's a cruel trick on the kids - they'll head for the calculator every time.
Look at most people under 50 and watch the way they write-physically the way they hold a pen or pencil and write, most make it appear as some highly difficult task and one that certainly produces a highly distorted and slow crabbed scrawl as handwriting or most likely a sort of hurried printing.
Why do children need to know the proper way to hold a pen anyway? An educationalist might ask-they will all use keyboards, it's a wasted skill they can use the time for other things.
Problem is of course that we are often separated from the mechanical means to produce script and need to be able to write and clearly so it can be read.
Introduce this argument to any group involved in education today and be met with total scorn. Are there no thinkers left out there?
Here in the states a Harvard Professor (doesn't that explain all?) has run an experiment that showed "unequivocally" students learn better when they are paid. Now wouldn't that solve all our problems, sarc.
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