I think searching for things on the internet should be taught as a core competency, like reading, writing, and arithmetic.
I feel like way too much of formal education is focused on memorization. Especially now that we have this ubiquitous searchable memory called The Internet, this time should really be spent teaching kids and young adults how to actually do things.
But education focused on developing skills has its roots in trade schools, where kids with bad grades were sent to learn how to retread tires. That precedent makes skill-driven education a tough sell to parents. But I think technology has advanced to the point where skill development is the way to go.
There's also resistance from academics who believe distilling university down to a way to attain job market viability somehow cheapens academia; that academics should at least to some degree be academics purely for the sake of academics.
But I really believe that if someone has internet access and can wield it well, knowing things is a problem that will solve itself over the course of that individual's life. So why don't we just get on with actually doing things? That's the part of education that benefits most from instruction and traditional academic social structures anyway.
I think that there is a problem with the 'three 'R's' not being taught properly. I am shocked to find people hired to write copy for the internet and lacking basic standards of literacy. Product copy, newsletters, blog posts for 'social media' and that sort of stuff requires some ability to spell, the sort of ability that most people on this site had when they were aged 11.
There are also those that 'learned' to write with Microsoft applications that capitalise the first letter of a sentence. When these people are allowed to use something like Wordpress that does not have this magic, what happens? All notion of punctuation goes out of the window and they do not care. They really don't and little things like spelling and grammar shows that, plus if challenged they state that it does not matter as there are more important things - as if!!!
IMHO the 90% that cannot use CTRL+F cannot spell or use punctuation. They have the reading age of a small child.
I feel like way too much of formal education is focused on memorization. Especially now that we have this ubiquitous searchable memory called The Internet, this time should really be spent teaching kids and young adults how to actually do things.
But education focused on developing skills has its roots in trade schools, where kids with bad grades were sent to learn how to retread tires. That precedent makes skill-driven education a tough sell to parents. But I think technology has advanced to the point where skill development is the way to go.
There's also resistance from academics who believe distilling university down to a way to attain job market viability somehow cheapens academia; that academics should at least to some degree be academics purely for the sake of academics.
But I really believe that if someone has internet access and can wield it well, knowing things is a problem that will solve itself over the course of that individual's life. So why don't we just get on with actually doing things? That's the part of education that benefits most from instruction and traditional academic social structures anyway.