The Death of Knowing…
If knowledge is power then despite access to information being freer than it has ever been, why is there an overwhelming feeling that the average individual is even less inclined to make any difference in this world.
Has the ability to access unending knowledge created a generation of geniuses or has it simply deferred the need to know anything at all. If all knowledge can be acquired on an as and when basis, is stored knowledge a waste of time or a necessary differentiator between the gifted and the challenged?
The rapid and somewhat chaotic democratisation of knowledge that has occurred over the past decade has simultaneously revolutionalised and destroyed Education or at least the concept of a “Formal Education”.
We, believe it or not, have only had the pleasure of Google’s company for roughly ten years. It is hard to imagine life without google now and equally hard to remember what life was like before. Google, however, was just the start in a shift in the way we acquire, process and recall knowledge.
Until big search engines came along, the web operated as a niche and specialised location for specific information such as news headlines via newsgroups, social clubs, and the odd business here and there, the web, it seemed, was a great novelty and one I can recall from my high school days.
In 1997, my second year at school, the internet was used by teachers as a tool for commanding attention, a promise of 20 mins on the internet was enough to encourage a class of rowdy teens to sit still and pay attention. It was the overwhelming sense of freedom of information that was the pull (although that was mostly the lewdest content that could be found through academic firewalls!)
It was still the humble printed matter that formed the cornerstone of my early education, books, encyclopaedias, journals, magazines and newspapers, educational authority simply didnt trust the content of the “that web thing” and the oracle of knowledge was still the humble brown and orange library of the 90’s British high school. Towards the end of high school things has started to move on, slowly, very slowly. There was no longer three or four computers between a thousand or so students, the internet had warranted the construction of computer rooms, where on many an occasion, a group of students could be found hiding from the tyranny of the IT teacher.
It was around this time that CD-ROM’s had begun to take hold. I remember being amazed at the low res images and, by todays standards, bloody awful animations on the early Encyclopaedia Brittanica Software, but it was DK’s “The Way Things Work” that captivated our imaginations (and was the cd permanently on loan from the school library).
This was the first time, in my experience, that a piece of education software attempted to be as equally entertaining as it was educational. It was then I realised that there was more to this computer thing than the odd glance of lady bumps and a snigger at the back of the library computer rooms. One question, that I still recall, despite being more than a decade older, is one that I asked my IT teacher that was never answered.
“If all of this information is on this disc, and I can get to this disc whenever I want to, why do I have to learn any of whats on it?”
This was, although not to my teen mind, a simple yet extremely complex question on many levels. I had, inadvertently cracked open a can of educational worms that my teacher was unable to harvest. The answer I received was the simple “because you have to” that most teachers tended fling at questions beyond the expected. But I struggled to accept that school, education and all that it entails was just to please those older than me. At this point, my education began to take a bit of a treacherous path towards mediocrity, I believed that I knew it all, more than that, I believed I knew better…
I gave up. At the age of 15 I was convinced that school was pointless, dreary and full of false hope. My general grades nosedived and my school was convinced that I was on a path towards failure. My teachers were always so shocked that my exam results were quite good whilst during class throughout the term they would be so average.
I had seen through the mirage of authority and realised that those teaching me struggled to come to terms with the point of it all as much as I did, I truly felt that school existed to justify the livelihoods of teachers and to keep errant kids off the streets.
I convinced myself that education was only about memory, repeating and churning, and re-writing out the thoughts of others until they were almost mantra. I longed for expressing my own ideas, my own views and my own personality. It was at this point I discovered a passion for the fine art and how it could satisfy these needs, but I digress.
As the end of high school approached, I began to realise that there was a point to it all, experience, discipline and the first taste of conforming to social structure, restrictions and barriers, or more, how to do what you want to do and get away with it.
More important than this, however, was the realisation that it was not what I knew that mattered but having the confidence in my ability to find out that led me down the path I still follow today. The pillars of education are ‘facts’ and the knowing of them. The pillars of MY education understanding that those facts are not possessed but referenced.
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