Like me I am sure you look at our world and wonder how has it got its self in such a mess.

If anything, the amount of knowledge one needs to know to make sense of today’s issues is staggering.

Putting inequality and greed aside, the lack togetherness has to be one of the main problems. We with our interconnected world have little if any appreciation or understanding of other cultures in the world.

So has technology plunged the world into its present day state?

”You can look anything up on you iPad, so you don’t have to know anything (“factual mastery is become less and less important.”)

Real knowledge and understanding is going out the door. In order to have a conversation, or to contemplate or invent something, you must have the information in your head, so that you can combine it with other information that is also in your head. There’s no time to “look it up. You can only work with what’s in your head. That’s why computers don’t just have hard disks, they also have “working memory.

Or is the Internet making us more skilled at asking questions, or is it more important that it is parroting answers to someone else’s questions.

I can’t help wondering what will happen if we rely mainly on electronic devices to provide information…..and then there’s a blackout.

Then who has the floor?

The person who actually KNOWS something and can articulate it. The guy looking it upon the iphone plays second fiddle.  Who do you think would win? The guy with the knowledge, and therefore, quick retorts in his head, or the one fumbling with the Ipad?

Unfortunately, this is the road we are going down. I don’t see how present days technologist are creating knowledge to improve the world. This can only be true when a microchip can be implanted in my head so that my brain can draw on all the knowledge it needs to reason and think creatively. We can’t fix a human problem with a pure technological solution. I am also afraid to tell you that technology is no replacement for caring.

Education is a dance. A theatrical moving-about. It requires more than a dump of information and a hologram or computer or Smart Phone to be Intelligent.

You might think I am talking unadulterated crap but the best educated of most of us learned was what we did it with a pencil, some paper, an adult teacher and some chalk in a classroom. Miraculously such people got a man on the moon. The very idea of computers was invented by such people (Bill Gates and the late Stephen Jobs were in their middle 50s).

Humans have always worked in collaboration for important achievements. Unfortunately these days factual mastery is becoming less and less important.

We are into a hodgepodge of moment-driven quantitative analyses.

We now have Teenagers who have a great knowledge of math and science but no capability to understand what the value of it is beyond a paycheck they might earn.

Why learn a foreign language when there is Google Translate?  We persist in using skin color as a way of defining individuals.

The capability of the human mind to keep knowledge does not increase at the same rate as the expansion of knowledge. Learning is never done and there is no arbitrary point where we are ready for the real world.

At least becoming proficient, in another language is key to global integration, not the reverse.

In this computer-driven age more and more exams in many subjects are multiple choice guessing contests graded by computer – and even math exams require one to enter the problem’s solution in an exact and strictly timed format, making it possible to get all the right answers and still fail for lack of ability to perform data entry with sufficient dexterity and speed.

You hear these day with the current terrorism in the world that young people are being radicalized. Why?

1. Because the wheels of commerce are supercharged by the electricity of a million of Hippocratic hand shakes. USA-Iran,Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, Palestinian.
2. Because the alternative of the ignorant is to rely on some talking head.
3. Because New technologies are profoundly altering the way knowledge is conveyed.
4. Because the pursuit of knowledge and skills is too expensive.
5. Because we don’t educate our young to gain a full range of basic intellectual skills. Value, Curiosity, Tolerance, Respect, Creativity.
6. Because ethical thinking which is crucial for individuals and societies to better address and deal with public policy issues is a forgotten as a moral philosophy, leaving a void to radicalization, away from the materialistic world.
7. Because we have forgotten that Education will be more about how to process and use information and less about imparting it.  It has degenerated over the last two generations from a reflective science that gave value to life through the deep thinking of individuals and the careful review of their peers into I am all right Jack syndrome.
8. Because we rely almost entirely on passive learning.  To follow in over-trodden paths of conventionalism. If the goal is to turn students into robot-like performers they’ll certainly accomplish it, but how much can you expect the many problems in the real world to be solved by robots?
9. Because a big part of stopping radicalization and having students thrive is to give them people to emulate, and people who support their dreams. At the rate and direction we are headed I wonder if students will be able to answer what is 13 squared without a calculator or recall who fought in WWI or II.
10. Because we should pay for students to spend a semester or more abroad.  An educational experience worth every penny of its extra cost. To Master  A Language. would be far more beneficial than; mastering, or rethinking how to more effectively prepare.
11. Because we need to do away the basic notion that you have to learn something in order to be able to move toward higher level skills of thinking and analysis. So it can go down more easily with students who were raised on the internet.
12. Because the current system of grouping pupils by age across all subjects by force is archaic.
13. Because the idea that data and collaboration are “coming” is absurd. We need an education system the is flexible enough to be custom tailored to each student without the necessity to change any part of the system itself. The capability of the human mind to keep knowledge does not increase at the same rate as the expansion of knowledge.”It’s a common error to believe language exists in a vacuum, that by simply sharing a common lexicon the world’s social, economic and political barriers will fall like leaves in an autumn wind.
14. Because Specialization is for insects.
15. Because teaching Mandarin to the next generation wouldn’t be a bad idea, as a one-way communication of English will otherwise lead to global misunderstanding.
16. Because naked greed, willful ignorance, and incompetence – are as common as daylight. Let’s also deliver thoughtfulness.
17. Because  A good example is the concept of our living in a heliocentric system rather than a earth-centric system.
18. Because it was impossible to think seriously about the future many things in life holds that things take longer to happen than you think they will, and then happen faster than you thought they could.
19. Because there is a huge difference between sheer memorization of a tremendous amount of data and actually knowing how to use that data.

Do people leave college with an accurate robust knowledge of probability?

No. It is only attained.

Most things are as untrue as they are true.

“A human being should be able to change a nappy, plan an invasion, butcher a pig, steer a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.

The purpose of public education is to teach students to think, give students real skills, and give students experiences that require use of both.

University is a preserver of the past in terms of values and outlooks and shared “facts.”

Those who do not know history and have not thought about it, repeat its mistakes use Google, Safari Library or externalized knowledge stores.

.The initial development of revolutionary ideas come from individuals.

Isn’t this the way we should be handing the reins of government, over and over, to the “best and brightest”

That one expert will, one hopes, teach the controversies about the war, rather than simply teaching their own opinions as fact, but there’s still a real danger of creating an intellectual mono culture that might, like genetically modified crops, have a shared vulnerability.

We’ve already got this  (think Tea Party and climate change or evolution).

Educators have a huge problem on their hands as to how to offload their brain empower students to be creators, rather than mere consumers.

Da Vinci today alone cannot build an jet-airplane. The people who designed the microchips, wrote the operative system, made the special glass, and so on weren’t specialists?

Let me tell you the first time as a young man I went to see the Eiffel Tower it was surrounded by pigeons now it’s surrounded by machine guns.

Its time we taught values not just our values, values that we all share and need to live on this plant in Peace.