The End of Knowledge

When I was a kid, growing up in a sugar plantation town in Hawaii, on a barely paved road, the ocean on one side and sugar cane on the other, I knew where to get information. I could ask my parents, or read a book. I could ask a teacher, if it was about a subject I was studying at the moment. I could also ride my bike three miles to the Waialua Public Library, right by the sugar mill, and ask Mrs. Terukina for a book. If she didn’t have it, then I didn’t either. For mass media, there was AM radio, and the fuzzy signal of KGMB Channel 9 in Honolulu, which in the days before cable TV, just barely reached the North Shore of Oahu, providing us with a narrow stream of other information.

So for me there was true utility in becoming a person who collected a lot of information: books, documents, education, memories. Because if these sources I mentioned above didn’t have it, it just wasn’t there. My mind was starving. If I was interested in the Civil War, there was a book or two in the library, but not many, because in Waialua, the Civil War was as exotic a subject as Kamehameha’s campaign to unify the islands would have been in Mississippi.

At that time (which by the way, was the mid 1970s) the amount of knowledge we now have access to: past, present and future, all facts possible (correct and incorrect), images, video, primary sources, other states, nations, continents, planets: would simply have been impossible to grasp for the 11-year-old Chris.

Many people have written on the change in the nature of knowledge. In education, though, the legacy of the information repository paradigm affects every aspect of a school year: pacing, culture, teaching kids at risk and even the question of whether public schools can prepare a child to be a 21^st century adult. Why?

Because the idea of a classroom teacher as the sole repository of knowledge on a single subject, in a single classroom, is an iconic and unaltered one. Kids may routinely use their smart phones to instantly find song lyrics on the Net (anyone old enough to remember playing the vinyl, over and over again, picking up the needle, and scrawling lyrics in a spiral notebook?) but they still believe their science teacher (along with their textbook) to be the single source on earth for information on galaxies, air pressure or tornadoes.

Other adults, be they special education teachers, advisory teachers, or support staff, need to prove to a student that they too know about science, math or geography. Not that the classroom teacher particularly wants it this way: if students realized how they could verify and augment their own learning it would create a depth and richness to their education that a single teacher and textbook cannot match. We need to directly instruct them in this idea of one student to many sources of information. The Internet and the knowledge it provides also blow the single-repository model out of the water. It also allows a truly one-to-many relationship of a subject to its sources of knowledge.

This has both advantages and dangers. The dangers are clear: textbooks are carefully written and edited for clarity and accuracy, though with the recent growth of textbook adoption states it is no longer possible to say they are relatively objective. History in particular has always suffered from political omission: science and other subjects are now undergoing the same fate.

But the proliferation of other information sources is the antidote to a potion of ideological influence designed to provide students with a limited subset of selected facts. The dilution of textbooks, the conquest of school boards by interest groups, and with the limits of the single teacher-textbook model together provide us with the path to follow, which is this: We absolutely must, consciously and carefully, teach the kids thinking as a skill, with the same rigor and accountability we use now to teach them any other subject.

We should just give them any background information they need—no more memorizing vocabulary words-then provide them with a curriculum that forces them to synthesize, analyze, compare, evaluate. Entire occupations (individual tax preparer, accounts receivable, real estate broker) are becoming commoditized by outsourcing, offshoring and internet applications that have eliminated monopolies on procedural knowledge and process completion.

If we do not want public school to produce kids only suited to become an underclass (and there are no teachers that I know who do), we have to break the box, use all the technologies and information we can provide. Some information is junk, but it always has been. We now have the opportunity to guide them through some of the process of becoming discerning consumers of thoughts, ideas, proposals, ideologies--before they leave school.

We have the chance not only to level the playing field once and for all, but to change the game of public education permanently. We can no longer afford to operate as a factory, producing industrialized minds. That paradigm lies in rust. We must bring the world to our kids, that they may face it, develop the skills to manage it, and have a chance to prosper in a world without informational horizons. If we don’t, we as teachers will only be riding our school systems down into obsolescence.