(If you recognize your response below and want named credit, let me know or take it yourself in a comment.)
First response
I was just discussing something like this with my granddad. I was up on the top of our boat house with some friends, he was with us, when my friends started arguing about what star they were looking at. I pulled out my phone and used google sky map to tell him that it was called some weird arabic word, and was not what either of them had thought it was. My Granddad then started lamenting the instant accessibility of data. He said it eliminated the need for argument, destroyed discussion. I said that it allowed us to stop wasting time debating the facts, the knowable things, and gave us more time to discuss the critical questions, the ones to which there are no real answers. He then raised the question of what really were facts which I tabled for then cause my friends were with us, but we discussed it later when theyd all gone to bed. In the meantime, I went back to my friends and we started discussing things we couldnt settle by pulling out a phone. Discussions of how we could know we existed. Discussions of time travel and time paradox. The nature of the universe and our role in it. The fun questions. The ones that really stretch your mind. We didn’t waste time on what stars we were looking at because that doesn’t matter. If you can know something, then it’s not nearly as important. Don’t get me wrong, I love trivia. I’m all about knowing random facts, knowing people, books, gods, art, whatever it be – knowing things makes me feel smart. Just the surface knowledge I use in quizbowl makes me feel smart. But none of it is really important. Knowledge now is a parlor trick, used to make yourself interesting, something to bust out to feel clever. But it’s no more important than a parlor trick. The real discussions aren’t about who painted what or who killed whom. The real questions seek to instead determine what those facts mean. What makes art beautiful. What is art. What justifies killing. Does anything. Who will be remembered in the future. Sure, from a practical point of view the facts seem more useful than speculation on what I have in fact defined as irresolvable issues. But as far as the advancement of ones own thinking and potentially of humankind and this instantly accessible body of data surrounding us, we need to focus on those irresolvables. Who knows, maybe some do have real answers. And once we find those answers, and once anyone with a phone can know them, we’ll probably find new questions.
A second response:
… all material we have already discovered is ostensibly online. Depth of knowledge is discovered by truly groundbreaking individuals but “knowledge” should be measured by how well we use this information.
A third response:
I see two meanings of the phrase, “context-specific knowledge and skills,” that applies to the student’s question:
the content – what is the use of knowing context-specific knowledge/skills?
what you learn is necessarily specific – if you learn by principle, then it is difficult to apply because we showcase our learning through concrete actions (compare “control the center” vs. actually doing so in a game of chess)
learning by analogy – i often learn by remembering a specific instance that surprised me with insight, then using that occasion as a way to spark insights in different contexts (seeing my godsister make an insightful response that I failed to imagine reminds me to think in that way, allowing me to think more broadly)
the context – the focus on these skills in the classroom
the purpose of the class – the importance of context-specific knowledge and skills (csks) depends on what students should be able to do afterwards. if the goal is just to memorize the content, then knowing csks is important. if the goal is to prepare students to appear intellectual, then csks is important. if the goal is to prepare students to think for themselves, then csks may be important in exemplifying a thinking method, but the real value is in giving students practice in thinking for themselves. i.e. let them solve problems in class rather than repeat csks without a purpose
A fourth response:
Despite the generational and technological changes that have undoubtedly begun to shape the world as we now know it, I still think that there is a “threshold” for intelligence/competence. Maybe threshold is the wrong term. Maybe “bucket” or “minimum knowledge-base” are better. Before explaining what I mean, I think its important to draw a distinction, pretty much like you’ve done, between cold, hard facts and what I would call “adaptability” or the skills required to take new data, understand it, and apply it towards solving a problem. I think that in the world today adaptability has become increasingly more important, simply because, like you said, there is SO much information out there. It would be impossible to “know” it all at any one point in time. And not only would it be impossible, but unnecessary. For example, over the last 4 years or so I’ve been lucky enough to have some really cool opportunities to participate in three or four internships in completely different fields. Cardiovascular surgery. Marketing. Neuroscience. Lifeguarding. Venture capital and corporate data analysis. Etc. And in order to succeed or attempt to succeed at each of these, I HAD to know how to adapt in the new environment. I had to know how to find the information that I did not know. I had to be able to research on the internet, make calls, interact with people, be a student, and figure it out on my own if I was to keep up. Interestingly, after I left the internship and got back into the grind of high school or college, I simply forgot a large portion of the specific details behind what I did. And this is going to be the case with most people. It is a neuroscientific fact (or at least, to be technically correct, a theory) that you use it, or you lose it. My CV surgery experience and knowing what the left anterior descending artery was simply became irrelevant when I worked with the marketing team in Sydney. This is why adaptability is so important, especially to my generation who will be moving around and changing fields and jobs constantly, and much more so than the previous generation.
BUT, to make my point, I think despite ALL of that… I had to know the “minimum amount” about “life”, about science, about history, about news and culture, and the things I learned in high school, and the facts and figures for two reasons: 1. They gave me that basic “language understanding” that you talked about. I could communicate with the neuroscience team because I had had a bit of an intro to neurons and action potentials and cells and biology in school. I could talk to the marketing experts because my mom was a saleswomen and she’d taught me a lot about the basics of marketing. Not only that, but I used my historical knowledge of marketing and companies and commercials and propaganda from the cold war era and politics from USAP to understand what they were saying. In other words the seed had been planted. 2. Our past experiences fundamentally shape how we perceive our present world. Catching references or allusions or, more vaguely, connecting the dots, seeing trends and repetition, are all based on knowledge of facts. Not only that, but while I may not have had to know what the LAD artery was to work with this thinktank invention company, I can’t tell you how many times something from that experience popped into my mind. And to be honest, it wasn’t a specific case study or tiny detail, but it was the base, the information below the threshold that made me think about my current situation in a different way. SO, while teaching, like we’d talked about at LePeep, how to frame a problem and model a solution and be adaptable and harness ingenuity, all these things, are extremely important, and should absolutely be taught in and out of school, I admit that we HAVE to have the base, the seed, the facts behind the specifics if we are to understand the language of the experts and if we are to know what words to type into Google. 🙂
A fifth response: