I was having dinner with a couple of alums the other night, seeking feedback on my teaching (more on the question of my methods, general approach, and philosophy than course content). We got into a discussion of different teaching styles and approaches. At one point, the question of the value of gaining context-specific knowledge and skills arose, and one of them challenged why a number of teachers seemed to be so concerned with students’ learning specific knowledge and specific methods for solving specific problems. He went on to ask, “Don’t they realize that there’s so much knowledge in the world that no-one can know all of it? That what matters is not what you know but what you know how to do with it?”
That strikes me as very profound question and emblematic of a major generational difference between teachers of a certain age (mine, for instance) and a contemporary teenager. When I was a teenager, college student, and twenty-something, one’s intellectual reputation was based to a significant degree on what one knew. Those who were highly read (whether in a particular field or more broadly) were esteemed “smarter” than those who were not. To a degree, the more you knew, the more you were respected intellectually.
With the rise of ubiquitous data (I hesitate to call it all “information” though most people do so) in our intricately webbed culture, that situation is dramatically changed for today’s students. What they know is considered one step away from irrelevant compared to what they can do with the information once they find it.
There are exceptions. The students with whom I was conversing agreed that knowing a certain amount of vocabulary was important to real-time competence in a foreign language: regardless of how good a translation Google gives you, you can’t function well in a different language unless you know some of its words.