There’s a lot of talk around (mostly by consultants and bloggers, but still…) about the “looking up” vs “learning” approach to teaching. It seems to me there are three basic approaches to this question (albeit a large number of shadings in between):
- Never make students memorize something they can Google (courtesy of our ISM consultant).
- Thinking requires material about which to think, so certain basics must be memorized in order to have a foundation for higher-order skills.
- Looking things up is a shortcut that replaces thinking when allowed, and therefore it shouldn’t be.
Let’s look at these in some sort of context since almost nothing in life is absolute (ie, non-contextual). Readers should be aware that some of the material in this post is designed to be provocative and only represents the first step in some musings of the author. The questions may come across as rhetorical without being so…
- First point:
- Certain things do have a time value. Those who can interact successfully with others generally have an advantage over those who can’t. Having to look up who is president, for instance, is going to make you look stupid (and undesirable as a friend or colleague) regardless of how easy the look-up is.
- Academically:
- you can have geometry students look up (I suppose) the proof of any proposition you give them. Does that mean having them work through how to prove something is pointless? Only if the proof itself rather than the process of learning to prove is the desideratum. There can’t be too many people left who would argue for the former.
- Biology teachers sometimes claim that a large part of introductory biology is “learning the language of biology.” Does such a claim justify massive amounts of memorization of vocabulary that students fairly quickly forget?
- Moving to the analogue, how much vocabulary and of what sort should world language students learn—especially in light of advances in Google translate and apps such as DuoLingo?
- What do survey courses provide (in any discipline) now that everything they teach can be easily looked up?
- Given that we already know that many students brag about not reading the “required literature” in English classes, what is the point of having students study literature? What’s really important to people who are not going to be literature majors and thus who don’t come to the subject with a predisposition to like it?
- Second point:
It’s hard for me to argue against this one in spite of ISM’s claims. I suspect the question is (as it usually is) one of balance. Most of the “academic” questions from the previous section could be presented here in a less confrontational format.
- Third point:
Some form of this justification has been used by teachers for (literally) millennia. Whatever the merit of its argument in the past, the number of people who cling to it today is declining as the people who tend to hold it most strongly are tending to retire (to paraphrase implicitly one of Thomas Kuhn’s points).
One of the points in its favor is that experts in a field have a body of knowledge they’ve acquired that they don’t have to look up. This argument is sometimes used as a counter to the “every adult uses the internet to look stuff up all the time.” Each has some merit, which brings us back to the second point in our original list.
If we really wanted students to mimic the behavior of adults in the “real world” (and I would say it’s arguable the extent to which we should do so), we’d require them to become experts in some sub-field of each course and simply knowledgeable about the other parts of the field.