An old friend from the
Franciscan Third Order sent me a link to this amazing video. It is well worth
the five minutes it will take to watch it and, hopefully, the time it will
prompt you to reflect on the points it raises:
Entitled Shift Happens, 2014, the film well
documents, “[w]e are living in exponential times,” the pace of change in our
lives is accelerating at an exponential rate. The video is breathtaking,
overwhelming and well worth further consideration. I was struck by several
points.
Why Should Everyone Go To College?
“Researchers predict that 65% of today’s school kids will
hold jobs that don’t yet exist. We are currently preparing students for jobs
that don’t exist using technologies that haven’t been invented in order to
solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet….The US Department of Labor
estimates that today’s learner will have 10-14 jobs by the age of 38.”
The current conventional
“wisdom” regarding higher education in America would assert that everyone needs
to go to college in order to get a decent job. Despite the fact this “wisdom” is
being propagated by everyone from the President to the local media’s talking
heads, this myth is pernicious and needs to be laid to rest as quickly as
possible.
To begin with, not every
teenager completing high school is actually capable of attaining a higher
education. Sadly, it is not true that if they simply try their best they will
succeed. The road to college graduation is littered with the carnage of those
who simply couldn’t get there. This does not make them any less human or
valuable to our world. It simply means their life callings will be to endeavors
which capitalize on the skills they do have, not on those others think they
should have.
Moreover, not every teenager
capable of higher education wants to attend college. Some are simply not ready
for the demands of higher education right out of high school. The myth we have
told ourselves that college freshmen arrive as adults with fully developed
rational capacities and the maturity to use them is simply not true in many,
perhaps most, cases. At best, they are proto-adults capable of maturing into
adulthood assuming they are willing to grow and that vital mentorship is
available for that process.
There are also those who
simply do not want to undergo the process of higher education with its many
hoops to jump through and yearn to seek their fortunes outside its parameters. No
one should attend college because they were manipulated into doing so. There is
no small amount of sadism in forcing young people who are not capable of
completing college or who simply don’t want to be there to endure four years of
frustration and a long subsequent history of paying off student loans to pay
for that torture. There is also no small amount of social irresponsibility in
failing to insure that the equally valuable avenues for vocational success for
those not called to higher education are available to them.
It’s a College, not a Factory
But the more pernicious
aspect of this “wisdom” is the reduction of higher education to a vocational
process designed to insure jobs almost exclusively in the technical arenas. In
the first place, this thinking confuses training with education. The former is
focused on attaining skills, the latter is focused on the development of the
holder of such skills.
Education requires the
development of the capacity to think critically and solve problems creatively.
It requires developing the potential to express oneself clearly through verbal,
written, image-driven and technical means. A true educational process will take
students out of their comfort zones (and no, they don’t have the right to never
be troubled), expand their awareness of their own lives and the world around them.
An education worth its salt will prepare the student to be a life-long learner.
That last skill will prove
indispensable if the creators of the video are correct that the shelf life of
any skills learned in the first years of college will be of limited use by the
time of graduation. Many potential students today are buying into sales pitches
by undergraduate programs across the country desperately seeking new customers and
their tuition dollars. They are being sold a bill of goods that college is a four
year party – the best four years of your
life! – during which they will somehow learn all they need to know to go
make lots of money largely by osmosis. I know. I’ve taken the tours.
But this is a pernicious and
potentially destructive lie. If a student is lucky, they will find a college
that prompts them to ask questions of themselves, their classmates and their
professors. The student will figure out very quickly that despite the sales job
they got in their pre-college visit, seeing an undergraduate educational
process as “the best four years of your life” is acceding to an incredibly low
standard for a mediocre at best life. Indeed, they will recognize that a
college education in its best and highest use is actually the springboard to
the best years of their lives – the many years they have after graduation to
use what they have learned.
They will also figure out
that the campus cultures which suggest that shooting for the bottom line while
demanding undeserved high grades is an exercise in self-deception. They will also
quickly realize that the widespread and widely accepted practice of cheating on
online assignments and plagiarizing the work of others for writing assignments is
ultimately acceding to becoming a less-than-respectable human being.
The conventional “wisdom” by
which corporate imperatives to insure a supply of minimally trained workers would
reduce institutions of higher education to mere factories for minimal vocational
skills may be about a lot of things but education is not among them. And the
student who buys into that “wisdom,” the sales pitches of the money-hungry
university and the cynical campus culture of bottom line performance has
already conceded his or her opportunity to become an educated human being.
Worshipping the Work of Our Own Imaginations
Another section of the video
focuses on technological development.
“There are 5.9 billion searches on Google every day. This
is 100 times more than in 2000. To whom were the searches addressed B.G.
(Before Google)?”
It’s hard for post-Google
people to imagine how the world survived without the instant gratification of its
search engines. As an admittedly voracious user of Google, the presumption that
everything I need to know is almost instantly available to me assuming I have a
wifi connection is greatly comforting. But there is no small amount of vanity
in such a belief.
The B.G. question reveals
some of the self-blinded tendencies that informs the Technopoly that Neil Postman so well documented in his book by the
same name. To begin with, much of the world’s information, perhaps the majority
of it, is not yet digitalized. Google can only find that which has been made
available to online searches. The presumption that anything worth knowing is
already online is no doubt self-satisfying but beyond the smugness of such
assertions is the reality that much worth knowing is not yet online and may
never be.
This points to a related
concern. The major value of internet research is its speed which is often seen
as a proxy for efficiency. Sadly, it rarely is, particularly when it comes to
learning. The quality of learning generally turns on the amount of undistracted
time a student is willing to invest in the process of learning. All of us like
to find answers quickly. But the quality of the answers we find depends on a
number of things.
First of all, it depends
upon our ability to frame queries. This, in turn, depends upon the capacities
of our vocabularies and our abilities to think creatively and expansively. The
larger the in-borne thesaurus an individual searcher holds, the more likely
s/he will find ways to rephrase search terms to locate additional, often vital
data. Sadly, some of the most recent results of student learning suggests that vocabularies are
declining and that it is precisely
the use of internet technologies and their deleterious impact on substantive
reading that are feeding this decline.
“Skimming, Liu concluded, had become the
new reading: the more we read online, the more likely we were to move quickly,
without stopping to ponder any one thought.” - Maria Konnikova, “Being a Better Online Reader,” The New Yorker (July 16, 2014)
Second, the tendencies of
those of us who access online sources is to speedily read what we find there,
an extension of the faulty speed = efficiency premise. The result
is a tendency to scan, sometimes even using word search, but rarely to actually
read and consider the contents resulting in a corresponding decrease in
comprehension of that which has been hastily read.
As heavy an internet user as
I am I would be hard pressed to sing the praises of life Before Google. The World Book was a joy to read and I spent
many happy hours as a child immersed in it. But it was slow, heavily edited and
often incomplete and out of date. Google is a decided improvement.
Yet the joys of instant
searching, of having “the world at your fingertips” as internet technologies
often brag about themselves, have come at a cost to all of us who use them. It
is important to recognize that as we rely ever more heavily on online sites to
provide us with the intellectual equivalent of the sound bites we can readily
procure through scanning that we are already shutting out all the information
not online and only selectively accessing that which is present there. It is,
ultimately, a major sacrifice indeed that we make to the technological idol we
worship.
Billions and Billions of Data Bits
Finally, there are these
comments that require careful consideration:
“The first commercial text message was sent in December
1992. Today the number of text messages sent every day is double the population
of the planet. It is estimated that a week’s worth of the New York Times
contains more information than a person was likely to come across in a lifetime
in the 18th CE. 90% of the world’s data has been generated in the
past two years. The amount of new technical information is doubling every 2
years…For students starting a four year technical degree this means that half
of what they learn their first year of study will be outdated by their third
year of study.“
“In 1900 human knowledge doubled every 100 years. In 1945
human knowledge doubled every 25 years. In 2014 human knowledge doubled every
14 months. By 2020 human knowledge will double every 12 hours.”
We need to be very careful
not to confuse information, much less
data, with knowledge. On the knowledge hierarchy that most scholars of human
learning have long recognized, the data which are ultimately the basis for the
operation of computers is the lowest level of knowledge. It requires grouping
data by content to change data into information. It requires the verification
of information, checking of sources for authoritativeness, comparing various
takes on that information in context to become knowledge.
But it requires critical
assessment for that knowledge to become reliable. Even beyond that, wisdom
requires testing over time to generate insights into the big picture and provide
vision for our future as human beings.
An obsession with quantity
often masks an impoverished value for quality. It is quite possible to know more
but understand less. Indeed, one of the most frightening prospects of an
information rich, technologically powerful society arising in a
hyper-individualistic, atomized culture is the potential that this information
and power can be used to pursue individual and tribal interests in ways that
ultimately proves inimical to each other, our world and the living beings who
inhabit it.
Despite what our consumerist
culture tells us, more is not necessarily better. It is simply more.
The Billion Dollar Question
This provocative film ends
with this question: So what does it all
mean? Interestingly, of all the points made in the film, this is without a
doubt the most critical.
We are a people still
learning how to use our technological tools in a healthy manner. We are having
to learn that our connections to the internet can both provide us helpful
information and services as well as expose us to theft and defamation. We are
having to learn that despite what the consumer advertising tells us, we cannot
“talk all the time” and lead healthy lives. People who “talk all the time” quickly
run out of things to say worth hearing and in the process spend no time
listening. An obsessive use of technology to distract ourselves from our very
lives ought to make us wonder about the quality of those lives in the first
place.
We are having to relearn how
to read and study, coming to grips with the reality that despite the hype and
promises of its innumerable hucksters who see technological disruption as a
consummate value, the computer simply cannot do the hard work for us. We are
having to learn that the agreement to use internet technologies means to enter
into vulnerability, a fragile electronic world subject to slowdowns, failures, potentially
costly identity theft and debilitating viruses.
Finally, we are having to
learn once again how to interact socially with others in healthy ways. We are
having to learn that failure to be fully present with others because we are
immersed in our personal technologies is not only rude, it is dangerous. We are
having to learn the appropriate times, places and manners in which to use our
technologies and how to evidence appropriate concern for others in that usage. Most
of all, we have to learn the critical lesson of when we simply need to turn our
technologies off.
It is a steep learning
curve. But in answering the question “What does it all mean?” we are ultimately
answering the deeper question of “What does it mean to be human?” And while we
have the ability to avoid that question, as billions choose to do each day
through the use of their techno toys to remain constantly distracted, the challenge
of an ancient philosopher who lived long Before Google still thunders across
the ages requiring a response from each of us: “The unexamined life is not
worth living.” How do our own lives
measure up in light of that consideration?
Of course, we always have
the option to live as limited a life as we choose. The question is simply why
we’d choose to do so.
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Harry Scott Coverston
Orlando, Florida
If the unexamined life is not worth
living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is
not worth holding.
For what does G-d require of you but
to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your G-d? (Micah
6:8, Hebrew Scriptures)
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