Public Schools, Gas
stations, Iraq
and the Super Highway
We may need to solve problems not by removing the cause but
by designing the way forward even if the cause remains in place. -Edward de
Bono
It’s a an old adage, that needs repeating, information does
not necessarily equal knowledge or certainly wisdom. (We are using ‘knowledge’
here to mean having a sense of wisdom, of having the ability to make good,
educated choices based on information.) We do have plenty of information,
whether in print or available online (digitally) in its own many forms, images
for example. In 1987 the New York Times published a newspaper that was 1,612
pages long! Not only was that a contemporary record for the Times, it was twice
the information available to a person living in the 19th Century!
Twice. And that was in one newspaper.
Now we have the web, which is very, very wide, but very,
very shallow. By this I mean the amount of information is staggering, some 11.5
billion web pages and growing each day ( 9 zeros after the 11). Yet how do we
connect to this information? How is it organized? Google, Alta Vista and Ask
Jeeves are common, but they do not search in the same way that you would go to
the library and look for a book and only vaguely like you’d look up an encyclopedia
article. They search using “hits”, how many times a page is visited. That’s
shallow information. That means, using the old fashioned book technology, that
you would look in a card catalog that only contained books that are popular and
read a lot. This is why you say, how do kids find out this ‘stuff’! It’s a
popularity contest. Is this the way to knowledge, to knowing? I don’t know. I
don’t think so, but I don’t know, because information, or perhaps more
accurately, accessibility to information is changing so quickly I don’t know if
it is helping me gain knowledge or merely information of the popular variety.
Knowledge, remember, is dependent on information.
If I know gasoline comes from the Fennville gas station, I
have information. –I’m informed. I could tell you, or someone else, where it
comes from and be correct. I could tell you the address, show you a photo or a
map on Mapquest. I would be an informed person. Would I have ‘knowledge’ of
gasoline. Absolutely not. Knowledge of
gasoline is deeper, much deeper. (Pardon the pun.)
“Gasoline knowledge”, has geo-political and historical
ramifications. Most oil comes from ‘other’ countries. They are countries within
our “sphere of interest” and there in lies some major problems. Some are
friendly, some are just greedy and some just downright hate us, but knowledge
of gasoline, oil and energy is crucial to our world, even in Fennville.
We had information about Iraq,
but we, especially in hindsight, had little knowledge of the country, the
people, the geo-political ramifications of disrupting a region to impose our
ideas.
But, this is not about Iraq.
It is about information, knowledge and public schools. What do we do as
educators to teach children about the nature of information? What processes,
what curriculum vitae do we require, as teachers, as a community and as a
nation to produce knowledgeable
citizens? Citizens, by the way, who can protect their families, communities and
their livelihoods. This is pretty serious stuff, because we (Americans) do not
want to be out smarted by those who wish us ill or even those who just want our
jobs. We need to teach new information, literacy skills that reflect the
digital information forms –especially delivered on the internet. We need to
teach how to transform information into knowledge. We teach kids to look both
ways as they cross the street, yet we let them play on the Internet’s Super
Highway without a thought to their educational
safety, let alone as to who they are not becoming.
I fear this: not a super jet crashing into our skyscrapers,
but a bright future, suddenly dimmed, rolling ominously down that super
highway, towards us, towards our children who are playing indifferently on the
road, plugged into their ipods, unaware of that huge, crushing machine coming at
the speed of digital light towards them. And we with no way to warn them.
I fear all they will ever “know” is that gasoline comes from
the gas station.
