Steve Jobs: The End of an Era

The passing of Steve Jobs yesterday made me realize that the information age has truly reached its first important milestone in the 21st century. I remember reading and teaching about 'digital natives' and 'digital immigrants' -- the way people used and felt comfortable with personal computers in their professional lives. Little did we know, we who were first introduced to Apple computers in the mid-1980s, how much computers would transform education, the workplace, and the home. I did my student teaching in classrooms where Apple IIe computers sat on a counter, collecting dust and holding down papers, while the experienced science teacher at the front of the room lectured using mimeographed notes and wrote on clear plastic sheets from an overhead projector.

My children have never known a time when computers were not ubiquitous. No one talks about 'digital natives' anymore - in our culture, the technology is seamlessly meshed with nearly every aspect of our lives. And yet many of our older citizens are still puzzled by it all. My father-in-law was a man of all trades: he could build a house from the ground up, handling every aspect; fix all his own cars; repair any household appliance; and do all of this without ever having to look up information about what to do. Now he can't even fix his own car if it starts having problems, because it is all run by a computer, and he hasn't the ability to run diagnostics.

Our students don't want to focus on memorizing facts to keep in long-term mental storage with instant retrieval. Why learn something for life when you can just look it up on Google? I've had teachers report that students routinely simply search for answers for nearly all homework questions. Many of their replies come copied and pasted straight from Wikipedia. They ask, rightfully so, "What's the point of just learning facts for a test when you can look it up on your phone?"

But are our students actually learning any information at all? Have we been focusing on trying to teach critical thinking skills when they believe that any information of any worth is only a finger swipe or a click away?

I read a very thoughtful, detailed analysis of the recent draft of the National Research Council's Framework for K-12 Science Education. Included in this framework is an increased emphasis on engineering concepts embedded in, and added to, science content. The analysis, by Paul Gross for the Thomas Fordham Institute, discusses our intense focus for the past several years on teaching 'inquiry-based' science in K-12 classrooms:

But that’s not the end of the matter. In this Framework, “inquiry learning” and the learning of “scientific reasoning” morph into more specific processes, primarily cognitive skills. They are treated here, as in predecessors, as elements of science content, i.e., as subject matter.

If we keep teaching students to 'discover' scientific facts for themselves through 'inquiry' (in its broadest sense of total constructivism), then why should students spend time investigating natural laws, simplistic concepts, or easily discovered 'facts' when they can simply look them up on their phone, right there in the classroom? Why make them go through the motions of 'discovering' basic information?

Advances in sharing of information through electronic media have made textbooks, standard lectures, and cookie-cutter labs obsolete. But the argument of "I can just look that up" falls into the same category of "Why should I learn to add and subtract when the calculator can do it for me?" Why indeed? Teachers should be prepared to explain to 21st century, technologically-raised students, just why a person should have a vast pool of basic information stored in long term memory instead of relying on an evolving technology to never fail, always be accurate, and needing a power source. Remind them that a human brain still operates faster at basic retrieval than the fastest typist using a search box. And until we enter the Matrix, and can plug our brains directly into the global web of information, people will always need to know some basic information in order to do the heavy mental work of critical thinking, creative problem solving, and inventing solutions to problems that don't yet exist.

Everyone who ever worked with Steve Jobs called him a 'visionary.' He wanted to transform the world -- and he did. He invented technologies that no one knew they needed until they were available. Where would we be without people who didn't have to stop and 'look it up' to move on to the next step in a process of discovery? There's still a place in K-12 education for basic instruction in foundational knowledge -- 'facts', if you will. And teachers need to both know them and be able to teach them to their students in a usable fashion.