"Whoah...I Know My Multiplication Tables!"
June 02, 2008
The blog post title, if you didn't guess, was a not-so-veiled reference to a line from Keanu Reeves' character Neo in The Matrix. Remember -- when they plug the giant computer directly into the back of his head, and the trusty "kung-fu" program is automatically downloaded into his cortex. Or something.
Anyway -- Rear Admiral Chris Parry, the man who now heads Britain's Independent Schools Council (think private schools) recently predicted, in the esteemed Times Educational Supplement, that children will learn (absorb? process? digest?) information in this way not so long from now.
Parry told the TES: "Within 30 years, sitting down and learning something will be a thing of the past. I think people will be able to access, Matrix-style, all the vocabulary you need for a foreign language, leaving you to just clean up the grammar."
Cool, but I've studied Hungarian. Good luck "just cleaning up the grammar." (I describe my fluency level in the language as "belligerent.")
Just how would this information makes its way directly into all those kiddie brains? Well, details are sketchy, but it seems to involve some kind of organo/chemico-bluetoothy-wimax kind of thing. Parry said: "It's a very short route from wireless technology to actually getting the electrical connections in your brain to absorb that knowledge."
Needless to say, there's been some great blog reaction to these statements. My favorite comes comes from this blog, Neuroanthropology.
Uhhh, Admiral Parry, do I have to have one of those big plugs in the back of my neck or live in a tank of fluid while the robots steal my body heat after we suffer enormous losses in the big robot-human war? And can I learn super-ninja-no-gravity-martial arts along with my foreign language programming? And if I do have to live in the tank, can I at least choose which virtual reality I get to live in because I don’t really want to move back to Chicago…
The author continues:
I suppose people like Admiral Parry assume that we’re going to have memory ‘chips’ installed in our brains at some point. That’s entirely possible, I suppose, although I think there’s likely to be some serious issues involved, including not just ethical ones but also practical, neurological, and economic problems. Is he aware that the biggest challenges in schools are not the absence of technology or wireless connections to students’ brains, but lack of resources, social problems from outside the classroom affecting teaching, lackluster teaching, behavioural issues among students, and basic disagreements about what education is even supposed to accomplish (witness the problem with standardized testing)? And that’s not even touching on the fact that in the developing world, where most children are being educated, these problems are even more acute.
As a father, let me just throw my requisite line in here at the end: "Dadgumit, if I had to learn the multiplication tables back in my day (oh yes, had to be said), then my kid sure as heck has to as well."
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