Comment by mechanical_fish | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mechanical_fish | Hacker News Reader

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mechanical_fish

Don't we have Google for that?

I'm not kidding. This is a serious question.

Let me anticipate the obvious counterargument by acknowledging that anyone who wants to have a basic discussion of world events needs to know these facts, off the top of their head, because without them you can't reason logically about the news. But that brings us back to the original problem: Why would American kids want to have a discussion of world events? There is almost nothing in American journalism to inspire them. The published news in the U.S. is propagandistic, sensational, vapid, unenlightening, and often flat-out false -- and that's the New York Times and the Washington Post! The situation on CNN or (god help us) Fox is far, far worse.

Without any motivation to know the timeline of World War II, it becomes a piece of trivia: A random fact that is not especially useful. The ability to memorize trivia used to be considered a sign of intelligence; Google, Wikipedia and the iPhone are going to change that.

The advantage of facts in your head is that they can be mixed in with things you already know, provide context for new things you learn, and used to form new thoughts. While any given fact might be easy to retrieve from the internet, I can't use it until I ask for it. And I can't know in advance what the best facts to know are, so I try to put as much in my head as I can.

Well said. I think the best example of this would be the trivia geek; full of useless information, but almost always a well learned individual with wonderful ideas.

While keeping vast amounts of data in your head isn't worth it because of the internet, it is certainly still important to know this stuff off the top of your head.

The more that you keep in your head for later means that you have more information with which to provide a context for other information.

An example: I've been reading Noam Chomsky's book on the Balkans, and I remembered a few things he said. When I saw that Kosovo declared independence via the BBC I had a better understanding of how important that was. This type of stuff doesn't happen when you're sucking info from the internet on demand. When I see some news article, I don't lurk around Wikipedia for an hour researching it, I skip it.

FWIW, knowing is still important. The internet does not replace your brain. It replaces books (kinda).

Yes, I agree, but this is the argument that I tried to short-circuit.

How many freshmen in college are in the habit of listening to the BBC? How many have heard of Noam Chomsky in any context? How many have read so much as one book on history or politics, beyond high-school textbooks? Raise those numbers, and students will learn the trivia by themselves, just as your brain subconsciously learned trivia about the Balkans as a side effect of reading the Chomsky.

But the amount of trivia that students know is not, in itself, very important. Indeed, studies which show that "most students don't know where Kosovo is on a map!!!" can be dangerous because they misdiagnose the problem and lead to the wrong solution: Forcing students to memorize maps and regurgitate them on tests, a process which also convinces the students that geography teachers are sadists and geography is a torture device.

Learning starts before college. Parenting helps. I heard a noted essayist say once that more parents are more likely to know more about celebrity lives than to know their child's elementary school teachers.

But how can you know what to search for?

What if you get the following item in your RSS reader: "Dalai Lama Shows Support for Olympics" (NY Times)

How will you know the significance of this if you don't know who Dalai Lama is? And you would also need to know about the protests to know why his support is newsworthy.

This is on the right track, but once again we have the chicken-and-egg problem. You're using your knowledge of history and geography to sort through news feeds, trying to tease out which stories are meaningful. But students have little reason to practice that skill unless they believe that there is meaning to be teased out in the first place. And how are they to know that? It's all I can do to find a reason to read a news feed -- in fact, I don't do it. I get pointed to the most interesting news by reading the blogs of half a dozen news-junkie bloggers, who watch the papers and the TV and link to the articles that are actually significant... often placing them in a larger context at the same time. Otherwise, I ignore the news. I'm already depressed and fearful enough.

Those who haven't yet started reading news blogs, though, might find it hard to fall over them by accident. What they will find by accident is CNN and the like, and why should we be surprised when students think that CNN is a waste of time? It is a waste of time -- pseudo-scandals, celebrity gossip, mindless stenography, yammering talking heads, scare stories with blood, flames, and explosions...

Give the students a reason to believe that news is valuable and important -- perhaps by raising their political consciousness, as the author of the original article did -- and they'll learn the skills they need to find valuable and important news.

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