Comment by cbryan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cbryan | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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