A young and with-it person was complaining about why it is necessary to memorise so many things in order to become educated - all sorts of things from multiplication tables to dates in history to names of so many body parts to rivers and mountains and oceans and what not: 'After all, if there's anything you want to know you can always google it, can't you?'
I didn't see any point in arguing, so I agreed that he was probably right. So in the kind of future he has in mind, I said, doctors and lawyers and other people who used to be called 'knowledge workers' would simply google everything whenever people came to them for advice and help. And teachers, too: already I can see that teachers (at least in schools and colleges) are not really expected to know anything. And I am sure, I said, that people would gladly pay them hefty fees for using google to tell them what they needed to know.
The boy at least had enough intelligence to look abashed. But how much longer, I wonder?
.JPG)
14 comments:
Haha...didn't see any point in arguing. Haha. And the boy must have been quite happy at the beginning to have you agreeing with him until he started looking 'abashed'. How I wish I'd been sitting there.
It's one thing not to remember and to feel the horror of having a fast-fading memory - but it's quite another thing to argue that google is enough and that our brains/minds needn't remember things that need to be. I always think that students 'rebel' against memorising things that must be memorised as an excuse for being lazy and sloppy....
And one good acquaintance told me some years ago that a doc' he visited looked up on msn to read up on a particular disease that he knew nothing about (reminds me of your liner about the docs and trained assassins)
And you're quite right. Teachers in colleges and universities aren't really expected to know anything these days...
One can laugh maniacally or wonder.
Nice post this one.
Take care,
Shilpi
Dear Sir,
if everyone could get to know everything simply by google-ing, then no profession would exist! Moreover, Sir, the information that we can gather from internet stays just temporarily in our minds. And the Google may not have answers to all questions, some of which just need a little bit of pondering and proper application of common sense to be solved!
With warm regards,
Purnata.
Dear Sir,
while the argument of this young person seems compelling (and I am sure he is considered very smart among his peers) it is quite faulty. As of now the mind is still much faster in processing quiet a few different information classes than any computer. As such unless that information is readily available to it, progress is slow. Google is still a few clicks away. Someone who remembers things can do the processing way faster. Further, unless one remembers it is impossible to make connections to reveal interesting relations. While Google is a huge and superbly efficient data store, they are yet novices in making deeper connections among concepts and data. The mind seems to have extremely nontrivial structures and data storage mechanisms that seem to make lot of connections. Without remembering and making connections everything seems to be by itself pretty much and it will be hard to abstract and generalize.
The comments by this young guy seem to indicate that somewhere machines are beginning to overtake man not because they have become evil AI monsters but because human beings are becoming lazier! If this continues for a few hundred years evolution might very well take care of the reduced brain usage and make the human race into walking (and hopefully still talking) vegetables.
This is a great point raised on this blog and I do hope some people can learn the importance of memorizing. Unfortunately in schools it is almost 'unfashionable' to memorize things. I am not aware of the situation now but from my own school days I remember people making fun of others saying they were 'bookworms' or that they had no 'real brains' but only blindly memorized things.
While rote memorization is wrong it still is better than just googling everything!
With regards,
Nirman
This reminds me of one of my experiences a few years back, while I was attending drilling operations in the East Coast Deepwaters in India. A very specialised job was being carried out - a TCP job, which is done in rare conditions, and often you get a chance in a lifetime to see such jobs. I had a fresh trainee with me. As I asked him to go to the workfloor, see the entire operation, and educate me what a TCP job is, prompt came the reply - "please allow me, I'll tell you what is TCP from the net!
Yes. Some fools (who nevertheless enjoy the luxury of calling themselves educated, thanks to the abysmally lax standards these days) have even argued with me that it is unnecessary to remember dates while studying history. I'd like to see them declaiming in my classes on, say, Europe between the French Revolution and the end of World War II, or the Indian national movement between the Sepoy Mutiny and the post-partition riots, without mentioning any dates, and without suffering the ignominy of having to peek into the textbook again and again...
Some of them will even give asinine reasons saying that it's more important to remember what was happening and what the 'connections' were than it is to remember the dates. What connections do they think they are going to talk about if they don't know (or can't remember) the historical time-line? Gah.
Wow what worthless idea son.
How will you solve a mathematical or statistical question using Google?
Son, will you go to a shop and say, please wait, I’m counting my bill by GoogLE search. Though you won’t get your answer, Will you always carry or get an internet connection for whatever you do? These are all foolishness. Some common sense is required dear friend. That’s why we are send to school, so that at least these basic things are correct and for it we need to memorize. I'm astounded to see such post. Here is another blunt bloke. Sir, forgive him because at least he realized his mistake. Just tell this guy to ask questions or say something by thinking, at least twice.
Let me share a personal experience. Ok its fine that you are not good at studies. I’m among those, I have a friend who is alike me, I won’t name him, but sorry to say he doesn’t even know that 2.5*2=5, 7*3=21, etc, and he has to fetch the answer by means of calculator. Sometimes wonder, how such fellows do manage to get entrance in colleges that too in the field of management.
(Please don’t laugh, I’m not making fun of him; it’s a fact, there are such students.)
I would like to apologize for saying Blunt Bloke.
I shouldn't have said that, after all who am I to judge?Extremely sorry for being rude.
Ah, Arijit - but many people do wander around with the internet in their pockets these days. Little 18 year olds and some/many 30 year olds (at least) wander around with i-phones. Every other phone I see in the classroom these days, being wielded by a many smart and clever student, is an i-phone.
And for many a question or an argument (out-of-class) someone will flip out an i-phone to check on wikipedia...
Of course there is something (else?) to be said about those (especially some Indians I've come across here) who can memorise entire books and tomes like monkeys (and can do not much else) - they finish their dissertations on time and get proper jobs quickly. But about that and other things some other day.
Only a fortunate handful can actually memorise/remember, understand connections, and formulate (worthwhile) connections of their own. The rest are actually morons pretending otherwise and should either find some mechanical job to do or make do with being a moron and do the best under the constrained circumstances.
Haha. I'm still gurgling about the '...didn't see any point in arguing...' I would love to be able to do something that beautiful when faced with similar statements in class and out-of-class.
Take care, Suvro da.
I keep hearing from my daughter and other young people of her age about how pathetically uninformed and confused most of their teachers are these days - whether they are 'teaching' physics or history. The best of them only dictate notes in class (and the cleverer kids find out which books they have copied from, word by word!), the worst get furious when they cannot explain things, and are asked questions which 'humiliate' them by exposing their ignorance to public glare. No wonder: those who are becoming teachers now are the age of those whom I taught 10-15 years ago, and I distinctly remember wondering aloud in class a thousand times what was going to happen to education when lazy morons like them with outsize egos became teachers in their turn. That has now happened, and today's children are paying the horrible price. I was recently told by someone who attends one of the private cram-shops that have mushroomed in this town that a tutor there has openly said that they would not have had jobs if teachers in school could really teach...
Dear Suvroda
It is some sort of a tragic comedy (if there is something like that at all!) isn’t it? Even the Google founders perhaps did not think, they may be replacing teachers. We cannot be certain what to look forward to.
However, I am sure your student asked you this question in jest.
Regards
Tanmoy
Hi Sir,
I know this is a very old post, but couldnt resist slipping in something that happened just today in office.
A client had asked a fairly simple question in the course of an ongoing transaction. Me and a colleague had digged up the law, and found some judgements that seemed to fairly reinforce what we already knew. Job well and quickly done, we thought as we sent our responses off to a senior for review.
Heres the reply that came from him, two hours later:
"Guys, do a general google search to find out if this is done."
All this, ostensibly for about INR 8000 an hour!
Disillusionment, thou art my bedfellow tonight!
Abhiroop
alahiri@luthra.com
I can't help wondering about a part of your comment espcially, Abhiroop. Rs 8000/hour, which is appr. $160/hr...I feel like a dinosaur again, and an envious dinosaur, at that. That's like making $24,000/ month. Is this the sort of money that people make in some sort of management/IT job sector? Well I guess real people do make $300,000/year. Good for you.
Oh, and by the way, please don't mind - but that should be "dug", and not "digged". As far as I know there's no word like "digged" in the English lexicon.
Suvro da, I keep forgetting to add this little link from the BBC that I found last year (probably the last time that I checked the news report too). There are real researchers in the world who are actually saying that we haven't become stupid at all but only "smarter" precisely because we don't remember. The study itself is neither valid nor reliable but the pompous remarks regarding the conclusions (which is what I find galling) are what people around will remember! I suspect that once people around realized that even the so-called intelligent people in very important places can't and don't remember anything any longer, some grew alarmed and carried out a study just to tell folks that "remembering" isn't that important, and doesn't have much value in the world, and that remembering can now be safely forgotten. Makes me weep. I sometimes think that if people saw you here, Suvro da, they'd think you were some museum piece from another century or some wise man come back from the dead. Anyway, there's the link below.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14145045
It's been useful for my work. To think that you wrote this post a year before the stupid study was conducted, and there's your unforgettable line, 'The boy had enough intelligence to look abashed. How much longer, I wonder?'
Hi Shilpi,
My apologies first for the howler. Humbly, corrected. It is the "digged/ dug" kind of blooper that I am most frightened of, and I still cower (not unlike when I was in school!) in the anticipation of Sir's inevitable wrath when such a monstrosity is committed.
Second, to correct a misunderstanding (indeed, I should have been clearer): INR 8000 is how much the law firm I work for will make, in lieu for the googled advice which I rendered to my clients day before yesterday. It is by no means how much it will pay back to its overworked, harrowed employees! I have never cared for money more than a certain degree, and indeed, fie on me if I earned that kind of money for sitting and hitting search on google. As with other stories of the world, this is another story of victory for the giant corporation.
Regards,
Abhiroop
Post a Comment