I have a profound respect for knowledge and for people who know “things”. It doesn’t matter what “things”; I like to listen to people who know their stuff, who are passionate about a certain subject and who go all out to learn everything they can about it for the mere love of it. I’m also a great fan of evolution. I like the fact that we can get rid of unnecessary clutter to make way for things of greater importance and value. Let’s take, oh I don’t know, learning for example. Over the millennia of human existence, the way in which we learn has changed, and education systems have adapted to keep pace with changing demands and life requirements. And that’s cool. It’s important. I like that.

What I don’t like are shortcuts that detract from the overall meaning and experience of learning; changes that make learning a vapid, empty excuse to fill up the years between childhood and adulthood; evolution that results in incomplete human beings who are ill-prepared to life and that essentially drags all of humanity back a few generations.

In my opinion, which is probably not as humble as it ought to be, Don Tapscott, author of Wikinomics, epitomises this kind of backwards forward thinking. According to Tapscott, the current methods of teaching are pretty much archaic; they belong to another age and need to change with the digital times. And this, according to Tapscott, means that children should no longer be burdened with unnecessary facts and figures that are available on the internet at the mere click of a mouse.

Tapscott is part of the “net generation”, a term that he coined. I don’t have the exact definition of the term at hand, but I’m pretty sure that it refers to people who have been brought up on digital technology, those who learnt to operate a keyboard before they were toilet trained and who could programme the family home entertainment system before they were able to switch to solids from mushy peas.

As someone who has not quite reached 30 years of age yet, I probably, technically, fall into the outer reaches of the net generation, but as I have demonstrated time and again, I’m a simple girl at heart and I don’t think that you can beat good old fashioned books for learning (or entertainment). Now, I agree with Tapscott when he says that we need to teach children to think creatively, but then he adds that this is in order for children to be able to apply and supplement that creative knowledge with information that is freely available online. And I sort of agree with that too, only I think that creativity should be applied to a lot more than online activities.

An article on Brand Republic quotes Tapscott directly and I’m just going to reprint what he had to say here.

“Teachers are no longer the fountain of knowledge — the internet is. Kids should learn about history but they don’t need to know all the dates.”

“It is enough that they know about the Battle of Hastings, without having to memorise that it was in 1066.”

“They can look that up and position it in history with a click on Google. Memorising facts and figures is a waste of time.”

“Children are going to have to reinvent their knowledge base multiple times. So for them memorising facts and figures is a waste of time.”

I just about keeled over and died from horror when I read those lines.

The internet is the fountain of knowledge? Not in this world. Oh, it’s a fantastic source of information and I use it religiously to back up many of my arguments – after all, who’s going to dispute a Google factoid – but to call it the fountain of knowledge is going a bit too far. The internet is a hotbed of misinformation, facts blurred in translation and opinion and content from people (not mentioning any names) who consider themselves great minds and scholars but who are really full of so much hot air that they could power a fleet of zeppelins. There is truth on the internet, but you have to look carefully to find it, especially if you’re going to base your entire life’s knowledge on what you find.

How about memorising facts and figures as a waste of time because, for precise information, there’s always Google? What happens when you desperately need some information immediately, but you’re in the middle of the Amazon, where as far as I know, there are no Wi-Fi hotspots (yet)? The Amazon is an extreme example, I’ll admit, but what about many countries in Africa, the Middle East and the Asian Pacific where digital technology is not all that and where you’ll be hard pressed to find an internet café to verify your facts. You’re going to feel a right fool if you don’t know the correct form of address for a village elder because you thought you’d be able to Google it at the appropriate time.

Facts and figures are a big waste of time, sure, and I like to strip naked, paint myself with mud and run through Catholic churches during mass with my hair on fire. Learning is about a lot more than facts and figures, and I know that Tapscott knows this. The way in which we learn is crucial to forming neural pathways and networks and growing the grey matter that allows us to function as basic human beings. I don’t remember most of the dates that I learnt in history classes so long ago and I don’t remember any international shipping routes that I learnt in geography either. But I do know that learning them at the time helped me to learn to remember and retain information in general. There was a point to learning them and it wasn’t really to know the facts and figures themselves but rather to learn how to learn. And I understand that Tapscott is talking about learning a new way of learning that will equip children to live in an increasingly technological age. And I think that that is a good thing, I just don’t think that Tapscott is headed in the right direction.

What he proposes is not really a model for creative thinking but for lazy thinking. People are lazy (well, we are) and we will take the easy way out if there is one. If we’re given the excuse not to learn because the information is readily available anyway, we won’t learn, full stop. And that is never a good thing.

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