1786 My Empty Mind

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

I was going to write about listening to an opera on NPR the other day. I wanted to write about how it was the absolute WORST opera for radio. (I don't know what opera it was, didn't catch the name.) It's hard to write an entry saying what I want to say, because I don't know the terms any more. I once did, there's words like libretto, score, aria, uh, other stuff, but I just don't talk about opera with anyone, so I don't know the right words.

And then I thought, "Well, I can look it all up on the internet....", and then I realized I didn't want to look it up, even though it would be easy.

Why? Because it would mean learning, however temporarily, something I don't particularly need to know. Something I once knew and have forgotten.

I've always had a habit of learning what I need to know when I need to know it, and then promptly forgetting it when I no longer need it. I learn quickly and easily, and thoroughly. Within three months of Jay's diagnosis, I knew everything there was to know about brain cancer in general, and oligoastrocytoma in particular. By the third year, I knew enough to figure out a problem with a stage 2 clinical trial in immunotherapy that Jay was in, explained it to the neurosurgeon and oncologist, and they halted the trial. In the year and a half of the trial, none of the experts had figured out why half their patients were going blind. I nailed it.

Another habit I had was that in many areas I'd learn not so much the answers, but where I could find the answers. You don't need to know something if you know someone who knows, or know what book it's in.

Now that I'm, ahem, mature, I find that I'm purging more and more of the clutter in my mind. I'm less and less willing to carry around information I don't need, and with the internet at my disposal, there's less and less that I need to know.

There's less and less that anyone needs to know.

In the old days, like say Victorian England and before, the educated classes were amazing, men and women. They all knew all about literature and the arts. They all played at least one musical instrument. They knew about plant and animal classifications. They easily read Latin and Greek, and spoke at least one foreign language fluently, and one or two others passably well. They were familiar with all the major philosophers, usually reading them in the original languages. History and political systems (as opposed to politics) were dinner conversation.

The middle classes were perhaps not so broadly educated, but let's just say that today's college graduate probably could not pass an 1860s eighth grade public school final exam.

Even the uneducated people had to know a lot to survive. If you had sheep, you had to know sheep husbandry, birthing, shearing, processing wool, carding, spinning, dying, weaving, besides all the other things necessary to simply survive. Woodworking, soap making, sewing, mending, bread making, canning and preserving, everyone had to know something about everything, and the poorer you were, the more you had to know. Otherwise, you died.

I look back 30 years, before home computers and the internet, and if there was something you didn't know, it wasn't easy to find information. If you could afford to, you hired an expert. Otherwise, you'd better know everything you needed to know, because you weren't going to get any further than the contents of your mind would take you. The role of schools was to fill you as full as your capacity.

Now, we don't need to have much in our heads, because it's all easy to find.

What does this mean to the future of education? There are people now who ask why we still teach math, when calculators are so fast and easy. Do we need to teach skills that a machine can do faster and more accurately?

Maybe we don't need to teach facts at all? How much do you need to have in your head when it's all so easy to find?

Maybe we should concentrate on teaching communications and research skills, logic and discrimination, and analysis and synthesis? The skills needed to use the internet? And only the skeletons of other disciplines, for awareness only?

(And please, please, please, homonyms and spelling! I am so sick of reading about how wonderful is the site of a robin after a long winter! And people who loose their keys - mental image of wild keys running free through the woods.)

I think that within the next few decades, that's the direction education will be heading. Kids have always been bored in school, wondering why they have to learn history or algebra, when they'll "never use it". That's always been a difficult argument to counter, and it's going to get worse.

Oh, yeah, that opera, and why it was unsuitable for radio. The music was ten minutes of the same four notes, repeated, then ten minutes of a different four notes, repeated, then .... all the way through. The singing was the same. No words that I could discern, just "Eeeeeee aaaaaa eeeeee aaaaaa ooooooo oooooo eeeeee" very long and drawn out, and not much of that, mostly just the exceedingly mind-numbing music. There must have been a lot of silent acting and action on stage, but that doesn't show on the radio.

If anyone knows what opera that might be, keep it to yourself. I don't need to know.
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