More Matter Info affects education

Author: Matty Van Meter

I recently returned from the annual conference of the National Association of Independent Schools, which this year was in Denver, Colo. While my reason for attending was strictly professional (I was looking for a job) and I was cooped up in the ballroom of the Hyatt Regency, it was impossible not to notice the slew of speakers and presenters in the neighboring Convention Center, and to pick out some trends there.

The theme of the conference was sustainability, both financial and environmental, so there were obviously many speaking about that subject. Another theme was the "classroom of the twenty-first century," and technology in education. Despite the headlong pace of technological development, little of its impact is directly felt in most schools' classrooms. Certainly there are schools now which require every student to purchase a laptop, there are protocols for citing the increasingly popular web sources, there are burgeoning computer science programs in some schools, but high school classrooms are, in the real sense of what is taught, the same as they were. While one can argue about how much a laptop in an English class helps or hinders teaching, there is something deeply different about our lives now information.

We live in a world awash in information. According to a speaker at the conference, the number of cell phone text messages sent every day exceeds the population of the Earth, as does the number of Google searches. We have twenty-four hour news channels, news websites updated every minute, cell phones, Blackberries - at the time of writing (2 p.m.) I had already received 32 e-mails and sent six. The new billionaires are founders of Google, a website which does literally nothing but organize information. The dollars have voted: information is the most valuable service one can offer. It is amazing that we continue to adapt and stretch the limits of our capabilities, without ever reaching them. We were not designed for this amount of daily, even hourly information sorting, and yet we are extremely adept at it.

What does this mean for education? It means that the classroom of the twenty-first century may not look any different from the classroom of the late twentieth century, and may not differ as extremely as we may think from the classroom of the nineteenth. Instead, the teaching will revolve around a vital skill in this world: the ability to organize and make coherent a tremendous amount of information, and to be able to simply and quickly articulate our thoughts about it.

Some call it critical thinking. What we are taught, and will increasingly be taught, is good, old-fashioned critical thinking. It means that at all levels, people will need to be sorting through more information daily than a person in medieval Europe may have seen in a decade. I am not lamenting loss of the "simple life", nor am I celebrating it. We have made our decision and are saddled with it. Education will reflect those changes. Already we are asked to deal every day with more information than our peers from ten years ago could have ever dreamt of. And the students at Middlebury ten years from now will be confronted with still more.

At some point, we may reach the ends of human capacity. Already the limiting factors with certain characteristics of products (laptop screens, cell phone key sizes) are physical human limitations, not technological ones. We are still pushing the limits of our mental capacity, but they have yet to be reached. Until that point, nothing will stop the acceleration, and education will be even more important for participation in a world moving so fast.