359. A Good Education?
November 15, 2014
A good education would enable us to keep up with changing times, but we leave school at a relatively young age and tend to coast on early learning and on-the-job training into old age, carrying our increasingly antiquated internal maps and expectancies along with us.
Living longer makes it inevitable we will grow increasingly out-of-date. At the current rate of technological change, we need to go back to the classroom every year or two just to keep up with innovators who never take a day off.
To train our minds to keep up with the times, many educators believe we need to be trained conceptually to deal with the ever-larger masses of data and information streaming toward us. Big Data is the coming thing. Metadata. Überdata. First it was personal computers, then in rapid succession the Internet, World Wide Web, server farms, the Cloud, now smartphones and iPads we can’t live without. Soon it will be chips in our heads to augment our relatively slow wits. How will we survive in a world awash in Wowzerbytes and Ziggybytes? Artificial intelligence, they say, is in our cards.
What I’m getting at is the rush to replace the careful perception of subtle sensory phenomena (as in the appreciation of nature, art, music, poetry) with broader and bolder chunking of ever-larger masses of data (as in national security media surveillance), hoping to discover patterns we are missing at smaller scales and sample sizes. The scope of education is expanding while our brains retain the same number of neurons and synapses, our minds the same finite span of attention and experience.
To deal with a global world whizzing by at electronic speed, how do we meet the need to learn more and more while our capacity for understanding stays essentially the same?
We’ll probably face this challenge much as we have faced similar challenges in the past: by learning less and less about more and more. That is, by reducing the complexity and shading of concrete experience to abstract concepts that take up less memory space and so are easier to remember because less detailed.
