No Need To Learn....We Just Look It Up


I was going to post this anyway but Span's post on the shocking lack of any historical knowledge by some of our supposedly 'cleverer' students has prompted me to post it a day early.

One day this week I happened to mentioned to Caroline, one of our members of staff, that I'd been to Avebury last Saturday and what a fantastic experience it was. Now Caroline is, and I don't mean this to sound condescending, one person who I would have expected to react to this news in a positive way, she's into new age living, crystals, she's quite politically savvy and always strikes me as being a more grounded example of her generation. Anyway when I bounded downstairs and announced where I had been she pulled a strange face and said "Where?"

"Avebury, Avebury Stone Circle, come on you're pulling my leg," in my head I was beginning to sound like Brian in Family Guy astonished at a new level of stupidity Peter Griffin had attained.
"I've never heard of it, what's it about?"
"About? It's the largest stone circle in the world, site of pilgrimage. Neolithic man. 4,000 years old, at least."
"Sorry, it doesn't mean much."

Anyway I then went on to describe it and she became more interested and actually apologised for her ignorance. It seemed bizarre, given her new age 'credentials' this was like a Man.Utd 'fan' not knowing who George Best was or a Beatles 'fan' not knowing who George Martin was.

Then our conversation gently weaved its way, the way organic conversation's do, from Avebury to the Romans and eventually to modern technology. I made the point, which is something that Span and myself 'discussed' on one of his posts some time ago, about Danny Baker's comment that the Internet doesn't make us cleverer it just makes it easier to find thing. She agreed and told me that she'd had a conversation with Billie Piper a couple of weeks previously who had proudly announced that she didn't feel she needed to remember anything anymore because she could look anything up on the Internet. I then added an example of how I could remember useless information by telling her I'd just played Lloyd Coles first two albums back-to-back for the first time in almost twenty years and knew every word to every song, she of course said, "Who is Lloyd Cole?"

My point was that in the days of vinyl you had to sit in one place, generally, to listen to an album and read the lyrics from the book or lyric sheet that came with it. These days with the amount of portable music players available people listen to albums when walking, driving, jogging etc - you might still learn the lyrics but I bet it takes a bit longer, and as Damon Albarn says, "Karaoke, getting the words all wrong."

I suppose, and I know this sounds like I am making excuses, I'm from the old school of learning. You had a book and you read it, you learned about history, geography etc from books and a blackboard which you came back to time and again until you were good enough to pass tests and ultimately exams. These days, it seems to an old fogey like me, that learning in modules simply teaches you how to reach certain standards four times a year and contributes twenty-odd percent towards a pass grade - I've said before I work with someone who is one paper away from becoming a Chartered Accountant but she is hopelessly innumerate, simply because she doesn't need to be to pass her finals. I know newly qualified accountants who sit staring at figures and can't understand what they are looking at or spot errors because they haven't been trained the way we were thirty odd years ago when the first thing you were asked to do was prepare schedules for a senior that had to be accurate or else!

work in progress, not completed as at 4th July 2009