Even before reading Nicholas Carr’s poignant article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” in the Atlantic, I have been struck with the gnawing realization that we are slowly but surely degrading critical thinking skills through technology. This is not the fault of schools or parents or even kids. It is a naturally occurring phenomenon that is both insipid and insidious.
When I was a child in the 60s (born in 1958), technology was pretty limited. We had 3 channels on the TV (sometimes 4 if you count the local UHF channel), a radio, and a record player. Yes, those were the days when kids played outside with one another and the ear bud, if thought of at all, was a gnat that flew into your ear canal.
Kids had imaginations. They thought. They figured things out.
Think about it in terms of music alone.
When I was young, music was something we heard. We had to use our minds to imagine what the band looked like. We made up mini-movies in our heads that went with the lyrics. Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds had a different video for each mind that hummed it.
Then came the Midnight Special and MTV. Suddenly, we weren’t forced to make this stuff up any longer. The band was in our living room in all their sweaty, long-haired, torn-clothes glory. Video Killed the Radio Star didn’t just kill a star. It killed our need to imagine a story. And our brains got stupid.
Today, we have no need to commit facts to our brains. Let Me Google That For You is not only a modern catch phrase, but a fantastic site to use for those too lazy to even look stuff up for themselves. 6th graders arrive at middle school with few, if any, multiplication facts committed to memory. Why would they? They have calculators (or WolframAlpha). There is no need to remember important dates or historical facts. Wikipedia stands at the ready.
Henri Nouwen, my 2nd favorite author behind Kurt Vonnegut, Jr (what a combination), wrote that all decisions are laden with life and death. The key to successful living is to make decisions that contain more life than death.
Technology comes with life and death. We must integrate technology into the classroom. It is the future, and the future is now. We cannot ignore it. But we must also realize the death that comes with it and be prepared to combat that with every sinew of our educational beings.
We have to find a way to allow the technology to spawn creativity again (see Sir Ken Robinson’s TED Talk on how education is killing creativity). It is through creativity that critical thinking is born, enhanced, and maintained.
Is Google making us stupid? Is technology destroying critical thinking? What do you think? Leave me a comment.
I really believe that technology is destroying our critical thinking. It’s happening more and more lately, like you said, at a very rapid pace. Not too long ago, I recall sitting in classrooms listening to the sound of a teacher writing on a chalkboard while lecturing. They were passing on their knowledge to us in the form of writing and the spoken word. The notes you took, if any, were a combination of what you were gathering from having this conversation, and the skeleton of this session being drawn out on the board.
Today, I hear of videos being shown, and Power Point projects galore. While it sounds so neat and interactive, I feel a bit is lost in translation. There are those who obviously will use this technology to an advantage and produce some very nice projects, and use those to make an impression on the minds they are attempting to impact. There are always those that shine above others, and use everything at their disposal to provoke thought to those they teach. The story has two sides though – to some instructors, it doesn’t seem farfetched for a streak of laziness to hit. What’s stopping them from making these great projects at home, or downloading them and having them projected to the class – lecturing none, and tapping “Enter” once the students have copied down everything on the frame, just to move on to the next. I guess this is just a new method to the old story of three chalkboards worth of notes written early morning, and all 3-4 periods of the day copy it all down, and do textbook work in silence.
I guess there are those that teach and those that just administer the materials they are given, no matter the time period or amount of technology. It just seems that lately, with technology abound, it’s easier to be an administrator, and not a teacher. The students will remember which teachers actually taught, and hold their lessons dear, but the lessons they had to teach themselves from having an administrator instead of a teacher will only be thought of again out of necessity, not out of fondness.
There are subjects that are not fun to learn to some, and there’s no amount of Power Point, video, or any other kind of media that will make it interesting if the pupil just doesn’t have any desire to learn it. Nothing beats learning from a real person with real thoughts, creativity, and enthusiasm. Anybody can commit something to memory, and it’s much easier to do this using all of the technology available in this world, but personally I cannot feel a passion to dig deeper and “learn” something, unless the person I am learning it from has a desire to teach it, and a real enthusiasm for whatever it is they are trying to pass on. A computer can’t do that – strings of binary will never have the capability to emulate any sort of real passion for a subject, or for teaching in general. A computer can help you commit something to memory just fine, so grades stay fine and that keeps governmental agencies are happy, but on graduation day are those walking across the stage rich minded, free thinking individuals, or hollow robotic shells with lots of hard drive space?
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