Many years ago, I worked with Paul. Paul was about half my age and extremely intelligent. He didn’t brag but I knew he scored 90%+ for Mathematics in his university entrance examination. These were the early days of the internet and as the world-wide web crawled its way into our millennial lives, Paul was ready and welcomed it enthusiastically.
Our Wellington office followed the tradition of many others. Morning tea was ‘Dominion Quiz’ time. I expected Paul would comprehensively blitz the quiz every day but surprisingly, he rarely answered a single question. He could find answers to questions on the internet in a nano second, but the internet wasn’t allowed at quiz time. Paul was stumped.
One day we had a repeat question from a few weeks before. We all kept silent so Paul could answer. ‘I have no idea,’ he eventually offered.
Paul’s explanation for not recalling the answer was ‘he didn’t need to remember’ because he could just look it up again on the internet. It seemed the memory compartment of Paul’s extraordinary brain, was like a very expensive Christmas tree decoration. An ornamental crystal ball, in pristine condition, of the finest quality, and quite empty.
In 2022, we are deeply immersed in the information age with billions of bits of information being added to the internet every minute of the day. The question is, how can this information translate into retrievable knowledge? Can young people be expected to build knowledge when you can just ask Whaea Google for the answer anytime, anywhere?
There are multiple theories of learning. At the heart of each is knowledge – building knowledge, broadening knowledge, critiquing knowledge and creating new knowledge. Whether teacher directed or student centred, the process of learning is dependent first on remembering previous information so we have something to build on – something we can convert into knowledge. It is an active process by which we incorporate new information into existing cognitive frameworks and come to conclusions about it. As new information comes to hand, we reconsider, rearrange and reevaluate and eventually we construct new knowledge. Each stage is completely dependent on the knowledge we already have – the knowledge we have remembered.
So why is knowledge so important? For a start it is essential to help us to understand the world around us. It is also essential to making informed decisions. Our knowledge structures aid us to encode new experiences in our memories and guide us to respond rationally so we can extrapolate information to predict the future. Further knowledge can eventually be used to generalize to other things. It can be conceptualized and applied to quite novel information.
Over time, as we build up many knowledge bases in our brains, we assimilate and understand more and more knowledge and learn how some knowledge may inform other knowledge. Soon we have an entire eco-system of interconnected networks of knowledge to call on to interpret our world and give it vibrancy and colour. We get more and more efficient at storing incoming information when it fits prior knowledge and it becomes easier to consolidate and retrieve it.
Building our knowledge base then, is a critical feature of learning for young people. Encoding and recalling knowledge is part of that process. If our prior knowledge is available, we can build on it, change it, evaluate it and reconstruct it. We can apply critical thinking skills to help us decide what is worthy and relevant knowledge and what is not. We can comprehend and remember new information better when it is connected to existing knowledge.
This is a process which continues throughout our lives. When we actively assimilate new information and actively apply that knowledge to our already well-developed knowledge base, we eventually become wise. Our judgement is sharp and our thinking deep. We have much to draw on to reach our conclusions.
Whilst noting the importance of knowledge development, and the memory skills associated with that we also place a high value on the use of technology in classrooms. As a country we have a very high uptake of technology and in our schools we place considerable emphasis on our young people being technologically literate and capable.
These aspirations have merit at one level, but have we got the balance right? Are we making sure that technology is not doing our children’s schoolwork for them, giving them all the answers while their memory banks are starved of the rich nutrients we call knowledge?
Technology can be a wonderful aid. It supports teaching and can help children with learning. What it must never do is replace either.