Teaching what's important

A video floated by me recently that was a string of confrontations with "college students", asking them questions like "Can you find Mexico and Canada on this unlabeled map?" It was edited to make them look like idiots as a group, and prompt viewers to decry the "decline" in public education.

The more accurate picture is less charitable to history, but more optimistic: Education was never that great. The trend is generally upward, but there's much more we can do to accelerate the climb.

There is also another angle: Information, even skills, can become obsolete with time. Looking back, something that seems utterly useless now may have been useful to the learner for reasons that are now obscure.

One of my nephews knows an extraordinary amount about Pokemon. It helped him make friends. When I was a kid I had Doom 2 maps memorized stone cold and could run through them at great speed. That helped me make friends. My Dad memorized baseball stats on trading cards when he was a kid. Helped him make friends. Lord knows what my grandfather memorized out in the dirt in Oklahoma; probably Bible verses. I could make a case that it was better to know that stuff than to know where Mexico is.

But on the other hand, all that stuff is obsolete now. Pokemon, Doom 2, baseball stats, even - increasingly so - the Bible. And the sheer volume of "useless" short-lived things to learn has grown as well. It's amazing to me that we can still crowd in some good long-term learning amongst all the garbage!!

Perhaps what we need to do is turn up the volume on things that have lasting value.

These days about half the world population has smartphones that beam information almost indiscriminately, and the smartphone revolution is still ongoing. Here's a prediction: In ten years, parents will be able to instruct their kid's smartphones - using conversational dialogue - so they're preprogrammed to only display particular educational content and communicate with particular people. Forget these confusing boxes and checklists and rules: A parent will just say "Hey, phone, make sure Jimmy finishes his math lessons every day, before you let him go on Instagram." And the phone will say "Alright."

While the big tech companies slowly ratchet up their A.I. to handle stuff like this, here's another angle for you to consider:

Whether students can find Mexico and Canada on an unlabeled map is not what matters. What matters is how young people treat the Mexicans and Canadians that they're bound to encounter much sooner than later.

Just after the Civil War, when bands of renegades were still roaming around the states plundering their neighbors, my great-grandmother's uncle spent most of an entire year sleeping inside a hollow log in the woods behind his mother's farm, because a posse would come by on the regular and ransack his mother's house, then demand all the men and boys come out - whereupon if they presented themselves, they'd be shot - because they were Germans, and everybody knew all the f*%&#@ Germans objected to slavery on moral grounds, the bastards. He had to forage for food, sometimes stealing it from neighbors, instead of hunting, because even though he'd been let out of the army with his firearm, if he discharged it they'd immediately start searching the woods.

Now maybe those bastards trying to kill him could find Germany on a map. Probably not. Didn't matter much either way.

Better we teach our kids how to sensibly treat others, than worry about unlabeled maps. And that trend, thankfully, has been unmistakably positive.