Technology can make us smarter or stupider, and we need to develop a set of principles to guide our everyday behavior and make sure that tech is improving and not hindering our mental processes. One of the big questions being debated today is: What kind of information do we need to have stored in our heads, and what kind can we leave “in the cloud,” to be accessed as necessary?
An increasingly powerful group within education are championing “digital literacy”. In their view, skills beat knowledge, developing “digital literacy” is more important than learning mere content, and all facts are now Google-able and therefore unworthy of committing to memory. But even the most sophisticated digital literacy skills won’t help students and workers navigate the world if the), don’t have broad base of knowledge about how the world actually operates. If you focus on the delivery mechanism and not the content, you’re doing kids a disservice.
Indeed, evidence from cognitive science challenges the notion that skills can exist independent of factual knowledge. Data from the last thirty years leads to a conclusion that is not scientifically challengeable: thinking well requires knowing facts, and that’s true not only because you need something to think about. The very processes that teachers care about most-critical thinking processes—are intimately intertwined (交织) with factual knowledge that is stored in long-term memory.
In other words, just because you can Google the date of Black Tuesday doesn’t mean you understand why the Great Depression happened or how it compares to our recent economic slump. There is no doubt that the students of today, and the workers of tomorrow, will need to innovate, collaborate and evaluate. But such skills can’t be separated from the knowledge that gives rise to them. To innovate, you have to know what came before. To collaborate, you have to contribute knowledge to the joint venture. And to evaluate, you have to compare new information against knowledge you’ve already mastered.
So here’s a principle for thinking in a digital world, in two parts. First, acquire a base of factual knowledge in any domain in which you want to perform well. This base supplies the essential foundation for building skills, and it can’t be outsourced (外包) to a search engine. Second, take advantage of computers’ invariable memory, but also the brain’s elaborative memory. Computers are great when you want to store information that shouldn’t change. But brains are the superior choice when you want information to change, in interesting and useful ways: to connect up with other facts and ideas, to acquire successive layers of meaning, to steep for a while in your accumulated knowledge and experience and so produce a richer mental brew.
