All of these used to be incredibly useful, until they were made obsolete by machines. We (as a society) eventually decided that these skills were no longer needed, and our schools stopped teaching them. Instead, we started teaching more relevant skills like computer programming and auto repair.
Yet, in the year 2011, we still spend countless hours teaching poor frazzled seventh graders how to do long division! Granted, being able to quickly do basic addition and subtraction without the aid of a calculator is a useful skill. But when was the last time you used a paper and pencil to divide a 4 digit number into a 5 digit number? I'll bet it was seventh grade!
Schools are slowly getting with the program, and have started teaching useful twenty-first century skills like spreadsheets, power-point presentations, Spanish, and Chinese. But there are only so many hours in the school day, and so many days in the year, and only a short 12 years to pack all this info into our children's pliable little minds. And we can't afford to waste time teaching obsolete skills like long division. In another generation, all mechanical math skills (fractions, even multi-digit multiplication, addition and subtraction) will be obsolete.
What should we teach instead? Here's an interesting article from Wired Magazine. It turns out that kids are great at using computers, but are lousy searchers:
High school and college students may be “digital natives,” but they’re wretched at searching. In a recent experiment at Northwestern, when 102 undergraduates were asked to do some research online, none went to the trouble of checking the authors’ credentials. In 1955, we wondered why Johnny can’t read. Today the question is, why can’t Johnny search?
Who’s to blame? Not the students. If they’re naive at Googling, it’s because the ability to judge information is almost never taught in school. Under 2001’s No Child Left Behind Act, elementary and high schools focus on prepping their pupils for reading and math exams. And by the time kids get to college, professors assume they already have this skill. The buck stops nowhere. This situation is surpassingly ironic, because not only is intelligent search a key to everyday problem-solving, it also offers a golden opportunity to train kids in critical thinking.
New skills are needed to navigate today's information-rich world. Critical thinking is at a premium. How can one tell if an email is presenting a legitimate opportunity, or worthless spam? How do we know if the Obama's dog really flew in a private jet to join the family on vacation? Believe it or not, a person with a professional degree actually sent me an outraged email with that urban legend. So maybe a high-school class on "Critical Thinking and the Internet" would be useful. Tweet
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