By analogy: I used to have incredible direction sense. On one of my cross-country drives, a couple decades ago, I made it to my friend's place, having only vaguely consulted at an atlas a couple of times. I lived in New York; she lived in San Diego. (Edit: And I'm specifically including having navigated the local highways and surface streets in that anecdote, not just which Interstates I used.)
Now, I get lost in my own city without using my phone's mapping app.
When we outsource our cognitive capabilities to the exocortex, we lose those capabilities. When we give our children a tool that obviates their need ever to develop those capabilities, we rob them of something essential.
1) having answers at your fingertips is not that great, and
2) said answers are surrounded in many cases by a sea of useless opportunistic crap deployed by people whose aims are literally hostile to you.
"Punishment" is being dramatic anyway, and sounds a tad narcissistic. No problem in the world is quite so outrageous and unjust as the minor inconvenience that happens to a narcissist. I mean how am I gonna read about all the genocides without my smartphone? IT'S SO UNFAIR!!
I spent four decades being punished by having no smartphone. Do I lament all the answers at my fingertips that I never got? Hardly. I brag about it just like I'm doing right now, because it made me into something better, someone who doesn't need a spell-checker, someone who knows a gerund from a participle, an integral from a derivative, a list from an array, AND my ass from my elbow. Someone who spent his childhood playing outside or studying and not worrying about what some distant asshole thought of me.
And instead of having cheap, instant, abundant answers, I was instead able to wonder first and guess and theorize about those answers. Practicing the act of inquiry. Maybe I'd look them up in a book later, or maybe just forget the hell out of them like the trivial and unnecessary mind-clutter that they were. Which is the beauty of idle questions sometimes. Regardless, it's the same outcome as a smartphone user after having looked it up. If asked again in 6 months they'll have to look it up again. Those answers are like the SUV you've never taken off-road that you only use to go to big-box stores in the suburbs. (To buy stuff that's only slightly less unneeded than the SUV.)
The more cheaply and easily things are available to you, the less special and valuable (or in the case of knowledge, memorable) they are.
> Because you could have the answer to nearly any question at your fingertips, and yet it's arbitrarily taken away?
There's a person there, usually in the front. They have the answers in their head. It is their job to put those answers in your head. To transfer those answers you can ask them a question. It's what they're there for.
The key here is "any question." When did classrooms give you that kind of flexibility? In my experience it was hit or miss between how many on-topic questions an instructor would allow, let alone questions that deviated from the lesson plan.
Modern public schools institutionally are not designed to cultivate the intellect and knowledge of individual students. They're designed to transfer a specific set of ideas to a large group of people at once.
rosser|8 years ago
Now, I get lost in my own city without using my phone's mapping app.
When we outsource our cognitive capabilities to the exocortex, we lose those capabilities. When we give our children a tool that obviates their need ever to develop those capabilities, we rob them of something essential.
_m8fo|8 years ago
Danihan|8 years ago
rdiddly|8 years ago
1) having answers at your fingertips is not that great, and
2) said answers are surrounded in many cases by a sea of useless opportunistic crap deployed by people whose aims are literally hostile to you.
"Punishment" is being dramatic anyway, and sounds a tad narcissistic. No problem in the world is quite so outrageous and unjust as the minor inconvenience that happens to a narcissist. I mean how am I gonna read about all the genocides without my smartphone? IT'S SO UNFAIR!!
I spent four decades being punished by having no smartphone. Do I lament all the answers at my fingertips that I never got? Hardly. I brag about it just like I'm doing right now, because it made me into something better, someone who doesn't need a spell-checker, someone who knows a gerund from a participle, an integral from a derivative, a list from an array, AND my ass from my elbow. Someone who spent his childhood playing outside or studying and not worrying about what some distant asshole thought of me.
And instead of having cheap, instant, abundant answers, I was instead able to wonder first and guess and theorize about those answers. Practicing the act of inquiry. Maybe I'd look them up in a book later, or maybe just forget the hell out of them like the trivial and unnecessary mind-clutter that they were. Which is the beauty of idle questions sometimes. Regardless, it's the same outcome as a smartphone user after having looked it up. If asked again in 6 months they'll have to look it up again. Those answers are like the SUV you've never taken off-road that you only use to go to big-box stores in the suburbs. (To buy stuff that's only slightly less unneeded than the SUV.)
The more cheaply and easily things are available to you, the less special and valuable (or in the case of knowledge, memorable) they are.
craigsmansion|8 years ago
There's a person there, usually in the front. They have the answers in their head. It is their job to put those answers in your head. To transfer those answers you can ask them a question. It's what they're there for.
jdbernard|8 years ago
Modern public schools institutionally are not designed to cultivate the intellect and knowledge of individual students. They're designed to transfer a specific set of ideas to a large group of people at once.
Danihan|8 years ago
Studying programming on my own (not offered in my schools) was vastly more important.