I was talking with someone recently about a shift in education: as data becomes increasingly available to us and as the amount of data becomes exponentially greater, it seems to me that education has shifted from learning facts to learning how to learn.
This is no huge revelation, I know. But what occurred to me is a possible concrete example of this: it’s been a cliche ever since there were VCRs that your grandparents couldn’t figure out how to program them, that if you wanted to get a VCR programmed, you had to ask a kid. The same stereotype presumably holds true today for DVRs and the like, although it seems to be less true.
There are other possible explanations for this stereotype:
-There’s no truth behind it; or
-Old people have more trouble learning than young people; or
-The rate of technological change has caught old people by surprise, whereas young people grow up in it; or
-Something else.
But it seems to me that this stereotype matches what we know about education. If schools used to emphasize learning facts, then when something new comes along, people have trouble learning it on their own. If schools today emphasize learning how to learn, then when something new comes along, people learn it easily on their own. Thus a generation of children who are better at learning new technologies than their grandparents are, due to a different sort of education.
The example would be more compelling if it related to a skill which was worth having. Grandma couldn’t be arsed learning how to programme a badly designed VCR because she didn’t want to save any of the rubbish on TV. Thus demonstrating her wisdom relative to her grandchildren.
Conversely, Grandma had put a lot of effort into learning how to turn cheap basic ingredients into delicious nourishing meals for all the family to share. Her grandchildren have learned how to put processed crap in a microwave so that they can get back to their games console ASAP. Again, it isn’t a given that this represents intellectual progress. Why do youngsters find it impossibly challenging to learn simple skills, like feeding themselves properly? Could it be poor contemporary education?
I don’t think you can generalize. My grandparents were dead long before there were VCRs. but the TVs of my youth were much harder to “program” than those today, requiring careful tuning to get decent over-the-air signals.
My father never cared about any of that stuff. On the other hand I taught my father-in-law how to program 30 years ago when he was 65, and he used a complex piece of software for writing music for a long time in his 70s and 80s. He had a reason for doing all this, my father didn’t. There is also the factor that younger people have more time to fiddle than older ones.
BTW, in the '60s we were taught how to research things, not just facts, so I suppose we learned how to learn also.
I think there’s a generational gap in the learning of technology. People my parents’ age and older (65-ish) grew up in an era when most technological things were devised by guys in white coats, and maintained by trained repairmen or legions of trained military people. The only technology that they directly dealt with were automobiles and home appliances. Computers in particular, were the purview of larger companies, and had entire departments assigned to enter data and maintain a single large mainframe machine.
It’s not a huge leap to think that the concept of a “home” computer was a pretty shocking one, and one that might engender a certain helplessness along the lines of “If it took an entire department to run that one at work, how am I going to figure this one out?”
People roughly around my age (38) had most all of the current technology in place by the time we were about 25- computers, cell phones, cable TV, DVRs, etc… so most of us know that we can use them, and we can maintain them, etc… there’s no fear there.
Combine that with the tendency of older people to find what they like and stick with it, and you get the recipe for people to skip a generation of technology or two, and be completely befuddled and more than a little fearful.
I can totally see some old geezer whose last cell phone was about a 1999 vintage model (sans text messages) being completely and absolutely stymied by an iPhone, especially if he hadn’t ever used that style of interface before.
It has nothing to do with education. It’s not like people in their 30s and 40s when VCRs hit the markets were somehow incapable of learning what sequence of buttons to push. More likely, as others have said, they just didn’t care.
I’m 31 now, I own a VCR, and I don’t know how to “program” it. Not because I’m incapable, but because I don’t have a manual, and it matters little to me. If I can plug it in and watch a movie, I don’t really care if the clock reads the right time or anything like that.
And, I find that as I get older I focus my energies a lot more . . . I have interests that I pursue, and am less concerned with futzing around with things that I’m not that into. If life is already good, why bother with the work to learn new tech? I’m happy now.
Then, younger generations go and make technologies mandatory for living in the “modern world,” and the old folks say, “screw you, where’s the benefit?”
My grandfather couldn’t program the VCR. But he could build or repair anything before computers took over everyday objects. He rebuilt cars, motarized a grain mill for my mom, welded or soldered repairs to metal objects, fixed the vacuum cleaner or the blender or…I mean, there was just nothing the man couldn’t fix. And he wasn’t alone in this - whole generations of people grew up fixing, repairing or making things they needed to use.
He had no trouble learning how to learn, but his skills ended at computers. There was nothing there for him to physically manipulate, so it took him too far out of his comfort zone.
I can figure out VCR’s and click enough icons on a laptop to get done what I need to get done, mostly by accident. I’m comfortable clicking things at random to see what happens; Grandpa was afraid he’d “break” the computer.
But I couldn’t begin to rebuild a car of today, and most people of my generation don’t even bother to learn to change our own oil. When the “Check Engine” light goes on, we don’t check the engine, we take the car in so the mechanic can hook up the computer to his expensive reader and see what’s going on. We don’t repair a malfunctioning vacuum cleaner or blender, we buy a new one. No one repairs, or can repair, a cell phone that won’t power on - not even the phone company. They just send you a new one. That’s the biggest shift I’ve seen - we rely on buying a new one or sending an item in for experts to fix, instead of being able to fix it ourselves.
I would actually say the opposite, that learning how to learn used to be more important than it is now, because information is now so much easier to find. How many young students still have to learn library classifications (like Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress) or figure out how to use the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature? Few people learn how to use a slide rule anymore. Young lawyers never have to open a volume of Shepard’s or learn to navigate topic headings. Even the need for foreign languages is reduced, since electronic translation can serve a lot of people’s needs.
Turbotax reduces the need to understand what our tax forms actually mean; just plug in the numbers and it does the figuring. They used to teach cooking and car repair in high school, partly out of sexist assumptions but partly because cooking is a lot harder without a microwave oven, and car maintenance was a lot more demanding, and people couldn’t just pick up specific help from eHow.
Just learning lists of facts has never been adequate for eduction, from the time Og taught his son Thog to chip flints and hunt mammoths, to now. Education has always been about learning how to learn. Now, maybe we’re better at that now, and maybe we’re not, but it’s still just as important as it’s always been.
I’ve seen that in action; my old man is totally fearless when it comes to installing computer parts, building new computers out of old parts, etc…
He’s just about helpless when it comes to software issues though. He can install software, but he’s no good at troubleshooting software problems, or God forbid, software/hardware conflict issues. He’s so tentative and unsure when it comes to trying stuff that I’m amazed- I’ve told him a dozen times to just give it a shot- software’s easy and cheap to reinstall, while hardware is easily broken and expensive to replace.
I think VCRs are an often used example because they seemed to be a dividing line in the “language” of technology. I think there was a generation of older people that could learn to use new technology by pure memorization, but could never really get fluent in the language. I’m reminded of this every time I have to change the time on my car radio.
Step 1: Turn off radio
Step 2: Hold down 2 buttons simultaneously for 3 seconds
Step 3: Use the tune up/down buttons to program hours, the search up/down for minutes
I never remember the exact buttons to use and it generally takes me a few tries to figure it out, but for my Grandma it would be impossible. If she had the directions she could do it. If she needed to do it a lot, she could memorize how to do it. But it would never come naturally in the way it does to me. Because we grew up with it, buttons labeled “tools” or “menu” can have inherent meaning that someone never exposed to the language would have a hard time deciphering.
If you want to record something from TV, you’d use a DVR, right? Back when VCRs were the primary way of recording shows, we had to know how to work them pretty well. DVR programming today pretty much means going to the guide, clicking a button, and then clicking one or two more. That takes a lot less skill than doing a VCR.
Thus, I’d say that people of my generation and a bit younger know more about this stuff than younger people. Setting up a home wifi network today is a lot simpler than it was 10 years ago, and getting wifi on a lap top is even easier.
And you can get your damn computer you’ve never used the command line mode on off my lawn.
