Message from the Head of Secondary: Google the Heart Surgeon

In 1999, the computer scientist and educational theorist Sugata Mitra placed a computer in a ‘hole in the wall’ in a slum district of New Delhi, where children have had no previous experience with computers of any kind.  To the surprise of many, children rapidly learned how to use the computer, despite the absence of an instruction manual or teacher, and within a few hours they had become computer literate, able to use the Internet to search for answers, and had started to teach themselves English.  

As parents, we have seen this sort of independent learning in our own children, especially when they are very young. They do and say things that we know they have not been taught, but that they have learned through copying or perhaps through instinct. Sugata Mitra has since gone on to suggest that the most important skill we can teach our children is to search correctly for answers on the Internet, and he has predicted the ‘End of Knowing’.  He argues that there is little need to ‘know’ an awful lot today, since the internet can provide what we need to ‘know’ in a matter of seconds.  He has suggested that schools should spend time asking big questions of children and then let them find the answers on the Internet. He calls this type of learning ‘Just In Time Knowledge’, knowledge that you gain when you need to know it.  

Mitra’s work raises many interesting questions for schools about the way children learn and about what they should learn. But I confess to being a little troubled by the notions of the ‘End of Knowledge’ and ‘Just In Time Knowledge’, not only because such ideas would mark the end of the social quiz team.  Most of us would be unimpressed if we watched a car mechanic look up ‘how to change the oil’ on the Internet before starting work on our car. ‘I’m learning it now because I need to change your oil’ they might say to us. We might expect our car mechanics to have learnt that sort of thing before they were allowed to call themselves ‘A Mechanic’.  Change this car oil story to a heart bypass procedure. None of us would want a heart surgeon to rely on ‘Just In Time Knowledge’ would we?

Schools and parents have a responsibility to help young people to learn how to use the Internet effectively, and it can of course be a very powerful tool. But knowledge is not something to be learned once and discarded. Expertise, a deep understanding of subject matter, should be valued and promoted. The Internet cannot provide in-depth analysis of complex topics, cannot explain the ethical challenges within subject matter, cannot provide us with new knowledge based on trial and error or experimentation. Only human interaction can do those things.  

‘Expertise’ may to some, be an old-fashioned idea but I would much rather the expert car mechanic work on my car than the ‘Just In Time’ learner.  And if the heart surgeon turns up with an Ipad and a Google search, run as fast you can…

Chris Lowe