Archive for the ‘education’ tag
Immaturity Levels Rising
From the article:
The psychological neoteny effect of formal education is an accidental by-product — the main role of education is to increase general, abstract intelligence and prepare for economic activity. But formal education requires a child-like stance of receptivity to new learning, and cognitive flexibility. When formal education continues into the early twenties, it probably, to an extent, counteracts the attainment of psychological maturity, which would otherwise occur at about this age.
Searching for Dummies
Edward Tenner of The New York Times has written a rather interesting editorial on the possibility of Internet search engines making students dumber.
The Higher Education Supplement of The Times of London reports that a British survey also finds that the ability of undergraduates to read critically and write cogently has fallen significantly since 1992. Students are not just more poorly prepared, a majority of queried faculty members believe, but less teachable.
While some blame reality television, MP3 players, cellphones or the multitasking that juggles them all, the big change has been the Web. Beginning in the early 1990′s, schools, libraries and governments embraced the Internet as the long promised portal to information access for all. And at the heart of their hopes for a cultural and educational breakthrough were superbly efficient search engines like Google and those of its rivals Yahoo and MSN. The new search engines not only find more, they are more likely to present usable information on the first screen.