Among the wealth of articles about the bullying of teachers, I read one account that I wouldn’t describe as bullying but at most as impertinence, though a singular impertinence. A pupil, in order to annoy a teacher, had asked, “Excuse me, but in the age of the Internet, what’s the point of having you?”
What the pupil was saying had a grain of truth in it, and it’s a question that has worried teachers for at least twenty years now. At one time the school certainly had to educate, but above all it had to transmit basic facts, from multiplication tables at primary school, to information about the capital of Madagascar in junior high school, to the date of the Thirty Years’ War in high school. With the advent not only of the Internet, but of television before it, and also radio, and perhaps even with the arrival of cinema, children learned many of these basic facts outside the school curriculum.
My father didn’t know that Hiroshima was in Japan, or that there was an island called Guadalcanal; he had a vague idea about Dresden, and knew about India only through the stories of Emilio Salgari. Back in the 1940s, I could pick these things up from the radio and from the maps in newspapers, whereas my children could watch television and see pictures of the Norwegian fjords or the Gobi Desert, how bees pollinated flowers, what a Tyrannosaurus rex looked like; and they know everything about the ozone layer, koala bears, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Perhaps they don’t know exactly what stem cells are, but they’ve heard of them, though in my time it meant nothing even to the science teacher. So what’s the point of having teachers?
I said that the question posed by the student had a grain of truth, because the teacher’s task, above all, is formation as well as information. What transforms a class into a good class is not the facts and figures it has absorbed, but the continual dialogue, the exchange of opinions, the discussion about what is being taught in school and what is happening outside it. Television, of course, tells us what is going on in Iraq, but only the school can explain why something has been going on there since way back to the Mesopotamian civilization, and not, for example, in Greenland. It might be argued that there are experts who tell us this on current affairs programs, in which case the school must discuss what has been said on those programs.
The mass media tell us many things, and even transmit values, but schools should know how to talk about the way these values are transmitted, and to assess the tone and strength of the arguments put forward in print and on television. And then there is the investigation of information relayed by the media; for example, who but the teacher can correct the errors in English pronunciation people pick up from television?
But our pupil wasn’t suggesting that he didn’t need the teacher because he now had radio and television to tell him where Timbuktu is, or what has been said about cold fusion. In other words, he wasn’t telling the teacher that his role had been taken over by the disjointed discussions that circulate daily in a casual and disorderly fashion in the media. The student was saying that the Internet, the Great Mother of all Encyclopedias, is where we can find Syria, cold fusion, the Thirty Years’ War, and endless discussion on the largest odd number. He was telling him that the information available online is far larger and deeper than a teacher’s knowledge. Yet he was ignoring one fundamental point: the Internet tells us almost everything apart from how to search, filter, select, accept, or reject that information.
Everyone is capable of storing new information, so long as they have a good memory. But deciding what is worth remembering, and what is not, is a subtle art. This marks the difference between those who have passed through formal education, however poorly, and those who are self-taught, however brilliantly.
The crucial problem is that not even teachers themselves know how to teach the art of being selective, certainly not in every branch of knowledge. But at least they know they ought to know, and if they can’t give exact instructions on how to be selective, they can be the model of someone who tries to compare and judge, case by case, what the Internet has to offer. And lastly, they can strive daily to put into a proper context what the Internet transmits merely in alphabetical order when it tells us, for instance, that Tamerlane and monocotyledons exist but doesn’t explain the relationship between these two notions.
Only schools can bring sense to these relationships, and if the school doesn’t know how, then it must equip itself to do so. Otherwise, the teaching of the Internet at school is as pointless as the braying of a donkey that never reaches the ears of heaven.
2007