Inquiring Minds Want to Know

Tim is one month old today!

As Claire and Tim work toward the completion of their tenth- and eighth-grade years in 2025, the underlying idea of their coursework will undoubtedly be to teach them to process information.  Today we feel as though we are bombarded with information, yet the level of information we are asked to process in 2011 will seem quaint by 2025 standards.  How will they (and their parents and grandparents!) learn to manage it all?  I believe the answer is by developing a sharp and discerning mind.

Sometime within the last 10-15 years, the mainstream media seems to have made a decision, consciously or unconsciously, to no longer act as a responsible, impartial mediator of newsworthy events.  Light, in a manner of speaking, has given way to heat.  If someone claims loudly and forcefully enough that, say, the president of the United States was born on a distant continent despite indisputable evidence to the contrary, the media will report the controversy as “news,” even if the underlying premise is entirely bogus.  It is thus left to the consumer of news to think for him or herself and filter the illogical from the logical.  Howard Gardner agrees.  On page 11 of 5 Minds for the Future, he writes, “the ability to survey huge bodies of information—print and electronic—and to organize that information in useful ways looms more important than ever.”  As adolescents who will be starting the process of entering the adult world of information, it is my hope that Tim and Claire will be given teachers, schools, and curricula that will place a premium on helping them develop the tools they need to navigate the chaotic waters of this second yellow journalism age, particularly since these waters will likely only become more turbid in the next fourteen years.

In order to be able to do this, Claire, Tim, and their classmates must be taught to be independent thinkers.  But therein lies a paradox—how do you teach kids to trust what you as a teacher are saying if you are implicitly teaching them to question authority?  A firm but caring teacher-student bond of trust must be established.  Students need to understand why they are being asked to complete the assignments they are given, and how the work is relevant to their lives as young adults.  If this bond is cultivated, we as teachers will then be viewed as trusted sources of information.  A critical element of this “information trust” will be our classroom activities, which will have to evolve as well.  Out, I hope, will be pointless worksheets spoon-feeding pre-chewed information from an indeterminate source; in will be thoughtful examinations of primary sources, whether from a law passed the previous week or a diary entry written two centuries before.

These kinds of rigorous learning experiences will deepen the quality of Tim and Claire’s education, and will teach them to evaluate their own sources of information.  By role-modeling the importance of obtaining information directly from a first-hand account—and not from, say, someone’s opinion of someone else’s account of an event they heard about—we will teach our students to become more inquisitive thinkers.  By casting students in this more participatory learning role, we will engage those students who might otherwise have been left out of an old-fashioned, didactic lesson.  If we are able to reshape the learning experience in these authentic terms, we will make serious headway in banishing that dreaded student question: “Why do we need to know this stuff?”  By giving students the ability and the capacity to evaluate their information sources, the answer to that question will become clear: to be able to discern truth from propaganda—an ability that will be beneficial to them throughout their adult lives.