The learning of yore vs. the learning of today

It is beyond discussion that the spread of the internet has dramatically shifted many aspects of our lives, but one that hit me particularly hard is the way we learn. So gear up and get ready for time travel, because we are going to the past. If this all sounds like a story from a different age, it is because it IS from a different age, but I hope you find it interesting anyway.

When I was a kid, back in the early 80's, knowledge was much harder to come by. Being curious by nature, I soon started pestering my parents with "how's" and "why's" about the world that surrounded me and probably many other things. My parents, both surgeons, responded my questions with great patience to the best of their ability, but there is only so much knowledge that one can amass, and a limit to the amount of time they could devote to me, so when they eventually felt overwhelmed by my inquiring mind, they pointed me to one of the best treasures I have ever had: the encyclopedia.

Photo: Ricky Leong

I am sure that the mention of over 10,000 pages of small print bound together in twelve very heavy volumes (plus appendices) might sound laughable at some of you, but back then it was a very useful concept. I remember asking my father a question that he could not figure out and how he reached out to the encyclopedia and started reading to me. I was not able to read at the time, but I quickly grasp the value of those books and took an active interest in reading, so that I could check them by myself. Of course, that turned into the problem of explaining the encyclopedic language to a six-year old, but that is a relatively simpler problem.

A major shortcoming of paper books is that they are not easy to update: they are good for well-established knowledge, but they soon become obsolete for bleeding-edge technology and (unfortunately for my parents) that was one of my points of interest. Books were being published constantly, but we could not afford to just buy everything that caught my eye, so I was introduced to the next treasure: the public library.

Another relic from the past, libraries used to be (maybe they still are, but I have not been to one in years) a place where you could browse the shelves full of new and old books, pick a book or ten that sparked your interest and either read them there or take them home to enjoy in your own fortress of solitude. Of course, some of the books in there were even older than the ones I had at home, but there were also many which were newer, and the inflow was constant because there was public demand for them. However, loans were limited in time, so if you were interested in a particular book, you'd better read attentively and fast, because it might not be available the next time you needed it.

Of course, it did not take me long to fall for the book fever and as soon as I started to get some income I started to spend a sizeable portion of it on books: some of them I read straightaway, but others I kept for future reference, even if many never got read in the end. But the trend to hoard books as vehicles of knowledge has haunted me for years.

I got my first computer in 1985, but it did not have any outside connection beyond the tape recorder and the best hope for getting new programs was either to pay dearly for them at the store or painstakingly typing them by hand from a printed magazine. However, by 1992 my father had bought a bulky 80286 computer with a modem connection and I spent hours on end browsing the old search engines. Everything was incredibly clunky, as it pertains to a rising technology, but there were so many interesting things that I kept pages and pages of bookmarks to be able to return to them. I hope you see the hoarding trend here too.

However, as time goes by I have realized that searching has become so easy that most of the time I do not need to learn things anymore. More and more frequently I find myself looking at a piece of code and saying "yes, of course, how is it possible that I did not remember". But, if you think about it seriously, it is almost an economic problem, a matter of scarce resources, a trade-off between storage space and retrieval time. When the retrieval of knowledge was slow and even uncertain, it made sense to try to store it, either inside your head or in books on your shelves. But now that the retrieval is fast, easy and reliable there is no need to store the results, you can just look them up tomorrow again if necessary.

The bottom line is that in the world of today having the knowledge has become much less important than learning how to come by the knowledge. Unfortunately, it will probably take a decade before this idea percolates into the education system, and all along the kids will have to keep memorizing before they move out into the work life and finally discover that they will automatically learn the knowledge they need every day and for the rest they will have the means to look it up easily enough. Have a nice weekend.