Making 'copy-paste' too easy
Photo: AP
Technology replaces brains
Op-ed: Our children no longer need to think or analyze; they just use Google instead
This week, I was happy to hear that my daughter, a heavy metal fan, was almost the only student in her class whose assignment on British composer Benjamin Britten satisfied her music teacher. Yet the proud smile turned to concern when I discovered the reason: An overwhelming majority of her classmates submitted a report about the life of Benjamin Button, instead of Britten. And the search engine was at fault for everything.
When the students typed “Benjamin B.” in Google, Benjamin Button immediately camp up, and from there they quickly ended up in Wikipedia. Those who did not bother to look a little deeper into the information ended up submitting a report about the main character in Scott Fitzgerald’s short story (if it was at least a literature class maybe there would be something to gain here.)
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Looking for someone to blame here? How about “Copy” (last name, “Paste”). Yes, that function that draws out your child’s brain, flattens it, an fills this nothingness with dough of information; it’s unclear who drafted it, but the next generation spews it forth indiscriminately. Forgive me for the nausea, yet there is no other way to describe what we’re supposed to feel when we see our children turning into “information tweezers” who devotedly utilize the copy-paste keys.
The moment the confused student enters the endless world of free information, he faces a genie of data-dates-names that he must put back in the bottle, before he gets swallowed up by all that information. Ask an elementary school or junior high student to write a summary about anything, and you will discover that the only thing he can do is move the mouse and seek the Google rescue mission.
What about history, Bible studies?
And so the masters of Tweeter copy the information they find on the Internet to their Word document, to later print it out (with the original icons and ads that accompanied the information online) and submit it to their teachers. After all, nobody (including us) takes some time to teach them how to gather information, read a paragraph, rephrase it in their own words, summarize, rewrite, stop for a moment, think, and separate the necessary from the needless.
The only thing that matters now is to dig the information. It’s in our hands. We added it to our favorites, regardless of how vital it really is, what it teaches us, and where we’ll get with it. It’s even less important to analyze it and understand it or its implications in depth.
And just to further emphasize the point: The Education Ministry invests many hours in teaching important subjects such as science, math and English – but what about history and Talmud and Bible and literature? And did you know that civics classes are no longer mandatory?
And what about the investment and attention needed in order to turn our children from calculated people to thinking people?
Despite the central role played by the computer in our lives, fortunately technology had not yet managed to produce a machine with human perception. This fact leaves us, responsible adults, with the original role given to us by nature: Guide, direct, filter, instruction, and also teach our children to summarize something when needed. And this is indeed needed.
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