In the avalanche of articles on bullying in school I read an episode that, within the sphere of violence, not precisely define the maximum of folly ... but it is nevertheless a significant impertinence. He related that one student, cause a teacher, had told him: "Excuse me, but in the internet age, you, what's the use?" The student said a half-truth, which, among others, teachers say the same for at least twenty years, and before the school should transmit some training but mostly ideas from the tables in the primary, what was the capital of Madagascar in the middle school to the events of the Thirty Years War in high school. With the appearance, I say the Internet, but television and even radio, and even the movies, most of these ideas began to be absorbed by children in the area of \u200b\u200blife outside school.
a kid, my father did not know that Hiroshima was Japan, which was Guadalcanal, had a vague idea of \u200b\u200bDresden and India only knew of what he had read in Salgari. I, being the time of the war, I learned these things from the radio and the daily news, while my children have seen on television the Norwegian fjords, the Gobi desert, how bees pollinate flowers, how an Tyrannosaurus rex and finally a child today knows all about ozone on koalas, about Iraq and Afghanistan. Perhaps a child of today does not know what exactly are the stem cells, but the name has been heard, while in my time that the teacher did not speak even natural science. So what good teachers today?
He said the student told a half truth, because first and foremost a teacher, in addition to reporting should be. What makes a class a good class is to transmit data and data, but to establish an ongoing dialogue, an exchange of opinions, a discussion of what is learned in school and what comes from outside. It is true that what happens in Iraq says it on TV, but why something always happens there, from the time of the Mesopotamian civilization, and not in Greenland, is something only you can tell the school. And if anyone objected that sometimes there are persons authorized Porta a Porta (Italian TV show analysis of current issues), is the school who should discuss Porta a Porta. The mass media report on many things and also transmit values, but the school should know discuss ways in which they transmit, and evaluate the tone and strength of arguments which appear in newspapers, magazines and television. And besides, we need to verify the information conveyed by the media: for example, who but a teacher can correct mispronunciation of English that everyone thinks he has learned from television?
But the student was telling the teacher no longer I needed it because now there's radio and television to tell you where Timbuktu or what is discussed on cold fusion, ie he was not saying his role was questioned by isolated speeches, which are rotated so every day casual and disorderly in various media, we know very little about Iraq and Syria depends on good or bad will of Bush. The student was saying that today there is Internet, the Great Mother of all encyclopedias, where you can find Syria, cold fusion, the Thirty Years War and the endless discussion on the top of the odd numbers. She was saying that the information the Internet offers is vastly larger and even more profound than that of the available to the teacher. And it omitted an important point: that the Internet says, "almost everything" except how to search, filter, select, accept or reject any such information. Store
new information, when you have good memory, is something everyone is capable. But deciding what is worth remembering and what is not a subtle art. That's the difference between those who have studied regularly (albeit badly) and the self-taught (albeit great).
The dramatic problem is that sometimes even a teacher knows how to teach the art of selection, at least not in every chapter of knowledge. But at least he knows he should know, and who does not give precise instructions on how to select, at least be offered as an example, showing someone who strives to compare and judge each time all that the Internet offers. And you can put on stage every day trying to rearrange the Internet systematically what he conveys in alphabetical order, saying there Tamerlane and monocots but no systematic relationship between these two notions.
The meaning of that relationship can only offer the school, and you do not know how it will be equipped to do so. If not, the three I's internet, English and Instruction will being only the first part of a donkey braying not ascend to heaven.
Notes: Text prepared by the writer Umberto Eco published in the newspaper "La Nacion" Monday May 21, 2007. Buenos Aires, Argentina. Translation: Mirta Rosenberg.
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