by Ernest Capraro

Created on: November 15, 2007   Last Updated: December 15, 2010

Thousands of years ago, medical lore, history, and all knowledge were passed from one generation to the next by word of mouth. The people who maintained this knowledge had to have exceptional memory skills, and they could recite the information to the rest of the people as needed. The population en masse would only retain those facts that were meaningful to them. Eventually the arts of reading and writing came along. These skills remained the domain of but a few people, with the populace at large left out, but the number of people with access to the knowledge grew, and because people no longer had to memorize everything, the amount of knowledge that they could handle grew. They were freer to explore and add to the bulk sum of knowledge, freer to think, to apply their minds. One might argue that they sacrificed memory skills in the process, but because they were using their minds in new ways, I would hardly consider them impoverished.

In modern times, technology is reshaping the way we think and learn. Technology does provide us with crutches - support to quickly find the answers to known matters without investing the time ourselves. What this does is to allow us to tackle ever more complex problems, as we can focus on our horizons - expanding into what is unknown rather than focusing on what is known so well that...well...a person's grandparents knew it before he or she was even born.

We might consider math. I would agree that it is important for a child to learn how to carry out mathematical operations. The logic that governs numbers is crucial to understanding much of our world, and to contributing to it. However, once an understanding is achieved, there is little value in spending whole minutes in trying to find the quotient of 38027124 and 4457 through long division when a calculator could spit out the number immediately and allow us to use that answer to tell exactly how many photovoltaic cells can fit along the edge of our next Mars-bound satellite. I personally take pride in my math skills, and have even coached students for mental math competitions. It's fun, and sometimes it's nice to be able to churn out the answers without the calculator. However, I could not tell you what the base 6 logarithm of 453 was without spending a heck of a lot of time at it. What's more, even before calculators, people weren't going to figure it out if they could help it. They used a table of known logarithms to get a close estimate. Other pre-calculator technology was

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