[eitally]

It's amazing how much the wonders of technology and readily accessible information have screwed up the value many children in the past 3ish generations (my marker for the beginning of the decline is WWII reconstruction). A "renaissance man" now is a dilettante. In Jefferson's day it meant having both broad and deep knowledge.

One could argue that the advances of science have made this impossible in modern times but I disagree. Regurgitating the fractured work of others isn't intelligence. Applying this information as a tool to advance oneself and the human good is the goal of education. Most children not only don't get this, they aren't even being taught the basic building blocks.

I think this is the biggest incentive for the non-school movement, as well as the increase in other alternative [to governmental SOLs] programs. Those parents value an education for what it allows their children to contribute creatively, not just use the tools of others before them.

I have exactly the same problem recruiting programmers. Like many large corporations we are primarily a Java & .Net shop and it is incredibly disappointing when 50% of the candidates can barely do more than drag controls out of the toolbox (<--- slight exaggeration, but not too much. I hire mostly in MX, BR, and IN and skilled folks are hard to come by. Ironically, this is usually because the cream are already working in the US/EU or earning US/EU pay in consulting gigs that are geography independent. Good for them.)

My apologies for the rant, but this struck a nerve.

[btilly]

A "renaissance man" now is a dilettante. In Jefferson's day it meant having both broad and deep knowledge.

One could argue that the advances of science have made this impossible in modern times but I disagree.

I believe you're being too fast to dismiss that argument. As is pointed out in http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html, from Jefferson's day to relatively recently, the output in scientific journals increased 10-fold every 50 years.

In Jefferson's day it was truly possible to learn what was known about all fields of science, and keep up with them all. Your knowledge could be broad and deep. But based on the sheer increase of volume, this soon became impossible. Today there are over 100,000 journals devoted to scientific research. Even if you read one page per second, every second, day and night, you would not even be scratching the surface of what is being produced.

Regurgitating the fractured work of others isn't intelligence. Applying this information as a tool to advance oneself and the human good is the goal of education. Applying this information as a tool to advance oneself and the human good is the goal of education.

This is a strong argument, but not necessarily for the point you are trying to make. Your argument leads to the point that we don't want students to just memorize random facts and regurgitate them. It does not lead to the point that it is possible to have both deep and broad knowledge about all fields.

The challenge is that, thanks to the advances of science, today we both have more subjects to learn about (the "broad" is broader) and we know about them in more depth (the "deep" is deeper). This has made the ideal of having both broad and deep knowledge much, much harder. Hard enough that most conclude it is simply impossible.

[_delirium]

I do think breadth and depth have expanded, but I think fundamentally less than the explosion in page count would suggest. There has also been a big decrease in signal-to-noise ratio, with a lot of crap published in journals, and not enough gardening work. IMO a much bigger proportion of scientific resources need to be put into survey articles, "recent advances in X" retrospectives, post-intro-level textbooks and tutorials, and even ideally some cross-field work, matching up equivalent/redundant ideas and harmonizing terminology. In academia at least, the incentives don't encourage that, though: even though a survey article is probably the single quickest way to have significant impact on a field (they're widely read, and you're forging the lens through which many subsequent people will view that field), they're not as well respected for advancement purposes as even very niche original research is.

As it is, tons of stuff keeps getting reinvented just because the state of the literature is so bad that you'll never find it, unless it was invented exactly in your sub-sub-specialty, or you serendipitously found it via a colleague who remarked that what you were doing sounded similar to something he once read.

The decline in scientists writing books also doesn't help. It used to be that prominent scientists would gather up their scattered papers and unify them into a magnum opus laying out their theories, or possibly a few different books, one on each major area they worked on. That sometimes happens, especially in areas like cosmology, but it's much less the norm than it was 100 years ago. Today it's quite common to just publish 200+ papers over your career and not really do any summarization of them, even though there is plenty that could often be done, since it's common for papers to supersede or overlap with previous ones.

Actually, on that front, it'd be a big win if scientists with lots of publications simply provided some sort of brief guide to them. Take the 50 papers on lasers, and provide an annotated bibliography explaining which papers are the important ones, which papers are obsolete or superseded, and which ones might be of particular interest to people working on particular topics. A few people do that, but many don't even separate their list of publications by topic, let alone provide a guide.

Or, shorter: There is a lot of stuff published, but it's terribly indexed and summarized, which I think is a bigger problem than the volume alone.

[btilly]

I strongly agree with this point. See http://bentilly.blogspot.com/2009/11/why-i-left-math.html for how what I saw in math supports your point.

Worse yet, we have not just specialized, we have lost knowledge as well. My favorite example of this is a result I rediscovered. Every mathematician knows that, for instance, sqrt(2)+cube_root(3) must be the root of some polynomial of degree 6. (This one turns out to be x^6 - 6x^4 -6x^3 + 12x^2 - 36x + 1.) I came up with a construction for answering questions like this. I showed it to a number of mathematicians, and none had seen it until I showed an older one who said, "That looks like a very old way to do this. Go to the library, pick up an algebra book from the 1800s, and see if you find it."

I did, it was there, and it turns out that two of the mathematicians I had talked to were in fields that had gotten their start from the very construction I rediscovered! (One was in number theory, dealing with things like algebraic integers. The other was in combinatorics, and did a lot of stuff with symmetric polynomials.)

If you're curious, the observation behind the construction is that any polynomial expression that is symmetric in the roots of a polynomial can be rewritten as a polynomial in the coefficients of that polynomial. So if a1 and a2 are the roots of x^2-2, and b1, b2, b3 are the roots of x^3-3, then (x-a1-b1)(x-a1-b2)(x-a1-b3)(x-a2-b1)(x-a2-b2)(x-a2-b3) is a polynomial in x and the coefficients of x^2-2 and x^3-3, which means that it is an integer polynomial.

All that said, this point doesn't support your argument. It is true that if information were better presented, people could learn more about more subjects than they could otherwise. It is true that trying to do this would have tremendous value. But if you want to learn about multiple subjects then you need to deal with how information actually exists out there in the world, rather than how we'd like it to be organized. The disorganization that you point to is a significant barrier to learning. (This problem does not look like it will improve any time soon.)

[metamemetics]

>"renaissance man" now is a dilettante. In Jefferson's day it meant having both broad and deep knowledge.

Jefferson's estimated net worth is $212 million. George Washington's is $525 million. It seems like you are comparing the values of a notably intelligent and published subset of the upper 1% aristocratic crust subset of society to the general population today. Hardly a fair comparison.

You are railing against people for being dumb and yet have really bad proposals as to the cause. "It's the schools fault, let's do away with schools" "It's the kids' VALUES"

You fail to consider that:

1. Intelligence is a distribution. There have always been dumb people and there always will be.

2. Economics. Blacks used to score significantly lower on IQ tests than whites in America. But guess what, the gap was directly proportional to the gap in poverty rate (http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-IQgapgenetic.htm). As the economic status of blacks in America improved the gap has decreased.

If you want to compare the intelligence of groups of people large enough to account for outliers, the difference is always largely socioeconomic. Thus I will argue the OPPOSITE of your hypothesis is true:

The wonders of technology and readily accessible information are the most important factor driving down global poverty, resulting in a higher percentage of the global population fulfilling a "Jeffersonian" ideal of the renaissance man with deep knowledge, whereas it was the time and opportunities and books to achieve that level of study was before confined to the aristocracy.

[eitally]

1. Intelligence is a distribution -- I don't disagree, but I also believe 99% of the population never realizes their potential, and in a lot of cases the educational system is the cause.

2. Yes, technology is driving down global poverty, but in the already privileged world I don't think this holds true. Where people want to learn they will find ways to do so. Where they are apathetic, they will find ways to remain ignorant.

[ryanwaggoner]

It's amazing how much the wonders of technology and readily accessible information have screwed up the value many children in the past 3ish generations

Can you clarify the relationship of technology and readily accessible information to the downfall of societal values? I don't necessarily disagree with the conclusion, but I'm curious as to how you came up with that as a hypothesis for the cause.

[shantanubala]

I don't speak for him, but here's my opinion.

Since most information is just a quick web search away, most people have no incentive to actually absorb that information. Since we are constantly overloaded with information (and we're always connected to those sources of information -- email, IM, SMS, the news, etc.), we have to be extremely selective about the stuff we actually absorb. In the process, we lose absorption of the information that doesn't look good on the surface. For example, I was not very interested in physics until I started reading about Special and General Relativity. I wouldn't be able to understand those topics without learning boring and dry (in my opinion) Newtonian Mechanics first.

In other words, we now usually only truly absorb stuff that looks good in the headline, rather than actually reading about it first. If we actually tried reading about all the stuff that's available, we'd be dead before we even got through a percent of it.

[metamemetics]

>Since most information is just a quick web search away, most people have no incentive to actually absorb that information.

it's a moot point. In the 1700's we wouldn't have had access to the information anyway. Or even the money, time, and opportunities like aristocracy such as Jefferson had to buy books from London and study the smaller amount of knowledge available then.

So rather than not having an incentive to absorb information X, we wouldn't have even known it existed! A large part of knowledge is knowing what you DON'T know. The truly dangerous individuals are idiots that think they know everything.

Hopefully the web is making people realize that there are a lot of things out there they DON'T know. Decreasing anti-intelluctialism, provincialism, and narrow-mindedness.

I would be ecstatic if more people got their news from the web than from television!

[eitally]

You're correct, of course, but the fact that information is only a web search away has driven down the perceived value of formal study and demotivates children from learning. That was my point, not that Jefferson wasn't exceptionally fortunate himself. Jefferson's own regimented work ethic, however, was an outlier even amongst his privileged peers.

[patio11]

"If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys."

[eitally]

Agreed 100% (it's not my choice.)

[patio11]

You have my sympathy. (Two years managing an outsourcing operation in India working from specs Bablefished from Japanese. And being told by my Indians that my translations were wrong because Babelfish, Yahoo, and Google outvoted me. And having to justify to management why I was billing months of overtime to debugging in a project where a math error would be national news and where RC1 was delivered in a state where it was literally impossible to pass your test unless you were deaf...)

[eitally]

I'm not sure if my situation is better or worse. In our case they don't even bother trying to clarify specs. :-)

[kiba]

>>I think this is the biggest incentive for the non-school movement, as well as the increase in other alternative [to governmental SOLs] programs. Those parents value an education for what it allows their children to contribute creatively, not just use the tools of others before them.

Apparently, you missed makerzine, maker faire, 3D printers, harry potter fanfiction, and hackaday.

You also did not get the memo that people are actually becoming smarter over time. It's the Flynn's Effect.

If you're going to whine about how the good old day are better, maybe you should show us some real evidence why this is actually so.

[eitally]

No, I didn't miss those things, nor have I missed other great stuff like the Khan Academy or MIT's OCW. My beef is with structured education -- especially in the US -- and the fact that the immediate gratification provided by technology hinders more than helps many children.

[mmodahl]

"Fortunately, literacy, though it consumes its own oral antecedants and, unless it is carefully monitored, even destroys their memory, is also infinitely adaptable. It can restore their memory, too." Ong, Walter J.. Orality and Literacy. New York: Routledge, 2003: 15.

We need not limit our knowledge and view of the world to what fits in our brain. We do, however, need to make sure that what we are putting into our brain is useful to ourselves and to humanity; Up-Up-Down-Down-Left-Right-Left-Right-B-A-Start.

[Gormo]

If only that could give us 30x the retention and depth of understanding.

[wazoox]

  >  A "renaissance man" now is a dilettante.

I'm a proud dilettante. Heck, I've read all the books Jefferson mentioned :)

[hsmyers]

The older we are the closer to the surface lies that nerve! Yours is not so much a rant as a much needed plea...