venhi
Posted on March 4 2009 1:21 AM

I enjoyed the review of The Dumbest Generation.  Indeed the entire world having access to open source tools and learning is a good thing.  It far outweighs any potential negative consequences.  The author of the book reminded me of the Luddites-protesters of mechanization at the start of the Industrial Revolution.  All need to realize that the only thing certain is change.

Bob Schubring
LongTale LLC, Intellectual Property Managers
Posted on April 14 2009 3:06 PM

While Liz Losh’s posting speaks verbosely and passionately to the Bauerlein book, it misses the cause of the dispute completely.

There are two distinct schools of thought in philosophy, the Idealist and the Empirical.  The debate between them has raged since (at least) the days of Plato and Aristotle.  In an information-age context, the Idealist builds a cataloguing system to map out the entire Universe, then begins attaching bits of knowledge to this organized database.  Empiricists simply start experimenting with whatever catches their attention, learn from the experience, apply what they learned, and (unless hopelessly frustrated) babble on about what they learned, to whomever will listen.

During most of the 20th Century, universities generally took the Idealist approach to be the superior means of learning.  Scholars must be organized in their thinking, after all.  Empiricists were grudgingly relegated to the dark corners of an engineering college, or left out the door completely and sent to teach at a trade school.

Empiricists, content to learn in their own way, adapted to this environment.  My father, who had the rare privilege of being mentored by the retired-but-still-working Charles F. Kettering, is fond of “Boss Ket’s” instruction to young engineers:  “Get it working.  We’ll hire a PhD from M.I.T. later, to publish a paper on why it works.”

The exigencies of the late Cold War raised disturbing questions about the supposed primacy of the Idealist approach to knowledge.  Writing in his book, “The Cuckoo’s Egg”, astronomer-turned-computer administrator Clifford Stoll describes his encounter, while patching a security hole in a network at Lawrence Berkeley Labs, with an offshoot of the National Security Agency, then known as the National Computer Security Center.  NCSC had no desire to risk the US information infrastructure to an academic argument over the alleged supremacy of Idealist or Empiricist approaches to learning, so it established two, completely separate laboratories with utterly mundane names, one run by Idealists and one by Empiricists, and tasked them with studying every new item of hardware and software that computer companies hoped to sell the U.S. military.

The results were surprising.  Idealists found security holes by applying their scholarly approach to learning, to reach an advanced theoretical understanding of how the software or hardware functioned, then looked for flaws in the design.  Empiricists found security holes by interacting with the hardware and software experimentally.

Sometimes, both groups independently found the same security holes.  More often, each group caught some holes that the other group had failed to notice.

The lesson to be learnt from Bauerlein’s impassioned defense of Idealism and Losh’s equally-impassioned dismissal of same, is that humans learn in different ways.  Just as our genetic makeup makes some of us nearsighted, some farsighted, and leaves a few of us congenitally sightless, so our genetic makeup probably influences the ways in which we best learn.  It is from such biodiversity that cultural diversity, individuation, and specialization take root.

Some of us blunder around our environment and learn things.  Others sit back, watch us, and think.  If we bother to teach what we learn, we may arrive at a systematic understanding of what we learned, which then can be passed on to the aid of future generations.  Society couldn’t function without the efforts of both kinds of learners.  It is high time we recognize that the scholar and the experimentalist both contribute to the enlargement of knowledge, and make education fully accessible to them both.

The fallacio ad baculam..."Believe what I say or I’ll pound the crap out of you”...has been understood to be illogic, for quite a few centuries.  Why it slipped into 20th Century educational administration, in the guise of answering, “Who should be in charge of education?”, is an intriguing question for historians.  What matters most, in the present moment, is to recognize that our personal learning abilities (and disabilities) should not artificially limit access to knowledge by people of differing learning abilities.
Our goal should not be to pick a method of learning that is superior overall and create a Boss Class.  Rather, it should be to identify the method of learning that is superior for each student, and let each student go at it...while teaching people of differing talents and abilities how to interact helpfully, without squandering time squabbling over who “deserves” to be in charge of the learning enterprise.

Even if that means the library will have a gaming-themed workroom (hopefully soundproofed, to relieve stress on the adjacent scholars in the quiet study area), that replaces the hornbook of yesteryear’s Blab School with a bunch of cool virtual-reality environments, full of boisterous students testing out their ideas...who have to pause, on occasion, for an outdoor game of Frisbee, because the college wind farm got becalmed, triggering an automated disk backup and system shutdown.