At every juncture in history, new innovations have caused a rethinking and often a recasting of foundational ideas. In the realm of education, technology’s deeper impact remains underappreciated. While electronics, specifically computers and the Internet, have been steadily if stumblingly integrated into modern schooling, their fundamental implications continue to go ignored. Teaching has long revolved primarily around facts, and necessarily so – yet the new millennium heralds an age where facts are easily, instantly and constantly accessible. Put simply, Google renders obsolete a great deal of contemporary pedagogy.

The concept of a search engine – a world of knowledge at the click of a button – would have been utterly foreign to the designers of the American public school. In the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, the halcyon years for the mass schooling movement, impersonal information was available solely from books. Thus, developing a paradigm around the fact-based knowledge made perfect sense, and indeed was the only reasonable conclusion. While this model is not entirely without merit, an evolution is long overdue.

A shift away from routinized learning requires profound changes in instruction and content. The popular Core Knowledge Curriculum is predicated on the notion that students need to leave each grade with certain information, whether it be about the circulatory system or ancient Rome. Instead of focusing on charting the parts of the circulatory system or learning the dates and specific accomplishments of Roman emperors, however, pedagogy should focus on critical thinking skills and relating that knowledge to the real world. Google can take care of the minutia.

Taking away the “drill-and-kill” portion of education opens the door to project-based learning, a method which nearly every study says is better at developing students’ abilities. By allowing students to do large, mostly self-directed projects that follow their interests, they will engage the conceptual material, encounter the key information (you cannot reckon with ancient Rome and ignore the emperors), have more intrinsic motivation and in the end glean more intellectual benefits.

We have only begun to explore the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the Google effect: Within a decade, a Tablet PC should be as much standard issue as a four-function calculator, allowing students to quite literally have access to a thousand encyclopedias at their desk. Still, our curriculum, methodologies and assessments are formed around an early 20^th century model where the only search engine was in the mind. Now that facts are at our fingertips, it’s time to truly start teaching for understanding.

-E.H.