Everything I need to know I learned on Google

Being fascinated with learning and education, I read a lot of articles, research, stories and blogs about education, cognitive science, and learning from every perspective.

My mental image of learning (which is based in cognitive science research mixed with my imagination) is this.  Each of us has our own tree of knowledge.  Our knowledge is organized into branches, which split into many directions (this is obviously simplistic, as our knowledge connects to each other too; imagine a giant spider web of neurons surrounding the tree so the knowledge is connected entirely).

Every piece of information we come across needs to fit into our tree. If we can make sense of it,
it will build on a part of our tree to make it even bigger.  If we can’t make sense of it, it just drops with nowhere to hang.

There is a school of thought that the knowledge we have is not nearly as important as knowing how to learn, and knowing how to research.  That we can find everything we could possibly want to know on Google anyway, so stuffing it all into our brains is pointless.  This school of thought is popular among many educators in schools and universities across the country, many homeschoolers and unschoolers, and many other random people.  The problem with this theory is twofold: first, if we don’t know about something, we don’t know how much we don’t know, and therefore would have no reason to look it up.  Secondly, when learning something new it is much easier to have somewhere to hang it than to have to go back and construct the branches leading up to that piece of knowledge at the same time as constructing the new knowledge.

One of the awesome things about homeschooling is the ability to use the child and teacher’s trees together to build knowledge in both.  The whole point of this post was to share this story that happened a few days ago.  Ben and I were reading his history lesson together.  We were reading about the Age of Exploration and Vasco da Gama’s first trip to India, on which many men got scurvy and died.  Ben asked what scurvy was.  I said that I wasn’t sure, but that I knew it was a deficiency of some vitamin, and that it was common among pirates and explorers and others who spend a lot of time on boats, because of the types of foods they could bring with them.

That wasn’t a good enough answer (especially since I didn’t know which vitamin they were deficient in), so we went to wikipedia (first link upon googling scurvy).  There we found that scurvy was caused by a deficiency in vitamin C, due to the inability to keep fresh fruits and vegetables on the ships.  We clicked on vitamin C and there was a detailed chart of foods containing vitamin C and how much vitamin C they contained.  This, of course, was fascinating to Ben because anything that quantifies or enumerates things and puts them in lists or charts really attracts him.  We looked at pictures of strange fruits, vegetables and berries we’d never heard of.  We read all about pomegranates because we have talked about them before and Ben has never seen or had one.  We looked at the strange meats you’d have to eat to get your vitamin C from meat rather than plants.  Finally, we went back to the history lesson.

So what’s my point?  A couple days later we were reading My Side of the Mountain, by Jean Craighead George, which was Ben’s novel selection for literature.  It was deep winter and Sam, who was living in the Catskill mountains wilderness using his survival skills, began to develop symptoms of scurvy.  The book never mentioned scurvy, it just talked about the symptoms he was experiencing, dizziness, fatigue, etc., and the fact that there were no greens to be found.  Hmmm…. scurvy!  Sam did not know that he had scurvy, but he found himself gorging on the livers of the birds that he ate for awhile until his symptoms abated.

I love it when something comes up multiple times and connections are made.  It doesn’t just excite me, it also makes their eyes light up and we relish the knowledge together!  It makes me all the more aware of connections that are happening all the time that I miss because I don’t know enough.  If we had not just read about scurvy we would have completely missed that connection.  If we had not been “doing” history we would not have been reading about Da Gama and the age of exploration.  If we were not homeschooling, there would be no way to find those connections with what they are learning.  The more knowledge we expose ourselves and our kids to, the more connections can be made, and knowledge will grow exponentially.  The more we wait for knowledge to find us, the less likely it is to make itself at home.