An example of Active Reading: 有效阅读一例 —— Google时代不再需要背东西了么？
byXIAOLAIon2009/02/27·9 COMMENTS
Active Reading，即“有效阅读”[1]，往往需要“极度”耐心，并且时时刻刻要提防自己为了挑刺而挑刺。以下是一个有效阅读的示例。文章选自泰晤士报网络版【原文网址】，blockquote中的是阅读笔记。当然，更多的时候，大多数思考在脑中进行，而不一定非要落实到纸面上。
Google generation has no need for rote learning
Memorising facts and figures is a waste of time for most schoolchildren because such information is readily available a mere mouse click away, a leading commentator has said.
- Can anyone think through anything with an empty mind?
- Is memorising too difficult to practise?
- Is “a mere mouse click away” close enough?
- Who is that “leading” commentator?
The existence of Google, Wikipedia and online libraries means that there is no useful place in school for old-fashioned rote learning, according to Don Tapscott, author of the bestselling book Wikinomics and a champion of the “net generation”.
- “Rote leaning” is irrelevant to whether it is “old-fashioned”. “Rote learning” was, is, and will be everywhere, as long as fundemental learning skills (including skills for memorising) fail as always to be taught.
- A “bestselling book” author, is a “leading” person? Quite unlikely.
A far better approach would be to teach children to think creatively so that they could learn to interpret and apply the knowledge available online. “Teachers are no longer the fountain of knowledge; the internet is,” Tapscott said. “Kids should learn about history to understand the world and why things are the way they are. But they don’t need to know all the dates. It is enough that they know about the Battle of Hastings, without having to memorise that it was in 1066. They can look that up and position it in history with a click on Google,” he said.
- When we are memorising, we are not merely doing so for its own sake. In fact,there’re at least two fundamentals that are indispensable: a) sharpening memorising skills; b) Links among pieces of knowledge are more important than pieces themselves, but one has to memorise enough information at the first place to figure out meaning links.
- It is true that we don’t need to memorise all dates, and should not memorise mere dates, but this doesn’t mean we don’t need to memorise other useful information, and we don’t need to memorise at anything!
- Google is absolutely useful, but it is surely not everything, and it is just one useful tool, among many others.
Tapscott denies that his approach is anti-learning. He argues that the ability to learn new things is more important than ever “in a world where you have to process new information at lightning speed”. He said: “Children are going to have to reinvent their knowledge base multiple times. So for them memorising facts and figures is a waste of time.”
- The ability to learn new things hinged on the exact ability to fully comprehend existing knowledge, we have to be equipped ourselves with the known to explore the unknown.
- His saying that “Children are… So …” is hard to follow, what does he exactly mean by “so”? I fail to work out a clear causal relationship between two sentences.
Tapscott, who coined the term “the net generation” in his 1998 bestseller Growing Up Digital, bases his observations in his latest book, Grown Up Digital, on a study of nearly 8,000 people in 12 countries born between 1978 and 1994. His observations chime with a trend in British classrooms to cut back on traditional teaching and to personalise learning.
- Who he is doesn’t help validate his argument.
Schools are increasingly moving towards more independent study and so-called enrichment activities, with pupils learning at their own pace and focusing on what interests them most. At Wellington College in Berkshire, for example, teenagers are not taught from the front of the class, but instead sit around a large oval table for seminar-style discussions.
- This whole paragraph is merely a vague discription of a well known trend, and the link is remote to the argument that “memorising is useless”.
Tapscott believes that the model of education that prevails today in most classrooms was designed for the industrial age. “This might have been good for the mass production economy, but it doesn’t deliver for the challenges of the digital economy, or for the ‘net gen’ mind,” he said.
- A new but common example of “New is better” fallacy. Not everything has to cope with alleged “changes”, and learning skills are exact examples. No generation can learn better merely because they are a new generation.
- From Hawking back to Einstein, from Newton to Galileo, from Plato to Socrates, not single one of them has a poor memory, and never did anyone understand that any one of them hate memorising.
He suggests that the brains of young people today work differently from those of their parents. He argues that digital immersion, in which children may be texting while surfing the internet and listening to their MP3 player, can help them to develop critical thinking skills.
- Differently? A different species bred by human?
- No instrument can help develop critical thinking skills on its own.
His views are unlikely to be universally welcomed. Ofsted has reported that pupils’ knowledge and understanding of key historical facts is not good enough to enable them to “form overviews and demonstrate strong conceptual understanding”.
- I personally concluded after reading several paragraphs that his views are superficial, not well supported, and quite misleading, especially for the immature minds.
Richard Cairns, Headmaster of Brighton College, one of the country’s top-performing independent schools, said that a core level of knowledge was essential: “It’s important that children learn facts. If you have no store of knowledge in your head to draw from, you cannot easily engage in discussions or make informed decisions.”
- Modest comments.
Michael Gove, the Shadow Schools Secretary, has recently criticised “the move away from fact-based learning”, arguing that “knowledge, intellectual capital, is what makes educational progress possible”.
- Good position, but not fully elaborated.
Final Notes:
“Memorising Dates” for dates’ sake may be an good example of “Rote Learning”, but abandoning memorising is clearly absurd, and is not a proper way to fight “Rote Learning”. Google helps, but Google and any other internet application, among other learning tools, were not developed to relinquish fundamental human abilities, including memorising.
Footnotes:
- 我没把“Active”翻译成“主动”，是因为1) 阅读本身就是主动的；2) 过分“主动”实际上妨碍阅读——使读者只能挑刺不能吸收；3) 我认为哪怕译成“非被动阅读”都比“主动阅读”更好…… [↩]