Education 2.0 Part 4: Learning what we need to and when we need to

Here is a video snippet from the popular TV series Two and a Half Men. Please watch this...



Isn't this kid brilliant? He knows its more important to remember his locker combination and he can find out the information that he's being asked to memorize whenever he wants to! And when he asks the meaning of a word, and he's told to find out himself from the dictionary, he immediately gets up to go do that. Because its RELEVANT to him, he wants to know what the word means and will go find it out himself!

We're in an Information Age, where there is so much information available out there for us, that its impossible to know it all. We need to accept that we need to know, not everything, but where to look for anything and everything. And our brains have been wired/programmed for automatically retaining the most frequently and recently accessed information. Why then should we learn what we do not need to!

Important information such as our credit card/ATM PIN, maybe bank account No., an emergency telephone no., all these need to be remembered. But why what year did this happen or what year did that happen? Don't get me wrong, there are some things which we should remember, but then if they are that important, they will be repeated, or we will find out repeatedly and when the pain of finding out becomes more and more, our brains will automatically register it, realizing its importance.

How many of us remember our friend's or even our family member's mobile number. We don't, because we don't need to any more. There was a time when we did need to, but now we don't. Years back, I knew all my friends' telephone numbers on my fingers, never memorized them, but dialed them so often that I still remember them. Back then there were no mobile phones to store the numbers, and one had to dial in the numbers everytime to call someone. Today I don't even remember my brother's mobile number, who I call quite frequently. But I still remember his old mobile number which I used to dial to call him, few years back.

When I look back at my years of education, I realize there was so much I had crammed up, and I barely use a fraction of it today. Wouldn't it had made more sense to start working after high school, learning on the way, what I needed to, when I needed to!