Sorry Seth, I Have to Disagree

It’s a rare occasion when I disagree with Seth Godin, but his post today, The Wikipedia Gap, misses the point completely and berates the absolutely wrong group of people: teachers.

In an unusually snide comment, Seth says, “Apparently, going through the act of finding the books, sorting through them, reading a lot of chaff and eventually finding the facts is an essential skill for an 11-year-old kid. And for a college sophomore. Essential enough to be responsible for 80% of the time they spend on the work itself?”

Implying, apparently, that doing that work isn’t essential. Well, I don’t know how they do it at Stanford, but when I was in school, you weren’t allowed to use encyclopedias for primary research. And yes, finding the books, sorting through them and eventually finding the facts is an essential skill and should take up most of the time spent on the project.

Fortunately, we don’t yet live in a world in which everything we read is simply a regurgitation of an encyclopedic summary. Not to mention that Wikipedia, for all of its content, is wildly uneven. It’s a great starting point, but you shouldn’t base any kind of report solely on what you find there.

Seth goes on to opine that “I could care less about how good they are at memorizing or looking up facts.” But, when teachers assign students research reports, Seth, they’re not particularly interested in having students recite the facts about the first guy that went over Niagara Falls in a barrel, for instance. They’re interested in teaching the student the process of finding the facts, discovering differing points of view, and synthesizing those into a coherent position.

As for Seth’s example of law schools teaching students to be experts at using Lexis-Nexis, well, just because a law school does it, doesn’t make it right. My father is a retired trial lawyer and Superior Court judge. While he empathizes with the complaints about tedious legal research, he can also describe countless examples of lawyers who now depend so completely on electronic resources that often their cases make no sense.

Many lawyers now simply search for certain key phrases, copy and paste every citation they can find using those phrases, and hope that a few of those citations actually fit the case. When asked by a judge to explain how a particular citation actually relates to the case at hand, many attorneys simply can’t do it, because they didn’t go through the actual process of finding and synthesizing the facts (and maybe stumbling across another seemingly unrelated but relevant citation). No, they just copied it from the latest online resource.

I don’t think it’s teachers who are stuck. Oddly, I think there are a lot of technophiles who are stuck on the wrong-headed notion that technology solves everything. You don’t gain critical thinking skills by copying paragraphs from Wikipedia (which is what most students are going to do, Seth). You get them from doing what you did: finding the books, reading them, and compiling a set of relevant facts on which to make your case.

It’s not all about getting the right answer. Often, it’s about how to go about getting a defensible answer that makes sense. And to do that, you need to understand how to go through the process.