Technology is a neutral tool that you should use when you have a plan, when you know what you want to find, said Noam Chomsky, the world renowned social and political theorist.
Chomsky spoke at the first day of the Learning Without Frontiers event in London (albeit via video link). His was the very first presentation in a line-up that includes inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, sailor Dame Ellen MacArthur and the Minister for Communications, Culture and the Creative Industries, Ed Vaizey.
The MIT professor stated that technology can be compared to a hammer. "It doesn't care if you use it to build a house or crush someone's skull. The Web is valuable if you know what you're looking for, if you have a framework of understanding. But you always have to be willing to question whether your framework is the right one." He compared simply browsing the web for information to pointing a student at the library knowing they had no idea what they were looking for. "Exploring the internet can just be picking up random factoids that don't mean anything", he said. "The person who won the Nobel prize in biology isn't the person who read the most journals. It was the person who knew what to look for," he added.
But the comments were made as part of a wider talk on the benefits of encouraging entrepreneurship and inquisitiveness in students. Chomsky talked of the two contrasting schools of thought on education -- one of which "helps people to determine to learn on their own" while the other favours "indoctrination". He pointed to the trend towards tests for younger and younger children, arguing that these have limited value both for the students and for the teachers. Quoting a fellow MIT professor, he said that the response to students who ask what their syllabus is going to be is it "...doesn't matter what we cover, it's what you discover."
After all, continued Chomsky, exploration will lead to discoveries that could lead to gains, whether scientific, economic or medical. "Allowing people to cross frontiers to challenge accepted beliefs will lead to creation of technology, that will lead to economic gains."
Chomsky emphasised the idea that the choice that we initially need to decide is what we think education is, something that was reiterated in the talk after his by the founder of Learning Without Frontiers, Graham Martin-Brown. He asked: "Do we want to have a society of free, creative individuals able to gain from the knowledge of the past...or people who just add to the GDP?"
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