Copy-paste generation...

We have a saying. The Turk has novel ideas either on escape or in the toilet. Not strictly necessary, though, it just means we find creative ideas in the most unlikely situations. And it is true, too, I had written my little kiddy stories while ironing. Great time for creative thinking, ironing. Another is while tossing and turning in bed, trying to fall asleep.

This is what occured to me last night, under similar conditions. No, not in the bathroom. Trying to sleep, I mean.

When I was a student, if we were given research homework, that meant we would find an encyclopedia, find the related topic, find the related paragraphs and copy those, in as a neat handwriting as possible, to our notebook or better, on a clean sheet of paper. It didn't involve much research. The skills that would develop were to know the alphabet enough to enable you to find the related artice, read and, well, write neatly, at least that was the hope. I doubt those essays were ever read by the teacher, but that wasn't the aim, anyway. The hope was that bits and pieces of information would be left in the student's mind while reading and copying. It wasn't about different aspects of view, or the student's digesting the information to come up with her own ideas. It was about learning what's there.

These days research finds you lots of information. The kids turn on the computer, open a web browser, find a search engine, type in key words, and copy and paste whatever there is. It is possible to find more, but experience tells me that students click on any likely looking page and are content with it.

I cannot honestly claim that research taught more in the past. But with this new era, reading what you are submitting as homework has vanished. The students aren't, even, involved enough to write down what they are graded for. Almost no effort involved, other than clicking.

The result is, to my thinking, and I may very well be wrong, as this is a blog post, not an essay based on surveys, that children stop processing the information that passes through their hands and minds. And even when they do, they donot try to communicate that processed form to others. Because, processing information within the brain is different than putting it into a form that will convey meaning to others. Processing information in a reasonable way is an acquired skill. Communication is an acquired skill.

This, in turn, makes them consumers in the world of thinking. They read books, but don't think about writing. They watch films, but don't dream about making. They play games, but don't think about designing.

This is also about how big and complicated the created products have become. So big and complicated that, the child, with her limited abilities, is sure of failure even when she's interested.

And this is about how small scaled, local creative production has been crushed under the giant, global, commercial enterprises.

And this, in turn, is about the new world order that turns us into the vassals of the new conglomerate lords.

Too bad you cannot take one little problem independently and solve it. Everything looks tied up in a tight ball.

We know the answer is 42. But how to turn the answer into a workable solution?