Students not allowed to use Internet to answer questions | Hacker News Reader

Students not allowed to use Internet to answer questions

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My sophomore(H.S.) son is not allowed to use the internet to help answer questions on his science or history homework, we're talking about term definitions, not essay questions. He is only allowed to use the govt. supplied and approved text book or his notes. If schools were about learning, would it really matter where in the information comes from? Ignorance gone to sea.

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A few things come to mind:

1: The teacher might be doing this out of ignorance 2: The teacher might be doing this out of insight 3: The teacher might be doing this because not everyone has high speed Internet.

If it is done out of ignorance, it is because the Internet is this big scary unknown that someone told them "anyone can edit" so they banned it. That is awful.

If out of insight, I've seen more and more students at the university-level think that an article is something they say on Buzzfeed. (Not kidding) By banning the Internet, it forces students to do more effort (sometimes literally because they have to physically travel to a library) to prove their point.

Lastly with high speed Internet, the upper-middle class were the first I knew to get high speed broadband back in high school. To this day, it isn't cheap where I live (is it for you? It is better now, but would still be a burden for many where I live) so banning the Internet puts an even constraint on students. (Before anyone mentions a computer lab, staying late at the computer lab is not the same as using wifi while you're bed or desk at home)

All students are given a macbook air, the school has wifi, so item #3 can be eliminated.

I think the insight point is valid, but I disagree with the approach I've seen instructors take in the past. I know in college we were always told we couldn't use Wikipedia, but what they should have taught us instead was to use Wikipedia similar to how we use Google: as a springboard to find the sources we should use and cite.

"so banning the Internet puts an even constraint on students."

You should read a story called Harrison Bergeron.

Maybe the teacher believes that learning how to read a textbook is a useful skill and that in the age of the internet students are not developing it sufficiently to effectively evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of alternative approaches. It might be possible that the teacher wants to expose the students to the higher level concept that History and Science have literature and are not just dead collections of facts.

Sorry for failing to be outraged. I don't helicopter my teenager... being challenged by schoolwork is on the list of things I hope for and a great use of technology would be J for mathematics class. Google and Wikipedia were part of the elementary school curriculum.

Good luck.

That sounds like laziness on the part of the instructor. Textbooks are subject to being outdated the moment they are printed; restricting the scope of learning to that in an age where information is free and easily accessible sounds absurd.

If that were my kid, I'd be asking for more context from the instructor/school on the situation. If the school's response isn't what I deemed acceptable, I'd demand either a change in the scope, or that my kid was placed in an environment that reflects how today's learning actually occurs.

"If schools were about learning, would it really matter where in the information comes from? Ignorance gone to sea."

Are there term questions along with essay questions? When I was in HS, the majority of homework had both.

Allowing everyone to just Google the answers has created a situation where people can't critically think for themselves.

Books! Nah, let's restrict them to cuneiform tablets. There are more than one million of them in museums, that should be enough to answer any science or history question. (Just be sure to learn Sumerian to read them).

Cuneiform? Bah. Writing itself is a crutch. We should force them to memorize thousands of lines by rote, as in the days of Homer and the Northern European bards.

There's a famous section in Plato's Phaedrus which gives an argument against writing on the grounds that it will both damage the memory and lead to unoriginal thought (since people will just repeat arguments that they've read in books, rather than coming up with original ones).

Anyone can Google. Not everyone can learn.

Rote memorization of facts (followed, almost inevitably, by a brain cache flush) is a very poor type of "learning".

Learning to use a search engine effectively is a valuable skill in its own right, and no, "everyone" doesn't know how to do it. Watch some people thrash around with Google some time and I think you'll be surprised at just how bad they are at it.

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