•Google and Wikipedia make learning facts irrelevant to kids
Brand Republic, UK -48 minutes ago
by Staff, Brand Republic 02-Dec-08, 10:55 LONDON - The emergence of Google and Wikipedia means children should not be taught to memorise cumbersome facts, ...

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•Google and Wikipedia make learning facts irrelevant to kids
Brand Republic, UK -30 minutes ago
by Staff, Brand Republic 02-Dec-08, 10:55 LONDON - The emergence of Google and Wikipedia means children should not be taught to memorise cumbersome facts, ...

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I don't believe history courses have emphasized memorizing dates in a long time however it is useful to learn and be familiar with facts.

What would be more useful in World History would be to show how a breach of expectations launches a liminal social drama that may or may not result in an advance in solving political problems in a more civilized (i.e. less bloody) manner. History shows that such political dramas tend to recur time and again before humans discover an intelligent way to handle them.

And then that wizened generation dies off and the arduous learning process starts all over again with tabula rasa neophytes.

Wikipedia demonstrates this endemic learning disability, as young admins painfully decline to relearn the oldest lessons in the annals of human history, even as they imagine themselves to be managing an educational site that purports to represent the sum of all human knowledge.

I propose that the sum of all human knowledge is 42.