Almost every living creature is destined, to some extent, to live alone. Individuals are born and go through their lives, and the cycle repeats itself endlessly. However, identities are not preserved in the natural world.
That all changed with humans. Our entire culture and society are based on the fact that we pass on knowledge. At first, it was through tradition and oral stories. This craft evolved into writing and the use of complex languages.
Education drives innovation, but innovation can also drive education. The fact that you can easily search for the best research paper writing service is a miracle of innovation. Your parents did not benefit from such a service. If they want help with an essay, they would need to pay/ask a classmate.
Innovation vs revolution
It may seem strange to bring up the disadvantages of innovation, in an article designed to sing its praises. The truth is that all attempts to replace standard, classic education with a tech-based alternative have failed.
Even during the recent global COVID pandemic, schools from across the world haven’t managed to innovate their way out of the problem.
The most common attempt to adapt to the pandemic was the wide-scale adoption of remote learning. It mostly did not work, and we are now faced with children who retained nothing over 2 years of Zoom classes.
So, should we abandon all hope of innovating education? Of course not!
There is a difference between a revolution and innovation. A revolution seeks to upturn and replace the established order. Home Zoom classes weren’t implemented as a supplement but as a replacement.
And here’s where most people go wrong: you can’t replace traditional education. For example, you can’t use BestEssayServiceRadar.com and not do some work yourself.
Also, you can’t outsource all research to Wikipedia, and classwork to Zoom calls.
Humans have been around for a very long time, and we are wired a certain way. We are designed to learn from an elder, and nothing is going to change that.
Innovation and technology are going to work best when it is used as an addon, a crutch, or a bonus. Googling something will never replace a proper education on that subject. Still, Googling can save you a lot of time.
Instead of going through the trouble of getting dressed, walking to the library, and spending hours reading a book, you can pinpoint-target a specific subject or question.
A question of scale and price
At first, the instruction was very personal. You would have been taken as the apprentice of a craftsman, hunter, or farmer. In the more academic fields, wealthy parents paid for tutoring. Regardless, you had your teachers near undivided attention.
However, since the Enlightenment, society had been faced with the challenge to educate everyone, not just a few wealthy elites. And, sadly, the quality of the education process suffers.
The principle applies universally; if you mass-produce something, odds are that it will be inferior to something more customized, personal, and hand-crafted.
And the world population is not getting any smaller. More and more kids will need access to education. Also, the elephant in the room will always be represented by the cost of said education.
To these two major issues: price and scale, innovation and technology can bring major improvements. Even if it may not seem so at first.
The upfront cost of purchasing computers/laptops for students may seem high. It can also seem more expensive to invest and maintain a quality database.
That is true, IT services and electronic equipment are not cheap. Still, the advantages far outweigh the drawbacks.
A good website only needs to be created once. Then, students can use it for decades. The same principle applies to online courses. If a teacher works hard for a semester to develop proper courses and tutorials, his work will be made easier for potentially decades.
Numbers and words on a screen do not cost money to distribute. You can make infinite copies, so it won’t matter how many people need to access your materials.
In terms of grading, you can use software to narrow down the number of papers that require personal attention. Similar to our previous point, teachers and students should avoid relying on innovation completely.
You should identify the “busy work” and the repetitive limitations of your jobs, and attempt to solve them via tech. Correcting thousands of papers per year is not an experience that teaches you something. So, it will be safe to outsource or automate.
Engagement
Finally, we have the question of engagement. One of the reasons Zoom classes failed during these last two years, is that they failed to capture children’s attention. Like it or not, memory formation is closely linked to emotional attachment.
In plain English, that means that things that bore us, rarely remain in our memory. Chastising children for not remembering uninteresting classes is unfair, as the blame lies with the person who put together the course.
Innovation can maybe bridge that gap. For example, online puzzle games were made out of weaving together amino acids into protein strands. Students playing these games actually helped solve a few mysteries in biology.
Did you ever wonder why people hate something in class, but when they see the same info in a documentary, they love it? It’s not that people hate learning, it’s that learning was made to be boring.
Schoolwork can be astoundingly interesting if you take the time to polish it and work on a presentation. There is a thriving YouTube community that makes informational content, and they get millions of regular views. Teachers need to learn from this.
Conclusion
Transhumanism is the idea that technology can change and alter basic human nature. Experience shows us that regardless if we are living in caves, castles, or modern cities, human nature stays the same.
The experience of learning from a teacher will never go away, no matter how much we innovate. That technology is most useful when it is used to lower costs, streamline, make learning more accessible, and increase the entertainment value of lessons.
