The New World

I was, in the past, of the school that everything we experience is just a variation on a theme, and everything has more or less happened before. I was a “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” sort of person; look at the past and learn from it. Shakespeare still resonates today, I reasoned, so things must be more or less the same.

However, I’m changing my mind these days because of some particularities of our times. In the past, all those Shakespearan themes stayed the same over time: love, revenge, family obligations etc. etc. I think, though, that social media is changing the way we think about the world. I’m not sure that we fall in love the same way as before. I’m not sure that we relate to each other in the same way. I’m not sure that we communicate or share the world in the same way. I think our brains are being rewired.

Just as an example, some kids I teach have never really seen the stars. They live in cities with light pollution, and have never been anywhere where they could see them. How can they relate to Shakespeare’s “I am constant as the northern star, of whose true-fixed and resting quality there is no fellow in the firmament” when they’ve never seen the northern star with their own eyes?

It also used to be that the adults would teach the kids. Now, technologies change so quickly that kids have to teach the parents. The number of parents and grandparents who just can’t keep up, or give up, saying “we don’t need to learn that” and then suddenly find that the whole world is digital and they can’t pay their bills without a smartphone.

In some ways, I’m more prepared for that because I teach gym. As an adult, there’s very little chance that any kid who even half-way tries isn’t going to be better than me at most things. They’re younger, stronger, more flexible, and learn more quickly. There’s a reason why the athletes at the Olympics are mostly between sixteen and, at most maybe forty. There’s a reason they are there and not the older, wiser, more experienced coaches.

Today this disparity is everywhere. All the knowledge of the world is out there, and and teachers are no longer the dispensers of knowledge. We need to help kids learn to sort out what they see, but that’s a different skill from, say, presenting them with algebra for the first time. If they wanted to learn algebra, there are a hundred, decent, free Youtube videos to do that. A teacher’s job today is just as much as regulating knowledge as presenting it. We help them sort out the wacky stuff from real science, or math, or social studies.

It’s a new world, and I’m just of an age that I think I can still keep up, but maybe I’m deluding myself. “We are all In the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars” Oscar Wilde said, and maybe the trick is just to keep looking up.