I had a most shocking experience today. It started quite innocently. I applied for volunteering at a two-day event, got an e-mail with my schedule (7 hours’ shifts both days, I thought it was a little bit too much but I wanted to attend the event anyway so I thought OK, no problem), shifted my other scheduled stuff around to free up these two days. I turned up on time, sat at a reception table and everything went well until, about three hours later, the person in charge told me that they don’t need me anymore and would manage on their own.
Here’s our further dialogue:
- So, shall I come tomorrow morning?
- No, we don’t need you.
- But I can still attend the conference tomorrow, right?
- No, sorry.
- But you gave me the schedule, I freed up these two days…
- It’s enough that we allow you to stay today and mingle with the attendees; we normally do not allow the volunteers to do that.
I was completely astonished. I have had volunteered at around 20 events in Toronto so far, and it is common understanding that, when a volunteer is not on duty, he or she gets to walk around at the event, attend any sessions if there is room enough, talk to whoever he or she pleases, etc. This is actually why people volunteer: to exchange some of their time for the right of attending an event and everything that comes with it (a networking opportunity, etc.). The concept of a volunteer being low caste and not allowed to touch the regular attendees lest he soil them with his impurity is entirely new to me. Now, I totally understand that sometimes the resources are limited and the volunteers do not get invited to a final reception or something. But this really takes the cake. I am probably lucky they allowed me to use the washroom at the venue and did not send me to a McDonalds up the street for that purpose.
If I were talking to these kids face to face, I would say: hey, how about cutting down your Facebook time and meaningless e-mails and putting in some work or getting proper sleep? Basically, what they say is “we don’t know how to control our own time waste but blame it all on teachers who should come up with some new and miraculous way of teaching us, so we can absorb knowledge without making any effort”.
Actually, I realize that the intended message of the video is somewhat different (modern education requires using new media, etc.). This is questionable but at least there is a point for discussion. (Really, I don’t see much difference between a teacher drawing on a blackboard and a projector projecting slides that depict stick figures as if drawn on a blackboard, as in this presentation.) But whoever created the video completely failed to make that point. His students come across, not as victims of rigid and obsolete system but as lazy whiners that cannot take the consequences of their own actions (wasting time on thousands of e-mails and not doing the required reading, for example). As to this reading not being directly related to the students’ everyday life – of course it is not. These students will enter the workforce 3 or 5 years from now and will still be in there 30 years from now. Why should they learn the templates and routines of today? This, indeed, would be a waste of time. Fundamental science is not “relevant” to what we do every day, i.e. get up, dress, prepare and eat a hamburger, take a bus. Fourier transforms are not “relevant”. Human genome sequencing is not “relevant”. “War and Peace” is not “relevant”. Asymmetric p-n-transitions are not “relevant”. But if you take them out of the humankind, we are no better than a tribe of savages involved in a cargo cult.
As I have already said here and here (incidentally, quoting McLuhan as the video does), the art that apes the everyday life is dead crap. The real art does not reflect – it synthesizes and predicts. The same goes for education. Once we start teaching the young people how to press buttons on the latest modern device, whatever it is at the moment, instead of teaching them “irrelevant” fundamental things, we are doomed.
