Knowing things isn’t ‘20th century’, Justin Webb. It’s the foundation of a successful life

It’s scarcely possible to open a newspaper or magazine these days without reading an article about how the latest technological gizmo has rendered traditional education obsolete.

According to Justin Webb, a presenter on the Today programme, it’s no longer necessary to commit any facts to memory thanks to the never-ending miracle that is Google. ‘Knowing things is hopelessly 20th-century,’ he wrote in the Radio Times. ‘The reason is that everything you need to know — things you may previously have memorised from books — is (or soon will be) instantly available on a handheld device in your pocket.’

The same view was expressed by Ian Livingstone CBE, one of the pioneers of the UK games industry. In a recent interview with the Times, he said he intends to set up a free school where children will learn how to ‘solve problems’ and be ‘creative’, rather than forced to memorise ‘irrelevant’ facts that can be accessed ‘at the click of a mouse’.

I challenge this argument in a pamphlet I’ve just written for Civitas called ‘Prisoners of The Blob’. Google’s not much use if you can’t read — and roughly 20 per cent of British children leave school functionally illiterate. Even if you can read, finding something out on Google depends on knowing stuff already. I’m not just talking about typing in the right search terms. How can you interpret the results if you don’t know what the words mean? The American educationalist E.D. Hirsch, a defender of traditional knowledge, gives the example of a child who searches the word ‘planet’ and comes up with ‘a non-luminous body that revolves around the Sun’. Not terribly illuminating if you don’t already know what a ‘non-luminous body’ is. To find out what ‘planet’ means using Google alone, the ignorant schoolchild would have to search the internet forever, like putting a monkey in front of a typewriter and hoping it’ll come up with the complete works of Shakespeare.