Our Education System: Digital or Classic?

As far as the United States go, as I cannot speak on behalf of other countries, it seems our education system isn't evolving, with our current lifestyle. This lifestyle of using electronic devices, from a day to day basis. Some may say that this sort of lifestyle, that of the Information Age, is making education, a less engaging, and more tedious activity.

There are brighter sides to this. We learn skills, that cannot he taught, digitally, through human-human interaction. We also learn social skills, being around other students, who are relatively, our age.

What are your thoughts on the matter? Do you believe that our education system, should take full grasp at the technology given to us, this age. Or should we stick to convential methods?

Depending on your viewpoint, what do you think will become of the education system, had it become exclusively digital? And if you think we should stick to old ways, how do you think, teachers and administrators, can make the learning process, more engaging, for students, who are born into the Information Age, and/or revolve their lifesytle around it?

To be quite honest, I find that the education system in the United States is falling way behind in terms of technology. However, I do not necesarily see this as a bad thing.
As you mentioned, the life skills we are taught by means of being in a physical classroom cannot be replicated by means of a digital teacher. Though we should further integrate the technology into the schooling, I am not of the opinion that it is one hundred percent necessary to give up the physical classroom all together. This is because there is the inevitability that technology will one day fail us. Maybe not in a major way, but it is easily that case that batteries die, we are out of range, or a variety of other reasons that would render our technology useless. Therefore I find that the ability to communicate with others as well as complete tasks that we do in school by hand are important.

As to spice things up for those who are coming after us in the information age, I firmly believe that our generation of teachers are going to need to be the ones to instill a love of learning into the children. It is not necessarily a matter of the information not being useful or entertaining, but rather the delivery on the part of the educators is the issue. If we can get our educators excited, then the excitement of the students will soon follow.

I can't see too many practical advantages to using more technology for learning to be honest. It helps with visualizations sometimes, but that's about it. Sometimes I feel that people try to overextend a "so called hot" technology into a solution, rather then using technology when it's a natural solution. (ie, the one person who always thinks making an "app" is always the solution). In short, if you use technology nsturally, I feel like the education system will be mostly human based.

Take the computer scientist edsger W. Dijkstra for example. Dispite inventing a portion of the technology of software, he rarely uses his computer outside of browsing and emails. I wouldn't even see why he needs too. If you don't have nice hand writting, then it might be better to type things out (a lot of my profs use it up to that extent); but other then that, technology doesn't really offer a compelling advantage.

There are practical advantages to learning to use technology (as opposed to using technology to learn), but I don't feel like trying to over achive with "hot technology" is healthy.

In general I would say that the education system is good comparitively (well, at least in Canada). My main problem with it is Math. When you learn sciences in grade 11 and 12, they naturally extend into University/Collage science. Same with most of the core subjects. The problem with Math in Grade 12 and under is that it's nothing like real math. In fact, I would go as far as to say that a lot of the math taught does more harm then good (grade 11 and 12 math is at least practical to applied fields, but the way they teach it still will not extend to mainstream mathematics).

A better question: Should American education be changed completely? Yes. Before y'all talk about digital vs whatever, you need to rework the entire system. It's very flawed. Horribly flawed. To the point that the illegals stepping on one another to get their child into an American school should look elsewhere, as the perilous journey to get to America doesn't compensate for the trash learned in American institutions.

> It's very flawed. Horribly flawed.

How is it flawed?

I would prefer it if the education system here was a mix of classics and technology, that way you get the best out of both worlds.