"The Chip of Limitless Knowledge"

Imagine that we had a chip of limitless knowledge. What would that be? It'd be a tiny chip loaded with all the knowledge available to human beings, connected to a world cloud and constantly being updated as we learn more -- more about marine life and alien life, more about human behaviour and about the expanding Universe. At birth, every newborn would necessarily have this chip installed in her brain before her birth certificate was signed. Every human being would thus be endowed with limitless knowledge. Want to know what 3 times 3 is? A Grade 2 student need only think about the question, and the chip would transfer the answer into her brain. Want to know how to bake a blueberry cheesecake? The recipe can be downloaded into your brain in a matter of milliseconds. In short, your very own Google search, right there with you.

This isn't very hard to imagine. In fact, we're almost there. A few decades ago, you'd have to travel across continents in search of the right people to give you specialised information, in search of the right museums, in search of the right books in obscure libraries. With the advent of the age of the internet, searching for information became much easier. And easier and easier, to the point that life without our phones, without our Alexas and our Siris is impossible. Want to find out about the polio-ridden queen who reigned Kashmir in the 10th century? Google it. Need to find out when the Great Depression took place? Alexa's here for you. We don't even need to type the question out anymore. We simply need to ask. We're only a step away from not asking and just thinking about the question now.

Let's take a step back and think about the implications of such a chip for everyday life, and specifically for education systems.

Many of us may have wondered why we need schools at all. If all we need to know is available at our fingertips, what's the use of cramming from textbooks and writing tests? Why do children need to memorise multiplication tables when calculators can do that for us? Why do students need to learn about the Revolt of 1857 when hundreds of books, articles, videos, and documentaries are just a click away? We don't have an answer. We tell ourselves, "BECAUSE KIDS NEED TO KNOW THIS."

And we justify this stance because right now, all this information is external. It's outside of the kids -- in textbooks and on the internet -- and IT MUST BE INTERNALISED.

So all our efforts in educating children focus on getting students to internalise this information by getting them to rote learn, to recite and repeat facts and figures, to fill in the blanks and match the following, to circle the correct answer and list down facts and figures. After all, what is externally available in textbooks and on the internet must also be internally available in the students' brains. And then they must be assessed as smart or stupid based on how much they internalise.

So what happens when the chip becomes reality? When all that information is already internal? What would our education systems do then? What function would they perform, what role would they play? When there's nothing left to internalise, how would we educate our children?

The answer isn't tough. With every piece of information already available, whether externally in textbooks and on the internet or internally in a chip, we must teach our children WHAT TO DO WITH THAT INFORMATION. Let's take some examples:

Imagine a Grade 3 class reading a story. Every student in the class has the textbook open in front of her, and the story is also available on the chip. The teacher reads the story out loud, and then has students repeat the story line by line after her. After every paragraph, the teacher pauses and asks her students, "Understood?" The class as a whole responds with a "Yessss, Misssss." The second reading of the story is completed in this manner. Now, time to test the students. Question 1: What was the lion's name? Students think about the question and the chip transfers the name into their brain: Shera. They all respond with the correct answer: Shera. Question 2: What did the lion do when he saw the mouse? Students think about the question and the chip tells them: He growled angrily. Correct again! The students answer all the questions correctly! Have they understood the story?

Question 11: Why did the lion growl angrily? The chip doesn't know. The chip can simply relay information; it can't reason and form opinions. Silence in the classroom. Have they understood the story? Did the teacher teach them what to do with that information?

Another example: Students in Grade 8 read a history chapter on World War II. A week later, they are tested on it. Question 1: When did WWII begin? Chip says 1939. Question 2: When did WWII end? Chip says 1945. Question 3: Who were the Allies? Chip says Great Britain, France, United States, China, and the Soviet Union. Question 4: What is Hitler's autobiography called? Chip says Mein Kampf. The students answer all the questions correctly! Have they really understood one of the biggest events of recent history?

Question 9: How would World War II have progressed if Stalin hadn't risen to power? The chip doesn't know. The chip can simply relay information; it can't synthesise information and analyse it critically to form a hypothesis. But can at least the students, the human beings in the classroom, do that? No, because they were never taught what to do with that information.

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Thousands of edtech companies flourish by creating products loaded with information, hoping to replace teachers with their gizmos and gadgets. But what happens when we reach the absolute peak of this trend, when all edtech is replaced by a chip in the head? When that bubble finally bursts and we're a world full of people with instant access to unlimited information (aren't we already?), will we then finally acknowledge that education needs human beings, human conversations, processes beyond memorising and reciting? Will we finally acknowledge that educating another human being is the toughest job there is, because there are no videos or apps that can automatically make us people who can recognise our biases and question our assumptions, who can empathise and synthesise and form our own opinions. Will we, with the chip of limitless knowledge in our brains, finally acknowledge that information is worthless if we don't know what to do with it?

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