Global Consciousness

Listening to Howard Gardner is like the modern equivalent of the 1960s psychedelic era. These days he is touting his vision of global consciousness and how it should be nurtured in students. Everyone should have a working knowledge of how the world works, he says. Everyone should have access to the Internet and make use of it. Socioeconomic competencies and flexible skills, that's the way to go.

Well, he's right. But there is one small problem which we need to grapple with. How long does it take the billions of the world's population to transit successfully from one mindset to another? In the old days, you could sequester populations because travel was not easy. The technology gap could be steadily exploited and one population could dominate another that way.

The problem now is not a wide technology gap in the sense of how we navigate physical space. The old days of ships and planes as conduits for information are largely done, except for courier services and packages from Amazon and other niche areas. The problem now is a wide technology gap in the sense of how we navigate cognitive space.

This gap is an oscillating one. As the world progresses at its current pace, everyone will eventually have broadband access. Technological development is so rapid that whole societies can jump forward in time, from landline phones with plug-in exchanges to broadband wireless in five years. But the human cognitive gap is unpredictable.

These days, I struggle with Google and all the other paraphernalia of modern Internet life. Don't get me wrong: I've lived more than half my life on the Internet and I'm not that bad for an old fogey. The searchable infosphere makes information retrieval so much easier than it used to be. Everyone can now call up expert help. But the skills required to determine the validity, reliability and utility of the information are harder and harder to teach. There seems little point in constructing an excellent bullshit detector only to have it fail under the sheer weight of the ox-dung.

It leads to some sort of anomie in which people don't want to memorise anything because the information is always out there.

Somehow, the idea that having the data in your head for processing is faster than getting online to retrieve it has not quite sunk in. About the only area where this is too obvious to avoid is what I call art-form physicalities: things like dancing, fencing, sculpture—the more tactile and physical arts. You can't plan your next move online in such things yet, or if you can (as in some of the graphic or language arts), you will still not be able to compete with the mercurial power of the human instinct.

You can have the whole Library of Congress online, but the skill required to research a topic and mould it into something that will influence others is as elusive as the attempt to pin down an approach that will work for everyone. You can have the entire history of the world online, only to discover that it comprises many histories, and it's difficult to tell which ones are more reliable than the others, and where.

These are the limitations that Gardner and gang are trying to address. But I suspect that every school and every individual must craft their own approach to knowledge. Now that we're all drowning in data, the issues we need to deal with are far more complex than they used to be. The questions still sound the same though: What is truth, and where can we find it? If we think it's true, what do we do with it? And how can we communicate this truth, this quicksilver ephemeral thing, to someone else?