The Changing Value of Information

Why do we learn new things? Interest or curiosity. Somebody else tells us to. It serves some sort of a purpose in our lives. It’s needed for survival.

The part we struggle with in schools is what we tell kids they need to know. If it's interesting to them, they'll learn it anyway. If it fills a meaningful purpose, they'll probably learn it anyway. But just because the curriculum says so is a much harder thing to convince a student to go along with.

For the most part, the content that gets taught in schools has not meaningfully changed over time. We have changed emphasis, language, sequencing, outcomes, and sometimes the tools students use. We have added things like digital literacy, Indigenous perspectives, media literacy, coding, financial literacy, and more explicit attention to critical thinking. But the core academic structure is quite stable: reading, writing, arithmetic, science, social studies/history, and then progressively more specialized versions of the same subjects.

Kindergarten through Grade 8 is generally where foundational skills are taught. While I absolutely believe that there is room to question what we're teaching and why at those levels too, I think there is a far more profound change that needs to be made at the high school level.

High school is where we need to seriously question how easy access to information has changed what we teach and why we teach it. If the student is using AI to write the 500-word history essay for them, the question is why?

It's easy to just say they are lazy. But if we go back in time, who were the kids that traditionally didn't write essays or had somebody write it for them? Why was that happening then? We never actually fixed the underlying problem. Now that it's getting easier to get the essay written, the problem is just more obvious.

Does the student have the skills to successfully write the essay themselves to begin with? Is the student just not interested in the topic and therefore wants to avoid the essay? How do we resolve boredom in the classroom? How do we make sure kids have the skills or have access to the help that they need to be successful in the classroom?

One problem calls for instruction, scaffolding, practice, and support. The other calls for reconsidering the task itself, the topic, the purpose, the audience, or how much choice the student has.

What is the purpose of the essay? Regurgitation is boring. Writing for the sake of writing is also boring. Checking a box on a list of outcomes may be meaningful to you as the teacher, but has no value to the student.

What is the value to the student in learning the information? If the information is easily accessible anytime, anywhere, then we have to question how that affects a student's desire to learn, write about, or memorize the information.

Why is this being taught? Nice to know? Needed to function as an adult in the world? Somebody decided it was important in 1980 because walking to the library was inconvenient?

There are things worth knowing even when the information is easily accessible because knowledge provides context, judgment, cultural literacy, pattern recognition, and the ability to evaluate new information. You cannot critically assess everything from a completely empty head. But that still does not justify every fact currently sitting in every curriculum.

It's time to reconsider the value and importance of the information we're teaching. As technology makes it easier for students to avoid assignments, schools have the difficult job of determining what's still important and what's not, while finding ways to keep students engaged in a world where information is increasingly cheap.

Why is information cheap?

Easy access to anything makes it less expensive. That works in retail. It works in manufacturing. Mass-produced anything is generally cheaper. The Internet and AI have made information something that is mass-produced.

It’s not a question of whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing. It simply is, and that’s the part we just have to get okay with. We can’t go back to the world where information was hard to get. That’s like trying to convince people that we should stop streaming and go back to 8-track tapes and Walkmans. It’s not going to fly. The nostalgia will continue to exist, but the world has forever changed.

So how do we renegotiate learning and education around cheap, mass-produced information? Or how do we convince kids that cheap doesn’t mean unimportant?

A can of beans is cheap, but that doesn’t make food unimportant. A pair of socks can be cheap, but it doesn’t make clothing unimportant. The two things can coexist. It also provides a useful lens. What parts of the curriculum are still important even though the information itself may be easy to get?

Our individual valuation of importance is not what matters. If you don’t like beans, it doesn’t matter that they are cheap; you’re not going to buy them anyway. But that doesn’t mean nobody else likes them or needs them. A love of a given subject or topic doesn’t necessarily mean the information is more or less valuable or needed by anybody else.

In my opinion, there are specific criteria for determining what makes information important.

We can all think of plenty of topics in the curriculum that we never used again outside of the classroom we learned it in. That matters in a world where information is easy to get because it increases the likelihood that students will use AI to get around the assignments. They already know, as we did when we were their age, that the information would be of little value in the long run.

“When am I ever going to use this?” is one of the most valuable questions we can ask when determining what information matters in education and what doesn’t. “I might need it in university or college” isn’t good enough anymore. Post-secondary institutions have an obligation to teach the skills that are not important until that specific degree/diploma/certificate is wanted or needed. That information includes a certain amount of high school history/social studies, math, language arts, and science.

We can no longer assume that a student will graduate high school, choose a career, and stay on that path for the next 40 years. Kids often graduate high school with no idea of what they will do with their lives. I tell my own kids to make a 5-year plan. They just need to be doing something. It doesn’t have to be permanent. If they try enough things, eventually the breadcrumb trail leads to a possible long-term career option that makes new knowledge valuable.

High school needs to lead from that same place. Expose kids to as much information as we can without requiring them to memorize and regurgitate all of it. Teach for interest. Teach for a love of learning instead of mastery of every subject area, and then let students decide what they want to continue learning about.

All information can have value, even information we aren't particularly interested in. The interests students already have are valuable too. We can build on them. But not if we're stuck teaching something that happened 100 years ago simply because “everybody needs to know the history of our country.” That isn't enough of a reason on its own. In fact, it may be a very good reason for a disengaged student to get AI to write the essay.

That doesn't mean history isn't important. It means history needs to be learned in context and without the inflated valuation we sometimes give it simply because it has traditionally been part of the curriculum.

Yes, it's important. But not knowing a particular historical fact probably isn't going to dramatically change the course of most students' lives either. Both things can be true. And we need to be able to hold both ideas at once when deciding what students genuinely need to know in a world where information gets cheaper and easier to access every day.

Discuss...