If you’re old enough to remember writing a grade-school paper using encyclopedias or the painstaking task of researching in a dingy library for a college paper, welcome to the land of being old. In today’s educational system, the encyclopedias gather dust and the libraries, well that’s just a place to study.
Is all this technology at our fingertips a good thing? Ask a fourteen year old to do some simple math. Ask him what 12 x 12 is. Most of us remember going over our multiplication tables until they were seared into our memory. A good share of fourteen year olds will ask you where the calculator is or reach for their phone to input the data before they produce an answer. That’s probably not a good thing.
On the other hand, rural locations like Mission, South Dakota, thrive on technology to offer their students more options during their high-school experience. With limited resources and a staff that doesn’t have an abundance of math and science teachers, students at Todd County High School are able to take Advanced Calculus from an instructor on a television monitor.
In many rural locations, foreign languages cannot be taught at some of these smaller schools. Many universities now require a student to have some foreign language as part of their acceptance to an institution of higher learning. Children at Todd County High School can take foreign language via satellite or with online learning methods that ensure they have the same skill set as their peers when they enter high school.
It seems a common thread of a good education is to be able to put what you’ve learned to use as a real application in the real world. If you’re not going to be working in a world of numbers, not knowing how to do simple math in your head probably won’t be a problem.