I’ve been doing some thinking on learning lately. I’ve been doing some travel nursing again. Not too far away from home: about an hour fifteen north of Merced in Sonora, CA. It’s been a wholly wonderful experience: not just the lovely coworkers and appreciative patients, or the beautiful drive through the country, which I always seem to forget about. I love the silvery grasses, that truly shine and shimmer: I haven’t seen anything quite like it elsewhere in the world. I was talking with a friend about it recently and he agreed. It’s a little swathe of country that few seem to appreciate.
I had to do some quick learning on the go. As medical technologies continue to advance, I was all of the sudden seeing patients with medicines and pumps and drains that I hadn’t seen before. I seem to thrive on this kind of challenge, because I found it fun and exhilarating. I saw something new, and asked other nurse colleagues and my supervisor what they thought the salient points were about each device, and supplemented that with an internet search of the manufacturer’s instructions.
I had one lovely patient in particular. We ended up seeing each other several times a week for a few months, so you naturally get to talking about life in general and all sorts of topics. He was a truly adorable older gent, almost always in shorts and suspenders. I asked him about his work life. He fixed big trucks and machinery. I asked him how he learned to do that? He said “some old fella taught me the trade”
This is something that is, practically speaking, almost extinct from our modern society. Trust me, I am all for modernization, standardization, safety, and uniformity of practice. But think about how the shift away from apprenticeships towards standardized community college training for skilled trades, and think about what that means for our society and brains.
We no longer have these community connections. The generational knowledge preserved in a textbook if lucky, lost to the winds otherwise. The nature of our learning and our society has so fundamentally shifted. And shifted away from the personal. The connection. The eye to eye. The hands-on, and the resulting ownership, responsibility, and community relationships are practically speaking,
In their place, young people go to a community college or pay for a specialty trade school, and end up with a certificate with their name on it. They input this information into an electronic resume, and are then thrown into the working world, sink or swim.
Is it any wonder then that young people are entering the workforce in a state of high anxiety, armed with only theoretical knowledge? And often without the interpersonal skills required for excellent customer service? Never having actually answered a phone or greeted and welcomed someone into a space? Many couldn’t begin to conceptualize a healthy mentor relationship, because this is not modeled in the teacher-classroom setting.
We’ve lost something very fundamental, immediate, connecting. We’ve lost interpersonal touch in a very real way. And so many are suffering because of it.
Probably a decade ago, I came across an Atlantic Monthly article about how the ability to google anything at any moment was already fundamentally changing the way we learn as a species. Think about it: we used to have to think fundamentally differently if we had a question. First of all, we had to hold in our minds for a lot longer before finding an answer.
Do you remember having a question, and consulting an paper encyclopedia collection at your house, or the house of a friend or relative? Or, having a question, and actually going to a library to look up a book that would answer it? And if it was Sunday and the library was closed, can you even imagine at this point holding the question in your mind, waiting for the library to open on Monday, and actually going and asking a library assistant in-person where you might find the answer to your question in the rows and rows of physical books on the shelf?
So many people today have never gone to the front desk of a library to ask a verbally ask a question to a live person. Why would they? When the device in your pocket can give... some kind of answer...
Or, simply think about asking around with friends, family and acquaintances to find answers to questions you used to have? This makes me think about how instant internet information has actually eroded trust in the knowledge base of those in our immediate community. How many of us no longer trust information casually asked for in person? How much more do you trust what google serves you? This is shifting in real time, as google AI serves us increasingly questionable material, and people are noticing. But I would argue that the needle is still firmly in the “distrust your neighbors and acquaintances territory” What a fundamentally sad and disconnected world we now find ourselves in.
I really do feel like the immediate gratification angle to all this is chiefly to blame in harming our ability to retain knowledge. And I feel strongly that the lack of interpersonal connection, mentorship, and looking a live person in the eye while having a real dialogue is bankrupting us in ways that will only come more into focus over time.
I’m heartened to see people finding increased value in physical media, like books, CDs and vinyl. Film cameras. And in in-person meetups and gaming. Will it be enough?
