Finals week

Winter has finally come to Sandy! A bit too little too late but that’s besides the point. WE HAVE SNOW!…Kind of… not anymore. Well it was fun while it lasted. But on to our topic.

So today’s post will be a bit different, it’s going out to all you students, middle school, high school, college or otherwise. I’m currently in the midst of finals week and thought that it might be fun to read you all in (aka. fill you in) on the topic for my last essay: The Starvation of the Mind.

A little pretentious I know, but it’s the truth.

All my life I have hungered after one thing; knowledge. Why is the sky blue? How do we know that’s true? What moves the waves or makes the sunlight warm? I believe that knowledge is something we all hunger after, whether we know it or not. We have millions of supposedly inconsequential questions circling through our minds on a daily bases. We are starving for knowledge, but when presented with the opportunity to learn we often shut off our enthusiasm for the unknown.

We live in an age where ease and availability have become the masters of our subconscious. Every random fact or pithy quote we were looking for pops up on our screen, ripe for the plucking. Google is making everything possible, and that’s not a bad thing! However, we students have a tendency to rely on it for those quick fixes. Its so much faster and easier to just do a quick Google search and BAM! the answer is right there. So then why is it that in an age of ease we don’t do more to learn?

I didn’t grow up with Siri or the internet, so unlike now I couldn’t just google what something meant, I had to go find it. I would search through encyclopedias, thesaurus’, dictionaries, scientific papers, and library databases just to find the answer to my question. Whether I was looking for the meaning of a word or the significance of a historical character, I worked hard to find the answer. Why? Because I was curious.

Curiosity has been the backbone of discovery since the dawn of time. How do birds fly? What’s beneath the water? Why are all these people getting sick? Throughout history questions have produced answers. So what happens when all the answers are at our fingertips? Complacency. We no longer have to put in any effort to receive an answer. The answer to every question we could ever ask is served to us on a silver platter, exactly how we want it. Maybe that’s the problem. Google’s creators, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, have proclaimed that they want “[to create] the perfect search engine, one that understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.”

Did you catch the “exactly what we want” part? How many people do you know that want to be contradicted? How many people do you know who want their beliefs disproven? If Google is giving us exactly what we want then how do we know that what they’re saying is the truth and not just another view of the facts through our tinted lens?

The answer: We don’t.

Unless we go out of our way to research contradicting point’s of view, we have almost no way of knowing if those “facts” we just read on the internet are, in fact, true.

We find our facts with the click of a button and never bother to check who wrote them. Why would it matter, its just an answer, right? We use the likes of Wikipedia for overviews of “Who was John Paul Jones?” “When did WW2 start?” and “Why is Ukraine at war with Russia?” with no idea of what the author actually knows. Wikipedia itself warns against blindly trusting it’s information, saying that “Wikipedia has been criticized for exhibiting systemic bias, for presenting a mixture of "truths, half-truths, and some falsehoods," and for being subject to manipulation and spin in controversial topics.” If they’re warning you about themselves, you know it must be bad.

Unfortunately, we bury our thirst for truth under deadlines and due dates, terrified that if we miss one thing that we will fall too far behind to ever catch up. Our lives have turned into a mechanical mirage of merely repeating information we’ve been told and then forgetting it all in an instant to be able to keep up with the overwhelming flow of homework and other daily activities. Why has it become so common for us to discount the importance of learning and of desiring that knowledge? We are no more then copy-cats, faking our way through school until someone hands us a diploma and we’re home free. LEARNING IS NOT SUPPOSED TO BE THIS WAY.

I have two younger cousins who live next door, the oldest just turned 9 and the youngest is 5. Despite my own love of learning, I have warned them time and time again that they will hate school, that learning boring. And suddenly I am seeing that my words are making an impact.

These little boys idolize me. I’m “cool” to them. And yet suddenly my words, the ones I spoke out of frustration or in jest, are wreaking havoc on their love of learning. The boys who once asked me the meaning of the word “anaphylactic” before they even knew how to pronounce it, or wanted to learn about imaginary numbers before they started preschool, now balk at the idea of learning anything outside of the classroom. To them, learning has become a chore. All I ever wanted was for my cousins to love learning and to be excited about whatever opportunities cross their path. Unfortunately, I see in them the complacency that plagues so many of us. It doesn’t matter what the answer is as long as we get the work done and turn it in. We have been taught to simply regurgitate the “facts” shoved down our throat and then move on. This has produced disastrous consequences.

We no longer care about the credentials of those who wrote the article, only that it aligns with our own beliefs, further strengthening our resolve in whatever preconceived idea we hold. Facts are not things that we should take someone else’s word on. They’re not directions to a well-known restaurant or memorizing the speed limit on a sign. Facts are things we check, we read about. Facts are not infallible. They are flawed and messy and If that is something that we don’t understand then the misapplication of facts or even socially skewed facts can turn us down a road that is harmful to us and those who come after us. Google is not God. It doesn’t know what is true and what is false.

If we let our hunger for knowledge be suppressed by the ease of Google, we suffer for it. Using a calculator instead of paper, Google instead of a Thesaurus, Facebook instead of a Newspaper, each and every choice we make affects our outlook on the world. We are constantly bombarded with half-truths and skewed facts, but it is how we scrutinize the sources we receive them from that will allow us to see clearly through the fog of uncertainty. We can’t afford to allow our discernment to be clouded by a false sense of security. We have an incredible opportunity to learn, a gift that many are denied. We have access to library databases, articles from respected journalists or renown scientists, and sometimes even access to the authors themselves!

Now I am in no way saying that Google is bad, but it is deceitful. Those library databases take way less time then thumbing through endless links to find the right thing, and you know that they’re reliable because they’ve been checked by those who have a desire for the truth. So guys don’t shut off your hunger for the truth. Don’t let deadlines and the incessant onslaught of information deter you from looking deeper into the facts you find on Google. Go to the libraries, email the authors, and search deeper into the facts.

Wishing you all a relaxing and non-stressful finals week.

Namárie,

~Vira