I had an interesting conversation yesterday with my brother about information. He made a comment about how much easier it is for today’s kids to access information. Every little detail they need to know is available on their phone. If they want to know anything they google it. When most of us have a question, we google it. Who scored the winning goal in the All Ireland Final in 1989, how many times has France won the World Cup, what is gnocchi? Google has helped with homework, provided valuable research material and settled numerous heated debates. But, as he pointed out, how good is the quality of that information?
We are all better informed and better educated than our parents were, and they were better educated than their parents before them. It is part of the human spirit to want more for our children than we ever had, to give them a better education, better opportunities in life. All parents can relate to that. As children, our information came primarily from books and television. When my eldest son was a toddler we invested in a set of Encyclopaedia Britannica books. They cost so much that we had to buy them on HP, but we thought we were investing in his future. The information age quickly overtook us, and the books became redundant before he ever got to use them. Nowadays our children gather their information primarily from the internet, through their phones, through their laptops, through the family desktop. As parents, we have a duty to ensure that the information they are accessing is age-appropriate, accurate, and educational. We need to understand that not every article published on the internet is truthful or accurate. We need to educate our children to this indisputable fact.
It’s nothing new. History has always been written by the winner. The viewpoint of the writer will always have a certain bias no matter how hard that writer attempts to tell both sides of the story. That is human nature. And there is nothing wrong with it. As long as we are aware of that.
We are extremely fortunate to live in the information age. We just need to learn how to disseminate the information available to us. Read widely. Discuss. Debate. Particularly with our children. They are our future. We want them to be well-educated, smart, compassionate but most of all, we want them to be good people. And they won’t get that from the internet, or from a book.
Mariamac 