The bigger problem is with the generational understanding of technology. Scores of authors and futurists have warned of the perils of increasingly rapid technological development -- an exponential explosion of new gadgets and social practices that would leave our current students behind the advances of more forward-looking societies. Well, that does not appear to be the case. Middle school students are born with the ability to text and manage social networking profiles with ease. The inherited instincts to run at the sound of a low growl are apparently being replaced by a proclivity to press buttons and multi-task streams of information.
The difficulty is not in keeping up with the future, but in keeping up with the past. In the United States, courses in History have been replaced by the examination of Social Studies - in an attempt to understand the importance of multiculturalism. While this is a noble goal, social networking is bringing multiculturalism into extinction. With the ability to chat and share files with humans all over the planet our students are forging common experiences that are quickly steering entire societies into a mono-cultural human experience. However, with the loss of History courses, major events in the past are disappearing from our own cultural fabric.
This is extremely evident in the physics textbook we are using. The acceleration of gravity at sea level on the earth, known as "g" is listed to be 9.81 m/s/s at three significant figures. After using this value to calculate distances, velocities and time in projectile motion scenarios, the textbook seeks to reinforce the student's understanding by asking questions about our moon. The gravitational acceleration value "g" on the surface of the Moon is 1.63 m/s/s. This leads to all sorts of questions about falling objects, projectile motion and forces on the Apollo Lunar Module used to safely deposit and remove humans from the Moon's surface. And that is where the importance of History lessons comes in.
When the Apollo 11 mission landed on the Moon in July, 1969, I was a 3-year old toddler that was watching the landing on our family's black and white television in my father's lap. I don't have vivid memories of my preschool years, but I most definitely remember that event. Ever since, refrigerator boxes were immediately converted into space ships, spare sheets of graph paper were strewn with designs for flying saucers, posters of images from the voyager probes adorned my bedroom walls and even my space shuttle models in college became visual props as I explained the Challenger disaster to my classmates. I was mortally wounded a few years back when one of my college freshmen asked a question concerning a problem on the final examination for my physics course -- "Dr. Weaver, what is a Lunar Module?"
Undeterred, I rephrased the question in subsequent versions of the exam to substitute "spaceship". But of course this year, the question came -- "Dr. Weaver, don't we need to know the length of the runway on the moon in order to calculate the answer to this spaceship problem?" I have to keep reminding myself that these college freshmen were born the same year the Challenger's replacement shuttle Endeavor made its maiden voyage, 30 years after we last visited the Moon.
As with all emergent system properties, success has to be continually achieved -- or the knowledge of that success gets stuck in the past. If the success is not memorialized, it is soon forgotten and ultimately treated as myth. That is why we celebrate important milestones in our culture -- birthdays, July 4th, Easter. As I write this, Space Shuttle Atlantis is orbiting the earth on its final mission. Shuttles Discovery and Endeavor are scheduled to make their final flights later this Fall. The International Space Station is scheduled to be defunded five years later in 2016. With all of the political genuflecting about high-technology jobs of the future I am flabbergasted by the lack of vision for manned spaced flight and the exploration of space. After our smart phones soon connect us through the use of automated real-time translation we can spend the time celebrating our mono-culturalism and debating the hoaxes perpetrated through the use of Hollywood sounds stages. But then again, perhaps we will choose to use our new-found collaboration tools to explore the heavens instead of fighting over the redistribution of finite resources here on the Earth.
