Why Do I Need a Teacher When I’ve Got Google

source you read, the Tigris either ran red with the blood of the murdered scholars or black with ink from the books thrown into the river.
    Fast forward to the early roots of the current education system and you find that the teacher’s job is to take the fixed body of knowledge and pass it on. (The word ‘teach’ comes from the old Gothic word meaning ‘token’, 1 although ‘teacher’ didn’t emerge until around 1300 to denote the person teaching. Before it meant ‘index finger’. And while we’re in etymological mode, I find it curious to note that the word ‘pedagogue’ used to relate to the slave who escorted Roman children to school. 2 )
    The teachers were the educated ones, who had been to university, and whose job it was to drip feed the knowledge back into the community for whom the teacher was pretty much the only source of such knowledge.
    But then two interesting and related things happened to knowledge. Like an egg in a microwave, it exploded and went everywhere.
    What’s the most populous country on earth? Currently, as we have seen, China with 1,338,612,968 citizens. 3 But let me rephrase the question. What is the most populous
community
on earth? The answer, by a virtual mile, is the Internet with, as of 2009, 1,668,870,408 citizens. 4 That’s a growth of over 360 per cent in less than a decade and means nearly a quarter of the world’s population is online now. As you might expect, Africa scores lowest on the penetration rate with just 6.7 per cent of its population part of the Internet population, although, that said, it’s still a growth of nearly 1,360 per cent on the figures at the turn of the twenty-first century. Interestingly, the highest growth over that time is in the Middle East, returning nearly 1,650 per cent growth in Internet users (Arabic recently knocking Russia out of the Net’s top ten most widely used languages). 5
    And which region is top in terms of sheer weight of numbers of users? Asia, with over 700 million users.
    Governmental censorship notwithstanding, any one of those users can share knowledge with the other 1,668,870,407 at any time and instantly. And as the knowledge changes, as it surely will, the Internet and its community will update it instantly. Google ‘fellow’ Amit Singhal recently said, ‘Information is being created at a pace I have never seen before and in this environment, seconds matter.’ 6 As an example, it is said that the sequencing of the HIV genome took 15 years. The sequencing of the SARS virus genome took 31 days. According to the UK government’s
Digital Britain
report, 7 494 exabytes were sent around the word on 15 June 2006. That’s 494,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes and bear in mind that one exabyte 8 is the equivalent of 50,000 years of DVD quality video. In 2008, 210 billion emails were sent and, although 78 per cent of them were spam, that’s still a great deal of information moving about the world at practically instant speeds. In fact, it has been said that even if all but 1 per cent of what’s on the web is rubbish, the scale of the thing is such that it would still take you more than a lifetime to read it. Compare that with the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, first published between 1768 and 1771 (note how long it took to publish three volumes), and whose size:
    has remained roughly constant over the past 70 years, with about 40 million words on half a million topics.
    ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopædia_Britannica )
    How do I know this? Wikipedia, in a scholarly and properly researched entry, where the source of this fact is attributed, if you follow the link to footnote seven, to the 15th edition of the
New Encyclopaedia Britannica
. Whatever your views on the academic merits or otherwise of Wikipedia, it stands as a shining example of the democratization of knowledge. ‘To giveevery single person free access to the sum of all human knowledge’, is Wikipedia’s founder Jimmy Wales’s mission for it, yet it does more than that. It allows you to contribute to it. It gives your knowledge a voice. It releases the inner expert. You know about something. You can add your voice and share that knowledge with anyone anywhere and instantly, regardless of who you are. As the saying goes, ‘On the Internet, no-one knows you’re a dog.’ In the early days of Wikipedia, I met a geography teacher who was getting his class to contribute to the entry on their hometown. When one of the facts was challenged by the Wiki