Dude!  I just saw Uncle Phil on TV again!!

Holy Crap!  I mean, I never actually liked The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and couldn’t wait for it to be over back whenever I had to show it when I used to work in television, but man was it neat to see Uncle Phil again.  (The only thing I really liked off of that show was the stellar, incomparable acting of DJ Jazzy Jeff.  Man, he was awesome.)  No I never really liked his character, Uncle Phil’s character that is, Jazzy Jeff was awesome.  But Uncle Phil was too… professional.  Too much of a Ward Cleaver or an Andy Taylor type of sitcom dad and not enough of a Dr. Cliff Huxtable for my tastes.  Way too knowing and wise without nearly enough wacky sweaters or pudding pop endorsements. Perhaps if he had had a successful stand-up comedy career prior to and following Jazzy Jeff’s triumphant domination of the television airwaves I would have been a bigger fan.  Oh well.

In fact I only remembered the guy  because I saw him just now.  He was on another pretentious, pandering commercial for a “school for working adults.”   St. Michael and the Angels, I love those things!

Of course, just like Uncle Phil said in the commercial, the educational system has failed you.  It isn’t your fault you are failing in life, it is the educational system.  They just haven’t recognized your talent.  That is the problem.  And now that the educational system recognizes that they are going to fix things.  The solution is on the way and that solution is technology.

Yes!  Now through the power of the information age you will no longer fail to understand things because now instead of having to sit through classes you can just go online and watch the.  Now instead of handing in papers you can email them.  And the best thing about it is that you can do all of this whenever you want.  And that is the key to learning.

See you may have thought that the key to learning was gaining understanding but it is not.  The key to learning and practical knowledge is doing a series of assigned tasks over a period of time.  It is kinda like an assembly line.  That is why we have an educational system set up where we all learn one set of things over a period of a year, then another set of things over the period of a year, and so on.  Because learning is like an assembly line.  The road to understanding is to work through a process.

That is why you can go take a class with hundreds of other students whom you may not even see because you are online and work through a text or study guide while listening to lectures and gain understanding about a subject.  You can even be graded by a Scantron to prove that you gained understanding because understanding is born from having covered and retained material and nothing more.  And when the Scantron says you have gained covered the material then of course you are prepared to utilize it and be certified as such.  There really isn’t even a need for teachers because really the only way to understand is to review material. I even begin to wonder why we have teachers at all.

I mean of course there would be a reason for them if gaining understanding wasn’t just a process that could be applied with assembly line systematization but rather was a personal journey that can require different types of effort and different lengths of time but always required someone who already had understanding guiding and leading the individual all along the way to understanding.  If that was the case then of course the teacher who guided the pupil through study would be necessary because they and others like them would be the only ones who could determine if the student really understood what they studied and had talent in the field or was just marking time and doing assignments just the way they were told so they could get the highest grade possible.

But that can’t be.  We have the World Wide Web and that proves that understanding can be transmitted seamlessly through a computer.  This blog proves it every week.

Right?

-Bob

Share and Enjoy!: