I saw someone describe the Millennial generation, especially those of us born in the 1980s, as living with an analog childhood transitioning into a digital adulthood. I was reminded of this again today at the library.
Source image by kdavis25 from Pixabay
I spent a lot of time reading. I was home-schooled through most of my education, and we had both a home library and access to public libraries. My family also owned a set of World Book encyclopedias, and I learned early on how to use an index to find answers. I also learned how to use the dictionary to learn definitions and pronunciations of unfamiliar words.
I only had limited television through a basic antenna, and never owned the classic NES/SNES/Sega consoles of the era. My dad had an IBM clone PC, and I played edutainment games like Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego and Super Solvers: Outnumbered! However, those physical encyclopedias were part of finding answers to the game clues for WITWICS. I also remember when the hottest software included CD-ROM multimedia encyclopedias and how they were often less useful than a regular book in spite of the hype.
With that in mind, I hope you can understand the mix of amusement and contempt I felt when a kid resisted the idea of looking up the answer to a trivia challenge today without a computer or mom's smartphone. The home country of a famous classical musician is easy to find. The minor effort of opening a big reference book was just too much for this kid, though.
I suppose I could use this as an excuse to claim all of Generation Alpha is lazy, but the simple fact is these kids were born in the digital age. They often have tablets before they can read, and the only access they may have to books at all is at a library. Being ignorant can be remedied, and learning new skills is never easy. I can also look back the other direction and recognize I don't know how to do things that were commonplace in the more mechanical world just a couple generations before mine. Tuning a carburetor is almost completely obsolete in the automotive world today, for example.
I think this incident is better used as an opportunity to encourage everyone to learn both new and old skills. The more diverse your skill set, the better you can adapt to change or overcome obstacles you encounter. Old technology is not necessarily obsolete. The most important skill you can ever learn is how to continue learning. Education is a lifelong process, not something that ends with a degree.
