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Last year, Gary Kasparov wrote an illuminating article entitled “The Chess Master and the Computer.” In this article, Kasparov discusses how the computer has changed chess, and, more importantly, how it changed the way people learn chess:
The availability of millions of games at one’s fingertips in a database is also making the game’s best players younger and younger. Absorbing the thousands of essential patterns and opening moves used to take many years….. Today’s teens, and increasingly pre-teens, can accelerate this process by plugging into a digitized archive of chess information and making full use of the superiority of the young mind to retain it all. In the pre-computer era, teenage grandmasters were rarities and almost always destined to play for the world championship. Bobby Fischer’s 1958 record of attaining the grandmaster title at fifteen was broken only in 1991. It has been broken twenty times since then, with the current record holder, Ukrainian Sergey Karjakin, having claimed the highest title at the nearly absurd age of twelve in 2002.
This is a great example of the effects a superior process can have on its surroundings.
The concept displayed here is incredibly important. But let’s think bigger than chess. Here’s the question I’ve been asking for several years: Is there a superior learning process that can be applied to many knowledge areas? and what tools would be needed?
After thinking on this long and hard, I’m convinced there is.
A few thoughts on the implications and necessity of answering these questions:
- Our education system is broken. It hasn’t changed in a hundred years. And yet the world is very different. Our education system reflects a widespread lack of understanding of human learning (well, and many things really….)
- Computers have changed what we need to learn, and they’ve changed how we can learn. We’re absolutely flooded with information. The challenge is managing this information, gaining the necessary meaning from it, and using it to make better decisions. Information is becoming less and less of a bottleneck. This creates tremendous opportunity. But, it’s clear that accessibility to a wealth of information alone doesn’t solve the problem of making meaning and making better decisions.
- The world’s challenges are more complex and require a greater level of technical understanding. What sort of impact would a better learning process have on our governance system? and our ability to effectively use government to our advantage?
- And beyond all this, how many things do you want to learn right now ?! People are beginning to focus more on life-long learning, and I think have a growing interest in personal improvement. People don’t want to live lives of drudgery and want to break out of the daily grind. Right now, I have a laundry list of things I want to learn and skills I’d love to master one day. I bet you do too.
If you have any thoughts on this topic, I’m all ears.
-Kevin
1.29.2011
