I think I might be part of a dying species.
I say this with the understanding that I may have already written about this previously, but the idea lives in my mind and seems to explain so many differences between the generation I was raised in and the one in which I am raising my children. I will start by staying that I was born in the age of Atari. I played pong when it came out. I remember my many phone conversations being centered around the kitchen wall where the phone lived, my orbit determined by just how far I could stretch the cord. I remember school being about memorization, procedural understanding, and depth of knowledge. I remember when kilobytes were a big deal.
I am no Luddite. I can program in multiple languages (some of which are outdated by now), and strip and build a computer the way military folk breakdown a rifle. Still, I come from an era where I thought about such things very differently. I come from an era where information was internalized and commoditized, where if you did not know something, you simply did not know it and had to locate someone who did or otherwise locate a library or similar location where that knowledge could be slowly absorbed.
Consider that world I am talking about. People knew things and studied them often to the point of at least a degree of specialization. Bob knows how to do X, I know how to do Y and together we can develop Z. We collaborated out of necessity, because carrying multiple forms of knowledge and multiple skillsets was a rare thing.
Today’s world is not at all about what you know. If I ask (or have) a question about anything I can run to the web for the published (and polished) response. I don’t have to be a portable internal library of information, because the portable library is sitting in my pocket, and it makes phone calls too! As a result, the type of knowledge this new species needs is about access and application. We are no longer expecting people to recite Shakespeare verbatim, but to know how to find any line of any given play and interpret that line in a way that is reflective of our needs at that moment.
Somehow I have to raise the new species and teach them along the way.