Uladzimir Matskevich: Why attend lectures, if one has all the knowledge in the world in a pocket?

photo by EuroBelarus Information Service

When do professors treat their students as dupes? And what for one should spend the best years on university that doesn’t change anything within a person?

On September 17 a lecture of Uladzimir Matskevich, the head of the Board of the International Consortium “EuroBelarus”, a philosopher and a methodologist took place in the open in Minsk.

“A world before the eyes. And what it means for education” – is a first in a cycle of lectures that are to be held within the frames of a new academic year in the Flying University. The lecture plunged the audience into the times when the world was still free from the Internet and made them question their diplomas.

A device with the mobile Internet is the whole world on a palm. But what about being a student before the Internet, Wikipedia, and iPhones were invented? Why go to university if a diploma doesn’t guarantee social takeoff? We publish the most interesting moments from the lecture of the philosopher.

- Everything that can be placed on a palm or in a pocket we had back in the 70s, too, though at that time it was heavy and big. And one could only make up such thing as iPhone in human engineering.

At that time there wasn’t Silicon Valley or Jobs, who assembled the first personal computer in a garage, but the idea of it already existed.

In the mid 70s a dream about a typewriter that combines with the TV and telephone and can send inquiries to the library of the British Museum or the US Congress was fiction that couldn’t possibly come into our lives. But it engraved upon my heart very strongly, and I decided to get acquainted with not reality, but with a dream.

But I didn’t get a permission to leave the country, so I wasn’t included in the era of computerization and internetization until it started. Nevertheless, in ten years I got my first computer and Internet, even though the access was poor. I didn’t expect that this dream, developed to a device on my palm that can access the whole world, would come true soon.

- But with all that we don’t have an opportunity to influence the events reflected on the screen of a device, as having developed information medium to such high level, the humanity now has to defend itself from not very clever people who still might get power to control the object.

So, together with the extension of the channel of information we are deprived of possibility to interfere into the processes on the screens of our smartphones, iPhones, and tablets. Isn’t it annoying?

Take the war in Ukraine. Millions of people would like to stop it; but giving a possibility to know everything that happens in Ukraine, a smartphone still deprives us of a possibility to control it.

We get some information about it, but not the complete picture. And people make absolutely different conclusions about the events in Ukraine, which might even be shocking for each other.

- One could try to control this world through knowledge, influencing this knowledge. But can we do that, and do we have such ambitions – influence the knowledge?

Why attend lectures, if one has all the knowledge in the world in the pocket? No one in the university will allow you to control the studied subject. Before you start influencing it, you have to get permission – a diploma, a certificate, and so on. And even it doesn’t guarantee that you won’t do harm with your interference.

- When I was studying, it was hard to study – you had to spend time in libraries and make efforts. Now, when it only requires several clicks with your fingers, the value of knowledge is changing, too.

Earlier a man of knowledge was recognized in the society; no anything like that happens no longer. A diploma costs almost nothing; so why go to university and to lectures? Everything can be acquired at the screen of a smartphone.

The answer is not in the information available, but in the changes you experience within yourself when getting one and the same knowledge through different channels.

If no changes within you happen, it means you lose your time in vain. Cynical it might sound, but almost all Belarusan lecturers know that. And that is why they treat you as complete dupes.

I.e. students pretend that they study and teachers pretend that they teach, unless a specific situation appears: a clash of people who want to change.

In the Flying University we have hard times explaining that there is no difference between the audience and the teachers. That is why we are always saying that the Flying University is not for students, who have been told since childhood that they get knowledge in educational institutes and lose the best time of their life in vain.

- So if people don’t establish specific connection aimed at mutual change, education is a simulation.

The meaning of today’s education is to give and pass knowledge that has lost much in their price. Inflation of education has reached such scale that it costs almost nothing. So we have to build some other form.

This form of education is for people who are not satisfied with only being proletarians, or consumers, or the office plankton, or a research worker and so on, but want to search for what they are, not merely fill in socio-templated cells.