Dear LPG, 

During the last bank holiday, I was visited by the whole family, which was chaotic but also a day that I would not have missed for the world in equal measure. When things got a bit louder than I can handle. I left them all downstairs and went for a bit of a quiet half hour, but there is nowhere to hide when they are all there at the same time. 

My oldest granddaughter searched me out in the end, and when she found me, we had a nice quiet chat about this and that which was much more calming.  She is involved with the business of preparing for her GCSEs at the moment and she was busy telling me about all the online research involved and how long it was taking.  

All that exam talk got me thinking back to that time in my life, although I could only think about how much longer it took the students of the 1960s to do the same thing.   I was never an exceptional student, but I remember when we relied on books and I tried to explain how much longer finding the facts that way took.   In one way, I envy her being able to find exactly what she is looking for without having to read pages of other information to get there, but perhaps we earlier students learned a lot of other things along the way.   

All that talk of learning got me wondering what the student of tomorrow will be stressing about.  I can imagine that, by the time she has grandchildren, basic methods of studying will have changed radically.   

Perhaps the idea of cramming for exams and memorising information will be overtaken by instant access to knowledge. All those future youngsters will have to do is look things up on the internet on a ‘need-to-know’ basis. 

I can imagine a future in which passing an exam depends less on what you can remember and more on how effectively you can find the answers you need online when you need them. There is now so much information available that even the minds with the largest data-retention capabilities would struggle to hold all the knowledge required for a single subject, let alone broad general knowledge. 

After our chat, we went back to the pandemonium downstairs, but I could not help thinking that perhaps my speculation on the subject was a bit far-fetched, but I remember how mad people thought I was when, in 1989, I thought I could see a 2010 world when nearly everyone would have a mobile phone…  


GK, Surrey