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> This parent is wrong, and the teacher is also wrong. There is no reason for children to use a source like Wikipedia for anything. Exactly. To oversimplify,
by tablespoon 4y ago
> This parent is wrong, and the teacher is also wrong. There is no reason for children to use a source like Wikipedia for anything.
Exactly. To oversimplify, the correct advice has two parts: 1) don't use Wikipedia, 2) use these better sources instead. The teacher is wrong because they're apparently forgetting the second part, but the parent is also wrong because missing that doesn't make Wikipedia a good source.
IMHO, a pretty good lesson for schoolchildren is: quality information usually takes some effort to access, and information that's easily accessible is probably bad. That's because quality is usually expensive, so free very often takes shortcuts on quality or injects an agenda.
- mountainb 4y agoCorrect. If the children are going to get any value from the many, many hours spent in a school, why not use the library resources that the school pays vast fees to maintain access to (public, private, AND parochial all pay for these things), which require actual skills to be developed to use effectively? Why should the teacher earn a salary for telling children to type into a text box? A computer could do the job of telling kids to "search Wikipedia" for less money, but a teacher can be more helpful to train students in the core academic skillset that is formal research. Why do we look at the state of affairs in which undergraduates even at "elite" schools arrive to universities completely unprepared to use any academic-caliber library research tools and consider that acceptable?