Cyber Age of Education

When I am asked to look back at my education, I come to realize that my generation is participating in a changing segment in the history of education. Starting school from pen and paper, my generation has gone through the period when education was about static textbooks and handwritten papers but we are now in the movement toward a new cyber age. We have come from a history where religious and ethnic culture played a major influence in education but now our advancing technologies shift the major contributors to computers and electronic media. In this shift, there have been techniques in education that work, however not all of them have succeeded.

At the start of our lives, our parents decided where our education would begin. The type of institution we attended was out of our control: whether it was Jewish or Catholic school, or secular public school, our parents decided how we would start our education based on their own religious beliefs. Looking at our early institutions, we see how important religion was in our early education. Parent’s fell back on their faith of religion for the future of their children. In retrospect however it is questionable how much this push into a religious environment affected our religious beliefs now. Some of us have been positively pulled into religion while others have been repulsed by it.

Despite what type of institution we attended, the methods in educating students have constantly been improving. In middle school, I recall my teacher telling my class that our generation is learning faster and more than she herself learned at our age. Her statement reflects how refined our system has become in that we are able to learn more in a shorter amount of time. Teachers are more efficient now, and stud...

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... huge resource for those who take their own initiative for learning. The problem with self-education however is certification. Student’s who learn on their own may have the same level of knowledge however they do not receive a certificate that indicates their proficiency in the field.

In the transition from our old styles of learning to our developing cyber network of education, there have been both positive and negative techniques in education that work. There has been a huge increase in the efficiency of education through developing technologies and we are able to communicate with each other faster than ever before. However, though we have our vast amounts of information, our ability to assimilate the information is still most efficient through inquiry and one-on-one training. The personal interactions between students and teachers promote the best learning.