Dad, Dad! He's looking up answers on his iPod!

So exclaims my 7-year old, running into the kitchen, eyes bright at the prospect of getting his older brother in trouble. His face fell as I asked why it was a problem for him to be looking up the answers to his history homework on the Internet. As I explained that it was OK to search for answers to questions on the Web, he walked dejectedly back to my laptop and harvested some more crops in Farmville. Clearly, the little guy was missing the point of the World Wide Web.

As I went about my business in the kitchen, I couldn't help but feel sad (and completely upset with myself as the technology director of his school district) that somewhere along the way he got the impression that Googling was somehow equivalent to cheating. Obviously, there are things that we should all be able to do without consulting the search engine of our choice. I want kids to not only know how to differentiate a function, but understand what those derivatives mean, both in terms of mathematical models and real-world situations. That sort of understanding comes from good teachers, good textbooks, and some actual practice by hand (as well as with a graphing calculator and any number of java applets for visualization); Yahoo! won't get you there.

Same goes for being able to write and communicate effectively. Googling "essays on Hamlet" and then using essays someone else wrote instead of interpreting the play and laying out their thoughts in clear, concise prose is cheating.

I want students to be able to easily manipulate fractions and have a pretty good sense of what it means to have an 1/8th of a tank of gas or why cutting our state sales tax in half would need to be balanced by revenue increases elsewhere. These are not skills with which Bing can help. However, why should our kids be asked to dig through pages of dead-tree textbooks for answers to questions that have been indexed, crawled, and organized so handily by search engines? Why is it less valid to Google "Major battles in California during the Mexican-American war" than to flip through pages looking for the paragraph that describes the Battle of Monterey or the Battle of Santa Clara? Savvy use of the Internet should allow students to quickly access facts and information and get on to the important questions that tap their higher-order thinking skills: What parallels can be drawn between the Mexican-American War and modern Israeli settlements in disputed areas of the Middle East? How do cultural divisions seen during the Mexican-American War still play out today in US immigration policy?

I don't care if my kids don't remember who Zachary Taylor or Stephen Kearny were. They can Google it if they ever really need to know. I care if they understand the sort of stage that events in American history have set for their modern lives. I care if they can make connections between the evolution of our country and where we might be headed. I care if they understand the broader issues of American politics and the historical and cultural contexts that brought us to a point where healthcare reform has already passed in their home state of Massachusetts, but remains locked in a stalemate in Congress. I care if they understand these issues well enough to make their own judgments. They can't Google critical thought.

My time (both as a parent and educator) needs to be spent ensuring that kids are immersed in an environment that fosters critical and higher-order thinking skills. It also needs to spent teaching those same kids to use the vast stores of data online effectively and sort the figurative wheat from the chaff of Internet search. These skills will serve them much better than the ability to flip pages skimming for bold print, wasting time digging up factoids that are a few keystrokes away.