Sara Scribner on LATimes talks about Saving the Google students where she says that not teaching kids how to sift through sources is like sending them into the world without knowing how to read. Thus, for the google generation, closing school libraries could be disastrous.
The current generation of kindergartners to 12th graders — those born between 1991 and 2004 — has no memory of a time before Google. But although these students are far more tech savvy than their parents and are perpetually connected to the Internet, they know a lot less than they think. And worse, they don’t know what they don’t know.
As a librarian in the Pasadena Unified School District, I teach students research skills. But I’ve just been pink-slipped, along with five other middle school and high school librarians, and only a parcel tax on the city’s May ballot can save the district’s libraries. Closing libraries is always a bad idea, but for the Google generation, it could be disastrous. In a time when information literacy is increasingly crucial to life and work, not teaching kids how to search for information is like sending them out into the world without knowing how to read.
While she is not suggesting us that Google is making us stupid, it does talk impact of it on abilities and thinking
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