Wikipedia and Education

As I've been helping my younger brother with homework, I was thinking about how the world around us changes whereas the education system has a hard time to catch up and adapt.

Certainly when my parents were growing up, and to some degree when I was in school, just finding information for, say, a history project, was quite an undertaking. You had to search and read through books in your school library, and then perhaps find some specific books in a larger regional library, and work to assemble those pieces into some body of work. Perhaps you even interviewed an older member of the family or a friend if he/she had some relation to the events. An those skills of gathering information were indeed quite relevant in the world.

Nowadays, give a class an assignment on, say, The Declaration of Independence, and many of the works you get back might be different variations of the same Wikipedia article. One the one hand, this is quite understandably frustrating to the teacher, who sees how little effort and thought was put into the work. One the other, I don't think the pupils are to blame here. 

The world has changed - the internet brings us a wealth of sources and information on any topic we wish to research, and students should be taught different skills - not of gathering anew information which is already out there but of filtering the relevant findings and analyzing them for insights or distilling the essence of an idea. 

Here is an approximate assignment from a while ago (in Geography class) that I think was an excellent example - "Image you are a travel agent and a client (a family, an elderly couple, a single traveler, etc...) comes and asks you to suggest a trip plan. Choose a destination and tailor a few days' trip to the client." This both gives the pupil freedom of choice as well as requires independent thought - you have to think what kind of trip plan you are preparing (walking outside vs going to museums...), research the country for attractions as well as distances and reduce all the possibilities to some logical plan that combines interesting locations and is achievable in the chosen time frame.

It will however take some time for this change to take place more widely. First, because it is much easier  for teachers to continue teaching the same way they are used to. And second, once each assignment is individual per student - there is no standardized answer sheet, like in a multiple choice exam, where the answers can be checked quickly. Rather the teacher has to evaluate each work on it's own, which takes more effort and dedication on his part.