About a month later, we took a family trip down to Miami to see my wife’s parents, and my wife and I slept in the room where she grew up. Among the other keepsakes and collectibles (Pee-Wee Herman dolls, old Rolling Stone magazines), there was an encyclopedia. I had owned the same encyclopedia, and I paged through it with a mix of nostalgia and boredom.

Image Credit... Holly Wales

I looked up anacondas and then slid out the S volume to read a bit more about snakes. Did you know that most snakes only have one functional lung? I did not. Did you know that snakes are reptiles? Yeah, I did know that. What was most interesting about the research is what it did not tell me: the second-largest snake. I read fairly closely, but there was no search function, and I couldn’t just flip through the S volume to get to the entry for “Second-Largest.” What my son was able to do in 10 seconds, I was unable to do in 10 minutes.

When I was a kid, I did the same reports as my son. (I mean the same kinds of reports, of course — my body of work in elementary school included coruscating monographs on raccoons and airplanes and George Washington Carver.) If I had done an anaconda report, and my teacher had asked after the second-largest snake, I would not have simply turned, walked, typed and learned. I would have returned to the encyclopedia, and if the answer wasn’t there, I would have ended my investigation abruptly. Or maybe, if I was especially motivated, I would have gone to the library and checked out a book about snakes, but even that would not have been a guarantee. And so I would have most likely gone on with my life in third grade, and then fourth, faintly feeling the burr of the question in my brain, continually assessing how important it was to scratch that itch.

By supplying answers to questions with such ruthless efficiency, the Internet cuts off the supply of an even more valuable commodity: productive frustration. Education, at least as I remember it, isn’t only, or even primarily, about creating children who are proficient with information. It’s about filling them with questions that ripen, via deferral, into genuine interests. Each of my sons passes through phases quickly: one month they’re obsessed with marine life, the next with world flags. This is not so different from how I was (the ’70s was all about robots), but what is different is how much information they can collect, and how quickly they come to feel that they have satisfied their hunger.

Until recently, I have been entirely complicit in the Second-Largest Snake Problem. (By the way, the answer is the reticulated python.) When either of my kids has asked me a question, I have tried to answer or, if I could not, just looked it up. Google and I, as it turns out, know everything. But in recent weeks, I have begun playing dumb, saying that I don’t know and not offering to find out. Sometimes they’ll drop the question immediately, but sometimes they’ll persist, and I’m learning not to give in to the persistence but rather to ensure that the questions stay with them until they arrive at a point when they know nothing for certain except that they have questions they cannot answer so easily.