Watching my Grade 6 son do his homework today feels like watching a wizard cast spells. He types a three-word prompt, and an AI instantly synthesizes a century of history into a neat paragraph.
In my day, searching for an answer was a full-blown expedition. There were no shortcuts or digital assistants. Only towering, narrow racks of old books categorized by genre and subject. To find a single fact about the Roman Empire, we didn’t just click, we hunted. The library wasn’t a sleek app, it was an endless maze of towering racks overflowing with old books. We navigated every dusty rack, scanning titles until our neck ached.
The “Cloud” back then was just the layer of dust that hit our face when we finally pulled a heavy Encyclopedia Britannica off the shelf. It was a physical workout, we didn’t just learn history, we lifted it. If our library’s old edition said Pluto was a planet, then as far as our homework was concerned, it was a planet until the next decade’s printing arrived!
Today, my son processes more data in a second than I could in an entire weekend at the library. He has the ultimate superpower, but I’ll always have the edge in survival, because while he panics when the Wi-Fi drops, I’m still a veteran of the “Great Book Hunt,” a survivor of the era where the only way to download information was through a library card and a very strong pair of biceps.
Mrudusha Jithin (Parent of Dhyan Jithin Rajan 6-O)
