3. Life Without School: Learning in the HL World
In the beginning, human learning was limited to what could be accumulated in a single human brain in one lifetime. The invention of spoken language, then written language, then printing, and later, electronic communications media, incrementally expanded the human ability to accumulate and share knowledge among people and across generations. But all those innovations simply expanded the storage of information outside the human head; the basic processes of thinking, deciding and learning still were mainly confined within the skull.
Technology now is extending the learning process outside the human brain and into the environment. Tomorrow’s technology is quickly transforming the role of learning not only in human labor but in the economy as a whole.
Distance learning is an intermediate step toward a telelearning environment where distance, location, and attendance become arbitrary and largely irrelevant factors in learning. Basically, schools will be transformed from a centralized architectural and bureaucratic structure to a dispersed information and service channel. Technological opportunity and economic necessity will give the individual learner of any age at least as many choices of “schools” as the television audience now has of cable TV channels. For most adults and many youth, school will not be identified with any distinct building or location, but rather with a brand or franchise of media through which services are accessed. Home technology ── video, audio, computer, telephone ── is far more adroit at meeting diverse life cycle needs for entertainment, information, work, and learning than is the technology of conventional academic structures. And telelearning technology can help conserve the modern family’s scarcest resource, time.
Even to the extent younger children require custodial care in some central facility, those buildings no longer will contain simply a collection of classrooms. Rather, they will house a diversity of alternative services and programs, somewhat analogous to today’s shopping mall “food court” which provides, under one roof, a wide choice of menus and vendors to serve individual preferences and needs.
This imminent hyperlearning world, where learning and expertise are diffused everyplace and where people of any age and status may be engaged in learning anytime, makes the infrastructure of “schooling” irrelevant and even obstructive. Yet, as I noted at the beginning of this chapter, the inertia of language may lag for a while behind the sweeping reality of this technological transformation.
In the seventies it was trendy to define schools, colleges, or universities “without walls” to suggest a variant academic institution that was open to the real world. Like “distance learning” or “distance education” ── which imply that the telecosm is a mere adjunct to academia rather than a time bomb destined to blow it up ── other mongrel platitudes will burden us for a while with a vocabulary contrived to portray revolution as mere evolution: electronic classroom, embedded training, campus-free college, and a term I find particularly idiotic, “technology-based” teaching (as if talk and chalk, books and pencils and such are not technology). Bolder editorialists may begin to speak of classrooms without teachers, schools without classrooms, or ultimately even education without schools. But eventually it will become clear that the system break I identify with hyperlearning represents not merely a new form of “education” freed of this or that encumbrance, but a world freed of the encumbrance of education altogether.
While it may seem difficult to believe at the moment that “hyperlearning” or some other terminology will simply replace tweaked variations on the vocabulary of “education” by the early years of the twenty-first century, a precedent can be found in the automotive revolution at the beginning of the twentieth century.
In 1895, ten years after the invention of the increasingly popular “horseless carriage,” a Chicago newspaper offered a $500 prize (serious money) for a new name to indicate what the technology was, rather than what it was not. Suggestions ranged from “autowain” to “petrocar,” and the prize-winner was “motocycle.”
But by the turn of the century, it was the French term “automobile” which started to catch on, to the great consternation of the perspicacious New York Times, which condemned both the machine and its name in a January 3, 1899 editorial:
There is something uncanny
about these newfangled vehicles. They
are all unutterably ugly and never a one of them has been provided with a good
or even an endurable name. The
French, who are usually orthodox in their etymology if in nothing else, have
evolved ‘automobile,’ which being half Greek and half Latin is so near to
indecent that we print it with hesitation; while speakers of English have been
fatally attracted by the irrelevant word “horseless.”
All this angst was to no avail. A year later the Times acceded to the people’s choice and changed its index to cite horseless vehicles thenceforth as automobiles.[*]
However quaint it may seem in hindsight, there was and is nothing trivial about this kind of semantic struggle. In the case of the automotive revolution, the economic ── and hence political ── stakes could not have been greater. At the end of the last century, farmers represented over 40 percent of the U.S. workforce, and a majority of Americans lived on farms or in rural towns. The farmers themselves owned eighteen million horses and mules, and millions more such animals were used in transportation, the Army, mining, and other fields. Altogether there was at least one horse or mule for every four or even three people in the U.S. The horse and its offspring ate like, well, horses ── at least a quarter of the country’s cropland was used to provide them with fodder.
Over half of the American workforce at the time had a stake in the horse economy. So every time an automobile or truck or tractor replaced a horse or mule, it cost the farmer a consumer of two cash crops as well as some of the market for the animals he raised, and it threatened the livelihood of a host of blacksmiths, mule skinners, saddle and bridle makers, liverymen, veterinarians, and such. Not surprisingly, Farmers’ Anti-Automobile Leagues were among the political coalitions that formed to combat the dangerous machine.
So the ferment to replace “horseless carriage” ── implying an incomplete or deficient technology ── with “automobile” ── a term almost synonymous with “independence” ── was charged with political importance. As sociologist David Riesman once observed, words are not merely transitory objects, “they change us, they socialize or unsocialize us.”
”Hyperlearning” may not be the ultimate people’s choice to label the fabric of new technology that is making teachers and classrooms as archaic as buggy whips and horse collars. After all, as the Times’ current linguistic tribune, William Safire, may point out, the term obnoxiously commingles Greek and Old English etymology. Maybe “autowain” deserves a second look.
Whatever the words, it is inevitable that, as the HL revolution unfolds, a sufficiently potent public before long will seize on some term to package its recognition that learning has been liberated from the thrall of academia. Soon thereafter “school” truly will be out and “education” will be kaput.