Shortly after I talked to Mark Ticer and Sharon Kuster, my friend Karen got the results of an intensive examination by a second doctor. It seemed that Karen would not be undergoing the heart surgery. But even now she couldn’t tell for sure. What’s more, if Karen received drugs instead, the medical benefits of the Visible Man might still help her someday; a major pharmaceutical company, after all, was hoping to use the digitized cadaver as a tool to explore and demonstrate the effects of its products.
My thoughts shifted back to Jernigan the human. Lying on the death gurney, awaiting the poison, would he have wanted to make The Gift if someone had rushed in and asked at the last minute, “Do you realize you’ll be all over the Internet? That you’ll suffer the ultimate invasion of privacy? That strangers from here to Oslo will see your guts?” I’d like to think that Jernigan would have nodded and the Learjet would still have flown the body up to Denver. For the sake of Karen, of other sick people, of those who just might live longer and better if their surgeons were slightly more skilled, or if they themselves could make the right decisions about their medical care—for the sake of them all, I was not-so-quietly delighted that the invisible man was now visible.
Schools: Park View Educational Centre
The big motto out of the United States, in the 1990s, seemed to be, “Build jail cells, not classrooms.” Again and again, politicians would promise to shrink the bloat in school budgets while Fighting Crime; I shared some of their skepticism toward the edutocracy. Washington, D.C., was Exhibit A here. In one recent year the city had shelled out half a billion on public schools but paid just $2 million for books.
Suppose, however, that U.S. schools had been spending their money in a way that helped keep children out of jail and helped them learn. Americans might do well to study Park View Education Centre. It is a high school up in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, and something weird and wonderful had been happening there over the past few years. At Park View the Internet was not reserved just for the usual suspects—the would-be Bill Gateses, the local Steve Jobses, the prodigies who already owned PCs and Macs and were dialing up Christie Brinkley photos on electronic bulletin boards. Many of the children on the Net were the at-risk students, those in danger of leaving Park View because of academic or disciplinary problems.
They were in the “general-stream” track. And just as in the States, the college-bound children looked down on them. That was unfair. Many of the general students were bright and simply didn’t want to go to college. Some of the general boys, not all, wore black leather jackets, tight jeans, and black boots. And they used razor blades to tattoo the logos of Ford and Chevy onto their skins. The at-risk girls were less colorful. But some had disciplinary problems of their own, along with the same lack of interest in academics. What’s more, certain teenagers in the area were doing marijuana and hashish and boozing it up; teachers at Park View worried constantly that the wilder of the students would turn up on the police blotters.
Fighting against pot smoking and other behavior of the Jernigan variety, some teachers at Park View systematically used the Net to bolster the egos of the general students while also improving their scholastic skills. Yes, alarms went off in my head when I heard the word “self-esteem.” Too often, at least in the States, this quality came at the cost of academics. Saying, “You’re good!” was not enough. Gold stars—if dishonestly earned—would just teach the children that the educators were liars.
Some teachers at Park View Education Centre, however, were mixing self-esteem with reading and writing in a way that true Net nerds would love. And it was happening in a cash-strapped place a continent removed from Silicon Valley in both distance and technical expertise.
This was not borderline Canada. Park View Education Centre was a good two days’ drive from the state of Maine. The school served Lunenburg County, a mostly rural area settled by German-speaking people whose descendants still reverted to dialect. Bridgewater (pop. 9,000 or so) was the nearest town. Named for the modest bridge across the La Havre River, it was in many respects All Canadian—with streets with names like “King” and “Queen” and “Prince.” Businesses such as Gow’s Hardware and Rofihe’s Men’s Wear had been in the same families for generations. The Bridgewater area boasted a Michelin tire plant, too, and a mall and twin cinemas. And it was growing. But many inhabitants were displaced farmers, lumberjacks, and cod fishermen; tensions from work or the lack of it could show up in some homes, to the disadvantage of the children. When I was researching this chapter, Canada’s unemployment rate was 10 percent, while Lunnenburg County’s was 12-13 percent.
In at least one way, Park View Education Centre may have reflected both the business climate and the Canadian winters, or perhaps just some of the educational crazes of yesteryear. Park View was built in the late ’70s with narrow little windows that more or less cheated the classrooms of a river view. Those slots were somewhat emblematic; many children hadn’t been outside Nova Scotia. Even among the academic-track students, fewer than 40 percent were making it to college. Park View, then, was not quite the stereotypical place for educational high tech.