In order to respond to the needs of the pragmatics of high efficiency leading to the civilization of many literacies, education needs first of all to rediscover the individual, and his or her extensive gamut of cognitive characteristics. I use the word rediscover having in mind incipient forms of education and training, which were more on a one-to- one or one-to-few basis. Education also needs to reconsider its expectation of a universal common denominator, based on the industrial model of standardization. Rather than taming and sanitizing the minds of students, education has not only to acknowledge differences in aptitudes and interests, but also to stimulate them. Every known form of energy is the expression of difference and not the result of leveling.
During this process of re-evaluation, the goals of education will have to be redefined, methods of education rethought, and content reassessed. A new philosophy, embodied in a dynamic notion of education, has to crystallize as we work towards educational alternatives that integrate the visual, the kinetic, the aural, and the synesthetic. In the spirit of the pragmatic context, education ought to become an environment for interaction and discovery. Time taken with reiterations of the past deserves to be committed to inferences for the present, and, to the extent possible, for the future.
Some of the suggestions to be made in the coming lines might sound utopian or have the ring of techno-babble. Their purpose is to present possibilities, not to conjure up miraculous solutions. The path from present to future is the path of human practical experiences of self-constitution. To achieve goals corresponding to the requirements and expectations of the civilization of no dominant literacy, education needs to give up the reductionist perspective that has marked it since generalized education became the norm. Education has to recognize its students as the individuals they are, not as some abstract or theoretic entity. Basic education should be centered around the major forms of expression and communication: language, visual, aural, kinetic, and symbolic. Differences among these systems need to be explored as students familiarize themselves with each of them, as well as combinations. Concrete forms of acculturation should be geared towards using these elements, not dispensing instructions and assigning exercises. Each student will discover from within how to apply these systems. Most important, students will share their experiences among themselves. There will be no right or wrong answer that is not proven so by the pragmatic instance.
Fundamental to the educational endeavor is the process of heuristic inquiry, to be expressed through programs for further investigation. These programs require many languages: literate inquiry, mathematics, chemistry, computation, and so on. By virtue of the fact that people from different backgrounds enter the process, they bear the experience of their respective languages. Relevance to the problem at hand will justify one approach or another. Frequently, the wheel will be re-invented. Other times, new wheels will emerge as contributions of authentic ingenuity and inventiveness. In their interaction, those involved in the process share in the experience through which they constitute themselves at many levels. One is to provide access to the variety of perspectives reflecting the variety of people.
Interactive learning
Education has to become a living process. It should involve access to all kinds of information sources, not only to those stored in literate formats. These resources have their specific epistemological condition-a printed encyclopedia is different from a database. To access a book is different from accessing a multimedia knowledge platform. Retrieval is part of the practice of knowledge and defines a horizon for human interaction. All these differences will become clear through use, not through mere assertion or imitation. The goal of education cannot be the dissemination of imitative behavior, but of procedures. In this model of education, classes are groups of people pursuing connected goals, not compartments based on age or subject, even less bureaucratic units. A class is an expression of interest, not the product of statistical distribution based on birth and zoning. The physical environment of the class is the world, and not the brick and mortar confined room of stereotyped roles and interactions. This might sound hollow, or too grandiose, but the means to make this happen are progressively becoming available.
Here is one possible scenario: Students approach centers of interactive education after the initial phase of acculturation. Perhaps the word center recalls one of the characteristics of the civilization of illiteracy. By their own nature, though, these centers are distributed repositories of knowledge stored in a variety of forms- databases, programs pertinent to various human practical experiences, examples, and evaluation procedures. With such a condition, such centers lend themselves to making refreshable knowledge available in all imaginable formats. On request, its own programs (known as intelligent agents) search for appropriate sources through the guidance of those in need, independent of them, or parallel to them. Requests are articulated in voice command: "I would like to know …." Or the requests can be handwritten, typed, or diagrammed. Such interactive education centers are simultaneously libraries of knowledge, heuristic environments, laboratories, testing grounds, and research media. The hybrid human-machine machine that constitutes their nucleus alters as the individual involved in the interaction changes.
As we all know, the best way to learn is to teach. Students should be able to teach their neural network partners subjects of interest to their own practical experiences. In many cases, the neural networks, themselves networked with others, will become partners in pursuing practical goals of higher and higher complexity. The fact that students interact not based on their address and school district, not based on homogeneity criteria of age or cultural background, but on shared interests and different perspectives gives this type of education a broader social significance: There is nothing we do that does not affect the world in its entirety. Repeating these words ad nauseam will not affect the understanding of what this means, as one practical endeavor of global consequential nature can.
In the model suggested, interests are identified and pursued, and results are compared. Questions are widely circulated. What students appropriate in the process are ways of thinking, procedures for testing hypotheses, and means and methods for ascertaining progress in the process. Professional educators, aware of cognitive processes and freed from the burden of administrative work, no longer rehash the past but design interactive environments for students to learn in. Teachers involve themselves in this interaction, and continue to evolve as knowledge itself evolves. Instead of inculcating the discipline of one dominant language, they leave open choices for short and long-term commitments, their own included.
Not having to force themselves to think in an imposed language, students are freed from the constraints of assigned tasks. They are challenged by the responsibility to make their own choices and carry them through. In the process, differences among students will become apparent, but so will the ability to understand how being different, in a context of cooperative interactions, is an asset and not a liability. Motivation is seeded in the satisfaction of discovery and the ability to easily integrate in a framework of practical experiences that are no longer mimicked in education, but practiced in discovery.