Footing the bill
Instead of an education financed by the always controversial redistribution of social resources, interactive learning will be supported by its real beneficiaries. That a biogenetics company, for instance, can do this better than an organization engaged in bureaucratic self-perpetuation is a fair assumption. Freed from the costs associated with buildings and high administrative overhead, education should take place in the environment of interactions characteristic of the pragmatic framework. As extensions of industries and services, of institutions and individual operations, education would cease to be training for a hypothetical employer. Like the practical experience for which it is constituted, education points to the precise reward and fulfillment, not to vague ideals that prove hollow after the student has paid tens of thousands of dollars to learn them. Vested in the benefits of a company whose potential depends on their future performance, students can be better motivated. Will business cooperate? As things stand now, business is in the paradoxical situation of criticizing the inadequacies of an education that has many of the same characteristics as outmoded ways of doing business.
Once students reach a level of confidence that entitles them to attempt to continue on their own or to associate with the company, the alumni of such educational experiences have better control over their destinies and can follow the cognitive path of their choosing. There will be analytically oriented and synthetically oriented individuals, many embracing the experience of articulating hypotheses and testing them. Some will follow cognitive inclinations to induction, to making observations and drawing generalizations. Others will follow the path of deduction, noticing general patterns and seeing how they apply in concrete cases. Others will follow abductions, i.e., applying knowledge about a representative sample in order to infer for a broader collection of facts or processes.
No cognitive path should be forbidden or excluded, as long as human integrity, in all aspects, is maintained and human interaction supported in the many possible forms it can assume. Motivation reflected in integrity is the element that will bring individual direction into focus. As it is practiced today, education cultivates motivations that exclude integrity and the development of skills appropriate to understanding that you can cheat your teacher but not yourself without affecting the outcome. In the current system of education, integrity appears as something incidental to the experience. Collaboration on a project of common interest introduces elements of reciprocal responsibility in respect to the outcome. Since outcome affects everyone's future, education is no longer a matter of grades, but of successful collaboration in pursuing a goal.
In order to accomplish these goals-obviously in a greater number of manifestations than the ones just described-we need to free education from its many inherited assumptions. Progress can no longer be understood as exclusively linear. Neither can we continue to apply a deterministic sequence of cause and effect in domains of non-deterministic interdependencies, characteristic of distributed cooperative efforts. Neither hierarchy nor dualism can be cultivated in the educational environment because the dynamics of association and interaction is based on patterns of changing roles within a universe focused on optimal parameters, not threatened by the radical disjunction of success vs. failure. Complexity must be acknowledged, not done away with through methods that worked in the Industrial age but which fail in the new pragmatic context.
Unless and until one discovers through practical experience the need for a different viewpoint, for values outside the immediate object of interest, nothing should be imposed on the individual. Shakespeare and Boole are neither loved, nor understood, nor respected more by those who were forced to learn how to spell their names, learn dates by heart, or learn titles of works, fragments of plays or logical rules. The very presence of art and science, sport and entertainment, politics and religion, ethics and the legal system in educational forms of interactive media, books, artworks, databases, and programs for human interaction opens the possibility for discoveries. As serious as all these matters are, no education will ever succeed without making its students happy, without satisfaction. In each instance of education, good or bad, the human being, as a natural entity, is broken in. Tension will always be part of education, but instead of rewarding those more adept at acculturation, education should integrate complementary moments. No, I do not advocate interactive study from the beach or from a remote mountain ski resort; and I am not for extending human integration in the world of practical experiences around the clock. But as education frees itself from the industrial model-factory-like buildings, classes that correspond to shifts, holidays and vacation time-it should also let students make choices that are closer to their natural rhythms. Instead of physical co-presence, there should be interactive and cooperative creativity that does not exclude the playful, the natural, and the accidental.
If all this sounds too far-fetched to bring about, that is because it is. Even if the computer giants of the world were to open interactive learning centers tomorrow, it would be to little avail. Students will bring with them attitudes rooted in traditional expectations. There is more consensus in our world for what is right with the current system of education than for what can or should be done to change it. But with each nucleus of self-organization, such as on-line classes on subjects pertinent to working on the network, seeds are sown for future development. In our time, when the need for qualified people surges in one field or another-computational genetics, nanotechnology, non-linear electronic publishing-the model I presented is the answer. Waiting for the educational system to process students and to deliver them, at no cost to the corporations that will employ them, is no longer an acceptable strategy. Instead of endowing university chairs dedicated to the study of the no longer meaningful, corporations should invest in training and post-academic life-long learning.
To preach that in order to be a good architect one has to know history and biology and mathematics, and to know who Vitruvius was, equals preaching the rules of literacy in a world that effectively does not need them. To create an environment for the revelation of such a need, if indeed it is acknowledged as humans discover new ways to deal with their questions, is a very different task. How much reading, how much writing, mathematics, drawing, foreign language, or chemistry an architect needs is the wrong question. It assumes that someone knows, well in advance of the changing pragmatic context, what is the right mixture and how future human practical experiences will unfold. The ingredients change, the proportions change, and the context changes first of all.
As opposed to the current hierarchy, which proclaims drawing or singing as extraneous but orthography and reading as necessary, education needs to finally acknowledge complementarity. It has to encourage self-definition in and through skills best suited to practical experiences of self-constitution in a world that has escaped the cycle of repetition, and pursues goals unrelated to previous experiences. Instead of doing away with or rationalizing intuition, or being suspicious of irrationality, education will have to allow the individual to pursue a search path that integrates them. Students should be able to define goals where intuition, and even irrationality and the subconscious, are applicable. They should be freed from the constraints and limitations of the paradigm of problem solving, and engaged in generating alternatives.
A wake-up call