Whether we like it or not, the economy is driven by consumer spending. This does not automatically mean that we can or should let the feedback loop follow a course that will eventually lead to losing the stability of the system to which we belong. If consumption were to remain the driving force, however, we would all end up enjoying ourselves to death. But the solution to this state of affairs is not to be found in political or educational sermonizing. To blame consumption, expectations of abundance, or entertainment will not help in finding answers to educational worries. Education will have to integrate the human experience of consumption and facilitate the acquisition of common sense. A sense of quality can be instilled by pursuing cooperative projects involving not only the production of artifacts, but also self-improvement. Generations that grow up with television as their window to reality cannot be blamed for lack of interest in reading, or for viewing reality as a show interrupted by thirty-second messages. Young minds acquire different skills, and education ought to provide a context for their integration in captivating practical experiences, instead of trying to neutralize them. Television is here for good, although changes that will alter the relation between viewers and originators of messages will change television as well.
The cognitive characteristics and motor patterns of couch potatoes and moderate viewers in the age of generalized TV and interactive networking are very different from those of people educated as literate. These characteristics will be further reshaped as digital television becomes part of the networked world. Where reading about history, or another country, is marginally relevant to praxis in the new context of life and work, the ability to view, understand images, perceive and effect changes, and the ability to edit them and reuse, to complete them, moreover to generate one's own images, is essential to the outcome of the effort. Without engaging the student, education heads into oblivion. As difficult as it is to realize that there are no absolute values, unless this realization is shared by all generations, we will face more inter- generational conflicts than we already face. Television is not the panacea for such conflicts, but a broad ground for reaching reciprocal awareness of what it takes to meet an increasingly critical challenge. Sure, we are focused here on a television that transcended its mass communication industrial society status, and reached the condition of individual interaction.
Understanding differences cannot be limited to education, or reduced to a generalized practice of viewing TV (digital or not). It has to effectively become the substance of political life. While all are equal with respect to the law, while all are free and encouraged to become the best they can be, society has to effectively abandon expectations of homogeneity and uniformity, and to dedicate energies to enhancing the significance of what makes its members different. This translates into an education freed from expectations that are not rooted in the process of self-affirmation as scientists, dancers, thinkers, skilled workers, farmers, sportspeople, and many other pragmatically sanctioned professionals. The direction is clear: to become less obsessed with a job, and more concerned with a work that satisfies them, and thus their friends and relatives. The means and methods for moving in this direction will not be disbursed by states or other organizations. We have to discover them, test, and refine, aware of the fact that what replaces the institution of education is the open-ended process through which we emerge as educated individuals.
Does education henceforth become a generic trade school? For those who so choose, yes. For others, it will become what they themselves make of it through their involvement. Remaining an open enterprise, education will allow as many adjustments as each individual is willing to take upon oneself for the length of one's life. The education of interactive skills, of visualization technologies, of methods of search and retrieval, of thinking in images, sounds, colors, odors, textures, and haptic perception requires contexts for their discovery, use, and evaluation which no school or university in the world can provide. But if all available educational resources are used to establish learning centers based on the paradigms of interactivity, data processing, multimedia, virtual reality, neural networks, and genetic engineering, using powerful carriers such as digital TV or high-speed and broadband networks, we will stop managing a bankrupt enterprise and open avenues for successful alternatives.
As humanity ages, and societies have to cope with a new age structure, education will have to focus also on how to constitute one's identity past the biological optimum. Among the fastest growing segments on the Internet, the elderly represent a very distinct group, of high motivation, and of abilities that can better benefit society.
Access to knowledge in the form of interactive projects, pursued by classes constituted of individuals as different as the world is, is not trivial, and obviously not cheap. The networked world, the many challenges of new means of communication already in place, the new medium of digital TV-closer to reality than many realize- and computers, are already widely available. A major effort to provide support to many who are not yet connected to this world, at the expense of the current bureaucracy of education, will provide the rest. Instead of investing in buildings, bureaucracies, norms, and regulations, instead of rebuilding crumbling schools, and recycling teachers who intellectually died long ago in the absence of any real challenge, we can, and should, design a global education system. Such a system will effect change not only in one country, not only in a group of rich countries, but all over the world. The practice of networking and the competence in integrating work produced independently in functional modules can be attained by tackling real problems, as these are encountered by each person, not invented assignments by teachers or writers of manuals.
Education can succeed or fail only on the terms of efficiency expected in our pragmatic framework. Scores, religiously accounted for in literacy-based political life, are irrelevant. Practical experiences of self-constitution are not multiple-choice examinations. They involve the person in his entirety, and result in instances of personal growth and increased social awareness. A global world requires a live global system of education that embodies the best we can afford, and is driven by the immense energy of variety.
Unexpected opportunities
We have heard the declaration over and over: This is the age of knowledge. The statement describes a context of human practical experiences in which the major resources are cognitive in nature. In the civilization of literacy, knowledge acquisition could take place at a slow pace, over long periods of time. The interlocking factors that defined the pragmatic context were such that no other gnoseological pattern was possible. Knowledge arising from practical experiences of industrial society progressively contributed to making life easier for human beings. Eventually, everything that had been done through the power of human muscle and dexterity-using mainly hands, arms, and legs-was assigned to machines and executed using energy resources found in the environment. Cognition supported the incremental evolution of machines through a vast array of applications. Human knowledge allowed for the efficient use of energy to move machines which executed tasks that might have taken tens, even hundreds of men to perform.
To make this more clear, let us compare some of the tasks of the Machine Age with those of the Age of Cognition we live in. Within industrial pragmatics, the machine supplanted the muscle and the limited mechanical skills needed for processing raw materials, manufacturing cars, washing clothes, or typing. Discoveries of more sources of coal, gas, and oil kept the machine working and led to its extension from the factory to the home. Literacy, embodying characteristics of industrial pragmatics, kept pace with the demands and possibilities of the Machine Age. In our age, computer programs supplant our thinking and the limited knowledge involved in supervising complex production and assembly lines that process raw materials or synthesize new material. Computer programs are behind the manufacture of automobiles; they integrate household functions-heating, washing clothes, preparing meals, guarding our homes. Publishing on the World Wide Web relies on computers. The scale of all these efforts is global. Many languages, bearing the data needed by each specific sub-task, go into the final product or outcome. Older dependencies on natural resources and on a social model shaped to optimally support industrial praxis are partially overcome as the focus changes from permanence to transitory communities of interest and to the individual- the locus of the Cognitive Age.