Education has stubbornly defended its turf. While it fell well
behind the expectations of those in need of support for finding
their place in the current pragmatic context, a new paradigm of
scientific and humanistic investigation was acknowledged-
computation. Together with experimental and theoretical science,
computation stimulated levels at which the twin concerns for
intellectual coherence and for the ability to establish
connections outside the field of study could be satisfied.
Computation made it into the educational system without becoming
one of education's underlying structures. The late-in-coming
Technology Literacy Challenge that will provide two billion
dollars by the year 2001 acknowledges this situation, though it
fails to address it properly. In other countries, the situation
is not much better. Bureaucracies based on rules of functioning
pertinent to past pragmatics are not capable of even
understanding the magnitude of change, in which their reason for
being disappears.
In some colleges and private high schools, students can already
access the computer network from terminals in their dormitories.
Still, in the majority, computing time is limited, and assigned
for specific class work, mainly word processing. Too many
educational outlets have only administrative computers for
keeping track of budget execution and enrollment. In most
European countries the situation is even worse. And as far as
the poor countries of the world are concerned, one can only hope
that the disparity will not deepen. If this were the case with
electricity, we would hear an uproar. Computing should become as
pervasive as electricity.
This view is not necessarily unanimously accepted. Arguments
about whether education needs to be computerized or whether
computers should be integrated across the board go on and on
among educators and administrators with a say in the matter. It
should be noticed that failure to provide the appropriate context
for teaching, learning, and research affects the condition of
universities all over the world. These universities cease to
contribute new knowledge. They become instead the darkroom for
pictures taken elsewhere, by people other than their professors,
researchers, and graduate students. Such institutions fathom a
relatively good understanding of the past, but a disputable
notion of the present and the future, mainly because they are
hostages to literacy-based structures of thought and activity,
even when they use computers.
To function within a language means to share in the experiences
which are built into it. Natural language has a built-in
experience of space and time; programming languages contain
experiences of logical inference or of object-oriented
functioning of the world. These experiences represent its
pre-understanding frame of reference. Knowledge built into our
so-called natural languages was for a long time common to all
human beings. It resulted in communities sharing, through
language, the practical experiences through which the community
members constituted themselves in space and time. The continuity
of language and its permanence reflected continuity of
experience and permanence of understanding. Within such a
pragmatic framework, education and the sharing of experience
were minimally differentiated from each other. Progressively,
language experience was added to practical experience and used to
differentiate such an experience in new forms of praxis:
theoretic work, engineering, art, social activism, political
programs. Diversity, incipient segmentation, higher speeds, and
incremental mediations affected the condition of
self-constitutive human experiences. Consequently, literacy
progressively ceased to represent the optimal medium for
sharing, although it maintains many other functions. Indeed,
plans for a new building, for a bridge, for engines, for many
artifacts cannot be expressed in literate discourse, no matter
how high the level, or how well literate competency is served by
education or impacts upon it.
Accelerated dynamics and a generalized practice of mediations, by
means not based on literacy, become part of human praxis in the
civilization of illiteracy and define a new underlying
structure. Language preserves a limited function. It is
paralleled by many other sign systems, some extremely well
adapted to rationalization and automation, and becomes itself
subject to integration in machines adept at sign processing (in
particular information processing). The process can be
exemplified by a limited analogy: In order to explore in depth
the experience embodied in Homer's texts, one needs a knowledge
of ancient Greek. In order to study the legal texts of the Roman
Empire, one needs Latin, and probably more. But in order to
understand algebra-the word comes from the Arabic al-jabr/jebr,
meaning union of broken parts-one really does not need to be
fluent in Arabic.
Literacy embodies a far less significant part of the current
human practical experience of self-constitution than it did in
the past. Still, literacy-based education asserts its own
condition on everything: learning what is already known is a
prerequisite to discovering the unknown. In examining the amount
and kind of knowledge one needs to understand past experience
and to make possible further forms of human praxis, we can be
surprised. The first surprise is that we undergo a major shift,
from forms of work and thinking fundamentally based on past
experience to realms of human constitution that do not repeat
the past. Rather, such new experiences negate it altogether,
making it relatively irrelevant. Freed from the past, people
notice that sometimes the known, expressed in texts, obliterates
a better understanding of the present by introducing a
pre-understanding of the future that prevents new and effective
human practical experiences. The second surprise comes from the
realization that means other than those based on literacy better
support the current stage of our continuous self- constitution,
and that these new means have a different underlying structure.
Searle, among many others, remarked that, "Like it or not, the
natural sciences are perhaps our greatest single intellectual
achievement as human beings, and any education that neglects
this fact is to that extent defective." What is not clearly
stated is the fact that sciences emerged as such achievements
once the ancillary relation to language and literacy was
overcome. Mathematization of science and engineering, the focus
on computational knowledge, the need to address design aspects of
human activity (within sociology, business, law, medicine,
etc.), all belong to alternative modes of explanation that make
literate speculation less and less effective. They also opened
new horizons for hypotheses in astronomy, genetics, anthropology.
Cognitive skills are required in the new pragmatic context
together with meta-cognitive skills: how to control one's own
learning, for example, in a world of change, variety,
distributed effort, mediated work, interconnection, and
heterogeneity.
We do not yet know how to express and quantify the need for
education, how to select the means and criteria for evaluating
performance. If the objective is only to generate attitudes of
respect for tradition and to impart good manners and some form
of judgment, then the result is the emulation of what we think
the past celebrated in a person. In the USA, the bill for
education, paid by parents, students, and private and public
sources, is well over 370 billion dollars a year. In the
national budget alone, 18 different categories of
grants-programs for building basic and advanced skills in
50,000 schools, programs for Safe and Drug-free schools, programs
for acquiring advanced technology, scholarships, and support for
loans-quantify the Federal part of the sum. State and local
agencies have their own budgets allowing for $5,000 to $12,000
per student. If a class of 25 students is supported by $250,000
of funding, something in the equation of financing education
does not add up. The return on investment is miserable by all
accounts. Knowing that close to one million students drop out
each year-and the number is growing-at various stages of their
education, and that to reclaim them would cost additional money,
we add another detail to the picture of a failure that is no
longer admissible. In other countries, the cost per person is
different. In a number of countries (France, Germany, Italy, some
countries in Eastern Europe), students attend school years
beyond what is considered normal in the USA. Germany discusses,
forever it seems, the need to cut schooling. Are 12 or 13 years
of schooling sufficient? How long should the state support a
student in the university? With the reunification of the
country, new needs had to be addressed: qualified teachers,
adequate facilities, financing. Japan, while maintaining a
12-grade system, requires more days of schooling (230 per year
compared to 212 in Germany and 180 in the USA). France, which
regulates even pre-school, maintains 15 years of education.
Still, 40% of French students commit errors in using their
language. When, almost 360 years ago, Richelieu introduced
(unthinkable for the American mentality) the Académie Française
as the guardian of the language, little did he know that a time
would come when language, French or any other, would no longer
dominate people's life and work, and would not, despite money
invested and time spent to teach, make all who study literate.
The new pragmatic context requires an education that results in
abilities to distinguish patterns in a world of extreme
dynamism, to question, to cope with complexity as it affects
one's practical existence, and with a continuum of values.
Students know from their own experience that there is no
intrinsic determination to the eternity and universality of
language-and this is probably the first shock one faces when
noticing how large illiterate populations function and prosper in
modern society. The economy absorbed the majority of the dropout
population. The almost 50% of the American population considered
functionally illiterate partakes, in its majority, in the high
standard of living of the country. In other countries, while the
numbers are different, the general tenor is the same. Well
versed in the literacy of consumption, these people perform
exactly the function expected: keep the economic engine turning.