As the scale of humankind changed, and the efficiency of human
practical experience corresponding to the scale ascertained
itself as the new rationality, the practical experience of
self-constitution had to adjust to new circumstances of existence
and activity. There is no magic borderline. But there is a
definite discontinuity between what constituted the relatively
stable underlying structure of literacy and what constitutes the
fast-changing underlying structure of the pragmatic framework.
Because in our own self-constitution literacy is only one among
many media for achieving the efficiency that the new scale
requires, we come to realize, even if public discourse does not
exactly reflect it, that we cannot afford literacy the way we
have until now. And even if we could, we should not. People
recognize, even if only reluctantly, that the literacy machine,
for some reason still called education, endows the new generation
with a skill of limited significance. The resulting perspective
is continuously contradicted by the ever new and ever renewing
human experiences through which we become who we are. Education
based on the paradigm of literacy is, as we have seen, a luxury
which a society, rich or poor, cannot afford. Conditions of
human life and praxis require, instead of a skill and
perspective for the whole of life, a series. Skill and
perspective need to be understood together. Their application
will probably be limited in time, and not necessarily directly
connected to those succeeding them.
Nobody seriously disputes the relevance of studying language, but
very few see language and language-based disciplines as the
prerequisite for the less than life-long series of different
jobs students of today will have. Although colleges maintain a
core curriculum that preserves the role of language and the
humanities, the shift towards the languages of mathematics-a
discipline that has diversified spectacularly-and of visual
representation is so obvious that one can only wonder why the
voices of mathematicians are not heard over those of the Modern
Language Association. Mathematics prepares for fields from
technical to managerial, from scientific to philosophic, and
from design to legal. The realization that calculus is first of
all a language, and that the goal of education is fluency in
it, corresponds to an awareness that musicians had for the
longest time with respect to musical scores, but the champions
of literacy always refused to accept. The same holds true for the
disciplines of visualization: drawing, computer graphics,
design. In today's education, the visual needs to be studied at
least as much as language-dependent subjects.
Against the background of deeper changes, education is focusing
on its on redefinition. The major change is from a container
model of education-the child being the empty container who needs
to be filled with language, history, math, and not much more-to
a heuristic education. Our pragmatics is one of process, as the
pragmatics of education finally should be. Education needs to be
conducive to interaction and to the formation of criteria for
choices from among many options. But change does not come
easily. Still using the impertinence of literacy, some educators
call the container model "teaching students to think." They do
not realize that students think whether we teach them to or not!
Students of all ages are aware of change, and familiar with modes
of interaction, among themselves and with technology, closer to
their condition than to that of their teachers. The majority of
the new businesses on the Internet are instigated by students
and supported by their inventiveness and dedication. They have
became agents of change in spite of all the shortcomings of
education. And students have become educators themselves,
offering environments for conveying their own experience.