Literacy-based education, as all other literacy experiences,
assumes that people are the same. It presumes that each human
being can and must be literate. Just as the goal of industry was
to turn out standardized products, education assumes the same
task through the mold of literacy. Diplomas and certificates
testify how like the mold the product is. To those who have
problems with writing or reading, the labels legasthenic and
dyslexic are applied. Dyscalculus is the name given to the
inability to cope with numbers. The question of why we should
expect uniform cognitive structures covering the literate use of
language or numbers, but not the use of sounds, colors, shapes,
and volume, is never raised. Tremendous effort is made to help
individuals who simply cannot execute the sequentiality of
writing or the meaning of successive numbers. Nothing similar is
done to address cognitive characteristics of persons inclined to
means different from literacy.
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.