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.