In view of the fundamental changes in patterns of human activity,
not only students need education, but practically everyone, and
probably educators first of all. Connection to education centers
needs to be different from the expectation of children sitting
in a class dominated by a teacher. On the interactive education
networks, age no longer serves as a criterion. Learning is
self-paced, motivated by individual interests and priorities and
by the perspectives that learning opens. A sense of common
interest is expressed through interaction, unfolding through a
diversity of perspectives and ways of thinking and doing.
Nothing can help generations that are more different and more
antagonistic than ours to find a common ground than an experience
of education emancipated from hierarchies, freed of
authoritarian expectations, challenging and engaging at the same
time. Education will be part of the continuous self-definition of
the human being throughout one's entire life.
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.