The Educators Manifesto

Renewing the Progressive Bond with Posterity through the Social Construction of Digital Learning Communities

Robbie McClintock
Institute for Learning Technologies
Teachers College, Columbia University
1999

This is a pre-publication draft, circulated privately for comment, corrections, and suggestions.
rom2@columbia.edu

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Notes

Note 01 ["to educate educators!"] The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Penguin, 1968), Kaufmann, trans., p. 50.

Note 02 ["the height charms us"] Goethe, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, Book VII, Indenture, Thomas Carlyle, trans.

Note 03 [events span a long duration] Fernand Braudel opens The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (2 vols., Sian Reynolds, trans., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996) with a penetrating reflection on the importance of the longue durée for history.

Note 04 [happening . . . at a rapid pace in our extended present] For those who like to have such phenomena dated, let us try the following chronology. The incorporation of digital technologies into our modes of cultural creation is following a classic S-curve course. The process begins with a sustained period of acceleration from roughly 1940 to 1980. The process then moves through a sustained period of rapid transformation from roughly 1980 to 2020. It then closes with a sustained period of deceleration, lasting roughly from 2020 to 2060, moving into an indefinite steady state of marginal improvements thereafter, having by then become the dominant infrastructure for cultural communication. For those who like some functional grounding to such dates, let us note the following: 1940 marks roughly the introduction of the first useful digital computers; 1980 is the approximate start of the broad application of useful microchips as CPUs to personal computers, with Moore’s law, which holds, loosely, that digital device capacity doubles every 18 months, indicating the rate of transformation; 2020 probably signals when the rate of increase in device capacity indicated by Moore’s law starts significantly slowing as the physical constraints of matter begin to impede the rate of improvement in circuit design and manufacture; and 2060 suggests an arbitrary terminus to establish an overall symmetry. Thus what we call the extended present through this document spans roughly 1940 to 2060, with 1980 to 2020 the most rapid period of transition in it.

While these dates suggest the chronology of technological possibilities, the potential for cultural lag in considerable – hardware advances faster than associated software, which in turn advances faster than the patterns of use that it enables. Consequently, the timing of technologically enabled educational innovation may stretch out considerably beyond this chronology. One might argue that from a cultural/educational point of view, the period of rapid transformation does not start until the mid-1990s (rather than 1980) with the broad public influence of the World Wide Web. If so, the period of rapid innovation may persist further into mid-century or thereabouts, with the period of deceleration stretching to the end of the 21st century. Pedagogically, our extended present, marking the restructuring of educational activity to make full use of digital communications, spans the period from 1950 to 2100 or thereabouts.

Note 05 [digital technologies set aside long-lasting limits on educational activity] It is difficult to convey the idea intuitively that fundamental potentialities in education are now different than they have been in the past. Nevertheless it is important to reason out the possibility so that educators can try arrangements and activities they would otherwise hold impossible. The task of communication was easier in architecture. Here is a working drawing from 1884 from an early proposal for the Eiffel Tower, in which the engineers sought to convey the idea that they could now develop structures built to an unprecedented scale. Unfortunately educators cannot make such a point as succinctly as structural engineers could. It took the seven tallest structures in Paris (the Statue of Liberty was then under construction there with a good deal of public attention to it). Note that only one, the shortest of the seven, was a building for everyday use. Reproduced from Spiro Kostof, The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings Through History (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1991) p. 320.

Note 06 [copious digital libraries, transform the cultural conditions] Large-scale digital library projects can seem to be concerns primarily for rarefied scholarship. In fact they are developments of broad public import and care should be taken to widen the constituency for the effort. James Billington, Director of the Library of Congress, has been most alert to the potential public benefits of digital libraries. The Library of Congress is rapidly digitizing extensive portions of its collection, with the main discussion of its digital library plans at http://lcweb.loc.gov/rr/digital.html and with major examples such as the American Memory Project, building an ever-widening base of users. Major research libraries are collaborating (and competing) to develop components of the digital library. The Partner’s page of the National Digital Library Federation ( http://www.clir.org/diglib/dlfpartners.htm) provides a fairly full sampling of these. To form a sense of the depth of coverage open to anyone that digital libraries can offer, the Perseus Project at Tufts University ( http://www.perseus.tufts.edu) is worth exploration as it encompasses a stunning range of sources, textual and archaeological, for the study of ancient Greek culture. In the sciences, major digital libraries of current papers in many fields are under development, and additionally researchers are creating on-line collaboratories, which permit the digital pooling of research resources located at many different centers. While everyone and anyone cannot usefully gain access to libraries housing large book collections or laboratories filled with instruments that are often both delicate and dangerous, the character of digital information and instrumentation is such to permit very broad access to the on-line libraries and collaboratories. Science educators are beginning to develop pedagogies for using these for inquiry-based education with children.

There is a good deal of divergence, circa 2000, about whether digital libraries should be proprietary and the degree to which owners of them should manage them to maximize income or intellectual facilitation. Retroactive digitization is costly and funding streams to support the process are necessary. Like building roadways, digitization is in large part a civic function. It seems very likely that free access to digital collections will displace access for a fee, for there are so many resources building up with no fees attached, that it is hard for information sellers to add sufficient further value to be able to justify potential access fees. Embedded advertising and public subventions are likely to finance open, no-fee access.

Students of information science are producing voluminous literature on digital libraries. A good discussion of issues, current to 1993 and oriented to the Bibliothèque de France, is in R. Howard Bloch and Carla Hesse, eds., Future Libraries (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). To grasp fully both the difficulties and the possibilities of digital libraries, readers need sustained engagement with the resources on-line, however. There is a huge, distributed effort taking place world-wide as libraries and archives metamorphose, the dynamics of which it is much easier to experience than to describe. Nonetheless, discussions of scholarly communication and academic publishing are contending with the dynamics of digitization in works such as Robin P. Peck and Gregory B. Newby, eds., Scholarly Publishing: The Electronic Frontier (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1996). Unfortunately, such scholarship pays more attention to the processes of change and less to its cultural and historical implications. An excellent exception is Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace by James J. O’Donnell (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).

Note 07 [the root pedagogical problem changes profoundly] Humans live in self-sustaining collectivities situated in time and space. Historical and social conditions consequently impinge inescapably upon all their efforts and activities. Cultural history conditions psychology and human biology, not only as it influences the thinking of the working psychologists and biologists, but more fundamentally as it conditions the empirical subjects who provide the data about which the psychologists and biologists develop their explanatory theories and data.

Interactions between human potentialities and the conditions impinging upon persons set determinate pedagogical problems for people who seek to make their potentials actual. In other words, under different historical and cultural conditions, their pedagogical purposes – what people can and should acquire through their education – change; so too, the educational conditions – the key difficulties that they must surmount in acquiring their education – also alter fundamentally; and finally, the educational means – the pedagogical strategies that will work with appropriate effect under the given conditions – adapt pervasively, continuously, and on occasion radically. For instance, the skills that convey cultural power in an oral culture differ drastically from those in a highly literate culture, and the basic challenges people must meet in order to become highly educated in an oral culture differ from the problems that people face in pursuit of education in a literate culture. At any particular time and place, the knowledge that educators need about what to do, how to do it, and why it should be done will derive in large part from their historical and social understanding.

Attention to the root pedagogical problem tries to go to the core of the interaction between human possibilities and historical and social conditions. Under diverse conditions, educational attainments by people are most likely to increase in substance and benefit as they become independent learners, individually and collectively capable of directing and sustaining their own development. Under different cultural conditions, as these impinge on individuals and groups, the key difficulties that people must solve in order to become effective as independent learners vary. Root pedagogical problems are these difficulties, these impediments to self-sustained, self-directed development, which people encounter in their educational conditions. To diagnose these difficulties and to develop strategies for surmounting them, educators need to develop interpretative insight into the educational affordances and limitations inherent in their particular relationships with their concrete circumstances. Doing so has been the object of "historical pedagogy" and "social [or civic] pedagogy" as these topics have developed in the educational literature.

Unfortunately, for reasons of historical accident, the traditions of scholarship in historical pedagogy developed by Anglo-American students of education have at best been very weak, with one great exception, John Dewey’s Democracy and Education (New York: Macmillan, 1911). Dewey extracted a full educational agenda from reflection on the possibilities for human development under the conditions of life and culture in the early twentieth century. By and large, however, Anglo-American study of education has been dominated by the assumptions of psychology, which abstracts away the historical and social concretions of life. We need to renew our engagement with the pedagogical thinking of classical German humanists.

Note 08 [multimedia is an epistemologically interesting development] For reflections on multimedia in a philosophical frame see Mark C. Taylor and Esa Saarinen, Imagologies: Media Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1994). Janet H. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (New York: The Free Press, 1997) and David Gelernter, Mirror Worlds, or the Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox – How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991) also raise interesting questions about the effects on digital technologies on our basic ways of communicating and representing the world. J. David Bolter’s Turing’s Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1984) is still worth studying. The most recent contribution, an important one, is by the philosopher of technology, Albert Borgmann, Holding on to Reality: The Nature of Information at the Turn of the Millennium (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999).

Note 09 [suitability of new media for serious intellectual work] With all the frenzy for e-commerce IPOs (circa 1998-99), we need to remind ourselves that the necessities that mothered most digital inventions were intellectual and academic, not commercial. Computational machinery was invented to help solve difficult design and decoding computations. The Internet was devised to facilitate communication among scientists, whether in times of peace or in times of war. The World Wide Web was the work of scientists and engineers at the European Center for Nuclear Research, who wanted to share Publications more easily. And the ubiquitous web browsers are based on a implementation done initially at the Super Computing Center at the University of Illinois. The growing role of open source software reflects the extension of principles of open scientific publication of peer-reviewed papers into domains of software development. At the very least it is proving to be a creative drive to innovation on a par with, if not superior to, that of commercial profit. See Chris DiBona, Sam Ockman, and Mark Stone, eds., Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly & Associates, 1999).

Note 10 [written media in the house of intellect] The concept of intellect that Jacques Barzun developed in The House of Intellect (New York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1959, esp. pp. 4-6) is useful in understanding why digital information technologies are enabling the transformation of education. The new media are technologies of intellect. For instance: "Intellect is the capitalized and communal form of live intelligence; it is intelligence stored up and made into habits of discipline, signs and symbols of meaning, chains of reasoning and spurs to emotion – a shorthand and a wireless by which the mind can skip connectives, recognize ability, and communicate truth. Intellect is at once a body of common knowledge and the channels through which the right particle of it can be brought to bear quickly, without the effort of redemonstration, on the matter at hand. . . ." Information technologies change the conditions under which people create and use intellect; they change the way intellect works. These technologies do not simply give people access to information, to data. In principle they change the access to intellect and control over it.

Note 11 [music, theater, and dance exist in repertoires of recurring performances] The text of a play or the score of a musical piece, even the choreographical record of a dance in Laban notation, are partial qualifications on this assertion. But still the work in these arts lies in performance and until the era of audio-visual recording and playback, the ability to bring such performances into the realm of on-demand storage and retrieval, so important for the work of knowledge, has been severely constrained.

Note 12 [multimedia subjects a wider range of communications to the rule of random access] A great deal of the work in the area of human-computer interaction involves a sustained effort to develop visual, auditory, and kinetic techniques for managing cultural storage and retrieval that will amplify (or possibly supplant) established written techniques involving keyword indexing and searching. For a discussion of some of these possibilities, see Shih-Fu Chang, Alexandros Eleftheriadis, and Robert McClintock. "Next-Generation Content Representation, Creation and Searching for New Media Applications in Education," Proceedings of the IEEE, Vol. 86, No. 5, May 1998, pp. 884-904.

Note 13 [AI in the strong sense and the weaker sense] There is a great deal of polemical literature, pro and con, with respect to AI in the strong sense. The role of embodiment in intelligence merits much deeper consideration. One might define augmented intelligence as an effort to use machine processing to strengthen intelligent capacities embodied in human beings. AI in the strong sense, in contrast, tries to embody intelligence in the machine. The Turing Test, which is at the foundation of the drive towards artificial intelligence in the stronger sense, was originally framed as a curiously disembodied test – whether or not, through an exchange of messages, one can differentiate an artificial from a human source, having only the messages exchanged as data for the test. Of course, one could postulate a version of the Turing test requiring not simply an exchange of messages, but sustained, intimate co-habitation, but that leads to the transformation of the "artificial" in the concept of artificial intelligence into something insignificant, with the ultimate test, one supposes, being whether the human can successfully reproduce by sexually coupling with the artifice. From the opposite dimension, digital technologies are making possible the disembodiment of much human experience with the multiple forms of virtuality that are fast arising. We may have our doubts, however, whether these can remain experiential on the one hand and attain complete virtuality on the other. We need to ground considerations of intelligence, human and artificial, in the recognition of the inherent embodiments of intelligence. The mind-body problem only occurs in the experience of creatures who embody intelligence. Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (Colin Smith, trans., New York: Humanities Press, 1962) should be more central in discussions of artificial intelligence than it has been. For educators, it is unfortunate that the rather fruitless debate about AI in the strong sense has obscured attention to augmented intelligence, AI in the weak sense. This AI is fraught with extensive practical consequences for who can do what under which conditions, extensive human consequences of special concern for educators.

Note 14 [the digital augmentation of human intelligence] Skeptics who intone that changes in the access to information do not necessarily lead to a better education, and may worsen it by furnishing people with a surfeit of trivia, miss the significant change. The new technologies do not simply enhance information access. They change conditions for participating in the creation of knowledge, the exercise of skill, the work of interpretation. With augmented intelligence, it is not information access but cultural participation that is widening significantly, for better or for worse. This development clearly poses difficulties, but it is a development that is deeply protean in historical character and potentiality. This development is also clearly not new, for participation in cultural activities has already widened discernibly throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with the wide distribution of inexpensive, quality Publications and the opening of access to institutions of education. Thus Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure depicted nineteenth-century social barriers internalized in institutions, situations, and persons operating to block what intellectually was both appropriate and feasible access. Many of these barriers have become much less rigorous as prevailing norms of experience by the late twentieth century. The historical limits to a widening of participation in intellectual activities have by no means been reached, however – not even approached. Loosely but suggestively, entertain the following analogy – twentieth-century changes in cultural participation are like the nineteenth-century changes in travel occasioned by railroads, whereas twenty-first century changes in intellectual participation are like the twentieth-century changes in travel associated with the automobile and aviation.

Note 15 [the spectrum of what may prove pedagogically feasible expands] One may, of course, doubt this description of what educators working with new technology perceive as the inherent possibilities that they enable. Is it not the case that numerous educators, on encountering the new technologies perceive no new possibilities at all? It is important to recognize something like a Gestalt pattern shift in the phenomenon. Many do not see the sketch of a rabbit change to a face. That failure to see the face is not evidence that perceptions of the face are in error. Those who do not see it have a problem of explanation, having to account for the perceptions of those who do. In the case of educators who perceive new possibilities in the new media, the problem of explanation is rather extraordinary. The rhetoric of constructivist, learner-centered, collaborative pedagogy has been popping up the world around as advanced information systems have entered the field of educational practice. There is virtually no research evidence showing the superiority of such practices and there are neither impressively authoritative nor universally popular presentations of the key ideas pertaining to it in circulation within the public or the profession. Yet a startling consensus about how new technologies can reshape educational practice is emerging with unprecedented rapidity among those who seek to use them. Sample the conferences the world around. The same ideas are enunciated everywhere. What is most remarkable, they are ideas that run quite counter to the controlling paradigms in the field of instructional design that held sway through the 1980’s. Instructional design geared to address narrowly defined objectives systematically, as in the work of Alexander J. Romiszowski, has not been shown wrong; it has been outflanked by a rapidly emergent common sense to which those prior principles appear irrelevant. The most plausible explanation for this global phenomenon is that educators share an independent, authentic "Aha!" as they engage in serious efforts to apply digital technologies to educational work.

Note 16 [educators have looked to the psychological sciences for guidance] Educational researchers have struck a sort of entente concerning quantitative and qualitative methodologies, but in doing so they have left the organization and institutionalization of educational research largely unexamined. The educational research establishment has long been committed to producing knowledge about education, which they hope will then be applied to education. We need a much more vigorous examination of the uses of knowledge in education, as well as attention to the application of knowledge through education. Ellen C. Lagemann has open some of these questions up in her essay "The Plural Worlds of Educational Research" in The History of Education Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 2, Summer 1989 and Stephen Tomlinson sharpens them in his article on "Edward Lee Thorndike and John Dewey on the Science of Education" in the Oxford Review of Education, Vol. 23, No. 3, 1997.

Note 17 [linear flow models make most sense in managing large-scale projects] For a very important critique of such models of research and innovation, see Pasteur's Quadrant: Basic Science and Technological Innovation by Donald E. Stokes (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 1997).

Note 18 [the telephone developed as a system in use] Key sources on the history of the telephone as a social construction are Ithiel de Sola Pool, ed., The Social Impact of the Telephone (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1981); Ithiel de Sola Pool, Forecasting the Telephone: A Retrospective Technology Assessment of the Telephone (Norwood, NJ: ABLEX, 1983); and Claude S. Fischer, America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).

Note 19 [historians of technology use models of social construction] For a good introduction, see The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology, edited by Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1987). The concept of social construction used in this essay is somewhat broader than the concept used in the history of technology. Steven Lubar's "Representation and Power" in Technology and Culture, 36:2, Supplement (April 1995), pp. S54-S81, is an excellent survey of the relevant historiography. It encompasses the many sides of the problem of making thought actual in the realm of lived life.

Note 20 [people share a common understanding of potentialities] The work of Max Weber is fundamental to thinking about the social construction of significant historical developments. Paraphrasing Weber's definition of social action, we can say here that the social construction of technologies result because people attach similar subjective meanings to the potentialities they sense in their circumstances and they consequently act independently in ways that conduce to common purposes. See Economy and Society, I:1:a&b, and passim.

Note 21 [nurture social action by bringing ideas to fuller awareness] We can treat the dynamics of education and technological change as processes of social construction without necessarily adopting the more epistemological argument that the truth of all knowledge, especially scientific knowledge, is determined by a process of social construction. Social construction provides a genetic explanation, telling us how something comes to be. How knowledge comes into being is not the same matter as how knowledge comes to be true, or false for that matter. Truths, conventions, beliefs, and falsehoods all come to exist in culture through processes of social construction. Other criteria, however, differentiate them as truths, conventions, beliefs, and falsehoods. Stephen Toulmin’s Human Understanding (Volume 1, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972) provided a very thoughtful epistemology, oriented to scientific practice and based on ideas of social construction (although not the terminology of it). Scientists who object to the relativity (in the epistemological, not the physical sense) need to be careful to preserve in their scientific realism grounds for preserving the possibility that current physical truths can be held falsifiable.

Note 22 [the human costs of cultural lag can be great] One can depict, over-simplifying to show the general development rather than a myriad of details, the history of the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation as an example of such cultural lag and its historical human costs. Early on, Catholic leaders used the printing press to lower the production costs for lucrative indulgences. They also put much traditional pietistic literature into print, but it did not change anything. Clerics at the fringe, disposed to long-standing marginal heresies about the relationship between the Bible and Christian teaching saw more potent uses in the presses. What once were fringe heresies became prevailing movements as they used the printing press with great effect in ways consistent with their doctrine. In a few generations, Western Christendom was mobilized in tremendous internal struggles that turned in large part over how cultural-religious work with the then new technologies were to be managed. Elizabeth Eisenstein provides a good over-view of the interactions between printing and the religious movements of the sixteenth century in The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (2 vols., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979, esp. Part Two: Classical and Christian Traditions Reoriented). Miriam Usher Chrisman’s detailed study of the effects of printing in Strasbourg, Lay Culture, Learned Culture: Books and Social Change in Strasbourg, 1480-1599 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982) delves into the cultural lag on one side and the aggressive activism on the other: "The production of this Catholic literature, much of which involved the printing of standard works from the Christian corpus, did not reflect a conscious use of the presses by the Roman hierarchy to educate the secular clergy or to reawaken the religious interests of the laity. It was this element that would make a marked difference between Catholic publication and the Protestant publication to come. The Protestant reformers, from the very beginning, recognized the usefulness of the printing press to their cause, and they used it to propagandize both clergy and laity, to educate the clergy, and to instruct their congregations. . . ." (p. 81) Eamon Duffy shows how sophisticated Protestant groups were in using media to advance their cause in The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). Duffy shows the pre-Reformation Catholic culture to be a vigorous and vital culture with a distinctive internal system of communication, rooted in the liturgy and an associated explication of images. Protestant success was slow and hard-won. English Protestants not only made effective use of the vernacular in print to propagate a new the basis of religious authority. Perhaps more importantly, they also attacked the Church’s media of popular communication forcefully, fomenting iconoclastic movements that destroyed much of the Church’s sacred imagery and greatly weakened the capacity of people to interpret it by radically simplifying the liturgy.

Note 23 [a plan cannot take all of these into account] It is very difficult, as chaos theory increasingly teaches, to anticipate all dimensions of truly transformational changes. Henry Adams in his essay on "The Rule of Phase Applied to History" (1909) was one of the first (skipping over Hegel for the moment) to reflect on such changes. See Henry Adams, The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma (New York: Capricorn Books, 1958, pp. 261-305). Adams’ speculations about changes of historical phase still have some interest – the basic metaphor is useful. In particular, the change of phase metaphor helps alert us to the problem of latency in assessing educational developments. With thorough-going changes, which changes of phase by definition are, a prolonged period of latency can precede the emergence of palpable evidence of what is taking place. In everyday physics, such latency phenomena are commonplace, for instance, whenever a variety of substances undergo a change of phase, as when ice melts or water boils. As the experimenter steadily heats cold water, its temperature increases at a uniform rate, increment by increment, until the water reaches the temperature of 100º centigrade. Then, as the source of heat continues, the water remains at a fixed temperature, until it absorbs a significant quantity of further heat, whereupon it starts boiling off as steam, remaining unless pressurized at 100º. The traditional correlation between amounts of heat added and changes in water temperature break down. With digital technologies in education, we are not simply adding inputs that make incremental improvements in the performance of the existing system. We are adding inputs that are forcing a change of phase in that system – in due course. We need to be aware, however, that this process includes a sustained period of latency in which much added input can have at the systemic level no discernable effect. All historical development, whether large or small, probably involves something like a change of phase in which evident interrelations between cause and effect may be punctuated by significant latency and transformative metamorphosis.

Note 24 [an "interpretation from within,"] "Pidiendo un Goethe desde dentro" (1932), José Ortega y Gasset, Obras completas, IV, Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1957. pp. 395-420.

Note 25 [the degree that educators find they hold a similar understanding of the educational situation] It is important that educators test this probe fully in the Socratic spirit. A survey of opinions is too static and does not disclose well the recognition and conversion processes taking place. The degrees to which individuals are engaged with a development at any particular time varies and differences of engagement matter in the formation of their views. Surveys do not control for these differences. Querying educators and finding the proportion that would nominally agree or disagree with a proposition at a particular time tells little about the proportion that will cumulatively come to agree as, one by one, they come to engage with it across the span of an extended present. Hence the Socratic test – whether or not each person, on serious and sincere reflection, considers the probe to be sound – is a better predictor. Of course, the aggregate results of the Socratic test are most likely to be evident, ex post facto, in the substance of people’s actions. Hence, even in an era of numerous programs of survey research, retrospective historical accounts have much to add.

Note 26 [educators act with greater awareness of the shared potentialities] Theorists have long struggled to make sense of the process by which complex historical developments emerge in history. Some traditional formulations about the dynamics of public choice have more current value than they are commonly recognized to have. For instance, Rousseau's observations in the Social Contract about how people should deliberate in order to disclose the General Will are highly relevant in considering this process, particularly if one discounts the locus in a cantonal assembly that he used to situate his discussion. In the quiet of their own counsel, people do formulate, alas often with far-too-imperfect information, convictions about the General Will, with significant historical effect. See Rousseau, The Social Contract, II:3. Likewise, Reformation doctrines of Grace and Election, understood as a theological construct for describing observable historical, public developments, merit some reflective attention in thinking about the dynamics of social construction. In ways that are virtually impossible to anticipate or fully explain, various individuals find themselves at the intersection of complex developments exerting influence derived from the situation and projected on them by others, influence that greatly exceeds their own intrinsic powers. Ortega saw this as a dynamic of exemplarity and aptness, Weber as one of Charisma.

Note 27 [revolutions are clearest on the level of guiding principles] The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn (2nd edition, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1970) provides an excellent study of these dynamics in the area of scientific practice, as did Alexis de Tocqueville for political practice in The Old Régime and the French Revolution.

Note 28 [people develop similar understandings of potentialities] If one relies only on causal explanations, with effect always following a cause that precedes it in time, it is hard to make sense of such potentialities, and more generally of the social construction of complex developments. When one plants a seed, or feels impressed by a child's future possibilities, or responds with excitement to an unexpected professional opportunity, one is dealing with "potentialities inherent in the present situation." One creates an extended present intellectually, which consist is numerous reciprocal interactions between states that co-exist across time and space. One feels impressed by the child’s potentiality, not because the child’s immediate capacities are so powerful that they directly cause a sense of respect and deference to a master, there, before one, in full force. Rather, one feels impressed by anticipating a trajectory of development, seeing signs of future capacities in present hints, feeling impressed in the immediate instant by that anticipated potential. In dealing with the fullness of life, we do not only think about things linked in a linear succession in time, with A causing B and B causing C and so on. We also think about things as they coexist through an extension of time and space with lots of different things all reciprocally interacting, sensing that later states are implicit in former ones, should all the ensuing interactions play out in certain ways. Immanuel Kant used this distinction to distinguish fundamental analogies drawn from experience – the principle of succession of time, according to the law of causality, and the principle of coexistence, according to the law of reciprocity (Critique of Pure Reason, b232-b264). This distinction is important throughout this essay. twentieth-century pedagogy has been obsessed with developing causally effective methods of teaching and has paid too little attention to reciprocal interactions between states co-existing across time and space to do full justice to the potentialities of educational work.

Note 29 [sociologists of knowledge] Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann with their influential book on The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1966). In a stunning way, it adapted broad currents of European thought to the social expectations of American academia, limiting the issues and defining disciplinary boundaries within which students could concentrate without much concern for peripheral issues, theoretical or empirical. As a result, thinking about the social construction of knowledge narrowed into a sub-specialty in sociology; it percolated in diverse minds as Berger and Luckmann’s highly readable book continued far more broadly to be assigned in countless introductory courses to sociology; and then it burst forth a quarter century later as a broader, apparently novel strategy of inquiry and explanation, applicable to diverse components of contemporary culture. A lot of the work on the social construction of science, technology, and innumerable facets of our civilization seems ungrounded in serious methodological traditions, and hence too easily propounded and too easily dismissed. A whole tradition comes with interest in the social construction of thought and action, which we can most economically identify as all the variations on Immanuel Kant’s basic enterprise of critical philosophizing, his strategy of observing that interesting forms of thought and action exist and asking how it is that the existence of these forms of thought and action comes to be possible in human experience.

Note 30 [educators control the material forces shaping the knowledge society] Those stuck in the mind-body problem, upholding a disembodied theory of mind, have trouble treating the state and movement of knowledge as a significant material condition of history. The rest of us see it as a palpable force, the driving force of history in the twenty-first century. As scholars develop an ability to deal with the effects of knowledge in historical life through the past five hundred years, educators can better comprehend their historical potential as a class. Such work of scholarship is dispersed across several literatures, however, each of which is diverse and demanding.

Historians of science pay increasing attention to the conditions associated with the creation of new scientific practices and principles, with growing appreciation for the role of instrumentation, communication, and intellectual technique. In this area, the work of Peter Galison, for instance, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997) is exemplary. Such studies explain more effectively how people create scientific knowledge and bring it to bear in the flux of human activity.

Historians of technology have contributed a growing number of studies concentrating on the implementation and historical consequences of large-scale technical innovations for a spectrum of concerns ranging from the structural-functional conditions of the world system to the design of simple artifacts and their effects on the textures of everyday life. Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1934, 1962) and Siegfried Gidion’s Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948) pioneered these inquiries, which have now concentrated multiple works on examining the human effects of time keeping, statistics and probability, weights and measures, electrification, mass production, communication and control principles, the pencil and the zipper, the automobile, the built environment, broadcasting, map making, visualization techniques, materials sciences, flight, medical technologies and knowledge, and so on.

Policy analysts are concentrating effectively on national innovation systems and their fruits for human life. The papers drawn together by Richard R. Nelson in National Innovation Systems: A Comparative Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) indicates the global scope of efforts to apply knowledge; and those edited by Lewis M. Branscomb and James H. Keller in Investing in Innovation: Creating a Research and Innovation Policy that Works (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1998) provide an excellent introduction to efforts to strengthen the uses of knowledge in American life.

Historians of education, particularly higher education, are paying less attention to how educational institutions mirror and reinforce social structures and are emphasizing the broad historical consequences that accompany the substantive failures and achievements of educational practice. Two recent works on the history of American higher education reflect this increased attention to the effects of academic policy on the condition of knowledge – To Advance Knowledge: The Growth of American Research Universities, 1900-1940 by Roger L. Geiger (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986) and The Rise of American Research Universities: Elites and Challengers in the Postwar Era by Hugh Davis Graham and Nancy Diamond (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). Ellen C. Lagemann in The Politics of Knowledge: The Carnegie Corporation, Philanthropy, and Public Policy (Middletown, N : Wesleyan University Press, 1989) concentrates on how the uses of knowledge interacted with a major foundation.

Economic historians increasingly take the condition of knowledge and the rate of its advance as a useful explanatory variable to analyze in studies of economic productivity. See for instance The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress by Joel Mokyr (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990) and Favorites of Fortune: Technology, Growth, and Economic Development since the Industrial Revolution edited by Patrice Higonnet, David S. Landes, and Henry Rosovsky (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991).

Critics of culture and education increasingly concentrate on the historical consequences, for better and for worse, deriving from different curricular developments, particularly in the humanities and social sciences. The fact that the curricular debates have generated considerable resonance outside academia, and have sustained themselves, engaging a wide spectrum of participants, suggests that many people are perceiving curricular issues to be of significant import. The most significant results of the debates take up matters at issue within them to deepen the terms of discussion, something done well for multiculturalism by Charles Taylor, et al. In Multiculturalism and "The Politics of Recognition" (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); for academic freedom in Louis Menand, ed. With The Future of Academic Freedom (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), and for affirmative action by William G. Bowen and Derek Bok in The Shape of the River : Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).

Through the sum of diverse inquiries, educators can understand more clearly the historical effects of their work. Educators, people creating, disseminating, and applying knowledge, values, and skills in the conduct of life, become aware of themselves as a powerful class increasingly responsible in manifold ways for determining the quality of collective life around the globe.

Note 31 [the self-awareness shared by educators is largely inchoate] Marx and his followers have been overly deterministic in that they reified their characteristic conception of class into substantive, active entities, into self-subsistent sets, with respect to which each person was existentially either a member or a not-member. We need to read Marx with a heavy admixture of Weber. Classes arise as individuals orient their actions according to the interests they form in the process of engaging in basic types of creative work. Accordingly, individuals can think and act as members of several classes, which are conceptual groupings that can map onto existential experience with significant overlaps. It is not so surprising that Marx reified class membership into an existential either-or. The material conditions of life in his time led naturally to it. Then, the status of many persons much more massively typed their experience, the conditions of life being far more homogeneous than now. A person lived life more exclusively as peasant, as laborer, as bourgeois, whereas now the farmer trades in grain futures, pork bellies, and stocks while the bourgeois even does a variety of menial household chores to a degree quite unthinkable in a well-to-do household early in the nineteenth century. Real conditions of life have thus become much more heterogeneous at the level of lived experience than they were in Marx’s time. Hence, during the course of the day, individuals act as educator, as investor, as artisan, as consumer, and so on. In this condition, issues of willed social hegemony become far more significant in determining the overall direction of historical change than the supposed objective conditions of conflict between homogeneous classes were for Marx. The formulation – "the class of persons acting as educators" – reflects this mixture of basic Marxian and Weberian concepts. Class should be taken as a conceptual grouping linking all persons insofar as they are acting "as educators," that is, subjectively aware that they are orienting their actions towards other people by engaging in the creation, dissemination, and application of knowledge, ideas, and culture in the conduct of life. To a significant degree – within the range of choice enabled by the available materialities of action – people can choose to pattern their collective existence according to their interests as educators, as consumers, as spectators, and so on. The argument here is thus not one of historical necessity, but one of historical choice – people can deal with their present-day opportunities as educators and by doing so, they can create a more fulfilling future. Our lives become most meaningful, and human fulfillment becomes the greatest, if our interests as educators predominate.

Note 32 [progressive educators lost ability to shape pedagogical practice] Lawrence A. Cremin’s The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876-1957 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961) remains far and away the best book on the subject, although it may put progressive education somewhat too much in the historical spotlight and blur distinct, chronologically contemporaneous developments into it. There is a voluminous literature on twentieth-century school reform. A good guide to it through the mid 1980s is the bibliographical essay by Cremin in American Education: The Metropolitan Experience, 1876-1980 (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1988). For more recent perspectives see David Tyack and Larry Cuban, Tinkering Toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995).

Note 33 [educators had to appeal to the commercial classes to build a system] Much of the revisionist critique of the progressive movement does not take the real limits of historical conditions on action sufficiently into account. As a result, revisionists end by blaming the victim. Radicals and reformers – reactionaries, too, for that matter – frequently encounter the dilemma that arises when they realize they lack the power to achieve fully their driving purposes. They can be pure and settle for minimal results, or the can seek strategies that augment their historic power by compromising their purpose through combinations with other groups. Under such circumstances, those content with their ineffectuality, can scorn compromise and hold without effect to the purity of their principles.

Tyack and Cuban, in Tinkering Toward Utopia (op. cit., passim), do a good job in showing how internal school conditions have limited the feasibility of reforms. Attention to the reality of limiting conditions can in its turn go too far, however. Translated into the present-day context, when educators have available to them real forces making radical alternatives feasible, Tyack and Cuban’s realism can be read too easily as a rationale for inaction. Such quiescence surfaces in Larry Cuban’s commentaries on digital technologies in the schools, for instance, "The Technology Puzzle: Why Is Greater Access Not Translating Into Better Classroom Use?" (Education Week, August 4, 1999, pp. 68 & 47). It is myopic to concentrate on immediate impediments to the effective use of computers without weighing into the balance long-term pressures for school transformation with them. Educators need to mobilize substantial historical forces sufficient to put their best ideas into effective practice.

Note 34 [the public elaborated the bureaucracies of education]This process came to its peak with the reforms of the 1950s, represented at their best by James B. Conant’s ideas about the comprehensive school. Conant recommended the elimination of small schools, most effectively in his influential book, The American High School Today: A First Report to Interested Citizens (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1959). This report explained well the rationale for the consolidation of schools and school districts. It, and the trends it represented, were driven in part by economizing measures and in larger part the desire to make schools more effective in serving multiple social function simultaneously – to provide a safety net of minimal skills to the least advantaged and least able, to prepare the broad middle-range of students for successful participation in the labor force, and to identify the highly talented and to provide them with a strong educational foundation for intellectual leadership in a society that would be increasingly meritocratic. For schools to perform these multiple functions well, they needed to employ a wide range of professional specialists, which was economic only if the scale of the school was large.

Such reforms were all too successful. The diversity of specialists has become a structural feature of schools throughout the system and professional schools of education have adapted their programs to this principle of specialization in the profession. Graduate schools of education are conglomerations of separate programs training this specialist and that, with nearly no overlap, no common professional ground between the many different programs. One consequence: schools of education are having great difficulty integrating new technologies, which are synthesizing, binding, uniting technologies, into the preparation of educators. The dance educators need something unique, as do the art educators, as do the music educators, as do the social studies educators, as do the language arts educators, as do the TESOL educators, as do the guidance counselors, as do the school administrators, and so on. In the midst of this fragmentation, it is very difficult to draw the attention of all to the ways in which the new technologies potentially permit, even encourage, educators to reconstruct the entire system. It would be instructive to compare the degree to which students in law schools, medical schools, business schools, and schools of education have, within their respective systems of professional education, a set of courses and topics that all students in the field presumably master despite differences of specialization within it.

Note 35 [suppressed educational awareness among students] I initially explored this miscasting of the student in the educational process more fully in "Toward a Place for Study in a World of Instruction." Teachers College Record. Vol. 73, No. 2, December 1971, pp. 161-205. http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/publications/papers/studyplace/title.html

Note 36 [education became a minor profession] For the concept of minor professions as ones that do not set their own controlling norms and standards, as distinct from the major professions, preeminently law and medicine, that do, see Nathan Glazer, "The Schools of the Minor Professions," Minerva, xii (1974), pp. 346-364, and Amitai Etzioni, ed., The Semi-Professions and Their Organization: Teachers, Nurses, Social Workers (New York: The Free Press, 1969). The hegemony of production in education accounts in part for the low status of schools of education in universities during the twentieth century. Other academics perceived faculties of education as providers of training for professional roles controlled by external groups. An indicator of who is winning hegemony in the knowledge societies of the twenty-first century would be an increase in the prestige, or lack of such, of schools of education within their encompassing universities. Currently, the situation is very ambiguous: on the one hand, universities are trying to enhance the place of schools of education within them, and on the other the leaders of those schools seem stuck in a cultural lag, trying to preserve their hermetic isolation within academe.

Note 37 [forces of market-driven consumption become hegemonic] TO BE FILLED IN.

Note 38 [cultural packagers may drive traditional educators out] No one has yet advanced a fully developed theory of how consumerist strategies can decisively advantage new participants in education. There is, however, a good deal of attention to the possibility, driven partly by efforts to attract capital to new ventures, especially commercial ventures in distance learning, for instance, For-Profit Higher Education: Developing a World-Class Workforce by John Sperling & Robert W. Tucker (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1997), and driven partly by the warnings of social critics concerned to defend the purview of civic choice from the marketeers’ celebrations of consumer choice, for instance, Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market System (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999).

Schiller (pp. 170-200) sees three forms of digital capitalism becoming significant in higher education – corporate in – house programs, for profit suppliers of educational resources, and proprietary schools both partnering and competing with educational institutions. The first of these, we might suggest, was simply the advanced wave of the third group, the proprietary schools, which, as 90’s corporations became leaner are flourishing as an outsourcing of the prior in-house, corporate programs sets hold. Leaving the in-house programs aside, we might still identify three incipient business models for consumerist education. The most clearly defined consists of start-up ventures, such as the Apollo Group with its University of Phoenix, which seek to provide convenient, no-frills post-baccalaureate training to adults. The second, which overlaps a bit with the first, comprises established publishing companies, which may parlay intellectual property on their backlists or in their morgues, along with their ability to recruit and commission providers of content, into some sort of killer app that will be so effective relative to established means that it suddenly takes over provision of one or another area of education. The third is the looming shadow of the huge media conglomerates – Disney, Dreamworks, the News Corp, et al. Here there are a few trial balloons such as Time-Warner’s Union City Project have had some prominence, but these companies seem to have no real plan that goes beyond their serving as a carrier and occasional provider of content to their becoming the full-fledged provider of education at any established level.

Influential media are paying much attention to the business of for-profit groups in education, especially the University of Phoenix and its corporate parent, the Apollo Group, in higher education and the Edison Schools in K-12. As James Traub summarizes the basic method in "Drive-Thru U.: Higher education for people who mean business" (The New Yorker, October 20 & 27, 1997, p. 123) "once you conceive of education as a product and regress from the needs of the consumer [regressing entails surveying professed needs and working back to the cheapest, simplest way to satisfy them], a whole world of possibilities presents itself [in both higher education and K-12 schooling]." Arthur Levine, president of Teachers College, Columbia University, in "How the Academic Profession is Changing" (Dædalus, Fall 1997), discusses diverse forces that are causing thorough-going transformation of the academic profession. Levine suggests, according to Traub (p. 122), in a few generations there will be a new landscape of higher education as a result of for-profit pedagogues – "we’ll still have some number of residential colleges and some number of research universities, but most of the rest will disappear." How far assiduous attention to the professed wants of students will carry educational innovators is a moot question, however. The Apollo Group is exploiting a clear niche within the market for higher education – as they put it on their website, "The University of Phoenix became the first accredited for-profit university in the United States with the sole mission of identifying and meeting the educational needs of working adult students." How big this niche is remains to be seen. A significant component of their actual competitors are the "universities" and training programs in major corporations. Currently The Value Line Investment Survey covers seven publicly traded companies serving it, with combined revenues for fiscal 1999 estimated at $2.8 billion, versus some $250 billion for post-secondary education as a whole. Rapid growth so far has taken place in largely unoccupied niches and provision of service in these little contested markets is likely to saturate quickly (company growth rates have already shown signs of slowing). Fairly soon, to continue growing, such companies will have to compete against a large, publicly subsidized sector, graduate and professional education offered by state universities, against which they will have great difficulty being to low-cost providers. If proprietary schools have to go upscale and compete against the higher priced private universities, their no-frills, no-research product would seem to be at a disadvantage.

Note 39 [School’s Out] It is a popular book title. In addition to several books for parents on after school activity, there is School's Out: Hyperlearning, the New Technology, and the End of Education by Lewis J. Perelman (New York : William Morrow, 1992), anticipating the demise of the school as the place of elementary and secondary education, which has gone out of print, and School's Out: The Impact of Gay and Lesbian Issues on America's Schools by Dan Woog (Boston : Alyson Publications, 1995), which has not.

Note 40 [campuses and schools, pedagogical places, may continue to have great value] As many tremors rattling the left belie a baseless inferiority complex, so a lot of bravado coming from the corporate sector reeks with specious over-confidence. Arthur Levine reports as typical one leader’s claim that higher education was ripe for corporate takeover – "As one visitor recently explained to me, higher education is a $225 billion industry with a reputation for low productivity, poor management, high cost and low use of technology." "Higher Education in the Digital Age" 1998 Annual Report (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1999, p. 8) The correct response is the intellectual response – "Are these judgments true and on what evidence can you ground them?" Expectations that corporate business can take over the provision of higher education are largely pinned on very poor comparative methodology, assuming, among other things, that businesses can reap all the benefits of new technologies and educators none. Dan Schiller, for the opposite side, makes the same assumption, a disempowering one. Use of technology through campus and school needs to be taken into account. These uses are sophisticated, fecund; they do not all simply serve to enrich corporate capitalism. In many cases they are advancing the state of the art very substantially. The same technologies that make distance learning feasible also leaven and transform on-campus pedagogical possibilities.

More generally, it is not clear that proponents of business solutions in the educational sector have thought particularly deeply about the essential characteristics of the educational sector. Corporate solutions are generally financing solutions, which proceed by concentrating large amounts of capital in proposed large-scale initiatives to be implemented according to a rigorous financial plan. Invariably, these sound impressive at the outset, but not infrequently they collapse after initial efforts show that the total returns may be more difficult and less profitable than originally hoped. Academic solutions have their roots, not in financial capital, but in knowledge, and they proceed by linking intellectual resources and working more haltingly towards significant initiatives. This halting, bottom-up procedure accounts for their reputation for low productivity and poor management, if you will, as measured by the accepted measures of corporate finance. But these measures are neither prepossessing nor obligatory. Financial measures are not the only relevant measures determining the effectiveness of large-scale innovations. For instance, developments of immense dynamism such as the World Wide Web were not creatures of finance. And initiatives of high finance, for instance Iridium, designed is an initiative of high finance to capture the future of networking with satellite systems such as Iridium, now bask in bankruptcy. Are corporate solutions so surely the higher productivity, better managed, low cost, and higher use of technology solutions compared to the knowledge-driven, incremental programs of universities? Educators do not need to tremble at the shadows of corporate giants.

Note 41 [educators are not weak vis-à-vis a consumption model] Educators need to be careful not to splinter their power by adopting narrow definitions of their power bases. In Education and the Rise of the Global Economy (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Association, 1998), Joel Spring is beginning to broaden the base for his critique of corporate interests in education by calling for an education in and through human rights issues, but he still defines a "we" that is much too small and a "they" far to large to have much hope of effecting real change. Educators need to be at once inclusive in their reach and authentic in their commitment.

Note 42 [seriousness comes on one by surprise] Goethe, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, Book VII, Indenture, Thomas Carlyle, trans. Education begins with the unreflective intentions of the student and draws those out, disclosing more and more fully the range of their implications and entailments. To make education nothing but the satisfaction of the student’s ostensible intents is to convert education into a form of entertainment. Far better to aspire to art, which converts entertainments into a form of education.

Note 43 [might many people engage in education in great earnest?] Let us differentiate training and education precisely with regard to what happens to a student’s initial ends-in-view. People are fond of the observation that the root meaning of education is to draw out, to pull something out of itself as one pulls a ductile metal into a long, strong wire. What is it that the educator draws out in the course of education? In large part, what are drawn out are the animating intentions of the student. Educators work on these to disclose and empower the further and further implications for action and effort implicit in those initial intentions. To treat those as givens, as settled ends, that are to be directly satisfied, the transaction thereupon closed, is to provide training in lieu of educative service. I try to develop a clear distinction between concepts of training and education in the essay "Kant in the Culture Factory: On Design, Study, and Technology in Education," a preliminary version of which is available at http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/projects/dante/index.html.

Note 44 [reduce a knowledge society to an information society] In addition to differentiating education and training, let us distinguish clearly between an information society – a society with an economy geared to attain the maximum, most profitable, flow of bits, undifferentiated units of information – and a knowledge society – one fulfilled as all people participate to their fullest potential in the work of creating explanations, meaning, and control in their lives. A knowledge society, of course, presupposes flows of information that people generate as they participate in cultural activity. We might even hypothesize that as a society fulfills its potential for the advancement of knowledge, and the uses of it in the conduct of life, it maximizes its sustainable flows of information. If this is the case, there is no conflict between those whose economic interest is to profit from the flow of information and those engaged in the advancement of learning. Otherwise there may be a conflict. Whatever that case may be, however, information flow in a quantitative sense is not the proper measure of value in a knowledge society. Properly speaking information flow is not in itself a measure of value at all; it becomes so only in a particular commercial context where economic values, generated by trade in information as a raw commodity, accrue to those who provide the means enabling the information to shuttle among the various consumers of it in the society. The proponents of consumerist education miss the point that at bottom people do not simply seek quanta of expert information. They seek participation in the work of creating knowledge, values, and skills of service to them in the conduct of life. As always, the debate between Socrates and the Sophists about the nature and purpose of education is still deeply current in the contemporary conduct of life.

Note 45 [efforts to develop edutainment products] Along with distinctions between education and training and between information and knowledge, we should distinguish between education and entertainment in some significant way. At root, to entertain means to hold or detain someone between things; entertainment thus helps to occupy the interstitial spaces of life. It is of the essence of entertainment that it does not really change the people entertained – it helps fill the space after this and before that. On the other hand, education in its essence does lead people to change, to draw themselves out. The commerce of entertainment requires stable formulas that work, week after week of ever-repetitive episodes holding a steady audience, constantly eager to return for more of the same. Education properly speaking does not serve such commerce well. As Walter Kaufmann said of Plato, a prolonged educative encounter changes a person.

Note 46 [providing education whether or not the balance sheet is good] Reports indicate that the Walt Disney Company has been both parsimonious and timid in following through with its proclaimed educational commitments in the implementation of its private, planned community of the future, Celebration, Florida. See Michael Pollan, "Town-Building Is No Mickey Mouse Operation," New York Times Magazine, December 14, 1987, pp. 56ff. If a corporation of such stature will back away from a full effort in a high visibility, prototyping effort, can we expect such corporations to expend their capital on a massive scale on ever-rising expectations and risk steadfastly their good will in the face and ever-more-bitter controversies? The privatization of the polity is a corrosive concept. The real world has an enduring need for public choice and civic action by and for the whole community.

Note 47 [subject elements of education narrowly to intense rationalization] One of the commonly suggested implementations of this strategy in higher education involves proposals to use new media to package course lectures by those unusual professors who can be simultaneously engaging and authoritative. Why take a course from Joe Shmo at East Podunk when one can have it from Lustrous Ludwig at Virtual Ivy? The Teaching Company has been doing a pretty good job offering Lustrous Ludwig on audio and video tape for some time, without putting a big dent in East Podunk. The reason is that what Joe Shmo does at East Podunk is actually more complicated than deliver a set-piece lecture with pedantic mediocrity. Capturing his full role in new media may not be easy. East Podunk does not market mere quanta of information and skill. East Podunk provides participation in the creation, dissemination, and use of knowledge, values, and skills. Participation is hard to mass-market. Participation involves people deeply. To be genuine, its production values need not be that great. The would-be marketer of participation faces a serious problem – the would-be marketer does not control the transaction. Consider, for instance, the services of the minor has-been, helping to coach village youths on a rocky soccer field in rural Mexico, as the boys get ready to play against their peers from the neighboring village. They participate, and this has-been participates with them. It is not World Cup football. Nevertheless it has deep meaning to the participants and the washed-up player turned coach will not be made obsolete by world-class stars, no matter how well they may be packaged and marketed, for there is a difference in being a fan of the game and participating in it. East Podunk serves would-be participants in the work of culture and Virtual Ivy had best gear itself to help East Podunk do that. Furthermore, Joe Shmo’s in-person lectures may change, adapt, and develop just as rapidly as Lustrous Ludwig’s. The in-person lecture as a form, already a highly adapted survival from pre-print pedagogy, is likely to change substantially with the addition of new media, making it possible for the lecture hall to open out to the world and for the lecturer, no longer a soloist, to act as symphony conductor, so to speak, bringing all sorts of interactions to and with the audience. If new technologies enable Joe Shmo to become better at facilitating participation in the work of culture by his students at East Podunk, they will celebrate his achievement more fully than they will the virtual appearance of Lustrous Ludwig. Those who would preserve the academic greats in sealed tins might remember that most of the time, fresh vegetables, even if grown in less-than-perfect soil, taste better in comparison to canned succulents.

Note 48 ["filling all the intervening space"] Pascal, Pensées, 353, Trotter, trans. English translation on-line in one big Gopher file.

Note 49 ["art is long, life short"] Goethe, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, Book VII, Indenture, Thomas Carlyle, trans. (revised).

Note 50 [theory shapes action] Some may object that theory is a domain of thought, not of action. For that matter, too, one might object that policy, even practice of the reflective sort, should be in the domain of thought. Certainly intellection is fundamental in the process of theorizing, in policy making, and in codifying practice, in all forms of conscious action. Nevertheless theory is in its substantial use in human culture a form of action. It is an intellectual tool that allows people to act on and in the stuff of experience with significant comprehension and power. If it is not anchored in action, theory becomes idle speculation, fantasy. As a form of action, theory often makes the impossible possible, as in enabling the construction of machines that fly, even though they are heavier than air.

Note 51 [George Santayana recognized the ineluctable condition] George Santayana, Scepticism and Animal Faith: Introduction to a System of Philosophy (1923, New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1955).

Note 52 [the vocation of science and the vocation of politics] Translations of Max Weber's speeches on "Politics as a Vocation" and "Science as a Vocation" are in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology edited by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946).

Note 53 [the academic enterprise has its roots in enlightenment ideals] Let us use the term "enlightenment" in a very broad sense to direct attention to developments rooted in Renaissance and Reformation, passing through the European Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and sweeping through the age of democratic revolutions, imperialism, and the hot and cold warring of the twentieth century. In this sense, the enlightenment involves the historical construction of modernity, in particular the construction of secular cultures, scientific and technical reason, industrial economies, nation-states, democratic polities, bureaucratic management, systems of public health and education, massive cities, and global transportation and communications.

Note 54 [rationalizations supporting self-interested professional retreats] Educators must be cautious that hard-won means of securing intellectual autonomy do not become simple sinecures. Tenure must mean more than job security for like-minded colleagues and peer review must identify disturbing excellence wherever it has merit, and not merely reinforce the privileges of securely established academics. Like any other form of privilege, academic privileges must maintain their real value for the whole community or they will be excised as parasitic preferences for the undeserving as surely as quit rents once were.

Note 55 [thoughtful critiques of enlightenment aspirations] As Marx said in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in history things happen twice, first as tragedy, then as farce. The European critique of the Enlightenment tradition, centered chronologically in the Interwar period was a serious critique. Robert Wohl’s Generation of 1914 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979) is a good introduction to the core waves of deep doubt. Martin Jay’s The Dialectical Imagination : A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996) provides an excellent introduction to the influential critique of Enlightenment and instrumental reason by Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno. The belated American flirtation with these problems has yet to generate criticism of equal stature. The best of it, say Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991) has the cloy of beaux arts Academicism to it, a predictable virtuosity within a bounded set of themes. We need more academics who do things, who act in the world on the world in ways consistent with their ideas.

Note 56 [entering into an Hegelian Aufhebung] Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (A. V. Miller, trans., New York: Oxford University Press, 1979). Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is a book about education, undoubtedly the most significant and difficult book about education, one that educational scholars in America have virtually entirely ignored. I have examined it from an educational point of view in an essay from the early 1980s, "Notes on Education and Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: The Importance des Begriffs des Anerkennens," recently put on the web at http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/hegel/.

Note 57 [rapidly receding in relative educational attainments] Henry Adams, in The Education of Henry Adams gives an extended meditation on the historical relativity of educational attainments and the terrible cost of remediating their debasement through the force of historical events. "The picture of Washington in March, 1861, offered education, but not the kind of education that led to good. The process that Matthew Arnold described as wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born, helps nothing. Washington was a dismal school. . . . Not a man there knew what his task was to be, or was fitted for it; everyone without exception, northern or southern, was to learn his business at the cost of the public. Lincoln, Seward, Sumner and the rest, could give no help to the young man seeking education; they knew less than he; within six weeks they were all to be taught their duties by the uprising of such as he, and their education was to cost a million lives and ten thousand million dollars, more or less, north and south, before the country could recover its balance and movement." Henry Adams, Novels, Mont Saint Michel, The Education (New York: The Library of America, 1983), pp. 818-9. As the scale of human action increases, with irreversible global effects unfolding over decades and centuries, the human costs of historical remediation can now far exceed those which Adams rued. At the turn of the twenty-first century, educators need to keep in mind the extreme complexity of the world. It is all too easy to become obsessed with the digital surface of experience, as if in mastering that surface we master the full complexity of the human situation. A bracing antidote is Robert D. Kaplan’s The Ends of the Earth: A Journey at the Dawn of the 21st Century (New York: Random House, 1996). Ronald J. Deibert’s study, Parchment, Printing, and Hypermedia: Communication in World Order Transformation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997) presents one of the few efforts to probe beneath the surface of digital innovations to think about their effects on the basic social structures in force around the world.

Note 58 [personal awareness of impending death has deep effects] Jean Hyppolite has an excellent discussion of the recognition of death in Hegel’s understanding of life in Studies on Marx and Hegel (John O’Neill, trans., New York: Basic Books, 1969, pp. 3-31). Humanism as a philosophy of life would be stronger if thinkers more fully confronted the realities of personal mortality.

Note 59 [power of the progressive bond with posterity] Religious cultures might seem far more powerful, measuring the matter by numbers of professed adherents, even in this supposedly secular age. Nominal adherence is not a good measure of historic power, however, as a glance at the historical demographics of the human enterprise will indicate. Historic power consists in the capacity to shape the character and meaning of the human enterprise. The progressive bond with posterity, the inner grounding of enlightenment effort, has had far greater effects on the aggregate conditions and quality of human life over the past two or three centuries than have beliefs in transcendent eternities. There are a growing number of studies thoughtfully examining the global historical transformations that have taken place since 1750 or so. David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (New York: 1998) is a good starting point. That the human condition is still insecure and imperfect is not a sign of historic failure, but one of historic incompletion. Of those with a choice, the number who opt for seventeenth-century dentistry, sixteenth century surgery, fifteenth century court procedure, fourteenth century public health, or thirteenth century education, are not many. One might complain that such a measure is tendentious, for it turns on material indicators that do not touch on the lost meanings and values left behind in the material amelioration of life over the past centuries. Enlightenment humanism, as much as any other worldview, is replete with structures of meaning and value and no worldview has a privileged position over and against it. Which worldview leads to the fullest historical realization of all the potentialities of life? The progressive bond with posterity is a ground for finding meaning and value in life. Posterity is a far more concrete, palpable, believable ground for meaning and value in life than is eternity and the workings of a timeless, disembodied deity. Educators can address the grounds for belief, for the conviction of work, for meaning and value. Having the grounds, educators must voice their certainties and act with a conviction of worth and meaning.

Note 60 [rational persons develop a commitment to the bearers of their social selves] Kant's stricture in "What Is Enlightenment?" – "For himself (and only for a short time) a man may postpone enlightenment in what he ought to know, but to renounce it for himself and even more to renounce it for posterity is to injure and trample on the rights of mankind." – states succinctly this bond between the dignity of the rational individual and the rights of posterity. Beck, trans., Berlinische Monatsschrift. Dezember-Heft 1784, p. 490, equivalent to Königliche Preussische Akademie, 7:39.

Note 61 [digital tools are not culturally neutral] A typical instance of this complaint is C. A. Bowers, The Cultural Dimensions of Educational Computing: Understanding the Non-Neutrality of Technology (New York: Teachers College Press, 1988). For a useful survey, see Daniel Chandler, "Technological or Media Determinism" (1995, http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/tecdet/tecdet.html).

Note 62 [exacting rational discipline and the capacity for choice] Scholars pay too little attention to the integral relationship between freedom and standardization. It may be a mistake to see standardization as the iron cage of modernity, following Weber, or the discontent of civilization, following Freud. The locus of freedom, the capacity to act effectively with autonomous intention, is far more complicated than the churning urges of the Id. Human options are largely created by accepting the necessities of nature and of standardized conventions. People need to internalize all manner of disciplines in order to have complex systems of action. A simple, everyday example: to drive where we may want to go, we must observe the elemental rules of the road, driving on the right in the United States and on the left in England. Most (perhaps all) enablements involve conformity to restrictive regularities, standards, and conventions. Political scientists and educators have failed to study constraint setting adequately. For instance, there has been far too little attention paid to standard-setting groups as powerful determiners of significant domains of autonomous action. The best introduction to these topics is James R. Beniger’s The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), a book that is all-too-often misunderstood.

Note 63 ["Sapere aude!"] Kant, "What Is Enlightenment?", Berlinische Monatsschrift. Dezember-Heft 1784, p. 481, equivalent to 7:35.

Note 64 [Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen] The document is in many collections, on-line in English [INSERT URL] and in French [INSERT URL].

Note 65 [vernacular languages and the uses of print] There is a rich, rapidly growing literature on the ways in which printing enabled important cultural developments in Western history, a literature highly instructive in efforts to understand the sorts of enablements developing with digital communications innovations. In 1958, the French scholars, Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, provided the foundation for much of this scholarship in The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450-1800 (D. Gerard, trans., London: NLB, 1976). This work culminates with a discussion of printing and language – "Just as printing favoured the growth of the Reformation, so it helped mould our modern European languages" (p. 319). Elizabeth Eisenstein has a good discussion of the relation between printing and the primacy of national languages in The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (2 vols., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979, esp. pp. 349-364. In The History and Power of Writing (L. G. Cochrane, trans., Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994, esp., Chapters 5, 6, and 7), Henri-Jean Martin is especially effective in his explanations of the processes through which printed books were incorporated into European culture during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and his discussion of how the various markets for printed works operated early on is particularly clarifying. Harvey J. Graff gives a thorough survey of the literature, current through the mid 1980s, in The Legacies of Literacy: Continuities and Contradictions in Western Culture and Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987, esp. pp. 108-172).

Note 66 [whether English becomes the global learned language is moot] The interactions between languages of learning and new communications media through the extended present require a separate essay, which would distract this one from its purpose. Let us here take note of one complexity in the question. Over-determination exists on both sides of the development in the sense that there are many distinct causalities working to globalize English and many distinct causalities working to preserve the uses of national languages. Benjamin R. Barber analyzes a ominous globalizing causality in his critique of the American commercial culture as global culture, Jihad vs. McWorld (New York: Times Books, 1995), as well as in his very thoughtful essay, "Democracy at Risk: American Culture in a Global Culture," (World Policy Journal, Summer 1998). We should join Barber in his critique, and even more in amplifying his sustained call for strong democracy, and at the same time we should observe that other causalities, less ominous ones, also work to globalize the use of English and to promote common cultural resources shared by all humanity. Powerful educational aspirations coursing through humanity, which are far deeper and more powerful than the induced desires of McWorld, also drive the emergence of a global culture. The strongest democracy may be a cultural democracy, one in which each person participates with intellectual and civic autonomy in the work culture and education. Educators can build a cultural democracy on a global scale, but to do so they must preserve, perfect, and complete their command over resources of digital communications. Both Jihad and McWorld are two dystopias, which will come about should humanity disavow enlightenment.

Note 67 [higher education became a costly pursuit of new knowledge] Francis Bacon expressed with the most prescience the ideas guiding research efforts through the modern period. In Francis Bacon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), Perez Zagorin characterizes Bacon’s intellectual agenda: "Three closely interlinked thoughts or motives lay at the origin of Bacon’s philosophy: the rejection of Aristotle; the conviction that the proper object of philosophy in seeking truth must be scientia operativa or a science productive of works for the relief and improvement of human life; and the belief in the necessity of a new method aimed at discovery that would achieve a vastly enlarged knowledge of nature" (p. 30). Rather than say that the modern agenda conformed throughout its course to the one that Bacon laid out, it would be more accurate to say that as the modern agenda has evolved, it has matured into a very full realization of Bacon’s basic motives. Bacon had the power of prescience, not the power of prescription.

Note 68 [the culture of schooling and the culture of research] As early as 1630 in his Great Didactic, Johann Amos Comenius described systems of universal compulsory schooling that he perceived to be potentials implicit in the design of good textbooks and of schools pedagogically adapted to working with them. It took close to three centuries to implement those potentialities in the extended present of print-based educational reform. As with Bacon, no society promulgated a direct implementation of Comenius’s vision, but all modern societies have worked their ways to complete, albeit highly secular, implementations of the agenda for schooling that Comenius set forth in the Great Didactic.

Note 69 [rethinking differences between schooling and higher education] To a degree quite unprecedented in modern scholarship, university-based scientists and scholars are becoming engaged in using state-of-the-art data and conceptual tools as means to introduce students in elementary and secondary school to their fields of interest. One can find numerous examples of such developments on the World Wide Web. A comprehensive study of this trend would be very informative. It appears to be taking place across a wide range of fields and in many different countries.

Note 70 [scholars serve the advancement of education at all its levels] Such a purpose, making the broad education of the public integral to the imperative of advancing knowledge through research, is fully consistent with the original purposes set forth by pioneers of the modern intellectual enterprise in works such as The Advancement of Learning by Francis Bacon, which aimed to persuade the sovereign of "the merit and true glory in the augmentation and propagation of" learning and knowledge (I, "To the King," 3).

Note 71 [education to draw people into the work of producing knowledge] There is some danger that digitally enabled innovation in education will bypass schools of education, which are somewhat separated from developments in major research universities (even when functioning as a school within such universities). As the traditional system has solidified, there are two points of intersection between schooling and higher education – the selection process by which the favored few gain admittance to colleges and universities and the education process by which teachers and other professionals receive their preparation for jobs in the schools. Schools of education have, so to speak, owned the second point of intersection. They generally have been left to their own devices by the rest of higher education to engage in the professional development of teachers, except for periodic complaints by their colleagues in the arts and sciences, who from time to time become dyspeptic over the poor preparation of newly recruited students coming through the other point of school-university intersection. Hence those in schools of education have habitually experienced attention from their academic peers as an unpleasant challenge.

Digital technologies are changing the structural relationship significantly by creating a pervasive overlap between the intellectual resources of higher education and the intellectual resources available in the schools. Academics increasingly see the fruits of their inquiries potentially having a much broader, diverse audience, and they are beginning to recognize that they need to attend to the pedagogical issues arising with this broadening of their audience. Hence interest in the work of schooling is picking up throughout all parts of higher education, with the main issue being a pedagogical, curricular issue – how to enable the novice student learn effectively from direct involvement with the data and tools of advanced scholarship and science. This opens a whole new function for educators with pedagogical expertise in schools of education. The leadership of those schools, however, having been selected on the basis of their success under the traditional conditions, perceives the growing interest throughout the rest of higher education as an unwanted intrusion on their turf and reacts like a threatened turtle pulling into its shell. Unfortunately the shell may not be hard enough to provide safety under the resulting pressures. In the United States, much initial pump priming for a changed university role in education has been done by the National Science Foundation's funding of curricular initiatives at all levels, and by and large this funding has gone to state and local school systems or to university projects with roots in research science. It is important that faculty members in schools of education leave their familiar turf and involve themselves in university-wide projects as participants in much more complex development projects. Otherwise they may become terminally obsolete: as we suggested elsewhere, to work well with new media, teachers increasingly need different skill sets than the ones they receive in traditional schools of education.

Note 72 [the promotion of broad participation in intellectual work] One barrier to these developments lies in the inertia of promotion and tenure procedures, which may channel effort by many junior academics away from working with new media. Perhaps universities should start refereeing contributions to their web sites, not simply to guarantee the quality of research contributions, but also (perhaps primarily) as contributions to the educational effectiveness of the site. Among other things, throughout higher education new media will make a person’s work as a teacher more accessible to unobtrusive peer review. It is important to estimate whether the dominance of research Publications in promotion and tenure reviews results because this criterion is really held by academics to be the only significant criterion, or because it is the only one under the traditional constraints that is susceptible to well-grounded peer review, the fruits of research being public in ways that the results of teaching have not been. It would seem that the latter explanation accounts for a great deal of the pre-eminence of the research criterion and the conditions undergirding it are changing rapidly (historically speaking, at any rate).

Note 73 [the pedagogy of research] Much soul-searching is going on about the future of research universities, much of it very thoughtful – see Jonathan R. Cole, Elinor G. Barber, and Stephen R. Graubard, The Research University in a Time of Discontent (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), Roger G. Noll, ed., Challenges to Research Universities (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 1998), Ronald G. Ehrenberg, The American University: National Treasure or Endangered Species? (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), and William G. Bowen and Harold T. Shapiro, eds., Universities and Their Leadership (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). The common criticism of the effect of the research mission on the quality of teaching in universities has triggered much of the concern. Two serious studies of this effect on the twentieth-century research university are The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality by Julie A. Reuben (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996) and How Scholars Trumped Teachers: Change Without Reform in University Curriculum, Teaching, and Research, 1890-1990 by Larry Cuban (New York: Teachers College Press, 1999).

With respect to the pedagogy of research, it is important to note that the question of the quality of university teaching, and the effect of research on it, is a rather different matter. American research universities attract top students from all around the world not because the quality of set-piece courses that they offer is overwhelmingly superior to what is offered elsewhere. Rather students come to apprentice in the research milieu of the universities, to work, and thereby learn, on projects, to engage in problem-solving with peers and professors. Education through participation in the work of creating knowledge, skills and values in American universities is excellent. The question with a pedagogy of research is whether educators can new media to broaden and open this very strong component of the academic tradition – the pedagogy of research.

Note 74 [the whole educational system apprenticed to the research apparatus] In programs such as Archaeotype, developed through the Dalton Technology Project, this pedagogical model seems to work very well as early as the middle grades. See Evaluation of the Dalton Technology Project from a Thinking Skills Perspective by John Black, Clifford Hill and Janet Schiff (New York: CCT, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1993). For a general statement of the design principles in such programs, see John B. Black and Robert McClintock, "An Interpretation Construction Approach to Constructivist Design," in Brent G. Wilson, ed. Constructivist Learning Environments: Case Studies in Instructional Design. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Educational Technology Publications, 1995, pp. 25-31. http://daemon.ilt.columbia.edu/ilt/papers/ICON.html

Note 75 [process of consultation could push the structure of inquiry] Such services to problem-solving groups in schools may be the response that enables the university to avoid the educational obsolescence anticipated by Eli M. Noam in "Electronics and the Dim Future of the University," Science 270:13 October 1995:247-249. Noam suggests that publishers and media companies will take over the traditional forms of university instruction and academia will find itself without a teaching function. Noam does not take very concrete account of the ways in which familiar instructional forms can metamorphose to take account of new informational conditions. Canned lectures by the putative great teachers of the world may have far less educative value than timely consultation via video conference with someone over a question of common interest. It is a commonplace in academe that one does not really learn a subject until one has to teach it and a very productive undertaking for undergraduates and graduate students may involve serving as sources of expertise over networks to children and teachers. To be feasible, such networks of consultation require an infrastructure that is rapidly coming into place with the spread of good Internet connectivity into classrooms around the world.

Note 76 [five broad domains of professional policy] I have discussed these five domains, how current policies in each represent adaptations to print technologies, and possible alternative policies that digital technologies may make feasible in greater detail in Power and Pedagogy: Transforming Education through Information Technology (New York: Institute for Learning Technologies, 1992, http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/academic/texts/mcclintock/pp/title.html

Note 77 [we are not arguing a strict determinism] Critics and educators have found the issue of technological determinism vexing. The set of essays edited by Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx, Does Technology Drive History? – The Dilemma of Technological Determinism (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994), provides an excellent introduction and over-view of the issues. There needs to be more discussion of the ways in which a large-scale collective choice can result in the determination of an extended present, which may be irreversible and may encompass most or all of our life spans. Many willed actions are voluntary, but once chosen are irreversible – try in mid-swallow to unswallow your next sip of coffee. There are many collective choices, which at the outset might or might not have been taken at a scale of cultural significance. The collectivity is like the boy at the bank of a brook, hesitating whether or not to venture a jump across. Once a people have taken one of these collective choices, however, they cannot un-take it, but have to follow through with it to some course of completion, able only to exert efforts at mid-course adjustment, much as a broad-jumper twists his limbs one way or another to maximize his leap. Large-scale technological innovations, once underway in a decisive historic sense, have this character of irreversibility. At the same time, they have major challenges of mid-course adjustment within the. For example, the on-going development of an air transportation system became irreversible early in the twentieth century; whether that system should rely on a super-sonic transport plane circa 1985-2015, or rely during that period on large, sub-sonic designs, was an issue of significant mid-course correction.

Note 78 [practices determined by or with reference to the technology] The concept of "affordances" is useful here, but because it is useful, we avoid the term for fear of its being degraded into jargon. Donald A. Norman has a useful presentation of the concept in Things that Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1993, pp. 105-113). "The affordances of an object refers to its possible function: A chair affords support, whether for standing, sitting, or the placement of objects. A pencil affords lifting, grasping, turning, poking, supporting, tapping, and of course, writing. In design, the critical issue is perceived affordances: what people perceive the object can do. . . . Affordances also applies to technologies. Different technologies afford different operations. That is, they make some things easy to do, others difficult or impossible. It should come as no surprise that those things that the affordances make easy are apt to get done, and those things that the affordances make difficult are not apt to get done." Humans are relatively adept at perceiving the affordances in things and situations; hence we are tool-making animals. The problem, of course, is that things do not come with their affordances inventoried and labeled. People using things and technologies must discover and develop their affordances. Possible functions to complicated objects and technologies may go entirely unperceived and others emerge from a basis of widely shared experience.

Note 79 [the key was the invention of the textbook] The following schema of print-oriented innovations, culminating in Comenius, may help summarize the key historical interactions between textbooks and educational practice in the early modern period.

Note 80 [a compendium of knowledge] Johann Henri Alsted, Encyclopædia (Herbornæ Nassduidrum, 1630).

Note 81 [Comenius] M. W. Keatinge, The Great Didactic Of John Amos Comenius. (Translated Into English And Edited With Biographical, Historical, And Critical Introductions. New York: Russell & Russell, 1967). "There is one factor which by its absence or its presence can render the whole organisation of a school of no avail or can aid it in the highest degree, and that is a proper supply of comprehensive and methodical class-books. Since the invention of printing, it has been an easy matter to find men who are able and willing to make use of it, who will supply the funds necessary for the printing of good and useful books and who will purchase books of this kind. . . . It is evident, therefore, that the success of my scheme depends entirely upon a suitable supply of encyclopædic class-books. . . . " (p. 296)

Note 82 [questions of equity are persisting, far too tenaciously] In thinking about the social history of technological innovation, it is important to distinguish two matters: the social dynamics by which the innovation comes into use; and the social character of the interactions enabled by the innovation among those for whom it has become a technology in common use. With the goal of achieving equity in historical societies, we should ask two questions. First, as it matures, does the implementation of a technology make it available pervasively through the whole society? Second, are the affordances provided by the technology such to provide all users relatively more equal opportunities and empowerments than they would have without those affordances? The new, by definition, is at the outset scarce. Hence the historical introduction of an innovation is almost always elitist – the rich and powerful have privileged access to the new developments or, in a few cases, those with privileged access to the technology become the rich and powerful. Nevertheless, within the circle of those using the new technologies, technologies introduced through elitist dynamics can have highly egalitarian effects, doing away with existent social differentials. Certainly with the digital technologies, some are gaining command of them much more rapidly than others. Among those who do gain such command, however, many pre-existing differences in opportunities for full cultural participation thereby disappear. In such a situation, it is especially important to develop policies that enable all groups to utilize the technology with full effect, and towards such ends, reports like Falling Through the Net: Defining the Digital Divide: A Report on the Telecommunications and Information Technology Gap in America (Washington: National Telecommunications and Information Administration, U.S. Department of Commerce, 1999) are very important. To the extent that the uses of a technology will have egalitarian effects, it becomes imperative to ensure and hasten the introduction of the technology to all components of society.

Note 83 [cultural profusion is an approximate reality for many people] We should not be surprised if this fast-emerging condition rather quickly has a significant effect on some issues of curricular policy. For instance, with publication of resources such as Encarta Africana on CD-ROM and associated websites, the situation for African-American studies in schools shifts. Previously, the subject was vulnerable because materials to support the subject in the ordinary school were scarce and the demonstrable results of student work with the few resources that were available would often be consequently sparse. By insisting on the value of such studies despite these limitations, proponents of the subject would often sound doctrinaire to disinterested observers. With robust resources, the judgment by observers of good will then changes. With ample, quality materials available to students and teachers, the depth and breadth of achievement in African-American studies can flourish, and the terms of curricular debate must change accordingly.

Note 84 [policy enabled authorities to make choices on behalf of users] Critics and thinkers of stature have examined the ways in which cultural and educational practices legitimate elite decisions on behalf of sub-groups within society. For the English tradition, The Uses of Literacy: Changing Patterns of English Mass Culture by Richard Hoggart (London: Chatto & Windus, 1957) and two books by Raymond Williams – Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958, 1983) and The Long Revolution New York: Columbia University Press, 1961) – are excellent analyses of the difficulties in attaining a genuine democratization of culture. The work of Pierre Bourdieu – Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture with Jean-Claude Passeron (2nd. Edition, R. Nice, trans. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1990) and Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (R. Nice, trans., Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984) – examines such legitimizing functions in education and culture respectively. Among students of American education, Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis have developed the theme with respect to elementary and secondary education in Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life (New York: Basic Books, 1976). Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis (T. McCarthy, trans., Boston: Beacon Press, 1975) gives a succinct overview of the problem of legitimation.

Note 85 [authorities work to assist the student's power of choice] Daniel Bell, to my astonishment, having always thought I disagreed with him, anticipates much of the argument here, stressing with considerable detail, how economic power is giving way to intellectual power in The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting (New York: Basic Books, 1973, esp., pp. 165-265). His study, The Reforming of General Education: The Columbia College Experience in its National Setting (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966) also envisions the primacy of educational institutions and presents a pedagogical examination of undergraduate education in which issues of distributive justice diminish and those of regulative justice come to the fore. Events did not treat that work well.

Note 86 [Aristotle formalized the problem of distributive justice] For Aristotle’s views on justice, see Politics, esp. III: ix, 1280a-1281a, and Nicomachean Ethics, V, esp. 1129a-1134a. John Rawls’ influential study, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), treats the problem of justice largely within the frame that Aristotle set. Rawls makes only passing mention of education, as an enabling good to be distributed according to a theory of justice. He makes mention of Plato only in two dismissive footnotes. There is a serious need for renewed interest in regulative justice on the part of serious students of education. What distributive justice is to the practice of politics, regulative justice is to the conduct of education: the lack of serious thinking about regulative justice is a scandal for the educators’ profession.

Note 87 [where scarcities abound, regulative justice recedes from attention] It is very difficult to unravel the issues of distributive justice and regulative justice with respect to issues of race and minority cultures. Brown vs. the Board of Education is one of the few major educational actions to have been taken on the basis of reasoning about regulative justice – separate but equal schooling embodied a radically different relation of parts to the whole than did desegregated schooling, the relationships and interworkings of which the Court held to be more consistent with Constitutional principles. More recent controversies over affirmative action have largely cast it as a form of action controlled by principles of distributive justice – deciding who merits preferred access to scarce educational opportunities, with policies seen as righting accumulated wrongs in the view of some or violating due measure in the view of others. Issues of diversity and the incorporation of minorities into education and society are not well suited for resolution according to principles of distributive justice. Diversity, cultural multiplicity, is a conundrum for distributive justice, which can deal with it only by making comparisons, which are inherently dubious in the face of real differences, as old saws about comparing apples and oranges remind us. Diversity is not difficult to deal with in the context of regulative justice – e pluribus unum, the society that integrates complex parts into an effective whole is a more interesting, resourceful, and humane society than one of narrow homogeneity. Regulative justice exists as a human concern because people must deal constructively with their diversities, in the same way that distributive justice arises as a human concern because people must take their similarities fairly into account. The great importance of the study by William G. Bowen and Derek Bok in The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998) lies in the way the authors clearly define the educational issue of racial considerations as an issue of diversity. We can do much more to clarify and celebrate the educative value of diversity by paying more attention to the role in the process of education played by reciprocal experiences of recognition, in the Hegelian sense of the term, in which persons and groups interact, clash and cooperate, and progressively learn through those experiences to recognize the humanity of self and other. It is no accident that Charles Taylor, a great Hegel scholar, has gone to the heart of this matter in his essay. "The Politics of Recognition" in by Charles Taylor, et al. In Multiculturalism and "The Politics of Recognition" (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). It is unfortunately also no accident that his comprehension of the issue has had little resonance among American educators, whose grounding in the small, homogeneous circle of Anglo-American philosophy leaves them with little stimulus or drive to recognize recognition as a powerful process in education.

Note 88 [educators have generated little justification for existing practices] Recent polemics about the educative quality of higher education, and the discussions, pro and con, of the canon, border on but do not grasp the issue of regulative justice in education. Criticism, occasioned in part by these polemics, assessing actual contributions to the canon is worthwhile, works such as Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), David Denby’s Great Books : My Adventures With Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World (New York: Touchstone Books, 1996), and Andrew Delbanco’s Required Reading: Why Our American Classics Matter Now (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997). But for the most part, the recent discussions merit note mainly by virtue of their mediocrity – that must somehow signal something of historical significance.

Occasionally in cultural history, books that represent an important author’s second-rate effort, an effort well below his normal stature, take on an inordinate power in shaping important discussions. One such book was Sir Karl Popper’s Open Society and Its Enemies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950), which anathematized a significant side of the Western tradition in a way that was at once highly distorted and all-too effective among Anglo-American educators. The resultant one-sidedness has reverberated through much historical thinking, and Allan Bloom renewed its currency in his influential critique, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), another second-rate work of substantial influence by a scholar of stature. Bloom rehabilitated Plato from blanket Popperian-like dismissals, but he renewed the ban on Continental philosophies of history, a tradition of which educators have significant need in coping with the communications junctures of our time. Bloom’s subtitle provided the public with a scapegoat for numerous discontents that people felt in the aftermath of the 60s and 70s. It might have been a time when educators began anew to probe the serious issues of regulative justice inherent in their work. Unfortunately, substantial parts of Bloom’s own enterprise were lost from view as he was taken up by lesser followers. In the ensuing years, the pedagogy of higher education devolved into conventional polemics preached to the choirs of blame and defense.

It is unfortunate that negative polemics have dominated the issue, for it is raising almost the right question. Instead of what harm is one or another curricular choice likely to wreak, educators should pay more attention to the ways in which different curricular choices can benefit the person’s full development.

Note 89 [the question the young Socrates put so well] See Plato, Protagoras, esp. 313c-314c, 318a-320c. As Socrates both exploited it and experienced it, answering this question can prove dangerous – both in dialogue and in life. One might suspect that this danger accounts in significant part for the mediocrity of so much educational discourse. The mediocrity may be a form of self-protection that leaves the educator unexposed. If satisfied with such mediocrity, however, educators cannot fulfill the historic mission that they now have. Contemplating the demise of Socrates, Plato did not counsel mediocrity. Instead, he insisted that in the end each person’s most significant educator is oneself and that each person bears the responsibility for his or her own education. "The blame is his who chooses," Lachesis, the daughter of Necessity observes in the existentialist close of the Republic. This is consumerism in education at its best, which will drive educational discourse, reflection on regulative justice, to a pitch of excellence, for this makes the student the fundamental educator, the person responsible for the quality of his or her own education. The work of the political theorist, J. Peter Euben, Corrupting Youth: Political Education, Democratic Culture, and Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997) should be of major interest to educators willing to address the issues of civic pedagogy in our time. Benjamin R. Barber’s An Aristocracy of Everyone : The Politics of Education and the Future of America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994) and Amy Gutmann’s Democratic Education, With a New Preface and Epilogue (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987 & 1999) are also important. These studies do not quite make the move beyond issues of distributive justice in education to develop a full educative theory of regulative justice, however.

Note 90 [principles convert necessity into the fruit of reasoned choice] Marx’s theory of ideology analyzed this process thoroughly. In a pragmatic sense, it becomes a distortion only when the objective conditions no longer require the pattern of action in question. See Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1949).

Note 91 [Rousseau on educational estrangement and didactic acceleration] See the discussion of "gaining time by loosing time" in Emile or On Education Book 2, pp. 271ff. (Bloom, trans., New York: Basic Books, 1979. pp. 93 ff.) (Foxley-Roosevelt, trans., 1998. http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/projects/emile_intro.html

Note 92 [the business of the student] Of course, historical constraints in the information infrastructure were not the only factors that led people to design the educational system around efforts to channel and accelerate the pace of student learning. The argument here, however, is that educational alternatives to such arrangements, although frequently suggested, have never been significantly implemented because the constraints in the information infrastructure rendered such alternatives impracticable. As those constraints change, the historical verdict potentially changes. Let us put it this way: If, broadly speaking, the introduction of printing in Europe empowered failed medieval heresies to become the dominant theology in major areas of western Christendom and to force deep reform throughout the remainder, so too may the introduction of digital technologies in post-industrial societies empower the failed educational heresies propounding child-centered schools and progressive education to become the dominant educational system in the twenty-first century.

Note 93 [the starting point] "The first question a philosopher faces is where to start," as Robert Denoon Cumming put it in Starting Point: An Introduction to the Dialectic of Existence (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 1. This study is a generally overlooked contribution that indicates an important issue on which thinkers should make themselves clear. Cumming’s Human Nature and History: A Study of the Development of Liberal Political Thought (2 vols., Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1969) is also important for the topic here.

Note 94 [everyone assumes the natural goodness of other drivers] The need to drive defensively does not contradict this point, which pertains to a more existential level of driving. On the freeway with traffic dense but moving well virtually all drivers are at ease driving in packed formations at speeds in which their reaction time would not allow them to respond to a rapid change in path or speed by a car close by. With respect to the irrelevance of enforcement at the margins, it is interesting how the American rules of the road have adopted traffic regulations with respect to speed in thorough contravention to the official limits, with even the police generally conforming to the ruling common sense, enforcing a margin some 20% above the posted limits.

Note 95 [educational attainments of parents predicts educational success] The main source here is Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture by Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron (2nd. Edition, Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1990), Nice, trans.

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