appendix a schooling and learning in an information society

Appendix ASchooling and

Learning in anInformation Society

“We have now reached the stage when virtually anything we want to do in the field ofcommunications is possible: the constraints are no longer technical, but economic, legal,or political.” Arthur C. Clarke (3)

hether one considers it a curse or a blessing to be born in“interesting” times, such is the plight or good fortune ofthe current generation. Events and inventions of the pastseveral years strain credulity even for those accustomed

to seeing the unlikely occur. There is little doubt that the years atthe later part of the 20th century will provide a rich subject for his-torians as they explain to future generations the remarkableevents of today. Those of us living amid this period of monumen-tal change are faced with the difficult task of pulling back to gainperspective to see what is so close to us.

No developments among those of the past several decades areof greater consequence than those pertaining to information andcommunications technology. We have come to the point whereindeed as Arthur Clarke says, “anything we want to do in the fieldof communications is possible.” This audacious statement is cor-rect even when we broaden the scope to include information/com-puter technology; for indeed, the line between communicationsand information technologies is sufficiently blurred so that it isimpossible to know where one ends and the other begins.

The relevance for students and teachers of a technology that isused by scientists, technicians, business people, public officials,and others as the dominant means to create, store, and distributeinformation is obvious. As computer applications for personalproductivity become increasingly powerful and prevalent, and asnetworks become the “places” where scientific, technical, andcultural information is stored, there is little reason to wonder if | 25

by

James BoscoWestern Michigan University

26 | Education and Technology: Future Visions

such technology belongs in schools. Schools, noless than other agencies, and more than many,need to take advantage of information technology.The essence of the issue for schools is this: If any-thing is possible, what should we make probablein schools? What should be done to make the im-mense capability of information technology ameans for improving the lives of our children andfor enabling them to live productive and satisfyinglives in an increasingly complex and changingworld?

Every new technology brings with it specula-tion about the impact of the technology on the fu-ture. Looking back, it is not difficult to find thosewho look silly because they badly underestimatedthe significance of a major technological advance.Arthur Clarke tells of the reaction of the chief en-gineer of the British Post Office upon hearing ofthe news of Alexander Graham Bell’s invention.He told his colleagues, “The Americans have needof the telephone—but we do not. We have plentyof messenger boys . . . ” (3). This British PostalOfficial made the mistake of thinking that the tele-phone would fit—or fail to fit—into the world ashe knew it. He did not allow the possibility that thetelephone would generate other developmentswhich, in a sense, would remake the world so asto create a place for itself. Similarly the impact ofcomputer technology has been misunderstoodeven by some who we might think would havebeen unlikely to do so. Shortly after World War II,Thomas J. Watson Sr. predicted that five machineswould make up the world market for computersand, as recently as 1970, Kenneth Olsen, thefounder of Digital Equipment Company, wasquoted as saying that he saw “no reason for any in-dividual to have a computer in their home”(17).“Solemn prophesy,” J. B. Priestly is reported tohave said, “is obviously a futile proceeding, ex-cept insofar as it makes our descendants laugh”(16).

Speculation about the impact of technologyoften takes a utopian tone; the technology is seenas the means to achieve whatever lofty goals theproponent espouses. Ralph Waldo Emerson, whobelieved that America was destined to be a pasto-ral republic, hailed the advent of the steam loco-

motive. Railroad travel, he believed, woulddisperse the population to rural communities. Asa result of the invention of the steam locomotive,Emerson believed that the time was coming when,in his words, “the whole land is a garden and thepeople have grown up in the bowers of a paradise”(14). Emerson’s prediction reads no more quaintor mistaken than the statements from computerproponents which abounded in the early 1980sabout a “computer revolution” which would trans-form the schools and turn them into their own real-ization of an educational paradise by the end ofthat decade.

New technologies typically also generate abody of apocalyptic commentary. While Emersongreeted railroad technology as a means for im-proving the human condition, his contemporaryHerman Melville was among those who fearedthat the machines emerging during this timewould undermine the human condition. Thetheme of technology as a nefarious force which re-duces human control and denigrates human valuesis longstanding. This has been the case with com-puters and information technology. Many personshave expressed the fear that computers would de-personalize schools as children sat before a screenwithout any human contact from teacher or peers.

The record of past technologies suggests thatthe consequences of technology are seldom, ifever, so consistent or unambiguous to warrant ei-ther the utopian or apocalyptic characterization.There is little reason to believe that informationtechnology will bring either heaven or hell toearth; but it is clear that information technology iscausing profound changes in how we live, work,play, and learn. Many will continue to debatewhether information technology is making ourlives better or worse, but there is little argumentthat information technology is making our livesvery different from what they were before thistechnology was invented.

The changes caused by information technologyin what and how children, youth, and adults learnare not something we await in the future; we arein the midst of these changes. Informationtechnology is transforming the amount and natureof the informational content of civilization as well

Appendix A Schooling and Learning in an Information Society | 27

as the processes whereby this information is ac-quired. The modest changes in the nature and con-duct of schooling in recent decades stand amidstmonumental changes in how, when, where, andwhat learning occurs in our society. As informa-tion technology-based learning opportunities be-come increasingly ubiquitous and efficacious,schooling, teaching, and learning will take on anew character and the establishment of a new bal-ance between school and nonschool learning willbe established.

CURRENT CONDITIONS IN SCHOOLSIn the past couple of decades, the plight of UnitedStates public schools has been documented inmany books and articles; thus, a detailed accountis not necessary here. A brief recapitulation of keyaspects of the current status of schools will pro-vide the context for the ensuing discussion.

� Widespread dissatisfaction. With the publica-tion of A Nation at Risk, concerns which hadbeen building in the preceding years about theAmerican public schools coalesced andachieved prominence. Concerns about declin-ing test scores, the fitness of American youngpeople to provide the skills required by Ameri-can business and industry, and the prevalenceof drugs and violence in American publicschools became a major issue in federal andstate political campaigns, as well as a popularstory in the print and broadcast media.

� Federal, state, and local reform efforts. Dis-satisfaction about the status of the schools ledto the creation of America 2000 which was thefederal response to the need for a national re-form of American schools. Many state legisla-tures enacted reform legislation of varioustypes, such as charter schools, mandated schoolreform plans from local districts, lengtheningof the school day or the school year, etc. At thelocal level, thousands of reform projects wereinitiated. While most of these were modest inintent and scope, a number of more extensiveefforts were launched.

� Privatization. A number of school districts en-tered into contracts with private corporations to

provide services previously provided by publicemployees, such as custodial work, transporta-tion, special education, etc. The most extensiveuse of “contracting out” by a public school wasannounced in October 1994, when Minneapo-lis-based Education Alternatives, Inc. enteredinto a contract with the Hartford Public SchoolDistrict to run its schools. The Edison Projectled by Frank Whittle was an even more ambi-tious plan for school privatization. This proj-ect, which began as an effort to develop anationwide network of schools under the aegisof a private, for-profit corporation, more re-cently has entered into negotiations with schooldistricts to develop contracts to provideinstructional programs in a manner similar toEducation Alternatives, Inc. By the later part of1944, fiscal distress in the Whittle empire madethe future of the Edison project tenuous.

� Constraints. Even though school reform lawshave been enacted in states throughout the na-tion, state law and policy is frequently a barrierto change. Collective bargaining agreementsalso offer a substantial obstacle to change. Col-lege entrance requirements form yet anotherbarrier since entrance requirements play a sub-stantial role in setting curriculum requirementsfor high schools. Parents who may support cur-riculum changes at the high school become lesssupportive if it appears that the changes willcompromise their child’s college entrance. Theclimate and morale of schools provides yetanother barrier. In some cases teachers and ad-ministrators may resist change, but it is not un-common to find instances wherein teacherssupportive of the need for change “do them-selves in” with a self-fulfilling prophesy of fail-ure based on past experiences.

� Technology integration. Much of the discus-sion about schools and information technologyin the 1980s and 1990s has focused on how thetechnology could be integrated with the exist-ing fabric of life in schools. From a political, aswell as from a business point of view, this maybe a plausible stance. If the task is to sell com-puters to schools or to persuade teachers to usethem, then it is sensible to try to make them fit


into schools as they are now. If, however, thetask is to use information technology to reno-vate schools, then the disintegrative aspect ofthe technology becomes the focus. Informationtechnology becomes a means for disrupting ex-isting practices and for creating a new way ofschooling rather than becoming an accouter-ment to the existing practices.

PURPOSE AND FOCUSThis paper is written for the United States Con-gress, Office of Technology Assessment study en-titled “Teachers and Technology.” The purpose ofthe paper is to analyze the opportunities, pros-pects, problems, and barriers for technologicalchange and its impact on K-12 schooling in thenext five to 10 years. The question which servesas the focal point of this paper is: What are the im-plications of information technology for schoolsand learning in American society?

The use of the two terms “schooling” and“learning” in the title of this paper is not a redun-dancy. The pivotal point in this paper is the dis-tinction between schooling and learning.Learning refers to the fundamental human processby which individuals acquire the knowledge,skills, attitudes, and perspectives which enablethem to function in society. Functionality requiresa range of complex skills such as language, under-standing of rules of conduct and social interaction,life skills such as required by the specifics of theenvironment wherein the individual lives, and anarray of cognitive skills such as reading, writing,etc. Schooling refers to the institution which, forthe past century and a half in the United States, hasbeen expected to accomplish the preponderance oflearning outcomes for children and youth.Schools operate within a framework of well-es-tablished, and until recently, well-accepted poli-cies, practices, and conventions. The educationalimpact of information technology is not confinedto schools, and it is only when the broader im-plications of information technology for whereand how learning takes place in society beyond theboundaries of the school are considered that we

can understand what can and should done inschools.

Information technology, which has caused atransformation in so much of how life is lived inthe waning days of the 20th century, has not by-passed how learning occurs in American societyand will affect schooling, even though such hasnot occurred to any appreciable extent at present.Many persons have called for schools to be proac-tive with regard to the implications of informationtechnology for school practices. There is less rea-son to be concerned about the lack of proactive-ness in schools on this matter than their lack ofreactivity. Teachers, administrators, and policy-makers need to understand what is happening allaround them and react to cause the changes tomake schooling harmonious with a new way ofliving, working, playing, and learning.

In order to understand the full significance ofthe impact of information technology on humanlife and learning in particular, it is necessary tostep back and take a quick journey through a halfmillion years of human existence.

THE THREE GREAT CODES AND THECREATION OF HUMAN CULTUREOver the span of human history, from the dawn oftime to the present moment, there have been threegreat inventions which have shaped the develop-ment of human culture. Each of these inventionshas been an innovation in communication, and ineach instance a new chapter was begun in the storyof civilization. The current generation is in themidst of the invention of one of these codes andis witness to changes of a magnitude which arerare; only a handful of generations among thethousands who have walked on earth have ever ex-perienced events such as these.

In the beginning was the thought. Certainly,there could not have been the word had there notbeen the thought. Human beings have an inner lifeof the mind. They think, and it is the ability ofhomo sapiens to be conscious of what he or she isthinking about which is the basis for the creationof human culture. As a human being we can


“look” into our own mind and “reflect” on ourthoughts. We see the faces of those whom we en-counter, but we are not privy to their inner life un-less they choose to tell us about it. Nevertheless,we know that their minds, like ours, are spinninga tapestry woven of thoughts and feelings. Writerssuch as Proust tried to present a representation of“stream of consciousness” in their work, but it isterribly difficult to provide a completely faithfulrepresentation of human consciousness becauseof the dynamic and amorphous nature of con-sciousness.

Human beings had consciousness long beforethey had any particularly effective language sys-tem to tell others about it unless a scream of pain,a sigh of ecstasy, or a grunt of approbation is to beconsidered a language system. The initial step inthe story of the creation of human culture was theinvention of the first great code which was used toput what was in the mind into a form which en-abled the transmission of the inner world of themind to others. Sounds produced in the larynxwere used to represent cognition, and as languagedeveloped, increasing richness and subtlety of ex-pression was possible.

The invention of speech changed the humancondition. Even with the fullest power of ourimagination, it is difficult to get a good sense ofhow different life must have been when human be-ings existed together without the ability to talk toone another. With speech it became possible notonly for one person to see another’s face, but alsoto hear what was in their mind. Unlike the changesresulting from information technology which areoccurring in the world at present, changes whichare propelling us from one era to a new one in thespan of a generation, the development of speechoccurred over thousands of years. Thus, thechanges in how the increasing sophistication ofspeech affected the nature of human existencewere so gradual as to be scarcely noticed.

Speech provided a new dimension to human in-teraction. Speech made thought a social commod-ity. With speech it became possible to make publicand to store human cognition. The knowledge ofindividuals could be accumulated and the accu-mulated knowledge of the society was stored in

the brains of the elders. By memorizing the accu-mulated knowledge of the society and by passingit to successive generations by word of mouth, theproducts of human minds achieved a durabilitybeyond the life span of the humans “who thoughtthem up.” Just as a person could leave the productof their hands such as a bowl or an ax to their prog-eny, speech now enabled them to leave behind theproducts of their mind—their stories, their truths,their ideas.

Speech was responsible for the first and, in asense, the most important information revolution.The spoken word provided a means for humans toput structure to thought and to transmit it to others.By so doing, information was created. Speechmade it possible for one person to tell somethingto another person, i.e., for one person to informanother. Information may be significant or trivial,true or false, valuable or worthless, but in eachcase the transference of information requires ashared coding system which makes the informa-tion intelligible to those who know the code. Thenature of the coding system and the second orderconsequences which result from it create distinctconventions, processes, and beliefs pertaining tothe accumulated information of the culture.

The second great step occurred with the devel-opment of a code which made use of graphic sym-bols to record speech. The earliest known use ofgraphics was the cave drawings of the Upper Pa-leolithic period, c. 30,000 - 10,000 BC, in south-western France. The earliest use of writinginvolved the use of written symbols for numericalinformation such as calendars, inventories ofproperty, etc. These cave drawings were probablynot a primitive form of writing but were represen-tational of important aspects of the life of early hu-mans in a way similar to primitive music anddance. The first use of graphic symbols as a meansto code speech occurred around 3500 BC afterabout 500,000 years of human experience with anoral tradition (27). The literate tradition was born.

Several millennia later, the advent of printingproviding a means for information to becomemore popularized because of the favorableeconomics of movable type as contrasted to man-uscript production. Early printing simply auto-


mated manuscript production. The form of themodern book did not fully evolve until about acentury after the invention of printing. A series ofinventive and generally unknown printers createdthe form of the modern book with a title, author,and publication information page, a table of con-tents, an index, and page numbers. An additionalline of developments created the modern library,which initially was private but later (largely stim-ulated by private philanthropy) became public. Asmore and more books become available, it becamenecessary to devise ways to retrieve information.Earlier such was not necessary since a literate per-son would know of all of the books for which theyhad use. The information explosion caused by theinvention of printing necessitated the develop-ment of systems for cataloging books, such as theDewey Decimal System. The economics of print-ing along with the invention of new processes forthe manufacturing of paper were sufficiently fa-vorable so as to make printed material—books,newspapers, magazines, encyclopedias—avail-able to everyone who could read.

For most of the era of literacy, written informa-tion was available to only a small number ofpeople. It is only in the past few centuries thatpeople other than an educated elite have access towritten material. This fact is generally known.Less well recognized is the fact that until the de-velopment of cheap papermaking processes in the14th century (a development stimulated by the in-vention of the printing press) pictures were ascarce commodity. Artists were available to thenobility to depict historical scenes as well as por-traits. For the ordinary people, pictures in thestained glass windows of the great cathedrals ofEurope were used to provide information aboutthe life of Christ and the saints. Pictures, likewords, are means of storing and distributing in-formation, but their value and their use as a com-munication or learning resource has often beenminimized. Cheap paper opened an iconic as wellas a literate domain to a greater number of people,but reading pictures requires no training and thefact that pictures are so universally accessible may

explain why the value of pictures as an informa-tion source has been underestimated.

While both the oral and literate traditions aremeans of constructing and storing the informationof the society, there are significant differences be-tween oral and literate traditions. Writing madeknowledge much less precarious than it had beenin the era of dependence on the spoken word.Enormous effort was required simply to maintainthe existing knowledge so that the subsistenceeconomies of early societies could devote few re-sources into the expansion of knowledge. In pre-literate societies the advances of knowledge, evensubstantial advances when they occurred, wereoften not noticed. The advancement of knowledgewithin the oral tradition occurred though gradualevolution as it was transferred from person to per-son or as it was publicly talked out. The advance-ment of knowledge was a communal process;there were no Newtons or Einsteins in oral cul-tures (27).

Writing stabilized, depersonalized, and objec-tified knowledge. In the oral tradition, the elder isvenerated since it is he who is the source and re-ceptacle of knowledge. There is no such thing asa fallacy of an “argument to authority” in oral cul-ture. Words, and the information they constitute,take on a different character in an oral as con-trasted with a literate tradition. For example, inBiblical times:

The Israelite conception of “word” and par-ticularly the “word of God” was not consideredto be the mere verbalization or articulation ofthought. Rather it was God himself, communi-cating and giving himself in self-realization.Dabar (the Hebrew equivalent of “word”) istherefore a manifestation of God. In otherwords, “word” to the Israelites was somethingextremely personal, so that it would be correct tosay that the communication of the word is actu-ally the communication of the speaker him/her-self (32).

Writing existed when Socrates was born in 499BC, but the sprit of the oral tradition was stillstrong. Socrates spoke; Plato wrote. In the Phae-


drus Plato recounts how Socrates inveighedagainst writing as a means of advancing humanknowledge. Knowledge, for Socrates, was notsomething which resided in the inert written wordbut only in the minds of humans. Socratescompared writing to a painting. While the artist’sportrait stands before us as if alive, we cannotquestion it. In the same way, we cannot interrogatethe book. The faces in a good artist’s painting ap-pear alive and:

. . . seem to talk to you as though they were intel-ligent, but if you question them they maintain amost majestic silence. It is the same with words:they seem to talk to you as though they were in-telligent, but if you ask them anything aboutwhat they say, from a desire to be instructed,they go on telling you just the same thing forever. And once a thing is put in writing, the com-position, whatever it may be, drifts all over theplace, getting into the hands not only of thosewho understand it, but equally of those who haveno business with it; it doesn’t know how to ad-dress the right people, and address the wrong.And when it is ill-treated and unfairly abused italways needs its parent to come to its help.

After several centuries of life within a literatetradition, the disconnection of words from the liv-ing sentient being that produced them is acceptedand even appreciated since it objectifies the in-formation presented. Indeed, as citizens of a liter-ate world we often turn Socrates’ argumentupside-down and tell the person who is concernedthat their message may be misunderstood or mis-interpreted to “get it in writing.”

Writing did not eliminate talking but, as Ongpoints out, writing caused both an expansion oftalking and a transformation of it. Writing was aphenomenon of urbanization. Writing occurred incompact settlements and people in these environ-ments talked with one another more than those inscattered settlements; writing gave them more totalk about. Writing also transformed speech. Itmade possible highly complex and deeply orga-nized treatises on topics which were not possiblein an oral tradition and enabled a use of languageto manipulate and organize thought in ways which

were quite different and more powerful than thatwhich could be done with speech. Having learnedto express oneself in the manner which could beaccommodated by writing, individuals could, anddid, emulate these conceptual and semantic struc-tures in speech (26).

The invention of school was a consequence ofliteracy. The development of schools as places re-moved from the primary productive processes ofsociety is closely connected with the developmentof writing. Records of the first known schools dateto 2000 BC in Sumer. These schools were a directconsequence of the need to teach cuneiform writ-ing to a scribe class (26). Goody speaks about thecreation of schools where children were removedfrom their families and placed under special au-thorities as “decontextualization” (10). In oral cul-tures, learning was largely experiential andintegrated into daily life. One did not learn byreading written procedures and instructions but byobservation and practice. A person could learn tospeak by listening to others speak and by imitatingtheir behavior, but learning to read and write couldnot be accomplished in the same way since writ-ing and reading were activities confined to a scribeclass. Thus, schools as places where learning wasdecontextualized or disassociated from the every-day natural life tasks of the individuals were re-quired to provide the development of skills whichrequired extraordinary means for them to belearned. With the advent of writing, words—bothspoken and written—became more central tolearning in contrast to learning by observing anddoing.

It is fitting that like the invention of the first andsecond great codes, the time and place of the in-vention of the third and most recent code is alsouncertain. The popular choice (at least in theUnited States) is Samuel Morse who on May 24,1844, sent the message “What hast God wrought!”via telegraph. But there are other candidates inRussia, Germany, and England. Possibly the firstwas in Germany where in 1809 a “chemical tele-graph” was displayed in Munich which sent elec-trical current through wires in a water container


with each wire indicating a particular letter of thealphabet.

Around the time that Samuel Morse was work-ing on his invention, an Englishman namedCharles Babbage was deep at work on his AnalyticEngine, the precursor of the modern computer;however, Babbage’s Analytic Engine operatedmechanically rather than electronically. Babbagesaw a type of telegraphy similar to the one devel-oped in Munich and understood the relevance ofthe use of electronics in his machine. But given thestate of the art, this was impractical for him (13).In a little more than a century, however, the pathsinitiated by these two inventions would convergein the form of the ENIAC computer. This comput-er, which is generally acknowledged to be the firstdigital electronic computer, was developed byMauchly and Eckard during World War II at theUniversity of Pennsylvania. The information agehad begun.

The terms “information society” or “informa-tion age” are buzzwords. They are widely usedoften with only a casual effort to unpack the mean-ing from them. Probably, for many, these termsmean little more than that computers and otherassociated technologies are an omnipresent fea-ture of life and that most people will need to usethem with considerable regularity. Yet, it is clearthat a new manifestation of the human conditionhas emerged which is of a magnitude comparableto the two earlier advances in the construction ofhuman culture.

The rapid advancement of information technol-ogy over the past few decades is one of the mostdramatic episodes in the history of human ingenu-ity. As is well known, the power and performanceof the laptop computer of today which sells forless than $2,000, is substantially more powerfulthan the mainframe computers of a couple of de-cades which sold for hundreds of thousands ofdollars. Scholarship such as that provided by Ong(26) and Goody (10) shows clearly that the pro-gression from an oral to a literate and from a liter-ate to an electronic tradition changed the humancondition. Each step has altered the relationshipbetween the person and his/her own inner mentallife. Also, each step has had enormous conse-

quences on the amount and nature of the informa-tion within the culture. It is not difficult torecognize that a person living in rural Oklahomahas a different type of existence than one living inthe inner city of Manhattan because of the differ-ence in the physical environments. Similarly,changes in the intellectual environment of themagnitude that has occurred with the creation ofspeech, writing, and electronic information havehad immense impact in shaping the way in whichhumans live their lives.

The most obvious implication of the informa-tion revolution is the expansion of knowledge.Walter Ong estimated that at the beginning of hu-man history knowledge took from 10,000 to100,000 years to double. Later it took from 500 to1000 years to double. Currently, it is doubling in15 years or less (27). Within the oral tradition, oneperson could, and did, commit to memory thetotality of the knowledge of the society. Where isthe person who could memorize all of what isknown in our time? Within the literate tradition,it was possible for sensible people to take on thetask of creating a set of books which contained thetotality of human knowledge in an organized fash-ion. Who would set out to construct an encyclope-dia which purported to be everything which isknown in all fields of human endeavor? Asknowledge expands because of informationtechnology, it is information technology which of-fers the means to cope with the massive expansionof knowledge which is occurring. The knowledgewhich an individual has committed to memory, orthe books he or she has read, are less and less a de-terminant of functional ability. Increasingly, it isone’s ability to interact with the words, numbers,and pictures stored in computers in ways which re-sult in informing (in the fullest sense of that word)him/herself which determines functional ability.

As was the case with the progression from anoral to a literate tradition, the new tradition doesnot replace but transforms the old. Word proces-sing does not merely automate the process of writ-ing; it transforms it. Jay David Bolter provides adetailed and thoughtful analysis of the impact ofword processing on writing:


How the writer and the reader understandwriting is conditioned by the physical and visualcharacter of the books they use. Each physicalwriting space fosters a particular understandingboth of the act of writing and of the product, thewritten text. In this late age of print, writers andreaders still conceive of all texts, of text itself, aslocated in the space of a printed book. The con-ceptual space of a printed book is one in whichwriting is stable, monumental, and controlledexclusively by the author. It is the space definedby perfect printed volumes that exist in thou-sands of identical copies. The conceptual spaceof electronic writing, on the other hand, is char-acterized by fluidity and an interactive relation-ship between writer and reader. These differentconceptual spaces foster different styles andgenres of writing and different theories of litera-ture (1).

While epistemology, the study of the philoso-phy of knowledge, is an active interest of a smallpercentage of people, everyone carries with thema conception of the nature of knowledge. Writing,and more specifically the technology of the book,profoundly influenced the way in which peoplehave thought about knowledge for several centu-ries. The structure of the book became the struc-ture of knowledge. The book is linear. It is dividedinto chapters, each of which contains a unified andcohesive segment of the totality. The order of thepresentation is governed by logic which yieldsone order of presentation. The book has heft andthe words printed on a page have a permanenceand a physical presence. These characteristics ofthe book became transposed to the conception ofknowledge with cohesive and distinct disciplines,with a logical order to the structure of the disci-pline, and with durability.

Just as the traditions of the literate culture andthe structure of the book shaped the conception ofthe nature of knowledge, the emerging traditionsof the information culture are providing a newconception of the nature of knowledge. The meta-phor for knowledge changes from that of the bookto that of a colossal hypermedia stack. Knowledgebecomes a network of concepts with many con-nective pathways. Linkages between concepts areformed on the basis of functional utility rather

than on immutable and intrinsic logic. In the con-text of an electronic information tradition, knowl-edge is dynamic. Textbooks or reference bookswhich are used for several years before a new edi-tion is produced seem inappropriate, but editing oradding to an information in an electronic formatis easily accomplished. The electronic tradition,like the oral tradition, is much more congenial toa communal approach to the construction ofknowledge than is the print tradition. Just as therewere no Einsteins or Newtons in oral cultures, theadvance of knowledge in an electronic tradition islikely to involve fewer advances which are attrib-utable to the work of a solitary genius.

Information technology not only affects whatwe know and how we come to know it, it also af-fects what we do. The need for any particular skillis contingent on the context of individuals. In-formation technology is causing some skills to be-come less valuable at the same time that new skillsare becoming more valuable. Few people in oursociety rely on their ability to hunt for food to feedthemselves. Today, one requires skills at being aneffective shopper at the local supermarket. Oldskills pass and new ones emerge. Many factoryworkers who worked with their hands andwrenches, drills, and welding tools no longer re-quire skills with those tools but must now teachtheir hands keyboarding skills or work with com-puter programs that control machines that do whatthey once did with their hands. The value of beingable to spell by memory every word a person usesin writing is less important when the individualwrites on a word processor with spell check. Thetask of searching information bases did not existin any significant fashion a few decades ago. It isnow a skill of great value.

At the heart of the difference between a literateand an electronic culture (and certainly at the heartof the issue as it pertains to learning and schools)is the shift from a contemplative to an experientialmethod of learning. In a writing culture, humanbeings learn by pulling away from what is happen-ing around them and reading about events, con-cepts, facts which another person has abstractedand structured. An electronic culture, on the other


hand, puts the person in the midst of the experi-ences which often are raw, unprocessed and, to usecomputer lingo, are real-time. The orderliness and“one step back” character of reading is in contrastto the untidy and “plunge into it” nature of elec-tronic experiences. Thus, we do not read about thePersian Gulf War; we experience it on CNN. Theconcern of many is that what comes to the personin electronic formats are only pictures which mayhave no meaning beyond the momentary visual orauditory stimulation. Such a criticism goes be-yond television or multimedia and pertains to ex-perience itself. Experience is nothing more—orless—than the images, sounds, smells, and feel ofwhat is occurring. The old saying is: Experienceis the best teacher. But experience is not an infal-lible teacher. Thinking and reflecting do not go outof the picture in experiential learning. Thinking,evaluating, and reflecting are all part of “learningfrom experience,” but they are blended into thelearning process in a more subtle, less conspicu-ous way than in instances of “book learning.” Thetexture and rhythm of learning when mediated byelectronic resources is in sharp contrast to thatwhich occurs in the environment of the printedword. This is the fundamental “two cultures”problem of schools at present as literate traditionteachers try and too often fail to teach electronictradition students.

Information technology has substantially ele-vated the importance of pictures in learning.Today most people learn about their world in pic-torial form through television. Pictures are partic-ularly potent in engendering an emotionalresponse. A pictures of a starving child in Mogadi-shu or of students resisting repression in Tiana-men Square has an immediacy of impact whichsurpasses many columns of print in a newspaperaccount of the same story. Increasing attention hasbeen devoted to the use of visualization as a meansof presenting in pictorial form vast quantities ofinformation. The user of such information mightdrown in the sea of this information in verbal orquantitative forms. The use of pictures in learningis troubling to some people since there is fear thatlooking at pictures is an act which can be donewithout the mind engaged. Picture books are con-

sidered acceptable for very young children, butcomic books have been discouraged, usually morebecause of their use of pictures to tell the storythan because of the content of the story. Neverthe-less, there is a rich tradition of scientists, design-ers, and artists who think with images, and thecapacity of information technology to present stilland moving pictures expands the palette for devel-opers of learning resources. For those of us whohave lived and learned in a literate culture, thereis something unsettling if not invalid in the migra-tion from learning with text to learning with pic-tures, but it is quite likely that people in the futurewill look back on the limitations of our bias to-ward text in much the same way that we have ob-served the bias of earlier generations to the spokenrather than the written word.

There is little in contemporary life which is nottouched in some significant way by informationtechnology. Clearly, it has caused a fundamentaltransformation of the way people work. In onesense the computer is the most recent of a long se-ries of machines such as the cropping machinesused in textile manufacturing in the early 19thcentury at the outset of the Industrial Revolution.Cropping machines (which incidentally were de-stroyed by the skilled workers in England whowere being displaced by these machines in theLuddite incidents) and other machines such as thecotton gin, the steamshovel, and the drill press au-tomated work that had required a strong back or asteady and trained hand. The computer is quitedifferent from the machines of the Industrial Rev-olution. To use the words of Shoshana Zuboff(40), who provided a thoughtful analysis of theimpact of information technology on work, it is a“smart machine” and as such began a new chapterwith regard to the nature of work.

The “Management in the 1990s Research Pro-gram” at MIT issued a report called The Corpora-tion in the 1990s (23). This report contains richdetail about the nature of the changes at the levelsof production, coordination, and management ofthe workplace. The sweeping changes are visibleto anyone who walks on the floor of a factory. Onefinds fewer people, and many of the workers areusing robotics, process control instrumentation,


and intelligent sensors. Less conspicuous are thechanges in how those responsible for generatinga profit think about their business. There is an ex-pression used by some in the media productionbusiness, “I can give it to you cheap, quick, orgood. Pick two!” What the business person hearsis, “Our company needs to produce a quality prod-uct at low cost, and make a profit. Pick three!” In-formation technology is at the heart of the newconceptions about how to flourish—or at leastsurvive—in a world of new expectations with re-gard to cost and quality. In the words of the editorof The Corporation in the 1990s, “Informationtechnology has important general-purpose powerto manipulate symbols used in all classes of workand, therefore, as an ‘information engine’ it can dofor business what the steam engine did in the daysof the Industrial Revolution.”

Just as information technology is the influen-tial work tool of society, information technologyis also the dominant source of recreation. Parentsand teachers commonly decry the great amount oftime which children and young people spendwatching TV. But looking at a screen, be it a TVor a video game screen, is the overwhelmingsource of recreation for children and youngpeople, just as TV is the major recreational activ-ity of adults. Video games, like TV, are often criti-cized. But someone, and the someone is often aparent, likes video games enough to make Segaand Nintendo a multi-billion dollar industry (33).

It has been somewhat less than a half centurysince the first big and clumsy computers appearedon the scene, and in the succeeding years therehave been continuing advances and an increasingpervasiveness of the technology. There is a curi-ous similarity between the purpose of writing at itsinception several thousand years ago and the pur-pose of the first computers a half century ago.Both writing and computers began with a limitedrole in human conduct. The first writing systemsand the first computers were “number crunchers.”In both cases, they were used for numerical tasks,and also in both cases, the power of the symbolsystem which was developed gradually movedwriting or propelled computers to a vastly expand-ed role. Even after several decades of plotting the

growth of the expansion of computer technology,seasoned pros still can be surprised. Early in 1993Bill Gates of Microsoft and Andrew Grove of Intelpredicted PC sales of between 35 and 40 million,which was an increase from the 32 million salesin a good 1992 sales year. The actual sales were at50 million, 25 to 40 percent higher than forecasted(9).

Efforts to predict the world that informationtechnology will create can fall victim to a fatal trapif there is the assumption that at some point in theforeseeable future the process will have been com-pleted. There is no reason to believe that anyonealive today will see the completion of this processor the achievement of stability with regard to thedevelopment of this technology, it will continue tobe open-ended for generations to come. Neverthe-less, there are several dominant themes which arelikely to shape the expression of the technology inthe years ahead:

� Improvements in microprocessor design andreductions in cost. The capability of micropro-cessors continues to increase as costs decrease.The first microprocessor was built in 1971 andin less than 20 years, by 1989, the first micro-processor to contain more than a million tran-sistors was produced. By the year 1976, afterfive years of transistor production, the total ofall the transistors manufactured by the comput-er industry was about 100 billion which isequivalent to the number of neurons in the hu-man brain. Intel scientists predict a single chipthat can hold somewhere between 50 and 100million transistors will be produced around theturn of the century. With 100 million transistorson a chip, it would require only one 1,000 pro-cessors to produce a computer with as manytransistors as neurons in the brain. Gelsingerand his colleagues at Intel contend that whensystems with hundreds of billions of transistorsbecome available early in the next century, itwill then be possible to ask: “When will we putthe first brain on a single chip?” (8).

Even with the dramatic advances in chip de-sign over the past two decades, the capabilitiesof existing hardware is a constraint in applica-


tions design. There remains a great gap be-tween the way in which the mind processesinformation and the way in which this is doneby computers. This gap will narrow with theimprovements in chip design that will soonmake today’s supercomputers reminiscent ofthe Apple IIe. As this happens, the price ofcomputing storage and speed will decrease. Noone knows what a gigabyte of storage or 100MIPS of processing speed will cost in the year2000, but everyone knows it will be quite cheapand probably considerably cheaper than anycurrent prediction.

Increasing the processing power of chips isnot equivalent to increasing the horse-power ofan automobile which has quantitative signifi-cance in terms of the speed with which the ve-hicle can carry weight. Increases in theprocessing power have qualitative significancein enabling new applications to be developed.While it is possible to extrapolate from existingapplications and speculate about the improve-ments that will result from increases in proces-sing power, no one knows what inventors willbuild when they can hold the processing powerof hundreds of millions of transistors in theirhands.

� Networks. It was only about a decade ago thatbattles were being fought between mainframeproponents and microcomputer proponents.With the increased capability of microcomput-ers, many (myself among them) were preparedto officiate at the funeral of mainframes. Whatmany failed to see was the growth of wide areanetworks. Ultimately, in the contest betweenmicrocomputers or distributed computing andmainframes or central computing, the emer-gence of networks made both winners. The useof computers to create networks for commu-nication and access to information has movedfrom being an important to a dominant themein the use of the technology. Acronymsassociated with networks such as BBS and FTPare migrating from computer insiders to thegeneral population. By 1993, a little more thana decade after the first BBS or computer bulle-

tin boards opened up in California and Chica-go, there were more than 60,000 nationwide(34). The massive growth of the Internet dem-onstrates the rapidly growing interest in the useof networks. As of late July 1994, there were3.2 million machines worldwide reachable onthe Internet. This represents an 81 percent in-crease over the previous year. No one knowsthe number of people using the Internet, but itis many times greater than the number of at-tached machines.

� Portability. Advances in wireless technologiesin the past few years offer the prospect of mak-ing use of the virtually infinite resources of thespectrum of electromagnetic vibrations. In thenext few years advances in wireless technologyalong with the increased installation of fiberop-tics will reduce the cost of transmission of in-formation which requires larger bandwidthsuch as video and two-way communications.Andrew Grove of Intel put it succinctly, “Youthink computer prices are plummeting. Wait tillyou see what happens to bandwidth”(9).

Of course, the elimination of wires also en-hances the portability of devices that are al-ready being miniaturized because of advancesin chip technology. Smaller machines whichare not tethered by wires also will be improvedwith better display capabilities. The display ca-pability of a typical television set is roughlyequivalent to 62 dots per inch. Screens with 200to 300 dots per inch (which is equivalent to a la-ser print) will be available. Just as writing didnot eliminate reading but transformed it, in-formation technology will not eliminate read-ing on paper, but reading increasingly will bedone using small portable display screens.Screens which display information at a qualitylevel that is comparable to a well-printed colormagazine at a cost per word that is substantiallyless than the cost of the same word printed onpaper will have the effect of moving much ofwhat is read to electronic formats. Given thefact that most of the information that is pro-duced at the present time is already in electron-ic format, the extra step of printing it on paper


will be reserved for those who want paper tosatisfy emotional or particular practical needs.

� “Everything is data.” From our vantage point,it is ironic that Mr. Morse’s digital inventionwas swept away by Mr. Bell’s analog device.The future for analog signals such as those usedby television does not appear promising. Thebifurcated world of computer data in digitalformat and television signals is ending. As oneof my colleagues frequently reminds me: “Ev-erything is data.” The efficiency and utility ofstorage and transmission of information, be itpictures, sound, or words and numbers in digi-tal format is substantially greater than in analogformat. Analog is an appropriate technologyfor a 20th-century broadcast world, not a 21st-century network world. In Life After Television,Gilder puts it this way, “The computer industryis converging with the television industry in thesame sense that the automobile converged withthe horse, the TV converged with the nickel-odeon, the word-processor converged with thedrafting board, and digital publishing con-verged with the linotype machine and the letter-press”(9).

� Applications. The first applications for com-puters were directed in ways to manipulate nu-merical information. Statistical and othernumeric processing software was the dominantuse of the early computers. The computer wasa super calculating machine. As the technologydeveloped, new applications emerged. Ap-plications such as word processing and spread-sheets did not represent new ways to do oldtasks, but were new ways to do new things.Over the next several years there will be newsoftware inventions which will go beyond sim-ply improving existing applications (i.e., ad-vancing from version 3.0 to version 4.0). Newapplications will continue to emerge. For ex-ample, there are efforts to develop applicationssuch as idea processors which can be used tomanipulate concepts, ideas, and thoughts in away similar to the manner in which word pro-cessing enables the user to manipulate words.The development of specialized software to ex-ploit the full potential of computer mediated

group-work, generally referred to as group-ware, has just begun. This is an area still wait-ing for the “killer application,” or, more likely,the “killer applications.” As primitive andcumbersome as virtual reality is at present, itwill become more and more realistic and adeptat tricking the mind into believing that what ex-ists only in cyberspace exists in real space.Visual, auditory, olfactory, and tactile percep-tion of environments generated from strings ofdata will become so lifelike that the differencesbetween virtual reality and “real” reality willseem to be a trivial distinction. There is certainto be a market for virtual reality for pornogra-phy and for violence. The fondest sexual andhomicidal fantasies will be achievable withoutfear of criminal indictment. Some educationalapplications are obvious, such as the use in lan-guage learning by enabling the person to learnFrench in virtual France, or to learn about as-tronomy by taking a trip through space, or tounderstand human biology by engaging in anexpedition into the human body. Beyond suchobvious applications as these there is also anunknown continent of applications of this sim-ulation and virtual reality for learning purposesyet to be explored.

� Information technology vs. computers.Throughout this document, the term “informa-tion technology” has generally been used ratherthan “computers.” Thinking about the impactof this technology is inordinately truncated ifone thinks about it in terms of the microcom-puter. Microcomputers are only the current andmost prevalent manifestation of the handling ofelectronic information. Over the next years,multiple and diverse machines will emerge andevolve and it will be increasingly clear that in-formation processing represents a categoryrather than an entity.

The American public school has remained gen-erally impervious to the impact of informationtechnology. Much of the discussions about in-formation technology and schools has focused onthe question: How can information technologyhelp school personnel to achieve the goals and


purposes of schools? In this formulation, schoolsare the “horse” and information technology is the“cart.” Yet in reality, the horse and the cart are re-versed.

For previous generations, the American systemof schooling was seen as one of the great accom-plishments of this nation. Such is no longer thepopular perception, but in reality, it is not thatschools have deteriorated but that the world haschanged around them, making much of what oc-curs in schools anachronistic. The impact of in-formation technology on schools transcends whatschools do and affects what schools are.

THE AMERICAN PUBLIC SCHOOLAS AN INSTITUTIONFew aspects of life are as commonplace asschools. School buildings are the one place whereeveryone in society has spent time, some as muchas 20 or more years. If a person becomes a parent,he or she is back in school again as they tend to theeducation of their child. Everyone knows whatgoes on in schools. In this context, it might seemquite peculiar to ask the question: what is theAmerican public school? This question needs tobe answered, not it terms of an inventory of whatstudents and teachers do inside of classrooms, butin terms of what the American public school hasmeant to people in American society with regardto the learning and socialization required by chil-dren.

The American public school is an institution,and the term “institution” is key to understandingwhat it is as well as grasping the changes whichimpinge on schools as a result of informationtechnology. Connotatively, the term “institution”carries with it a vague honorific meaning suggest-ing something of importance and permanence.Often there is little more than superficial use of theterm institution as an explanatory concept, eventhough understanding the American public schoolas an institution is very helpful in any effort tomake sense of what the public school is, why it iswhat it is, and how it fits into American society.

Many who believe that the school must be re-formed, restructured, reengineered, or reinvented

draw upon the recent experience of Americanbusiness and industry to indicate what needs to bedone. There is, however, an important distinctionbetween the school and the firm. Both the schooland the firm are organizations. As such, both arecohesive entities comprised of elements, each ofwhich performs a specialized function necessaryto accomplish the goals for which the organizationwas formed. Yet, the firm and the school representtwo different types of organizations. John Meyerand his colleagues have provided a helpful analy-sis of the difference between organizations intechnical contexts, such as the firm, and organiza-tions in institutional contexts, such as the school:

Formal organizational structures arise main-ly through two processes. First, complextechnologies and social environments with com-plex exchanges (such as markets) foster thedevelopment of rationalized bureaucratic struc-tures to efficiently coordinate technical work. . . Second, institutional structures emerge thatdefine given types of roles and programs as ra-tional and legitimate. . . . The emergence of thefactory reflects the first process, and the emer-gence of the school reflects the second (22).

The “technical organization” exists to do some-thing. The purpose of the firm as an organizationis to produce goods and services in a profitablemanner. The term “bottom line” (which has be-come a popular metaphor) is far more than a figureof speech for the firm. The figure at the bottom ofthe accounting ledger is the critical criterion, ac-cepted by all within the firm, of the organizationalhealth of the firm. The organizational structure iseffective to the extent that the organization is ableto do what it needs to do, i.e., produce marketablegoods or services at a profit. While the firm is af-fected by social values which go beyond the spe-cific production or service goals of the firm (suchas environmental concerns or racial or gender eq-uity), these are not the raison d’être of the firm,but facts of life with which it must contend, grudg-ingly or willingly.

The school as an organization exists in an insti-tutional context. The “institutional organization”exists to be something. It is in this sense that Mey-er and Rowan point out that “modern schools pro-


duce education for society, not for individuals orfamilies” (21). This is not to deny that individualteachers or administrators strive to—and do—provide services for children and their parents.Rather it means that for the school, unlike thefirm, the beliefs shared by members of the societyof the role it plays for the perceived well-being ofsociety is of critical importance. The extent towhich it is perceived to be meeting its social man-date is the “bottom line” of the organizationalhealth of the school.

Shared beliefs are more than a desired featureof a society, they are an absolute necessity. Com-munity or society disintegrates in the absence ofa core set of accepted beliefs. Sociologists refer tothe shared beliefs as the “rational myths” of soci-ety which are the structural framework of institu-tions (22). They are myths, not in the popular useof that term as being untrue, but in the sense of be-ing widely and deeply held by members of the so-ciety. The myths are the ideological sinew whichhold together the individuals as a community. Theissue of the truth or falsity of the myths is irrele-vant since the myths are value statements whichdo not lend themselves to empirical validation.“The beliefs are rational in the sense that theyidentify specific social purposes and then specifyin a rule-like manner what activities are to be car-ried out (or what types of actors must beemployed) to achieve them” (37).

One of the most important tasks of society is toensure that each successive generation acquiresthe knowledge, technologies, skills, customs, andaffects which they require to maintain the society.In the last century a belief structure was put intoplace which became accepted about the way inwhich children would be educated. Schools hadexisted from the early days of colonization, butearly in the last century the American publicschool as an institution was created.

From 1830 to 1860, the size of the UnitedStates grew by 1,234,321 square miles, and thepopulation grew from 12,866,020 to 31,443,321.Only 7.2 percent of the population lived in urbanareas in 1820, but by 1860 this had risen to 20 per-cent. In 1820 there were only 12 cities with a pop-ulation of 10,000 or greater. By 1860, there were

101 United States cities with a population of10,000 or greater, and eight of them were largerthan 100,000. In 1826, 10,837 immigrants wereadmitted to the United States. Of the 10,837, most(7,708) were from England or Ireland. During thedecade of the 1850s, more than 3,000,000 immi-grants entered the United States, with large per-centages from Southern Europe.

Industrialization, urbanization, and immigra-tion transformed American society and spawnedproblems for a nation in transition. Cities becameengines of productivity with concomitant disease,poverty, and crime. Many persons felt that home-lessness, vice, and alcoholism were out of control.In the 1830s, there were numerous acts of mobviolence. The objects of the wrath of mobs wereoften immigrants or Catholics. By mid-centurythe Know-Nothing Party, with its platform of big-otry, was the fastest growing political party inAmerica. The success of the Know-Nothing Partywas a consequence of the widely held opinion,even by many who did not affiliate with it, that the“American way of life” was in jeopardy.

Coincidentally, with the great social distress inthe nation, a fever for reform swept through thecountry. There has never been a period of more in-tense reform spirit in America than the secondquarter of the 19th century. The reform agendaranged across a wide range of causes: abolition,temperance, women’s rights, vegetarianism, pris-ons, and treatment of the insane. Organizationssprang up which reflected the fervor and optimismof those who began them: Society for the Suppres-sion of Vice and the Promotion of Good Morals;The Friends of Universal Reform; The Boston So-ciety for the Moral and Religious Instruction ofthe Poor; The New York Association for the Reliefof Respectable, Aged, Indigent Females; and theAmerican and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society toname but a few. Dorothea Dix traveled thousandsof miles in her efforts to reform the treatment ofthe insane. Susan B. Anthony worked for thecause of women’s rights and temperance. WilliamLloyd Garrison took up the cause of abolition.

The theme which transcends the specifics of thereforms of the 19th century was the establishmentof social institutions to create a more perfect


society. They believed that the welfare of the indi-vidual was enhanced and protected by social in-stitutions rather than threatened by them. Theoptimism of the reformers was extended over awide-ranging array of new institutions. The in-sane asylum was created not as a last resort to lockaway the disconcerting and frightening specimensof humanity; rather the asylum was a manifesta-tion of the belief that a properly constructed asy-lum could cure virtually any incidence of mentalillness (35). Other institutions such as the refor-matory and the penitentiary were based on thesame optimistic beliefs about the potency of theseorganizations to change people and solve socialproblems.

Education was one of the focal points of the ear-ly 19th-century reform movement. The more per-fect society which the reformers sought toconstruct had clear and obvious educational im-plications. Though the educational reform move-ment was centered in New England, there werepersons throughout the United States who dedi-cated their lives to the creation of a new and betterway to educate American youth. James G. Carterand Horace Mann in Massachusetts, Henry Bar-nard and Thomas H. Gallaudet in Connecticut,Calvin Stowe in Ohio, John D. Pierce in Michi-gan, John Swett in California, Calvin H. Wiley inNorth Carolina, and Robert J. Breckinridge inKentucky were some of the most prominenteducational reformers. They were joined, not onlyby common cause, but by association and interac-tion. They read one another’s books and speeches,corresponded, and came into contact with oneanother in the many educational organizations andassociations which flourished.

The 19th-century reforms were a reaction to theapproach to education which had prevailed in theUnited States from the earliest days of coloniza-tion to the early years of the 19th century. Educa-tion was an important theme in the earliest days ofAmerican colonization. The first European set-tlers in America came to the New World at a timeof a great information revolution in Europe. Theyhad left England in the midst of an information ex-plosion. In the century prior to the emigration to

America there had been a tremendous expansionof the literacy with the rapidly spreading avail-ability of books in the vernacular. As a conse-quence there was less dependence on the oraltradition and a greater reliance on books for everyfacet of life. There was a profusion of books per-taining to all aspects of life, from agriculture topersonal conduct. The cost of books was such thatfor the first time in history the recorded word wasaccessible to a mass market. The abundance ofvaluable information which became availablethrough the advances in printing technologyplaced increasing importance on literacy. Literacywas required if one was to be able to read the vari-ous manuals, almanacs and technical informationin all fields which was becoming increasinglyabundant.

The attitude of people in the 16th century to-ward their information revolution was similar tothe attitude of people in the 20th century to ourown. Some rued it, some were oblivious to it, butmany, especially middle class townspeople, sawit as a basis for a better life. Robert Ryece, a friendof John Winthrop, the great Puritan leader, wroteto him on the eve of his trip to American on theArbella, “How hard it will be for one brought upamong books and learned men to live in a barba-rous place where there is no learning and less civi-lization” (4). As they left civilized England for theuntamed New World, there was fear of losing theculture of the homeland. Education was the pro-phylactic against barbarism. Thus, the Puritansbrought their books with them to the New World,but of even more significance, they brought withthem a belief that education was an importantmeans in achieving prosperity on earth and salva-tion in heaven.

The home was the prime educational agency ofearly American society, and the prime agent foreducation in the Puritan community was not thestate or the church but the family. This did notmean that the parents were the sole teachers oftheir children; rather, many arrangements weremade, depending on the circumstances, for educa-tion to occur, and indeed the colonists were proneto establishing schools. In essence, everyone in


the Puritan community was potentially a teacher.Children acquired instruction:

Anywhere and everywhere, not only inschoolrooms, but in kitchens, manses, churches,meetinghouse, sheds erected in fields, and shopserected in towns . . . pupils were taught byparents, tutors, clergymen, layreaders, precep-tors, physicians, lawyers, artisans, and shop-keepers . . . (4).

The manner in which education in the home orthe workplace occurred was informal and had tobe worked into one’s own life as the rhythm of dai-ly life permitted. It was common for children tolearn to read, write and cipher within the homewith parents, older brothers or sisters, other rela-tives, or neighbors providing the instruction. Forexample, as a young child near the beginning ofthe 18th century, Horace Mann learned to read byfollowing his sister around the house as she didher chores reciting from a copy of Noah Webster’sgrammar (20). Ministers, who had skills in classi-cal languages, would frequently tutor childrenwho sought entrance to college since knowledgeof classical language was the 19th-century equiva-lent of the SAT for college admission.

Proprietary schooling abounded. There weremany persons available to those who were able topay for schooling or tutoring. Tutoring could bepurchased for primary instruction in reading, writ-ing, and arithmetic, and for more advancedinstruction in Greek, Latin, geometry, surveying,navigation, and bookkeeping. Wealthy parentsmight hire a teacher to extend, supplement, or re-place their own instruction. The private masterwould provide instruction for all of the employ-er’s children along with the children of other rela-tives or friends. Those who wished to advancetheir position through more advanced learningcould secure the services of a teacher, either as aprivate student or in a school in the tutor’s homeor business.

Apprenticing was also a very important meansof professional and vocational training. Appren-ticeship was the way in which persons weretrained in agriculture, shopkeeping, manufactur-ing, the skilled trades, and the professions of med-icine and law. In the case of medicine, there was

a rather standard form of apprenticeship. In thecase of law, the apprenticeship was varied depend-ing on the proclivities of the master (5).

Thus, the flavor of education in the 17th andearly 18th centuries was characterized by two ele-ments: personal responsibility and diverse means.It was up to the individual to determine the extentof education necessary for self and children. It wasincumbent on the individual to achieve the re-quired education in a manner which provided thebest fit between one’s life circumstances andeducational goals. Writing about the colonial andearly national era, Cremin says, “Variegation,then, was the rule, and with it improvisation,imitation, trial and error—whatever historical de-velopment there was ended up anything but uni-form and linear” (6). But then over the span of 30or so years at the mid-point of the 19th century aradically different form of education emerged inAmerica:

The haphazard arrangements of the 17th,18th, and early 19th centuries cannot be consid-ered true progenitors of the school systems weknow today. For by the latter part of the 19thcentury the organization, scope and role ofschooling had been fundamentally transformed.In place of a few casual schools dotted abouttown and country there existed in most citiestrue educational systems: fatefully articulated,age graded, hierarchically structured groupingsof schools, primarily free and often compulsory,administered by full-time experts and progres-sively taught by specially trained staff. No long-er casual adjuncts to the home or apprenticeship,schools were highly formal institutions de-signed to play a critical role in the socializationof the young, the maintenance of social order,and the promotion of economic development(15).

The 19th century reformers saw the variegatededucational situation of the 18th century wheneducation occurred in many venues in many waysas dysfunctional. Yet, the approach to educationwhich had prevailed from the earliest days of thecolonial era through the first years of the republichad served the American people well. The dissat-isfaction with the old approach to education was


a consequence of the great changes which wereoccurring in the nation and the emergence of newbeliefs, a new rational myth, about how childrenshould acquire the cultural legacy of their fore-bearers. If there was one word which caught theessence of the changes the reformers sought to es-tablish it was “system.” In the words of one of thereformers, James Carter, the reform movementsought a “consistent system fully developed” (2).The 19th-century reformers created “the schoolsystem” not only in the jurisdictional sense asused to refer to a particular school district but alsoas the system of schooling which was to be themanner in which the society would handle thecommonalities of human action associated withthe transmission of the knowledge, skills, disposi-tions, and sensibilities required to maintain the so-ciety.

Nineteenth-century Americans were greatly in-fluenced by European education which in the late18th century was in the early stages of the educa-tional reform which would spread to the UnitedStates. A number of reports written detailing thesuccesses of European education achieved a wideand influential readership in the United States.The fundamental conception of the reform move-ment in Europe was the establishment of theschool as the primary social agency for educationof the young. This belief grew out of the concernabout the neglect of education of the children ofthe peasants. Concomitantly, there was a sharedbelief among those involved with school reformthat schooling, if systemic and systematic, couldproduce young people with the knowledge anddisposition which were requisite to ensuring eco-nomic prosperity and domestic tranquillity. Therewas, they believed, a pedagogy which rested on ascientific foundation which could ensure that thecontent the state needed to inculcate in each childcould be accomplished. The weak laws requiringparental or citizen support of schools were re-placed by laws which established state support ofschools and, by the turn of the 20th century, com-pulsory school attendance.

The idea that the school has had more responsi-bility thrust on it over the years is inaccurate. Thebroad nature of the mission of the school was not

constituted by accretion but by charter. CalvinStowe, the husband of Harriet Beecher Stowe,was one of a number of Americans who went toEurope to examine European education and to re-port on it to the Ohio legislature. His report waspresented to the governor of Ohio in 1837. It waswidely distributed and became quite popular. Hewrote as follows:

The children must be given up implicitly tothe discipline of the school. Nothing can be doneunless the teacher has the entire control of hispupils in school hours, and out of school too, sofar as the rules of the school are concerned. If theparent in any way interferes with, or overrulesthe arrangements of the teacher, he may attrib-ute it to himself if the school is not successful(38).

Similarly the words of Horace Mann from histhird annual report to the Massachusetts Board ofEducation express the conviction that the schoolwas the instrument to be used by society to main-tain society:

Common Schools derive their value from thefact that they are an instrument, more extensive-ly applicable to the whole mass of the children,than any other instrument ever yet devised.They are an instrument, by which the good menin society can send redeeming influences tothose children, who suffer under the calamity ofvicious parentage and evil domestic associa-tions. The world is full of lamentable proofs,that the institution of the family may exist for anindefinite number of generations, without miti-gating the horrors of barbarism. But the institu-tion of Common Schools is the offspring of anadvanced state of civilization, and is incapableof coexisting with barbarian life, because,should barbarism prevail, it would destroy theschools, should the schools prevail, they woulddestroy barbarism (19).

The belief that the school could accomplish theintellectual and socializing functions of educationwas quite functional to a nation increasingly in-dustrial and urban. The conception of schooling asthe place rather than a place where children ac-quire the knowledge and skill they will require tobecome effective members of society has re-mained the prevalent belief for a century. Even


though the existence of many nonschool learningresources exist, and even though many individu-als can speak of the impact of these resources intheir own lives, they have typically been per-ceived as ancillary to schooling as the means foreducating children and youth. The educated per-son has been the schooled person. We even lackgood terms to refer to the array of educational re-sources such as books, TV, clubs, movies, friends,parents, and other adults which may make impor-tant contributions in terms of the individual’sknowledge, skills, and attitudes. They are referredto as “nonformal education” and are thus definedin terms of what they are not in reference toschooling. Even those who do not esteem theirschooling tend to answer the question, “Where didyou get your education?” by naming a school. Lifeis divided into two segments. The first segment isthe period of schooling. Then there is a com-mencement or a beginning of the second segmentwhen the individual is expected to become an ac-tive and productive member of society.

Much as the economic structure of society restson the belief that coins and bills are more than bitsof metal and paper, so too a sustaining belief main-taining the school structure is that certificates, di-plomas, and degrees are more than attractivedocuments and that they certify competence. Theissuance of official certificates as social passportsboth validates the school and is validated by theschool. Certification informs the individual of hisor her abilities as assessed by the school, but also,and most importantly, informs society. As long asthe school is empowered to issue certificateswhich affect social status and economic mobility,the school will need to be taken seriously whetheror not the individual or their parent perceives heor she has received adequate services. The powerof schools to “mint” social currency is significantonly as long as the currency is valuable. The ac-creditation of schools, state certification of teach-ers, and standardization of the curriculumconstitutes the ways in which the state attempts toensure the value of diplomas.

The reformers believed that a critical require-ment for an effective system of education wasteacher training. In one of the most important of

the European reports which were so widely readby educational and political leaders, Victor Cous-in, who had been commissioned by the Frenchgovernment to produce a report on Prussianschools, provided a laudatory description of thePrussian school system and included a lengthy de-scription of teacher training. Cousin argued thatteacher training was an essential aspect of the ef-fectiveness of their schools. The skill and demean-or of the teacher was the critical element inachieving the change which was required.

The effort to establish state-supported normalschools in the United States began in the 1820sand many engaged in the reform effort saw this asthe keystone of the reform movement. James Cart-er, a member of the state legislature in Massachu-setts, was one of the leaders in the establishmentof normal schools in that state. In 1824 and 1825,Carter published a series of essays in the BostonPatriot arguing for normal schools and explainingwhy state support was appropriate and necessary.In his words:

It will do but little good, for example, for thelegislature of the State to make large appropri-ations directly for the support of schools, till ajudicious expenditure of them can be ensured.And in order to [do] this, we must have skillfulteachers at hand. It will do but little good to classthe children till we have instructors at hand. Itwill do absolutely no good to constitute an inde-pendent tribunal to decide on the qualificationsof teachers, while they have not had the opportu-nities necessary for coming up to the properstandard. And it will do no good to overlook andreport upon their success, when we know be-forehand, that they have not the means of suc-cess (2).

The champions for teacher training did notcome from the ranks of the current teachers andadministrators but rather were a cadre of politi-cians and religious leaders. One very conspicuousfigure in the history of normal schools was theRev. Charles Brooks, who traveled from town totown in Massachusetts lecturing for state supportof normal schools. Brooks organized a series ofconventions and provided a platform for notablessuch as Daniel Webster and John Quincy Adams,


who also spoke to the need for normal schools.Rev. Brooks, who had campaigned tirelessly fornormal schools, stated the underlying convictionthat had motivated him and the others who createdthe normal school: “As is the teacher, so is theschool” (18).

The campaign in the Massachusetts legislaturefor state support of schools to prepare teachersgathered considerable momentum in the late1820s. In 1827, Rep. Carter, who chaired theHouse Committee on Education, presented a re-port to the legislature that called for establishinga “Seminary for the Instruction of School Teach-ers.” Carter’s proposal failed by one vote. The de-bate continued, and 10 years later, on April 19,1837, the legislature established a Board ofEducation. Creation of the board proved signifi-cant in the development of normal schools be-cause Horace Mann (who was then serving asPresident of the Massachusetts Senate) was cho-sen to lead the board. Mann believed in the needto create a system to prepare teachers, and he com-mitted himself without reserve to the success ofthe normal school venture. At one point, whenfunds for the normal school effort were short, hesold books from his personal library to raise theneeded money.

There was considerable opposition to thefounding of normal schools, but with Mann’sleadership, and with a gift of $10,000 from Ed-mund Dwight, a member of the state board, theforces in the legislature arrayed against normalschools were neutralized. A year later, members ofthe Massachusetts legislature attempted to endstate support of normal schools. The opponents ofthe normal schools considered them unnecessary,arguing that anyone who had been taught wouldknow how to teach (18). In a letter to Henry Bar-nard in 1851, Cyrus Pierce, the principal of thefirst normal school at Lexington, Massachusetts,explained what he had hoped to accomplish. Heagreed that teachers may be able to acquire by trialand error over time the skills and powers they needto teach effectively, “but while teachers were thuslearning, I was sure that pupils must be suffering”(34). The normal school would ensure that “teach-ers may be prepared to enter on their work, not

only with hope, but almost with assurance of suc-cess” (34) A substantial effort in the Massachu-setts legislature to rescind the normal schools andto return the unused portion of Dwights’s fund tohim failed, and they continued to spread through-out Massachusetts and to other states.

At its inception, teacher training was disasso-ciated from higher education. The normal schoolswere more like secondary schools than colleges,and considerable emphasis was placed on equip-ping students with knowledge of the content theywere expected to teach. While a number of normalschools would eventually evolve into colleges anduniversities, the initial connection between teach-er education and higher education came througha different route. Chairs in didactics or pedagogybegan to be established in American universitiesin the last quarter of the 19th century. By 1892 theUnited States Commissioner of Education re-ported that there were chairs of pedagogy in 31institutions, chairs of pedagogy combined withother disciplines such as philosophy or mental sci-ence in 45 others, and lectureships in an additionaleight universities (28).

As early as 1890, New York University had es-tablished a School of Pedagogy which offeredcourses leading to a Master of Pedagogy and Doc-tor of Pedagogy degrees (28). The introduction ofchairs and coursework in pedagogy was met withstaunch critics in the university who consideredsuch to be insubstantial or inappropriate for uni-versity study. Abraham Flexner, who had led ef-forts to reform medical education, becameinvolved in efforts to install the study of pedagogyat the university level. In 1919 he was successfulin securing foundation funding for the founding ofa graduate school of education at Harvard. A de-cade later, however, Flexner had come to agreewith critics that the instruction being provided atschools of education lacked academic rigor andhad degenerated into a focus on simple practicalproblems which could be solved by “experience,reading, common sense, and a good generaleducation”(30). Flexner worried that the nature ofprograms in schools of education would dissuadethe intellectually competent from entering. De-spite the efforts of critics, teacher training and oth-


er related programs such as those for schooladministrators, counselors, curriculum special-ists, etc., continued to develop in universities, andmany normal schools continued on a path whichwas to make them into universities. The goal ofpeople like Mann, Carter, and Brooks for univer-sal teacher training was realized, but the benefit ofthe training in terms of the improvement ofschooling has been an issue of considerable debatefrom its inception to the present time.

So it was that the great reforms of the 19th cen-tury institutionalized schooling. Eventually all ofthe major aspects of the changes they sought wereachieved. State departments of education were es-tablished which regulated school programs by es-tablishing curriculum requirements and thelicensing of teachers. States required local dis-tricts to provide free elementary and secondaryschools and enacted compulsory attendance laws.Standards for the school buildings and their fur-nishings became established. Specialized trainingand licensing was required for those seeking towork as teachers. Districts developed standard-ized and age-graded curricula. Grouped instruc-tion replaced the method of recitation. Textbookswere provided to students. Centralized control atthe district level over building school sites was in-augurated. The concept of a public school systemwas new and strange to many a 150 years ago. Itcame to be taken for granted, even axiomatic. Yet,new beliefs about the nature of knowledge, whichwere a consequence of information technology(discussed above) and changes in understandingabout learning, which also are stimulated by de-velopments in information technology (discussedbelow), both challenge the structure which Mannand his colleagues put in place.

THE HUMAN AS A NATURAL LEARNERThere have been many answers to the question:What distinguishes human beings from otherforms of animate life? For Plato, the human wascharacterized as a featherless biped. For the Eng-lish essayist William Hazlitt, the human was theonly creature that laughs and weeps. In technicalterms, the human species is called homo sapiens,

man the wise. The capability of the human tothink, learn, and acquire knowledge was deter-mined to be the characteristic that distinguishedthe human being from other primates. Other ani-mals learn, as is evident from any trip to the circus,but no other form of life on earth exhibits cogni-tive capability comparable to the human being.Humanness resides in the central nervous system.

The ability to learn is not an acquired but a natu-ral capability for humans. The human being is alearner from the moment of birth until the momentof death unless such is precluded by some brainabnormality. In the first hours after birth, the in-fant learns to suckle at the breast or bottle. Veryquickly, the baby learns to discriminate his or hermother’s face from other faces. The child willlearn motor skills such as eating with table uten-sils, walking, and cognitive skills such as speak-ing, and social skills such as acceptable andnonacceptable ways of dealing with others as wellas distinctions in behavior appropriate for the dif-ferent people with whom he or she comes intocontact. The small child learns a language, and, inmany societies, may learn more than one lan-guage. Children acquire information and skillswhether or not they are prodded or deliberately as-sisted by parents or other adults. Anyone who hasspent any time watching a child cannot help butconclude that learning is a natural process.

In thinking about the human as a natural learnerit is important to keep two things in mind. First,“learning” is not an honorific but a descriptiveterm. To say that the human being is a learner isnot per se to pay a compliment. People learn badthings as well as good things. Children learn lan-guage, mathematics, how to play the piano, etc.,but they can also learn prejudice, pot smoking,how to hot wire and steal cars, etc. Learning thewrong things is not necessarily a less impressivetask when judged from the complexity of thelearning task. It is, for example, probably easier tolearn the occupation of a sales person in a fast foodrestaurant than to learn the occupation of a suc-cessful car thief. Second, to say that individualsare natural learners is not to imply that all demon-strate this capability to the same extent. People do


learn how to learn and can become more or less in-terested in learning and more or less effective inthe process.

In the past century there have been thousandsof studies of human learning. The vast preponder-ance of these studies has focused on learning inschools, and since a substantial proportion of thepopulation of school-aged children have prob-lems learning in school, it is understandable thatmuch of the literature has been directed to the na-ture of learning pathologies. Much less attentionhas been devoted to understanding natural learn-ing, or learning in those instances when the pro-cess is not structured and regulated by others butis woven into the life situation of the person. Inthese situations, learning occurs even thoughthere is not someone formally designated as teach-er directing the process.

In a small book written three decades ago calledHow Children Learn (12), John Holt discusseshow children learn when there is minimal or noadult intervention. Holt drew upon his experi-ences as a teacher in a fifth-grade classroom, buthe was less interested in understanding how chil-dren learn when the process is prescribed to themby their teachers than in observing how childrenlearn when they are not required to follow rules ofthe process established by the adults in their envi-ronment. Holt sums up his conception about thenatural learning style of young children in the fol-lowing passage from his book:

The child is curious. He wants to make senseout of things, find out how things work, gaincompetence and control over himself and his en-vironment, do what he can see other people do-ing. He is open, receptive and perceptive. Hedoes not shut himself off from the strange, con-fused, complicated world around him. He ob-serves it closely and sharply, tries to take it in.He is experimental. He does not merely observethe world around him, but tastes it, touches it,hefts it, bends it, breaks it. To find out how real-ity works, he works on it. He is bold. He is notafraid of making mistakes. And he is patient. Hecan tolerate an extraordinary amount of uncer-tainly, confusion, ignorance. He does not have tohave instant meaning in any new situation. He is

willing and able to wait for meaning to come tohim—even if it comes very slowly, which it usu-ally does (12).

One of the places where there is substantial andserious work currently underway to understandlearning as a natural process is the Institute forLearning Sciences at Northwestern University.The Institute was established in 1989 with spon-sorship provided by Anderson Consulting andAmeritech. The staff includes 21 faculty and re-searchers, 42 content specialists and program-mers, 50 graduate students, and 20 interns andvisiting staff. The Institute is dedicated to the taskof investigations of human learning as a naturalprocess and to make use of the knowledge ob-tained from these investigations to construct newmeans for improving learning in the workplaceand then in the schools.

Roger Schank, the Institute director, along withChip Cleary, one of his graduate students, au-thored a “hyper-book” which is available on theWorld Wide Web titled “Engines for Education.”This book presents their ideas about what is wrongwith education, and the role of educationaltechnology in reforming schools. The book’s per-spective on natural learning is similar to Holt’s.Like Holt they see the type of learning which oc-curs in schools as dysfunctional:

In public schools from first through twelfthgrade, much of the classroom routine is shapedby an emphasis on rote learning, a strict adher-ence to standardized textbooks and workbooks,and a curriculum that is often enforced with drilland practice. The methods and the curriculumare molded by the questions that appear on thestandardized achievement tests administered toevery child from the fourth grade on. Success nolonger means being able to do. Success comes tomean “academic success,” a matter of learningto function within the system of learning the“correct” answer, and of doing well at multiplechoice exams. Success also means, sadly, learn-ing not to ask difficult questions. When we askhow our children are doing in school, we usuallymean, “are they measuring up to the prevailingstandard?” rather than, “are they having a goodtime and feeling excited about learning?” (36).


Some caution must be exercised in overdraw-ing the distinction between school and non-schoollearning or in romanticizing the child as Holtdoes. There are classrooms where what is happen-ing for children looks much like a natural learningsituation, and it is much easier to know what iswrong about schools than it is to do what is right.Nevertheless, the conditions listed by Schank andCleary such as standardized curriculum, gradelevel expectations, as well as an increasingly ex-tensive amount of information which teachers areexpected to “cover” create an environment forlearning which, too frequently, does create a situa-tion where there is so much to teach that there isno time to learn.

It is not a coincidence that two recent books onlearning and technology, one by Donald Normanand the other by Seymour Papert, give consider-able attention to informal or natural learning. Forthose accustomed to “cruising the Internet,” “justin time learning,” hypermedia, and virtual com-munities, school or formal learning is far too con-fining. Interest in using technology ininstructional applications is not new. Sixty-eightyears ago S.L. Pressey published a paper called “Asimple apparatus which gives tests and scores andteaches” (31). In this paper Pressey described theplan for a machine which would be used as an “au-tomatic teacher.” It makes use of a typewriter ap-paratus to display questions and to providefeedback for correct or incorrect answers. Com-puter technology enables the production of moresophisticated versions of Pressey’s “automaticteachers.” These applications, while employingmore elaborate graphics and more advanced inter-active procedures, are fundamentally similar toPressey’s “automatic teacher” and many come outof a behaviorist, programmed learning, orienta-tion. Increases in storage, display, and processingpower of computers systems provides developerswith the capability to go beyond the design ofteaching machines and to create “learning ma-chines” or, to use Papert’s term, “knowledge ma-chines.” Such applications put in the hand of theuser a rich informational environment which is ac-cessible in a way which accommodates the inter-ests of the user. “Learning machines” are based on

an orientation which put the learner in control ofthe learning process and which is compatible withthe orientation of natural learning. Early examplesof these applications have appeared in the past fewyears in the form of various multimedia applica-tions.

In his book called Things That Make Us Smart(24), Donald A. Norman cautions that multimediatechnology can be used to provide applicationsthat epitomize the worst of what is wrong withschool learning or the best of what is possible withnatural learning. Norman distinguishes betweenschool learning and natural or informal learning(Table 1).

Norman cites the work of Mihaly Csikszentmi-halyi who writes about “flow experiences.” Flowexperiences occur when the person is totally en-gaged in the task at hand. Teachers may tell theirstudents to “Pay attention!,” and while such an ad-monition may cause the student to look attentive,there is no assurance that the student will be atten-tive. The flow experience can only happen whenthe goals and challenge of the task captures theattention of the individual. Many observers of lifein classrooms as well as teachers have expressedconcern about the lack of engagement of studentsin what they are being told to learn. The lack of en-gagement of students in their instruction evidentin many formal learning situations, kindergartenthrough college, is the antithesis of the “flow ex-periences.”

Seymour Papert’s book, the Children’s Ma-chine (29), is subtitled “Rethinking School in theAge of the Computer.” Papert contrasts two differ-ent orientations to education—“instructionism”and “constructionism.” Instructionism is the be-lief that the way to achieve better learning is toteach better. Constructionism, on the other hand,conceives of learning as a manipulative and build-ing process. It draws a direct connection betweenconstruction in the physical and mental domains,and sees learning to be an activity involving thecreation of mental structures by the learner whichorganize and synthesize the information and expe-rience which the individual encounters in theworld. Papert, similar to others who have dealtwith the topic of natural learning, emphasizes con-


crete or experiential learning. He calls for learningwhich is rooted in concrete experiences ratherthan that which exists as free-floating abstrac-tions. Perhaps one of the most radical of the as-sumptions of this perspective is that children canbe trusted to find the knowledge they need. If oneconceives of learning as an activity which is re-pugnant to the individual or if one believes thatthat there is a package of content which can andmust be installed into the minds of all students,then trust in the learner is unwarranted. If thesetwo conceptions are rejected, as they are by peoplelike Papert, Holt, and Schank, then trust in thelearner is quite appropriate. The task for those in-volved with the education of the young, as Papertpresents it, is to see to it that children are sup-ported materially, psychologically, and intellectu-ally in their efforts to learn. He contends, “Thekind of knowledge children need most is theknowledge that will help them get more knowl-edge”(29).

Holt, Schank, and Papert are only the most re-cent of a long line of persons to be aware of the dis-crepancies between school learning and learningas a natural human phenomena. Rousseau pub-lished Emile in 1762 and Pestolozzi opened aschool at Yverdon in 1805. Rousseau as a theoreti-cian and Pestolozzi as a practitioner gained a highdegree of recognition for their work. In both cases,they presented a conception of learning whichplaced emphasis on the interest and experience ofthe child and saw the learning of the child ratherthan the didactics of the teacher as the key to theprocess. Pestolozzi’s school was visited by theczar of Russia and by the kings of Spain, Holland,Prussia, Denmark, Wurtenberg, and Saxony.

John Dewey, who had the misfortune of havinghis work become popular mainly in the form of in-terpretations developed by his disciples who “wa-tered-down” and sanitized his ideas, saw this issueclearer than most and presented it as forthrightlyas anyone almost a century ago:

What is learned in school is at best only asmall part of education, a relatively superficialpart of education; and yet what is learned inschool makes artificial distinctions in societyand marks persons off from one another. Con-

sequently we exaggerate school learning com-pared to what is gained in the ordinary course ofliving. We are, however, to correct this exag-geration, not by despising school learning, butby looking into that extensive and more efficienttraining given by the ordinary course of eventsfor light upon the best ways of teaching withinschool walls. The first years of learning proceedrapidly and securely before children go toschool, because that learning is so closely re-lated with the motives that are furnished by theirown powers and the needs that are dictated bytheir own conditions. Rousseau was almost thefirst to see that learning is a matter of necessity;it is a part of the process of self-preservation andof growth. If we want, then, to find out howeducation takes place most successfully, let usgo to the experiences of children where learningis a necessity, and not to the practices of schoolswhere it is largely an adornment, a superfluity,and even an unwelcome imposition (7).

It is not remarkable that the contrast betweenlearning inside and outside of schools has beenobserved by a long line of educational practitio-ners and theoreticians since the differences areconspicuous to the reasonably careful observer.John Dewey’s disciples, most notably William H.Kilpatrick, attempted — and generally failed — tohave their cake and eat it too. They sought to im-plement the conceptions of Dewey about naturaland experiential learning while keeping intact theessential conventions of the system of schoolingwhich by the early part of this century was well ac-cepted. As information technology causes moreand more of the agenda for learning in our societyto transcend the domain of school, the orientationexpressed by Dewey a century ago or by peoplelike Papert and Schank in recent months becomesever more plausible as a basis for the design oflearning experiences. The constraints of formaleducation do not hamper the person who is de-signing learning opportunities for individuals inthe workplace or the home.

This brief summary of thinking on naturallearning leads to three key points. First, schoolsdo not own the child’s learning. Children are con-tinuously engaged in learning, and even thoughthe learning which occurs in their life outside of


school may be woven into their environment inways which may make it less conspicuous thanwhen they are sitting in a classroom with a teacherstanding before them presenting some concept orinformation, it is learning nonetheless. Throughthe span of civilization schooling has been onlyone of the ways by which humans have learnedwhat they needed to learn in order to function. Un-til quite recently (when put in the context of hu-man civilization) the extent of the schooledpopulation was quite limited.

Second, information technology has generatedinterest in natural learning and provided means tocreate new learning environments. While there isone cadre of developers and vendors of informa-tion technology who are intent upon developinguses of technology that fit into the existing condi-tions, traditions, and procedures of schools as theyare, there is another and more important cadre whoare attempting to make use of the technology topromote learning with less commitment to wherethe learning takes place or how well it conformsto expectations of the educational establishmentas to its validity. This orientation emphasizes themotivational, attitudinal aspect of learning. Thestudent may not be able to walk out of the boringclass, but he or she can certainly switch off the bor-ing multimedia program. Information technologyis particularly compatible with the nonlinearityand experiential texture of natural learning.

Third, many who are inadequate learners in theschool context seem to have no particular disabil-ity when they are learning in out-of-school con-texts. The ability to learn is not an esoteric humancharacteristic; it is quite normal. The high inci-dence of learning pathologies in schools hasmuch, much less to do with any organic or func-tion disability of learners than it does with whatstudents are told to learn and how they are told tolearn it. Designers of educational materials usinginformation technology can focus their attentionon the learning requirements of the users ratherthan on the needs and requirements of the orga-nizations within which the learning is supposed totake place.

THE FUTURE OF LEARNING ANDSCHOOLING IN AMERICAN SOCIETY:CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONSThe 19th century was a period of institution build-ing. It was a time of a great changes in the UnitedStates and a time when men and women believedin their power to create institutions to solve thepressing problems caused by the changes. Prisonswould eliminate crime. Insane asylums would putan end to mental illness. Reformatories wouldabolish juvenile delinquency. Schools financedby the state would stamp out ignorance, create aliterate populace, and mold upright citizens for theRepublic. The state-supported system of schoolswould be the “melting pot” where children fromdiverse backgrounds would meet and beinstructed in a manner which would ensure themaintenance of the “American way of life.”

The reformers were successful in realizing theirvision of schooling throughout the United States.They enacted the laws and policies which were re-quired to institutionalize public schools. As a re-sult of the work of the reformers, schools becamethe place—rather than a place—designated by so-ciety to transmit the cultural tradition to eachsuccessive generation. Public policy tolerated, butdid not encourage, the formation of alternate ap-proaches such as parochial or private schools. Thebasic features of the schools put in place by the19th-century reformers have endured, much to thechagrin of scores of later-day reformers. The dura-bility of the American system of schooling is afunction of an architecture which was particularlyharmonious with the ideological context of thetimes. But times have changed.

Information technology is the principal forcegenerating the great transformation of economic,political, and social life in recent years. Informa-tion has become central to every domain of humanlife and pervasive in every venue of human exis-tence. Human beings have always had the task ofobtaining, integrating, and using information as abasis for their thoughts and actions, but at no pointin human history has day-to-day life for the pre-


ponderance of the population put them in suchproximity with the informational resources of theculture. The economic and social value of beinginformed was never greater than it is now andthere is no reason to expect this to abate. The print-ing press did not turn everyone into an author, butit did substantially expand the number of such per-sons. Not even desktop publishing and networkswill turn everyone into information producers, butwe are already experiencing an explosion in thenumbers of persons who are producing and pub-lishing information, and more access to thesetools can only further expand the percentage of thepopulation who will produce as well as consumeinformation. Within this context, schooling andlearning take on a different character than has beenthe case in the past. The role of schooling in gener-al and the American public school in particular arebeing changed.

As discussed earlier, one of the consequencesof literacy was the establishment of schools as en-claves separated from the ongoing economic andsocial life of the community. Learning was “de-contextualized” and provided in terms of genericskills or as information to be stored in one’s mindfor later use when the individual was again en-gaged in activities outside of school. The funda-mental implication of an information technologyculture for learning and schooling is that learningbecomes “contextualized” and becomes part andparcel of daily life. This does not mean thatschools will disappear, but it does mean that theywill no longer have the dominant presence in soci-ety with regard to the transference of the culturefrom one generation to the next. Schools person-nel who do not understand this new world of learn-ing within which they live are likely to lead theirown organizations into oblivion or irrelevance.

More specifically with regard to the Americanpublic school, it is becoming ever more clear thatwe are experiencing a deinstitutionalization ofeducation in the sense that the public school is lessand less accepted as the essential and principalinstrumentality of educating American youth.While home schooling is not a mass movement,a considerable number of children are being edu-cated in their homes. Charter schools have been

established in a number of states. Television hasbecome the dominant source of learning about theworld. Millions of people are using the Internet asa means of accessing information and learningabout an almost infinite variety of topics. Thereseem to be few people, beyond the circle of publiceducators, who contest the idea of establishingschools apart from the control of local educationalauthorities.

The belief in the power of institutions is not asprevalent among the citizens of the later part of the20th century. Much of the rationale for the estab-lishment of the American public school symstemmed from the belief that a state-supportedsystem of schooling which educated the rich,poor, immigrants and established middle classwas the means to insure a common culture conge-nial to American political, social and economiclife. The extent to which the American publicschool achieved this mission is a topic of debatebetween those who believe it did serve to bring thediverse sub-groups of American society into acohesive entity, and those who believe it servedthe purposes of a white Anglo-Protestant middleclass. The optimism of people in the 19th centuryabout the power and value of institutions over-stated the case, but the pessimism of the currentgeneration about institutions probably is alsooverstated; nevertheless, the “melting pot,” “thecommon school,” and standardization are notthemes which resonate in contemporary America.Now “choice,” “diversity,” and “deregulation” arethe bywords.

The landscape of American education in thelater part of the 20th century is looking more andmore like it was in the colonial period through theearly days of the Republic. The variegation whichso characterized the approach to education ap-pears much more compatible with the nature of aninformation society than does the uniformity andlinearity of the conditions engineered by the 19th-century reformers. The parent who is concernedabout his or her child’s intellectual developmentis able to buy learning materials at the mall orthrough a network service. School personnel whoare committed to the welfare of the young peoplethey serve need to be comfortable working with


other organizations and purveyors of learning re-sources as partners rather than as the agent in-charge.

Most people realize that information technolo-gy needs to become part of the schools in someway. People expect to see computers in class-rooms and believe that students should spendsome of their time in schools working with them.School boards and parent groups have seen to itthat there are computers in schools. There are fewschools in the United States where one does notfind computers in classrooms, media centers, orcomputer labs, and it is not difficult to identifyteachers, here and there, who are making interest-ing, and in some cases, powerful instructional useof computers. Unfortunately, there are still an ap-preciable number of proponents of technology inthe schools who seem to focus more on gettingcomputers used in schools than they do on theeducational value of how the computers are used.Success ought not be measured by how manycomputers there are in schools, how often they areused, or how well they can be integrated into exist-ing curriculum content—much of which is irrele-vant or antiquated. There is nothing to be gainedby using information technology in the schools tobecome a more efficient anachronism. The dangerof this is real since many proponents of technolo-gy in the schools have a 21st-century conceptionof technology and a 19th-century conception ofknowledge and learning. The challenge is to useinformation technology to create in schools an en-vironment conducive to the development of indi-viduals who have the capability and theinclination to use the vast resources of informa-tion technology in their own continuing intel-lectual growth and skills expansion. Schoolsshould become places where it is normal to seechildren engaged in their own learning.

Bringing schooling into an informationtechnology culture is a much more difficult taskthan doing so for businesses or factories. Whatwas required of American industry to make thechanges necessary to survive in an informationage was for the leaders of corporate America tounderstand the nature of what needed to be doneand to work with others inside the organization to

implement the changes. This was not an easy task,but corporate leaders did not have to get the gener-al public to accept the fact that they would find astrikingly different environment when theywalked into an automobile manufacturing plant in1990 as contrasted with how the plant would havelooked in 1950. The general public does not havedetailed beliefs about what it means to be a goodfactory apart from the belief that a good factoryturns out a good product. The general public doeshave beliefs (or, to use the terminology of the ear-lier discussion, “rational myths”) pertaining toschools which are often strongly held. The beliefsabout the nature of schools and schooling held byparents, citizens, and policymakers whether artic-ulated or not set the parameters for what is per-ceived to be legitimate and appropriate activitiesin classrooms. The crux of the crisis for schools isthe discordance between existent beliefs aboutschools and schooling and the conceptions ofknowledge and learning engendered by develop-ments in information technology. A new rationalmyth needs to be created.

The history of audio-visual technology inschools has established a precedent that needs tobe overcome. Radio, telephones, audio tape, film-strip projectors, slides, television, etc., were allseen as means to be used by teachers to assist themin improving teaching. A popular shibboleth isthat the computer is a “tool.” While computer ap-plications are tools, the idea that computers arejust means to an end is a serious misunderstandingabout the extent to which information technologyrepresents essential changes in the creation andtransmission of the culture. Those who wish to de-termine the extent to which schools are using in-formation technology to change more than merelythe cosmetic aspects of schools need to begin byasking school personnel what they no longer do orwhat they have eliminated from the school be-cause of their use of information technology. Thenext question is: What is happening in this schoolwhich did not, or could not have happened, in thepast without the use of information technology?The least important question is: What was done inthe past and is now being done in a different way


because of the availability of information technol-ogy?

At the heart of the way schooling has been car-ried out for the past century and a half is a concep-tion of knowledge as an historic product. In thisformulation, knowledge is something whichcomes from the past work of scholars, scientists,and artists rather than being a work in progress.The dissemination of knowledge using print hasobscured the dynamic and even disorderly natureof the process by which it is created. The schoolcurriculum carves knowledge into subjects and ar-ranges the content of the subjects in a sequential,hierarchical order corresponding to the grade lev-els. Teachers in the first grade know what math,language skills, etc., they are supposed to teachand they understand that they are not to infringeon what will be taught in second grade. The sys-tematic processes of curriculum standardizationand age grading of instruction, as well as the es-tablishment of diploma requirements, is based onthe assumption that there is a collection of facts,concepts, and skills which need to be installed intothe minds of students and that this needs to bedone in a orderly manner which conforms to thelogic of the discipline.

Information technology shifts the conceptionof knowledge from something one has learned tosomething one uses. This is not a new way ofthinking about knowledge. The great philosopherand mathematician Alfred Whitehead referred toknowledge as only something one had to learn andwhich had no utility for the individual as “inertknowledge.” Whitehead wrote with great passionabout the need for learning to have connection tothe lives, interests, and contexts of the learner.“Ideas,” he wrote, “which are not utilized are posi-tively harmful. By utilizing an idea, I mean relat-ing it to that stream, compounded of senseperceptions, feelings, hopes, desires, and of men-tal activities adjusting thought to thought whichforms our life” (39). In Papert’s terms, this is aconstructionist point of view. The work of indi-viduals such as Whitehead and Dewey make itclear that a dynamic and utilitarian conception ofknowledge is not a recent understanding, but in-formation technology elevates the need to recog-

nize this reality because there is less benefitgained by remembering knowledge and morebenefit to those who can produce it, find it, or useit.

The 19th-century reformers were inventors.They saw themselves in the tradition of the othergreat inventors of their day who had constructedmachines to do wonderful things. The conceptionof schooling which they established involved theinvention of a social mechanism which they be-lieved would do what it was constructed to do withthe same assurance as the other inventions whichwere transforming American life. Their socialmechanism was a carefully crafted system whichwould produce an educated populace for society.System is no less a popular word in educationalparlance in 1994 than it was a 150 years ago, andthe term “systemic reform” is also fashionable.Yet, the analyses presented in earlier pages of thispaper suggest that it is time to move beyond thesystem metaphor. Certainly, from a social scienceperspective, the concept of the school as a socialsystem remains a useful analytic framework withwhich to define the key structural elements and theroles and relationships of the people who maintainthe system. Yet, system, in the context of schools,brings with it much “baggage” which is dysfunc-tional. It keeps us linked with the 19th-century re-formers’ belief that it was possible to create asystem of schools within which a proper arrange-ment of the elements of the system and an effec-tive pedagogy could ensure the accomplishmentof the expected instructional objectives. There isnothing to be served by continuing a quest for theMagic Fountain of Schooling, since there is noneto be found. The time has come to abandon theidea that it is possible to create a social mechanismwhich can act on the students who are in it in wayswhich ensure the desired outcome.

Efforts which approach the task of school re-form from the perspective of the design of envi-ronments offer a better footing for an attack on theproblem than those which set out to figure out howto substitute one system for another. More of thementality of the architect is needed to design envi-ronments which incline those who share theseplaces to create learning communities which take


full advantage of personal productivity and net-working resources. Ironically, the surest way toincrease the likelihood of desired outcomes maybe to concentrate on the design of environmentswhich make desired processes more likely. Think-ing about schools in this way requires less com-pulsiveness with regard to content objectives andmore focus on the factors which support learningactivities. Such environments would be placeswhich no longer fought the losing battle to enforcean unnatural form of learning. Touting thisorientation would be an act of futility (as it was forDewey and Whitehead) were it not for the fact thatthere are serious and increasing efforts to developlearning processes which understand the central-ity of the learners’ own interest and involvementin their learning and which respect the natural pro-cesses of learning. These efforts are centeredmainly outside of formal education and are led bythose who are interested in reaching the market forlearning in the home and the private sector. Thoseconcerned about learning for children in our soci-ety should also participate in the exploration ofnew forms of learning environments and re-sources.

In the 1950s and 1960s, in the era of the ascen-dancy of broadcast technology, there was fear ofan informational monolith as three powerful tele-vision networks emerged and as fewer cities hadmore than one newspaper. In the 1990s, in the eraof network technology, these fears no longer pre-vail. Developments in the use of informationtechnology over the next years provide a growingnumber of new educational alternatives. There isno doubt that there will be great progress in thenext decade in the development of learning re-sources which make use of the capabilities of thetechnology. Commercial networks such as Prodi-gy and America On-Line carry educational offer-ings for young children. They will be joined byother networks bringing learning opportunitieswherever there are children. The quality of the of-ferings will vary. Some, possibly many, will bepoor, but there are certain to be very appealing andeffective resources as well. With increasing capa-bility in networks and with the development ofsmall, inexpensive devices with multimedia capa-

bility, designers of learning resources will havethe resources they need to develop attractive andeffective learning environments. The federal gov-ernment, states, and the private sector need towork together to support the development of net-work resources for children and youth. Childrenof reasonably affluent parents will have access tonetwork resources, but the concerns, frequentlyaddressed, of a bifurcated society based on in-formation access are real. There is no one solutionto the problem of the gap between the rich and thepoor with regard to access to information, but pub-lic policy needs to be continuously attentive andresponsive to this problem.

It is impossible to conceive of how to bringschools into the information age without a verysubstantial expansion of equipment available tolearners. Computer labs or the availability of a fewmachines in classrooms are hardly adequate.Many schools have had to struggle to provide arelatively small amount of equipment, and theyhave been provided little funding for applicationssoftware, support, maintenance, training, or up-grades. Unless one expects very significant newmoney to come to school districts (an expectationwhich few hold), the money needed to make in-formation technology a dominant element in thelives of children in classrooms is not availablegiven existing conditions in school districts. Spe-cial millage or bonding initiatives to purchasehardware represents a way for schools to take asignificant step forward, but special funding doesnot address the issue of maintaining informationtechnology as a major and continuing element inthe operation of the schools.

The option of having a sufficient deployment ofinformation technology so that it becomes main-stream in schools while maintaining everythingelse schools currently fund is unrealistic. Thefunding for substantial increases in technology onan ongoing basis can only be accomplished bychanging the way the existing funds are beingspent in a substantial way. This may also includelabor costs. The painful reality faced by other or-ganizations which have moved to make informa-tion technology a major aspect of how theyfunction is that the technology is purchased with


the money recovered from reduced labor costs.Any changes in the way in which school districtsspend their money will be sharply contested byteacher unions and, in many cases, by parents andother residents of the district. If public schools donot find ways to move in this direction they willfind themselves in competition with other educa-tional entities such as private schools, charterschools, educational networks, and the other neworganizations which provide technology-basededucational services for children. The restructur-ing of the public schools and especially the re-structuring which entails the effective use ofinformation technology can only occur if schoolleaders have the courage and political skill to ac-complish the task of fiscal restructuring.

The availability of applications software withregard to learning opportunities for children andyoung people is a mixed situation. There are twokinds of applications which children and youthneed to encounter. One type is the various produc-tivity and information utility applications such asword processing, quantitative modeling, biblio-graphic and informational data bases. Of course,the quality of these applications continues to im-prove and children and young people need to haveaccess to them as a conventional element in theireducation. The only problem which needs to besolved with regard to this type of application isseeing to it that children and youth have access tothe same tools as those being used in the world be-yond the schools and not antiquated applications.

The other type of applications pertains to thoseprograms which are devised as learning resourcesfor children and youth. Most of the programswhich are marketed as learning resources for chil-dren and youth are of poor quality, even whenjudged on their own terms as quite conventionaldrill-and-practice or tutorial programs. Even moreproblematic is the situation with regard to innova-tive materials which begin to exploit the designopportunities provided by equipment of increas-ing capability. Private as well as public funds needto be provided to support the development of ap-plications which furnish concrete and usable ver-

sions of the type of rich learning environmentsdiscussed earlier.

The creation of colleges of education was aconsequence of the school reform movement ofthe last century. The perceived value of collegesof education was contentious at the point teachertraining entered the university and has remainedso to the present. The radical changes which in-formation technology is generating in Americaneducation creates a need and opportunity for col-leges of education. Within colleges of educationthrough-out the United States there are individualfaculty members who are involved in efforts tomake new technology improve the lives of chil-dren and youth. Unfortunately, there are fewerexamples of colleges of education which havegrasped the significance of information technolo-gy for how they are to function and for the viabil-ity of their future.

There are two elements to the formation of a fu-ture for colleges of education. The first is that col-leges of education need to be involved in thedevelopment and use of information technologyas it improves the educational opportunities forchildren in the broad array of venues wherein thiswill occur. For the most part, colleges of educationhave been “colleges of schooling.” The econom-ics and ideology of the past have forged a tightconnection between them and schooling, whichwas usually public schooling. The value of col-leges of education will be even more suspect ifthey attempt to hold to an orientation to educationwhich is less and less an accurate depiction of real-ity. A misplaced sense of loyalty to formal educa-tion will not even serve the needs of schools sinceschools are faced with the need to function withina new educational world. Colleges of educationneed to be seen as places where knowledge andskills reside to assist schools in making effectiveuse of information technology. If colleges ofeducation are “on the sideline” on the unfolding ofinformational technology in teaching and learn-ing, then the future of colleges of education maybe increasingly tenuous.


The second element pertains to the long-stand-ing complaint about the disconnection betweenthe training which occurs in colleges of educationand the realities of life and learning in the placeswhere teachers and other educational personnelwork. Information technology provides a basis fora reconstruction of teacher education. There areobvious but not fully realized implications of theuse of networking as a means of establishing link-age between colleges of education and schoolsand other places where education occurs. Also,colleges of education which produce credible anduseful research or development products canmake use of information linkages to enable theirproducts to be used.

A new era of the human condition has begun.This transformation will bring with it problemsand opportunities. No area of human existencewill be more affected than the processes of educa-tion. The question of how well the resources of in-formation technology will be used to improve thelives of our children is as yet unanswered. The re-sponsibility to begin the construction of theanswer to this question falls upon this generation.

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appendix a schooling and learning in an information society

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