The enormous satellite and radio-telephonic network, which physically embodies the once fashionable concept of ether, is another example of the scale of work under the circumstances of the new scale of human activity; and so are the telephone networks-copper, coaxial, or fiberglass. The conceptual hierarchies handled by such networks of increasingly generalized communication of voice, data, and images make any comparison to Edison's telephone, to letters, or to videotapes useless. The amount of information, the speed of transmission, and the synchronicity mechanisms required and achieved in the network-all participate in establishing a framework for remote interaction that practically resets the time for all involved and does away with physical distances. Literacy, by its intrinsic characteristics, could not achieve such levels.
Finally, the computer, associated or not with networks, makes this limit to our ability to grasp complexities even more pressing. We have no problems with the fact that a passenger airplane is 200 times faster than a pedestrian, and carries, at its current capacity, 300-450 passengers plus cargo. The computer chip itself is a conceptual accomplishment beyond anything we can conceive of. The depth encountered in the functioning of the digital computer-from the whole it represents to its smallest components endowed with functions integrated in its operation-is of a scale to which we have no intuitive or direct access. Computers are not a better abacus. Some computer users have even noticed that they are not even a better cash register. They define an age of semiotic focus, in that symbol manipulation follows language processing. (The word symbol points to work become semiotic praxis, but this is not what I am after here.)
In addition to the complexity it embodies, the computer makes another distinction necessary. It replaces the world of the continuum by a world of discrete states. Probably this distinction would be seen only as qualitative, if the shift from the universe of continuous functions and monotonic behavior-whatever applies to extreme cases applies to everything in between-were not concretized in a different condition of human self-constitutive practical experience.
In the universe of literacy-based analog expectations, accumulation results in progress: know more (language, science, arts), have more (resources), acquire more (real estate). Even striving-from a general attitude to particular forms (do better, achieve higher levels)-is inherent in the underlying structure of the analog. The digital is not linear in nature. Within the digital, one small deviation (one digit in the phrase) changes the result of processing so drastically that retracing the error and fixing it becomes itself a new experience, and many times a new source of knowledge.
In a written sentence, a misspelling or a typographical error is almost automatically corrected. Through literacy, we dispose of a model that tells us what is right. In the digital, the language of the program and the data on which programs operate are difficult to distinguish (if at all). Such machines can manipulate more symbols, and of a broader variety, than the human mind can. Free of the burden of previous practical experiences, such machines can refer to potential experiences in a frame of reference where literacy is entirely blind. The behavior of an object in a multi- dimensional space (four, five, six, or more dimensions), actions along a timeline that can be regressive, or in several distinct and unrelated time frames, modeling choices beyond the capability of the human mind-all these, and many more, with practical significance for the survival and development of humankind are acceptable problems for a digital computer.
It is true, as many would hasten to object, that the computer does not formulate the problem. But this is not the point. Neither does literacy formulate problems. It only embodies formulations and answers pertinent to work within a scale of manageable divisions. The less expressive language of zeros and ones (yes-no, open-closed, white- black) is more precise, and definitely more appropriate, for levels of complexity as high as those resulting from this new stage in the evolution. The generality of the computer (a general-purpose machine), the abstraction of the program of symbol manipulation, and the very concrete nature of the data upon which it is applied represent a powerful combination of reified knowledge, effective procedures for solving problems, and high resolution capabilities. Those who see the computer as only the principal technological metaphor of our time (according to J. D. Bolter) miss the significance of the new metrics of human activity and its degree of necessity as it results from awareness of the limits of our minds (after the limits of the body were experienced in industrial society).
Edsger Dijkstra, affirming the need for an orthogonal method of coping with radical novelty, concludes that this "amounts to creating and learning a new foreign language that cannot be translated into one's mother tongue." The direction he takes is right; the conclusion is still not as radical as the new scale of human activity and the limits of our self-constitution require. Coming to grips with the radical change that he and many, many others ascertain, amounts to understanding the end of literacy and the illiteracy of the numerous languages required by our practical experience of self- constitution. This conspectus of the transformation we experience may foster its own forms of fresh confusion. For instance, in what was called a civilized society, language acted as the currency of cultural transactions. If higher level needs and expectations continue to drive the market and technology, will they eventually become subservient to the illiterate means they have generated? Or, if language in one of its illiterate embodiments cannot keep pace with the exponential growth of information, will it undergo a restructuring in order to become a parallel process? Or will we generate more inclusive symbols, or some form of preprocessing, before information is delivered to human beings? All these questions relate to work, as the experience from which human identities result together with the products bearing their mark.
The active condition of any sign system is quite similar to the condition of tools. The hand that throws a stone is a hand influenced by the stone. Levers, hammers, pliers, no less than telescopes, pens, vending machines, and computers support practical experiences, but also affect the individuals constituting themselves through their use. A gesture, a written mark, a whisper, body movements, words written or read, express us or communicate for us, at the same time affecting those constituted in them. How language affects work means, therefore, how language affects the human being within a pragmatic framework. To deal with some aspects of this extremely difficult problem we can start with the original syncretic condition of the human being.
Innate heuristics
Conceptual tools that can be used to refer to the human being in its syncretic condition exist only to the degree to which we identify them in language. In every system we know of, variety and precision are complementary. Indeed, whether human beings hunt or present personal experiences to others, they attempt to optimize their efforts. Too many details affect efficiency; insufficient detail affects the outcome. There seems to be a structural relation of the nature of one to many, between our what and our how. This relation is scrutinized in the pragmatic context where efficiency considerations finally make us choose from among many possibilities. The optimum chosen indicates what, from the possibilities humans are aware of, is most suitable for reaching the goal pursued. Moreover, such an optimum is characteristic of the pragmatics of the particular context. For example, hunting could be performed alone or in groups, by throwing stones or hurling spears, by shooting arrows, or by setting traps.
The syncretic primitive being was (and still is, in existing primitive cultures) involved in a practical experience in its wholeness: through that being's biological endowment, relation to the environment, acquired skills and understanding, emotions (such as fear, joy, sorrow). The specialized individual constitutes himself in experiences progressively more and more partial. Nevertheless, the two have a natural condition in common. What distinguishes them is a strategy for survival and preservation that progressively departs from immediate needs and direct action to humanized needs and mediated action. This means a departure from a very limited set of options ("When hungry, search for food," for example), to multiplying the options, and thus establishing for the human being an innate heuristic condition. This means that Homo Sapiens looks for options. Humans are creative and efficient.
My line of reasoning argues that, while verbal language may be innate (as Chomsky's theory advances), the heuristic dimension characteristic of human self- constitution certainly is. In hunting, for instance, the choice of means (defining the how) reflects the goal (to get meat) and also the awareness of what is possible, as well as the effort to expand the realm of the possible. The major effort is not to keep things the way they are, but to multiply the realm of possibilities to ensure more than mere survival. This is known as progress.
The same heuristic strategy can be applied to the development of literacy. Before the Western alphabet was established, a number of less optimal writing systems (cuneiform, hieroglyphics, etc.) were employed. The very concrete nature of such languages is reflected in the limited expressive power they had. Current Chinese and Japanese writing are examples of this phenomenon today. In comparison to the 24-28 letters of Western alphabets, command of a minimum of 3,000 ideographic signs represents the entry level in Chinese and Japanese; command of 50,000 ideographic signs would correspond to the Western ideal of literacy. Behind the letters and characters of the various language alphabets, there is a history of optimization in which work influenced expression, expression constituted new frames for work, and together, generative and explanatory models of the world were established. The what and the how of language were initially on an order of complexity similar to that characteristic of actions. Over time, actions became simpler while languages acquired the complexity of the heuristic experience.
The what and the how of mediation tools of a higher order of abstraction than language, achieved even higher complexities. Such complexities were reflected in the difference in the order of magnitude between human work and outcome, especially the choices generated. Parallel to the loss of the syncretic nature of the human being at the level of the individual, we notice the composite syncretism of the community. Individual, relatively stable, wholeness was replaced by a faster and faster changing community- related wholeness. Language experiences were part of this shift. Self-constituted in the practical use of language, the human being realized its social dimension, itself an example of the acquired multiplication of choice.
Indeed, within the very small scale of incipient humanity corresponding to the stage of self-ascertainment (when signs were used and elements of language appeared), population and food supply were locked in the natural equation best reflected in the structural circularity of existence and survival. It is at this juncture that the heuristic condition applies: the more animals prey on a certain group, this group will either find survival strategies (adaptive or other kinds), or indeed cease to be available as food for others. But once the human being was ascertained, evidence shows that instead of focusing on one or few ways to get at its food sources, it actually diversified the practical experience of self-constitution and survival, proceeding from one, or few, to many resources. Homo Habilis was past the scavenging stage and well into foraging, hunting, and fishing during the pre-agricultural pragmatic frame. What for other species became only a limited food supply, and resulted in mechanisms of drastic growth control (through famine, cannibalism, and means of destroying life), in the human species resulted in a broadening of resources. In this process, the human being became a working being, and work an identifier of the species.
Language acquisition and the transition from the natural experience of self- constitution in survival to the practical experience of work are co-genetic. With each new scale that became possible, sequences of work marked a further departure from the universe of action-reaction. The observation to be made, without repeating information given in other chapters, is that from signs to incipient language, and from incipient language to stabilized means of expression, the scale of humankind changed and an underlying structure of practical experiences based on sequentiality, linearity, determinism (of one kind or another), and centralism established a new pragmatic framework. Individual syncretism was replaced by the syncretism of communities in which individuals are identified through their work.
Writing was a relatively late acquisition and occurred as part of the broader process of labor division. This process was itself correlated to the diversification of resources and types of practical experiences preserving syncretism at the community level. Not everyone wrote, not everybody read. The pragmatic framework suggested necessitated elements of order, ways of assigning and keeping track of assignments, a certain centralism, and, last but not least, organizational forms, which religion and governing bodies took care of. Under these circumstances, work was everything that allowed for the constitution, survival, change, and advancement of the human species. It was expressed in language to the degree such expression was necessary. In other words, language is another asset or means of diversifying choices and resources.
Over time, limited mediation through language and literacy became necessary in order to optimize the effort of matching needs with availabilities. This mediation was itself a form of work: questions asked, questions answered, commitments made, equivalencies determined. All these defined an activity related to using available resources, or finding new ones. When productivity increased, and language could not keep up with the complexities of higher production, variety, and the need for planning, a new semiosis, characteristic of this different pragmatic level, became necessary. Money, for example, introduced the next level of mediation, more abstract, that translated immediate, vital needs into a comparative scale of means to fulfill them. The context of exchange generated money, which eventually became itself a resource, a high level commodity. It also entailed a language of its own, as does each mediation. With the advent of means of exchange as universal as language, the what and how of human activity grew even more distant. Direct trade became indirect. People making up the market no longer randomly matched needs and availability. Their market praxis resulted in an organizing device, and used language to further diversify the resources people needed for their lives. This language was still rudimentary, direct, oral, captive to immediacy, and often consumed together with the resource or choice exhausted (when no alternative was generated). This happens even in our day.
In its later constitution in practical activity, language was used for records and transactions, for plans and new experiences. The logic of this language was an extension and instantiation of the logic of human activity. It complemented the heuristic, innate propensity for seeking new choices. Influenced by human interaction in the market, and subjected to the expectation of progressively higher efficiency, human activity became increasingly mediated. A proliferation of tools allowed for increased productivity in those remote times of the inception of language. Eventually tools, and other artifacts, became themselves an object of the market, in addition to supporting self-constitutive practical experiences of the humans interacting with them. As a mediating element between the processor and what is processed, the tool was a means of work and a goal: better tools require instructed users. If they use tools properly, they increase the efficiency of activity and make the results more marketable. Tools supported the effort of diversification of practical experiences, as well as the effort of expanding the subsistence base. The means for creating tools and other artifacts fostered other languages, such as the language of drawing, on which early engineering also relied. Here, an important point should be made. No tool is merely used. In using it, the user adapts to the tool, becoming to some extent, the used, the tool of the tool. The same is true of language, writing, and literacy. They were developed by humans seeking to optimize their activity. But humans have adapted themselves to the constraints of their own inventions.
At the inception of writing, the tension between an imposed written precision (as relative as this might appear from our perspective today)-keeping language close to the object, allowing into the language only objects that pictograms could represent- and a rather diverse, however very unfocused, oral language resulted in conflicts between the proponents of writing and the guardians of orality (as documented in ancient Greek philosophy). The written needed to be freed from the object as much as the human being from a particular source of protein, or a particular food source. It had to support a more general expression (referring to what would become families, types, classes of objects, etc.), and thus to support practical efforts to diversify the ways of survival and continuous growth in number. The oral had to be tamed and united with the written. Taming could, and did, take place only through and in work, and in socially related interaction. The practical effort to embody knowledge resulting from many practical experiences of survival into all kinds of artifacts (for measuring, orientation, navigation, etc.) testifies to this. Phonetic writing, the development of the effort to optimize writing, better imitated oral language. Personal characteristics, making the oral expressive, and social characteristics, endowing the written with the hints that bring it close to speech, are supported in the phonetic system. The theocratic system of pictographs and what others call the democratic language of phonetic writing deserve their names only if we understand that languages are both constitutive and representative of human experience. Undifferentiated labor is theocratic. Its rules are imposed by the object of the practical experience. Divided labor, while affecting the integrity of those becoming only an instance of the work process, is participatory, in the sense that its results are related to the performance of each participant in the process. Practical experience of language and experience of divided labor are intrinsically related and correspond to the pragmatic framework of this particular human scale. Labor division and the association of very abstract phonetic entities to very concrete language instantiations of human experience are interdependent.
The realm of alternatives
In defining the context of change leading from an all-encompassing literacy to the civilization of illiteracy, I referred to the Malthusian principle (Population, when unchecked, increases geometrically, while food sources increase arithmetically). What Malthus failed to acknowledge is the heuristic nature of the human species, i.e., the progressive realization of the creative potential of the only known species that, in addition to maintaining its natural condition, generates its own a-natural condition. In the process of their self-constitution, humans generate also the means for their survival and future growth beyond the circularity of mere survival strategies. The 19th century economist Henri George gave the following example of this characteristic: "Both the jayhawk and the man eat chicken, but the more jayhawks, the fewer chickens, while the more men, the more chickens." (Just think about the Purdue chicken industry!) The formula is flawed. Humans also intervene in the jayhawk-chicken relation; the number of animals and birds in a certain area is affected by more elements than what eats what; and the population increase is meaningless unless associated with patterns of human practical experiences. Species frequently become extinct due to human, not animal, intervention. Despite all this, Henri George's characterization captured an important aspect of the human species, as it defined itself in the human scale that made literacy possible and necessary.
George's time corresponded to some interesting though misleading messages that followed the pattern of Malthus' law. People were running out of timber, coal, and oil for lamps, just as we expect to run out of many other resources (minerals, energy and food sources, water, etc.). Originators of messages regarding the exhaustion of such resources, regardless of the time they utter them, ignore the fact that during previous shortages, humans focused on alternatives, and made them part of new practical experiences. This was the case leading to the use of coal, when the timber supply decreased in Britain in the 16th century, and this will be the case with the shortages mentioned above: for lighting, kerosene was extracted from the first oil wells (1859); more coal reserves were discovered; better machines were built that used less energy and made coal extraction more efficient; industry adapted other minerals; and the strict dependence on natural cycles and farming was progressively modified through food processing and storage techniques.
The pragmatic framework of current human praxis is based on the structural characteristics of this higher scale of humankind. It affects the nature of human work and the nature of social, political, and national organization within emerging national states. A retrospective of the dynamics of growth and resource availability shows that with language, writing and reading, and finally with literacy, and even more through engineering outside language experience, a coherent framework of pragmatic human action was put in place, and used to compensate for the progressive imbalance between population growth and resources.
Our time is in more than one way the expression of a semiosis with deep roots in the pragmatic context in which writing emerged. Engineering dominates today. In trying to define the semiosis of engineering, i.e. how the relation between work we associate with engineering and language evolved, we evidence both continuity-in the form of successive replications-and discontinuity-in the new condition of the current engineering work. Our reference can be made to both the dissemination of the writing system based on the Phoenician alphabet, and the language of drawing that makes engineering possible.
Phoenician traders supplied materials to the Minoans. The Minoan burial culture involved the burial of precious objects that embodied the experience of crafts. These objects were made out of silver, gold, tin, and lead. In time, increased quantities of such metals were permanently removed from the market. Phoenicians, who supplied these materials, had to search farther and farther for them, using better tools to find and preprocess the minerals. The involvement of writing and drawing in the process of compensation between perceived needs and available resources, and the fact that searches for new resources led to the dissemination of writing and craftsmanship should be understood within the dynamics of local economies.
Up to which point such a compensatory action, implying literacy and engineering skills, is effective, and when it reached its climax, possibly during the Industrial Revolution, is a question that can be put only in retrospect. Is there a moment when the balance was tilted towards the means of expression of and the communication specific to engineering? If yes, we do not know this moment; we cannot identify it on historic charts. But once the potential of literacy to support human practical experiences of self- constitution in a new pragmatic framework was exhausted, new means became necessary. To understand the dynamics of the changes that made the new pragmatic framework of the civilization of illiteracy necessary is the object of the entire book. While engineering contributed to them, they are not the result of this important practical experience, but rather a cause of how it was and is affected by them. The stream of diversified experiences that eventually gushed forth through new languages, the language of design and engineering included, resulted in the awareness of mediation, which itself became a goal.
Mediation of mediation
With the risk of breaking the continuity of the argument, I would like to continue by suggesting the implications of this argument for the reality to which this book refers: the present. First, a general thesis derived from the analysis so far: The market of direct exchange, as well as the market of mediated forms, reflect the general structure of human activity-direct work vs. mediated forms of work-and are expressed in their specific languages. From a certain moment in human evolution, tools, as an extension of the human body and mind, are used, some directly, some indirectly. Today we notice how, through the intermediary of commands transmitted electronically, pneumatically, hydraulically, thermally, or in some other way, the mediation of mediation is introduced. Pressing a button, flipping a switch, punching a keyboard, triggering a relay-seen as steps preparing for entirely programmed activities-means to extend the sequence of mediations. Between the hand or another body part and the processed material, processing tools and sequences of signs controlling this process are introduced. Accordingly, language, as related to work, religion, education, poetry, exchange in the market, etc., is restructured. New levels of language and new, limited, functionally designed languages are generated and used for mediating. The language of drawings (more generally the language of design) is one of them. Relations among these different levels and among the newly designed languages are established.
But how is this related to the innate heuristic condition of the human being and to the working hypothesis advanced regarding the change in the scale of humanity? Or is it only another way of saying that technology, resulting from engineering interpretations of science, defines the path to higher levels of efficiency, and to the relative illiteracy of our time? The increase in population and the dynamics of diversification (more choices, more resources) at this new scale assume a different dimension. It is irrelevant that resources of one type or another are exhausted in one economy. As a matter of fact, Japan, Germany, England, and even the USA (rich in the majority of resources in demand) have exhausted whatever oil, copper, tin, diamonds, or tungsten was available. Due to many factors, farmland in the western world is decreasing, while the quantities and different types of food consumed per capita have increased substantially. Faced with the challenge posed by the national, linear, sequential, dual, deterministic nature of the pragmatic framework that generated the need for literacy, humans discover means to transcend these limitations-globality, non-linearity, configuration, multi-valued logic, non-determination-and embody them in artifacts appropriate to this condition.
The new scale necessitated creative work for multiplying available resources, for looking at needs and availabilities from a new perspective. Those who see globality in the Japanese sushi restaurant in Provence or in the Midwest, in the McDonalds in Moscow or Beijing, in multinational corporations, in foreign investments mushrooming all over, miss the real significance of the term. Globality applies to the understanding that we share in resources and creative means of multiplying them independent of boundaries (of language, culture, nations, alliances, etc.), as well as in high efficiency processing equipment. This understanding is not only sublime, it has its ugly side. The world would even go to war (and has, again and again) to secure access to critical resources or to keep markets open. But it is not the ugly side that defines the effective pragmatics. Nor does it define the circumstances of our continuous self-definition in this world of a new dynamics of survival needs and expectations above and beyond such needs.
Where literacy no longer adequately supports creative work based on higher levels of efficiency, it is replaced by languages designed and adapted to mediation, or to work destined to compensate for an exhausted resource, or by machines incorporating our literacy and the literacies of higher efficiency. Hunting and fishing remain as mere sport, and foraging declined to the level at which people in a country like the USA no longer know that in the woods there are mushrooms, berries, and nuts that can be used as food. Even agriculture, probably the longest standing form of practical experience, escapes sequentiality and linearity, and adds industrial dimensions that make agriculture a year-round, highly specialized, efficient activity. We share resources and even more in the globality of the life support system (the ecology); in the globality of communication, transportation, and technology; and, last but not least, in the globality of the market. The conclusion is that, once again, it is not any recent discovery or trend that is the engine of change, from local to national to global, but the new circumstances of human experience, whose long-lasting effect is the altered individual.
Freed from the human operator and replaced by technology that ensures levels of efficiency and security for which the living being is not well adapted to provide, many types of work are simultaneously freed from the constraints of language, of literacy in particular. There is no need to teach machines spelling, or grammar, or rules of constructing sentences. There is even less of a need to maintain between the human being and the machine a mediating literacy that is awkward, inefficient, stamped by ambiguity, and burdened by various uses (religious, political, ideological, etc.). The new languages, whether interfaces between machines or between humans and machines, are of limited scope and duration. In the dynamics of work, these new languages are appropriately adapted to each other. Our entire activity becomes faster, more precise, more segmented, more distributed, more complex. This activity is subordinated to a multi-valued logic of efficiency, not to dualistic inferences or truth or falsehood.
Some might read into the argument made so far a vote against the many kinds of activists of this day and age: the ecologists who warn of damage inflicted on the environment; Malthusians tireless in warning of upcoming famine; the zero-population- growth movement, etc. Some might read here a vote for technocracy, for the advocates of limitless growth, the optimists of despair, or the miracle planners (free marketers, messianic ideologists, etc.). None is the case. Rather, I submit for examination a model for understanding and action that takes into account the complexity of the problem instead of explaining complexities away and working, as literacy taught us to, on simplified models. Mapping out the terrain of the descriptive level of the relation between language and work under current pragmatic circumstances will assist in the attempt to plot, in some meaningful detail, the position so far described.
Literacy and Education
Education and literacy are intimately related. One seems impossible without the other. Nevertheless, there was education before the written word. And there is education that does not rely on literacy, or at least not exclusively. With this in mind, let us focus, in these preliminary words, on what brought literacy into education, and on the consequences of their reciprocal relation.
The state of education, like the state of many other institutions embodying characteristics of literacy-based practical experiences, is far from what is expected. Literacy carried the ideal of permanency into the practical experience of education. In a physical world perceived as limited in scale and fragmented, captive to sequentiality, characterized by periodic changes and intercommunal commitments aimed at maintaining permanency, literacy embodied both a goal and the means for achieving it. It defined a representative, limited set of choices. Within this structure, education is the practical experience of stabilizing optimal modes of interaction centered around values expressed in language. Education based on literacy is adapted to the dynamics of change within the reduced scale of humankind that eventually led to the formation of nations-entities of relative self-sufficiency. Within national boundaries, population growth, resources, and choices could be kept in balance.
Purposely simplified, this view allows us to understand that education evolved from its early stages-direct transmission of experience from one person to another, from one generation to another-to religion-based educational structures. Filtered by a set of religious premises, education later opened a window beyond the immediate and the proximity of life, and evolved, not painlessly, into schools and universities concerned with knowledge and scholarship. This, too, was a long process, with many intermediate steps, which eventually resulted in the generalized system of education we now have in place, and which reflects the separation of church and state. Liberal education and all the values attached to it are the foundational matrix of the current system of general education.
If you give someone a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. If you give someone an alphabet, every problem becomes one of literacy and education-this would probably be a good paraphrase, applicable to the discussions on education in our day. It should not follow, however, that with the World Wide Web, education is only a matter of on-line postings of classes and the accidental matching of educational needs to network availabilities. In our world of change and discontinuity, the end of literacy, along with the end of education based on literacy, is not a symptom, but a necessary development, beyond on-line studies. This conclusion, which may appear to be a criticism of the digital dissemination of knowledge, might seem hasty at this point in the text. The arguments to follow will justify the conclusion.
"Know the best"
Resulting from our self-constitution in a world obsessed with efficiency and satisfaction, the insatiable effort to exhaust the new-only to replace it with the newer- puts education in a perspective different from that opened by literacy. Education driven by literacy seems to be condemned to a sui generis catch-up condition, or "damned if you do, damned if you don't." In the last 30 years, education has prepared students for a future different from the one education used to shape in a reactive mode. Under the enormous pressure of expectations (social, political, economic, moral) it simply cannot fulfill, unless it changes as the structure of the pragmatic framework changed, the institution of education has lost its credibility. Classes, laboratories, manuals, any of the educational methods advanced, not to mention the living inventory of teachers, account for contents and ways of thinking only marginally (if at all) linked to the change from a dominant literacy to numerous literacies. IBM, fighting to redefine itself, stated bluntly in one of its educational campaigns, "Since 1900, every institution has kept up with change, except one: Education."
More money than ever, more ideals and sweat have been invested in the process of educating the young, but little has changed either the general perception of education or the perception of those educated. The most recent laboratory of the high school or university is already outdated when the last piece of equipment is ordered. The competence of even the best teachers becomes questionable just as their students start their first journey in practical life. The harder our schools and colleges try to keep pace with change, the more obvious it becomes that this is a wrong direction to pursue, or that something in the nature of our educational system makes the goal unreachable-or both of these alternatives. Some people believe that the failure is due to the bureaucracy of education. Much can be said in support of this opinion. The National Institute for Literacy is an example of how a problem can become a public institution. Other people believe that the failure is due to the inability of educators to develop a good theory of education, based on how people learn and what the best way to teach is. Misunderstanding the implications of education and setting false priorities are also frequently invoked. Misunderstanding too often resulted in expensive government projects of no practical consequence.
Other explanations are also given for the failure of education-liberalism, excessive democracy in education, rejection of tradition, teaching and learning geared to tests, the breakdown of the family. (Listing them here should not be misconstrued as an endorsement.) It seems that every critic of today's education has his or her own explanation of what each thinks is wrong. Some of these explanations go well back, almost to the time when writing was established: education affects originality, dampens spontaneity, and infringes upon creativity. Education negates naturalness during the most critical period of development, when the minds of young people, the object of education, are most impressionable.
Other arguments are more contemporary: If the right texts (whatever right means) were to be taught, using the best methods to put them in a light that makes them attractive, education would not lose out to entertainment. Some groups advocate the digest approach for texts, sometimes presented in the form of comic strips or Internet-like messages of seven sentences per paragraph, each sentence containing no more than seven words. These explanations assume the permanence of literacy. They concentrate on strategies, from infantile to outlandish, to maintain literacy's role, never questioning it, never even questioning whether the conditions that made it necessary might have changed to the degree that a new structure is already in place. Educators like to think that their program is defined through Matthew Arnold's prescription, "Know the best that is known and thought in the world," an axiom of tradition-driven self- understanding. This attitude is irrelevant in a context in which best is an identifier of wares, not of dynamic knowledge. Some educators would follow Jacques Barzun's recommendation: "serious reading, serious teaching of reading, and inculcation of a love for reading are the proper goal of education." Ideal vs. real
Schools at all levels of education purport to give students a traditional education and promise to deliver the solid education of yesteryear. Contrast this claim to reality: Under the pressure of the market in which they operate, schools maintain that they prepare students for the new pragmatic context. Some schools integrate practical disciplines and include training components. Courses in computer use come immediately to mind. Some schools go so far as to sign contracts guaranteeing the appropriateness of the education they provide. In the tradition of the service industry, they promise to take back pupils unable to meet the standardized criteria. Every spring, a reality check is made. In 1996, a poll of 500 graduating seniors revealed that only 7% succeeded in answering at least 15 of 20 questions asked. Five of these were on math, the rest on history and literature-all traditional subject matter.
Experts called to comment on the results of this poll-E.D. Hirsch, author of Cultural Literacy and active in having his educational ideas implemented; Diane Ravitch, former Assistant Secretary of Education; and Stephen Balch, president of the National Association of Scholars, constitute themselves in the pragmatic framework of literacy-based education. They declare, and appropriately so, that educational standards are declining, that education is failing to produce the type of citizen a democracy needs. As reputable as they undoubtedly are, these scholars, and many of those in charge of education, do not seem to realize what changes have been taking place in the real world. They live in the richest and probably most dynamic country in the world, with one of the lowest unemployment rates, and the highest rate of new business creation, but fail to associate education with this dynamism. If education is failing, then something positive must be replacing it.
In modern jargon, one can say that until education is re-engineered (or should I say rethought?), it has no chance of catching up with reality. In its current condition of compromise, education will only continue to muddle along, upsetting both its constituencies: those captive to an education based on the literacy model, and those who recognize new structural requirements.
The reality is that the universality implicit in the literacy model of education, reflected in the corpus of democratic principles guaranteeing equality and access, is probably no longer defensible in its original form. Education should rather elaborate on notions that better reflect differences among people, their background, ethnicity, and their individual capabilities. Instead of trying to standardize, education should stimulate differences in order to derive the most benefit from them. Education should stimulate complementary avenues to excellence, instead of equal access to mediocrity. Some people may be uneducatable. They might have characteristics impossible to reduce to the common denominator that literacy-based education implies. These students might require alternative education paths in order to optimally become what their abilities allow them to be, and what practical experience will validate as relevant and desired, no matter how different.
Equal representation, as applied to members of minority students or faculty, ethnic groups, sexes or sexual preferences, and the handicapped, introduces a false sense of democracy in education. It takes away the very edge of their specific chances from the people it pretends to help and encourage. Instead of acknowledging distinctions, expectations of equal representation suggest that the more melting in the pot, the better for society, regardless of whether the result is uniform mediocrity or distributed excellence. Actually the opposite is true: equal opportunity should be used in order to preserve distinctive qualities and bring them to fruition.
As a unified requirement, literacy imparts a sense of conformity and standardization appropriate to the pragmatic framework that made standardized education necessary. Numerous alternative means of expression and communication, for which education has only a deaf ear, facilitate the multiplication of choices. In a world confronted with needs well beyond those of survival, this is a source of higher efficiency. The necessary effort to individualize education cannot, however, take place unless the inalienable right to study and work for one's own path to self-improvement is not respected to the same extent as liberty and equality are.
The globality of human praxis is not a scenario invented by some entrepreneur. It is the reflection of the scale at which population growth, shared resources, and choices heading to new levels of efficiency become critical. In our world many people never become literate; many more still live at the borderline between human and animal life, threatened by starvation and epidemics. These facts do not contradict the dynamics that made alternatives to literacy necessary. It is appropriate, therefore, to question the type of knowledge that education imparts, and how it impacts upon those who are educated.
Relevance
Schools and universities are criticized for not giving students relevant knowledge. The notion of relevance is critical here. Scholars claim that knowledge of facts pertaining to tradition, such as those tested in the graduating class of 1996, are relevant. Relevant also are elements of logical thinking, enough science in order to understand the wealth of technologies we use, foreign languages, and other subject matter that will help students face the world of practical experience. Although the subjects listed are qualified as significant, they are never used in polls of graduating students.
Critics of the traditional curriculum dispute the relevance of a tradition that seems to exclude more than it includes. They also challenge implicit hierarchical judgments of the people who impose courses of study. Multiculturalism, criticism of tradition, and freedom from the pressure of competition are among the recommendations they make. Acknowledging the new context of social life and praxis, these critics fail, however, to put it in the broader context of successive structural conditions, and thus lack criteria of significance outside their own field of expertise.
With the notion of relevance, a perspective of the past and a direction for the future are suggested. That literacy-based education, at its inception, was xenophobic or racist, and obviously political, nobody has to tell us. Individuals from outside the polis, speaking a different mother tongue, were educated for a political reason: to make them useful to the community as soon as possible. Conditions for education changed dramatically over time, but the political dimension remains as strong as ever. This is why it can only help to dispense with certain literate attitudes expressing national, ethnic, racial, or similar ambitions. It is irrelevant whether Pythagoras was Greek and whether his geometry was original with him. It is irrelevant whether one or another person from one or another part of the world can be credited with a literary contribution, a work of art, or a religious or philosophic thought. What counts is how such accomplishments became relevant to the people of the world as they involved themselves in increasingly complex practical experiences. Moreover, our own sense of value does not rest on a sports-driven model-the first, the most, the best-but on the challenge posed by how each of us will constitute his own identity in unprecedented circumstances of work, leisure, and feeling. Relevance applies to the perspective of the future and to the recognition that experiences of the past are less and less pertinent in the new context.
What should be taught? Language? Math? Chemistry? Philosophy? The list can go on. It is indeed very hard to do justice by simply nodding yes to language, yes to math, yes to chemistry, but not yes wholesale, without putting the question in the pragmatic context. This means that education should not be approached with the aura of religion, or dogmatism, assumed up to now: The teacher knew what eternal truth was; students heard the lectures and finally received communion.
All basic disciplines have changed through time. The rhythm of their change keeps increasing. The current understanding of language, math, chemistry, and philosophy does not necessarily build on a progression. Science, for example, is not accumulation. Neither is language, contrary to all appearance. Rules learned by rote and accepted as invariable are not needed, but procedures for accessing knowledge relevant to our dynamic existence are. To memorize all that education-no matter how good or bad-unloads on students is sheer impossibility. But to know where to find what a given practical instance requires, and how one can use it, is quite a different matter.
Should square dancing, Heavy Metal music, bridge, Chinese cuisine be taught? The list, to be found in the curriculum of many schools and colleges, goes on and on. The test of the relevance of such disciplines (or subjects) in a curriculum should be based on the same pragmatic criteria that our lives and livelihoods depend on. New subjects of study appear on course lists due to structural changes that make literacy useless in the new pragmatic context. They cannot, however, substitute for an education that builds the power of thinking and feeling for practical experiences of increased complexity and dynamism.
Education needs to be shaped to the dynamics of self-constitution in practical experiences characteristic of this new age of humankind. This does not mean that education should become another TV program, or an endless Internet voyage, without aim and without method. We must comprehend that if we demand literacy and efficiency at the same time, ignoring that they are in many ways incompatible, we can only contribute to greater confusion. Higher education was opened to people who merely need training to obtain a skill. These students receive precious-looking diplomas that exactly resemble the ones given to students who have pursued a rigorous course of education. Once upon a time, literacy meant the ability to write and read Latin. Therefore, diplomas are embellished with Latin dicta, almost never understood by the graduates, and many times not even by the professors who hand them out. In the spirit of nostalgia, useless rituals are maintained, which are totally disconnected from today's pragmatic framework.
The progressively increased mediation that affects efficiency levels also contributes to the multiplication of the number of languages involved in describing, designing, coordinating, and synchronizing human work. We are facing new requirements-those of parallelism, non-linearity, multi-valued logic, vagueness, and selection among options. Programming, never subject to wrong or right, but to optimal choice, and always subject to further improvement, is becoming a requirement for many practical experiences, from the arts to advanced science. Requirements of globality, distribution, economies of scale, of elements pertinent to engineering, communication, marketing, management, and of service-providing experiences need to be met within specific educational programs. The fulfillment of these requirements can never be relegated to literacy.
We have seen that the broader necessity of language, from which the necessity of literacy is derived, is not defensible outside the process of human self-constitution. Language plays an important role, together with other sign systems, subordinated to language or not. In retrospect, we gain an understanding of the entire process: natural instincts are transmitted genetically and only slightly improve, if degeneration does not occur, in the interaction among individuals sharing a habitat. The conscious use of signs takes newborns from the domain of nature and eventually places them in the realm of culture. In this realm, life ceases to be a matter of biology only, and takes on non-natural, social and cultural dimensions. To live as an animal is to live for oneself and for very few others (mainly offspring). To live as a human being is to live through the existence of others, and in relation to others. Established before us and bound to continue after us, culture absorbs newcomers who not only begin their existence through their parents, but who also get to know culture and to adapt to it, or revolt against it.
Education starts with the experience of the absent, the non-immediate, the successive. In other words, it implies experiences resulting from comparisons, imitation of actions, and formation of individual patterns corresponding to human biological characteristics. Only much later comes the use of language, of adjectives, adverbs, and the generation of conventions and metaphors, some part of the body of literacy, others part of other languages, such as the visual. With the constitution of the family, education begins, and so does another phase in labor division. The initial phase probably marked the transition from a very small scale of nomadic tribal life to the scale within which language settled in notation and eventually in writing. The generality of sequences, words, phonetics, nouns, and actions was reached in the practical experience of writing. The language of drawings, resulting from different experiences and supporting the making of objects, complemented the development of writing. When the scale of humankind corresponding to incipient literacy was reached, literacy became the instrument for imparting experiences coherent with the experience of language and its use. This account is inserted here as a summary for those who, although claiming historic awareness, show no real instinct for history. This summary says that education is the result of many changes in the condition of humankind and makes clear that these alterations continue. They also entail a responsibility to improve the experience of education and re-establish its connection to the broader framework of human activity, instead of limiting education to the requirements of cultural continuity.
It has been said, again and again, that what we are we had to learn to become. Actually, we are who and what we are through what we do in the context of our individual and social existence. To speak, write, and read means to understand what we say, what we write, and what we read. It is not only the mechanical reproduction of words or sound patterns, which machines can also be programmed to perform. The expectation of speaking, reading, and writing is manifested in all human interactions. To learn how to speak, write, and read means both to gain skills and to become aware of the pragmatic context of interhuman relations that involve speaking, writing, and reading. It also means awareness of the possibility to change this context.
To educate today means to integrate others, and in the process oneself, in an activity-oriented process directed towards sharing the knowledge necessary to gain further knowledge. Its content cannot be knowledge in general, since the varieties of practical experiences cannot be emulated in school and college. Within the pragmatic framework that made literacy possible, it sufficed to know how an engine functioned in order to work with different machines driven by engines. Literacy reflected homogeneity and served those constituted as literate in controlling the parameters within which deviations were allowed. The post-industrial experience, based on an underlying digital structure, is so heterogeneous that it is impossible to cope with the many different instances of practical requirements. The skills to orient us towards where to find what we need become more important than the information shared. Ownership of knowledge takes a back seat; what counts is access, paralleled by a good understanding of the new nature of human praxis focused on cognition. Education should, accordingly, prepare people to handle information, or to direct it to information processing devices. It has to help students develop a propensity for understanding and explaining the variety in which cognition, the raw material of digital engines, results from our experiences.
The unity between the various paths we conceive in projecting our own biological reality into the reality of the world housing us and the result of our activity is characteristic of our mental and emotional condition. It defines our thinking and feeling. At some moment in time, after the division between physical and intellectual work took place, this thinking became relatively free of the result. The abstraction of thinking, once attained, corresponds to our ability to be in the process, to be aware of it, to judge it. This is the level of theories. The dynamics of the present affects the status of theories, both the way we shape them and how we communicate them. At least in regard to the communication of theory, but also to some of its generation, it is worthwhile to examine, in the context of our concern with education in this age, the evolution of the university.
Temples of knowledge
Education became the institution, the machine of literacy, once the social role of a generalized instrument of communication and coordination was established. This happened simultaneously with the reification of many other forms of human praxis: religion, the judiciary, the military. The first Western universities embodied the elitist ideal of literacy in every possible way: exclusivity, philosophy of education, architecture, goals, curriculum, body of professors, body of students, relation to the outside world, religious status. These universities did not care for the crafts, and did not acknowledge apprenticeship. The university, more than schools (in their various forms), extended its influence beyond its walls to assume a leading role in the spiritual lives of the population, while still maintaining an aura about itself. This was not just because of the religious foundation of universities. The university housed important intellectual documents containing theories of science and humanities, and encompassing educational concepts. These documents emphasized the role of a universal education (not only as a reflex of the Church's catholic drive) in which fundamental components constructed a temple of knowledge from which theories were dispensed throughout the Western world. Through its concept and affirmed values, the university was intended as a model for society and as an important participant in its dynamics. Tradition, languages (opening direct access to the world of classic philosophy and literature), and the arts were understood in their unity. Engineering and anything practical played no part in this.
Compared to the current situation, those first universities were ahead of their time almost to the effect of losing contact with reality. They existed in a world of advanced ideas, of idealized social and moral values, of scientific innovation celebrated in their metaphysical abstraction. There is no need to transcribe the history of education here. We are mainly interested in the dynamics of education up to the turn of the century, and would like to situate it in the discussion caused by the apparent, or actual, failure of education to accomplish its goals today. When universities were founded, access to education was very limited. This makes comparison to the current situation in universities almost irrelevant. It explains, however, why some people question the presence of students who would not have been accepted in a college a century ago, even 50 years ago. Yes, the university is the bearer of prejudices as well as values.
The relevance of historic background is provided by the understanding of the formative power of language, of its capacity for storing ideas and ideals associated with permanency, and for disseminating the doctrine of permanency and authority, making it part of the social texture. Religion insinuated itself into the sciences and humanities, and assumed the powerful role of assigning meaning to various discoveries and theories. Education in such universities was for eternity, according to a model that placed humanity in the center of the universe and declared it exemplary because it originated from the Supreme power. The university established continuity through its entire program, and did so on the foundation of literacy. As an organization, it adopted a structure more favorable to integration and less to differentiation. It constituted a counter-power, a critical instrument, and a framework for intellectual practice. Although many associate the formula "Knowledge is power" with the ideology of the political left, it actually originated in the medieval university, and within conservative power relations for which literacy constituted the underlying structure.
Looking at the development of the medieval university, one can say that it was the embodiment of the reification of language, of the Greek logos and of the Roman ratio. The entire history of reifying the past was summarized in the university and projected as a model for the future. Alternative ways of thinking and communicating were excluded, or made to fit the language mold and submit, without exception, to the dominating rationality. Based on these premises, the university evolved into an institution of methodical doubt. It became an intellectual machine for generating and experimenting with successive alternative explanations of the universe, as a whole, and of its parts, considered similar in some way to the whole they constituted.
The circumstances leading to the separation of intellectual and educational tasks were generated by an interplay of factors. The printing press is one of them. The metaphors of the university also played an important role. But the defining element was practical expectations. As people eventually learned, they could not build machines only by knowing Latin or Greek, or by reciting litanies, but by knowing mathematics and mechanics. Some of this knowledge came from Greek and Latin texts preserved by Moslem scholars from the desolation following the fall of the Roman empire. People also had to know how to express their goals, and communicate a plan to those who would transform it into roads, bridges, buildings, and much more. Humans could not rely on Aristotle's explanation of the world in order to find new forms of energy. More physics, chemistry, biology, and geology became necessary. Access to such domains was still primarily through literacy, although each of these areas of interest started developing its own language. Machines were conceived and built as metaphors of the human being. They embodied an animistic view, while actually answering needs and expectations corresponding to a scale of human existence beyond that of animistic practical experiences.
Industrial experience, a school of a new pragmatic framework, would impart awareness of creativity and productivity, as well as a new sense of confidence. Work became less and less homogeneous, as did social life. Once the potential of literacy reached its limits of explaining everything and constituting the only medium for new theories, universities started lagging behind the development of human practice. What separates Galileo Galilei's physics from the Newtonian is less drastic than what separates both from Einstein's relativity theory, and all three of these from the rapidly unfolding physics of the cosmos. In the latter, a different scale and scope must be accounted for, and a totally new way of formulating problems must be developed. Humans project upon the world cognitive explanatory models for which past instruments of knowledge are not adequate. The same applies to theories in biology, chemistry, and more and more to sociology, economics, and the decision sciences. It is worth noting that scale, and complexity therein, thus constitutes a rather encompassing criterion, one that finally affects the theory and practice of education.
Coherence and connection
Education has stubbornly defended its turf. While it fell well behind the expectations of those in need of support for finding their place in the current pragmatic context, a new paradigm of scientific and humanistic investigation was acknowledged- computation. Together with experimental and theoretical science, computation stimulated levels at which the twin concerns for intellectual coherence and for the ability to establish connections outside the field of study could be satisfied. Computation made it into the educational system without becoming one of education's underlying structures. The late-in-coming Technology Literacy Challenge that will provide two billion dollars by the year 2001 acknowledges this situation, though it fails to address it properly. In other countries, the situation is not much better. Bureaucracies based on rules of functioning pertinent to past pragmatics are not capable of even understanding the magnitude of change, in which their reason for being disappears.
In some colleges and private high schools, students can already access the computer network from terminals in their dormitories. Still, in the majority, computing time is limited, and assigned for specific class work, mainly word processing. Too many educational outlets have only administrative computers for keeping track of budget execution and enrollment. In most European countries the situation is even worse. And as far as the poor countries of the world are concerned, one can only hope that the disparity will not deepen. If this were the case with electricity, we would hear an uproar. Computing should become as pervasive as electricity.
This view is not necessarily unanimously accepted. Arguments about whether education needs to be computerized or whether computers should be integrated across the board go on and on among educators and administrators with a say in the matter. It should be noticed that failure to provide the appropriate context for teaching, learning, and research affects the condition of universities all over the world. These universities cease to contribute new knowledge. They become instead the darkroom for pictures taken elsewhere, by people other than their professors, researchers, and graduate students. Such institutions fathom a relatively good understanding of the past, but a disputable notion of the present and the future, mainly because they are hostages to literacy-based structures of thought and activity, even when they use computers.
To function within a language means to share in the experiences which are built into it. Natural language has a built-in experience of space and time; programming languages contain experiences of logical inference or of object-oriented functioning of the world. These experiences represent its pre-understanding frame of reference. Knowledge built into our so-called natural languages was for a long time common to all human beings. It resulted in communities sharing, through language, the practical experiences through which the community members constituted themselves in space and time. The continuity of language and its permanence reflected continuity of experience and permanence of understanding. Within such a pragmatic framework, education and the sharing of experience were minimally differentiated from each other. Progressively, language experience was added to practical experience and used to differentiate such an experience in new forms of praxis: theoretic work, engineering, art, social activism, political programs. Diversity, incipient segmentation, higher speeds, and incremental mediations affected the condition of self-constitutive human experiences. Consequently, literacy progressively ceased to represent the optimal medium for sharing, although it maintains many other functions. Indeed, plans for a new building, for a bridge, for engines, for many artifacts cannot be expressed in literate discourse, no matter how high the level, or how well literate competency is served by education or impacts upon it.
Accelerated dynamics and a generalized practice of mediations, by means not based on literacy, become part of human praxis in the civilization of illiteracy and define a new underlying structure. Language preserves a limited function. It is paralleled by many other sign systems, some extremely well adapted to rationalization and automation, and becomes itself subject to integration in machines adept at sign processing (in particular information processing). The process can be exemplified by a limited analogy: In order to explore in depth the experience embodied in Homer's texts, one needs a knowledge of ancient Greek. In order to study the legal texts of the Roman Empire, one needs Latin, and probably more. But in order to understand algebra-the word comes from the Arabic al-jabr/jebr, meaning union of broken parts-one really does not need to be fluent in Arabic.
Literacy embodies a far less significant part of the current human practical experience of self-constitution than it did in the past. Still, literacy-based education asserts its own condition on everything: learning what is already known is a prerequisite to discovering the unknown. In examining the amount and kind of knowledge one needs to understand past experience and to make possible further forms of human praxis, we can be surprised. The first surprise is that we undergo a major shift, from forms of work and thinking fundamentally based on past experience to realms of human constitution that do not repeat the past. Rather, such new experiences negate it altogether, making it relatively irrelevant. Freed from the past, people notice that sometimes the known, expressed in texts, obliterates a better understanding of the present by introducing a pre-understanding of the future that prevents new and effective human practical experiences. The second surprise comes from the realization that means other than those based on literacy better support the current stage of our continuous self- constitution, and that these new means have a different underlying structure.
Searle, among many others, remarked that, "Like it or not, the natural sciences are perhaps our greatest single intellectual achievement as human beings, and any education that neglects this fact is to that extent defective." What is not clearly stated is the fact that sciences emerged as such achievements once the ancillary relation to language and literacy was overcome. Mathematization of science and engineering, the focus on computational knowledge, the need to address design aspects of human activity (within sociology, business, law, medicine, etc.), all belong to alternative modes of explanation that make literate speculation less and less effective. They also opened new horizons for hypotheses in astronomy, genetics, anthropology. Cognitive skills are required in the new pragmatic context together with meta-cognitive skills: how to control one's own learning, for example, in a world of change, variety, distributed effort, mediated work, interconnection, and heterogeneity.
We do not yet know how to express and quantify the need for education, how to select the means and criteria for evaluating performance. If the objective is only to generate attitudes of respect for tradition and to impart good manners and some form of judgment, then the result is the emulation of what we think the past celebrated in a person. In the USA, the bill for education, paid by parents, students, and private and public sources, is well over 370 billion dollars a year. In the national budget alone, 18 different categories of grants-programs for building basic and advanced skills in 50,000 schools, programs for Safe and Drug-free schools, programs for acquiring advanced technology, scholarships, and support for loans-quantify the Federal part of the sum. State and local agencies have their own budgets allowing for $5,000 to $12,000 per student. If a class of 25 students is supported by $250,000 of funding, something in the equation of financing education does not add up. The return on investment is miserable by all accounts. Knowing that close to one million students drop out each year-and the number is growing-at various stages of their education, and that to reclaim them would cost additional money, we add another detail to the picture of a failure that is no longer admissible. In other countries, the cost per person is different. In a number of countries (France, Germany, Italy, some countries in Eastern Europe), students attend school years beyond what is considered normal in the USA. Germany discusses, forever it seems, the need to cut schooling. Are 12 or 13 years of schooling sufficient? How long should the state support a student in the university? With the reunification of the country, new needs had to be addressed: qualified teachers, adequate facilities, financing. Japan, while maintaining a 12-grade system, requires more days of schooling (230 per year compared to 212 in Germany and 180 in the USA). France, which regulates even pre-school, maintains 15 years of education. Still, 40% of French students commit errors in using their language. When, almost 360 years ago, Richelieu introduced (unthinkable for the American mentality) the Académie Française as the guardian of the language, little did he know that a time would come when language, French or any other, would no longer dominate people's life and work, and would not, despite money invested and time spent to teach, make all who study literate.
The new pragmatic context requires an education that results in abilities to distinguish patterns in a world of extreme dynamism, to question, to cope with complexity as it affects one's practical existence, and with a continuum of values. Students know from their own experience that there is no intrinsic determination to the eternity and universality of language-and this is probably the first shock one faces when noticing how large illiterate populations function and prosper in modern society. The economy absorbed the majority of the dropout population. The almost 50% of the American population considered functionally illiterate partakes, in its majority, in the high standard of living of the country. In other countries, while the numbers are different, the general tenor is the same. Well versed in the literacy of consumption, these people perform exactly the function expected: keep the economic engine turning.
Plenty of questions
Industrial society, as a precursor to our pragmatic framework, needed literacy in order to get the most out of machines, and to preserve the physical and intellectual capability of the human operator. It invested in education because the return was high enough to justify it. A qualified worker, a qualified physician, chemist, lawyer, and businessman represented a necessity for the harmonious functioning of industrial society. One needed to know how to operate one machine. Chances were that the machine would outlast the operator. One needed to study a relatively stable body of knowledge (laws, medical prescriptions, chemical formulas). Chances were that one and the same book would serve father, son, even grandson. And what could not be disseminated through literacy was taught by example, through the apprenticeship system, from which engineering profited a lot. What education generated were literate people, and members of a society prepared for relations without which machines made little or no sense at all. The more complex such relations, the longer the time needed for education, and the higher the qualifications required from those working as educators.
Education ensured the transmission of knowledge, filling empty containers sent by parents, from settled families, as incoming students to schools and colleges. Industrial society simultaneously generated the products and the increased need for them. Some would argue that all this is not so simple. Industrialists did not need educated workers. That is why they transferred a lot of work to children and women. Reformists (probably influenced by religious humanism) insisted on taking children out of the factories. Children were taught to read in order to uplift their souls (as the claim went). Finally, laws were enacted that forbade child labor. As this happened, industry got what it needed: a relatively educated class of workers and higher levels of productivity from employment that used the education provided. Under the right pragmatic conditions, an educated worker proved to be a good investment.
Alan Bloom detailed many of the motives that animated industrial philanthropists in supporting education. I beg to differ and return to the argument that industrial society, in order to use the potential of machine production, had to generate the need for what it produced. Indeed, the first products are the workers themselves, projecting into machine-based praxis their physical attributes, but foremostly skills such as comprehension, interaction, coordination. All these attributes belong to the structural condition of literacy.
Industrial products resulting from qualitatively new forms of human self- constitution were of accidental or no interest to illiterates. What would an illiterate do with products, such as new typewriters, books, more sophisticated household appliances? How would an illiterate interact with them in order to get the most out of each artifact? And how could coordination with others using such new products take place? We know that things were not exactly divided along such clear-cut borders. Illiterate parents had literate children who provided the necessary knowledge. The trickle-down effect was probably part of the broader strategy. But all in all, the philanthropists' support of education was an investment in the optimal functioning of a society whose scale necessitated levels high enough for efficient work. Education was connected to philanthropy, and it still is, as a form of wealth distribution. But it is not love for the neighbor that makes philanthropists' support of education necessary, rather the sheer advantage resulting from money given, estate or machines donated, chairs endowed. Cynical or not, this view results from the perception one experiences when noticing how generosity, well supported by public money, ends up as a self-serving gesture: donations that resulted in buildings, scholarships, endowments, and gifts named after the benefactor. The obsession with permanence-some live it as an obsession with eternity, others as a therapeutic ego massage-is but one of the overhead costs associated with literacy.