Did you ever see the movie The Teahouse of the August Moon? Then you'll remember the funny scene in which a flustered young U.S. army captain (Glenn Ford) is trying desperately to explain to the bewildered Okinawan villagers that the Army wants to teach them democracy by building them a fine new schoolhouse.
Following instructions from his superior officer, the young captain pleads with the Okinawan interpreter (Marlon Brando): "Tell them that the schoolhouse will be pentagon-shaped! It will be shaped just like the Pentagon building in Washington, D.C.!"
The inspired absurdity of explaining the value of "democracy" in terms of the shape of a schoolhouse is an example of reification-i.e., turning an idea into a thing. And giving that thing a particular and irrelevant shape ratchets the absurdity level up even higher, to the heights of common U.S. educational practice, where learning has a set of acceptable rigid "shapes" that are defined by curricula, accreditations and so forth-the "full catastrophe" of bureaucratic trappings.
And, of course, the fact that there are many such shapes (not just a single "pentagon" shape) to give students many different ways of "fitting in" doesn't make the shapes any less rigid or less arbitrary. Lewis J. Perelman did an excellent job of describing the problem in his 1992 book School's Out.
By now, you'd think that the cookie cutter model of education would be a thing of the past, but it isn't. All we seem to have is more cookie cutters and a larger selection of cookies.
I remember Marshall McLuhan saying how excited he had been at Cambridge to finally find a curriculum that would go wherever it had to-a curriculum driven entirely by intellectual relevance (not social relevance, which is a different idea). Research was like detection, and you kept asking yourself, how did this happen?-and to get your answer you were led to another book, which explained some things but not all things, and left you saying: yes, yes, very nice, but that doesn't get to the root of the matter, I need to go back further-and you were led to still another book (or article, or whatever). As researcher/detective you had to jump (dare we say "hyperlink"?) from clue to clue, in a process unconstrained by the little boxes of a fixed curriculum, and guided only by the criterion of strict relevance to the intellectual search. For McLuhan, education wasn't a matter of fitting into shapes but of probing possibilities and mysteries.
It was commonplace at that time and place to distinguish between a problem and a mystery. You solved problems; you learned from mysteries. When you solved a problem, your intellectual work was over. When you probed a mystery, your intellectual work stretched ahead of you all the way to infinity. That distinction is now worth reviving, as the information age kicks into a higher gear with developments such as the World Wide Web and as the focus of systems work shifts from "problem solving," with an emphasis on logic and calculation, to "integration," with an emphasis on experience and pattern recognition. The boundless variety of the World Wide Web, like the boundless variety of the world itself, is overwhelming. Like the world, the Web is too much for us to handle, too much to comprehend. Though search engines will help us "navigate" the Web, they will not reduce its size or complexity, and it is foolish to think that the information explosion is a "problem" that will ever be "solved." It's a mystery to be contemplated, endured and enjoyed.
In an attempt to dramatize the "problem" of the knowledge explosion, people sometimes say that the knowledge acquired by a college freshman will be obsolete by the time that freshman is a senior. True enough-except that, actually, things are much worse than that! In an increasingly technological world, an amazingly high proportion of the knowledge acquired by any person (whether freshman, senior or principal scientist) is obsolete as soon as it is learned. It's old news, period. It is no longer true-and yet you don't know what to do with it. Should you keep it, or should you throw it away, like yesterday's newspaper?
Well, if you simply throw it away, you are behaving like someone with that sad condition called viral encephalitis, a brain inflammation that deprives a person of memory. For the victim of viral encephalitis, all experience is here-and-now. One patient's predicament has been described by Richard M. Restak as follows: "His world now consists of a moment, with no past to anchor it and no future to look ahead to. It's a blinkered moment. He sees what is right in front of him, but as soon as that information hits the brain it fades. Nothing makes an impression, nothing registers."
Of course, that's an impossible choice for us. We have to retain information-even if it's wrong! It's a grotesque predicament, but, after all, this is not really a new problem: it is an ancient condition, first and most famously identified by the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who argued that everything is "flux"-i.e., that change is so pervasive that it defines all things. You can't step into the same river twice; in fact, you can't step into the same river once. There is no "same river." There is only constant, relentless flux.
Alan Parkin of the University of Sussex has said that "part of what we call the mind is our ability to perceive ourselves in a continuum of time." So, in a sense, our challenge when faced with rapidly obsolescent knowledge is to understand that "knowledge" (in quotation marks) is just a practical accommodation with change.
Search engines are fingers in the dike (futilely disregarding the immensity of the information storehouse) or fingers in the Yellow Pages (futilely attempting to channel an information torrent). Well, the only harm in that is self-delusion of the kind that allows us to use a cookie cutter to deliver education in pentagon-shaped chunks. Yet knowledge has no fixed shape. Knowledge exists in the continuum of time, and the challenge of the student, the teacher or the "change agent" is to process, understand and reflect upon constant flux.
As students, teachers and change agents, we can conduct this reflection in an air-conditioned, pentagon-shaped cement block schoolhouse, or we can conduct it in a lovely teahouse on a little green hill-perhaps the Teahouse of the August Moon-where we can sip chrysanthemum tea and watch the orange sun descend softly into an azure sea.
You decide.
John Gehl is editor and publisher of Educom Review. [email protected]