I owe the following notice to alert writer Neil Postman, who produces it (in The End of Education) as an example of what happens "when those with the power to enforce definitions go mad":
Because Christmas Eve falls on a Thursday, the day has been designated a Saturday for work purposes. Factories will close all day, with stores open a half day only. Friday, December 25, has been designated a Sunday, with both factories and stores open all day. Monday, December 28, will be a Wednesday for work purposes. Wednesday, December 30, will be a business Friday. Saturday, January 2, will be a Sunday, and Sunday, January 3, will be a Monday.
The notice was posted in Prague. Prague is the only place where that kind of thing happens - right? Wrong. I'm writing these words in a rental beach cottage that is required by law to have an exit map posted in each room so that guests (or guests with sight) will know how to get out in case of fire. As though this tiny cottage were a Marriott hotel! Just six inches to the right of the door there is a map directing you to . . . the door. That's correct: six inches. Well, "absurd but harmless," one might say. On the other hand, one might say: "Absurdity is not something that people ought to get used to."
As Joseph Heller famously made clear in his classic novel, Catch-22, the worst kind of absurdity invariably comes from bureaucrats. Oh, sure, there are plenty of absurdities spawned by plumbers, engineers, programmers, actors and salespeople, but the real whoppers always come either from professional bureaucrats or amateur bureaucrats - such as faculty - or such as, let's face it, you or me when we're given a spare moment and half a chance to be pompous and stupid.
I remember a faculty meeting some years ago that devoted more than an hour to an angry raised-voice debate over whether two computer science students in their final quarter of study should be allowed to substitute Physics 5566 ("Physics For The Hoi Poloi") for the required Physics 5677 ("Physics For Physicists and Advanced Physics Burnouts"). The two young persons, both of whom were very good students, weren't trying to pull a fast one; their only motive for the substitution was to graduate in the Spring, and the required physics course wouldn't be taught again until the Fall.
I can no longer remember how the students' petitions were decided (shame on me), but the point is not the particular outcome of the faculty debate but the fact that in that dreadful and eternally long discussion there was no evident concern expressed by the faculty over the particular students (shame on the faculty). The acrimonious debate was not about what the two young persons knew or didn't know; nor about what kinds of careers the two were headed for; nor what kind of lives they wanted to lead; no, the debate was entirely limited to whether an exception to the curriculum requirement would set an evil and fatal precedent leading to public scandal, a precipitous decline in the department's reputation, and an end to civilization.
I should admit that one of the junior faculty did try to explain that whatever "precedent" might be set by the case would not last more than the length of the flame on a match stick, since the whole curriculum had just been completely revamped for implementation in the Fall; thus, the faculty's decision could by definition never affect another living soul other than the two students in question. Although the trouble-maker who made this point was not immediately ejected from the conference room, the only effect of his ill-advised observation was to destroy whatever slim chance the poor fool might otherwise have had to be awarded tenure. He was gone a year later. (By the way, in the revamped curriculum, neither of the two physics courses was required for computer science majors!)
As I say, I don't remember the ultimate resolution of the issue, but I do remember that the case was not decided at the end of that first, hour-long debate; instead, we broke for lunch. I happened to be meeting my good friend Jim, a senior professor at another institution, and I explained to him the facts recited above (without revealing my personal disdain for the proceedings). But when I asked Jim to tell me what he thought about the case he hemmed and hawed. Hemm, he said; haw, he said. I continued to press him. Well, he thought this and he thought that and he wouldn't get to the bottom line, until I demanded impatiently: "Just tell me what you think we ought to do about the two students." My friend, a man of wisdom, decency, substance and stature, said sagely: "It depends." Ah. We were starting to make some progress. "Depends on what?" "It depends on whether you want to help them or screw them."
And, that, of course, is the correct answer! - at least in the sense that it makes some slight reference to the students as individual living breathing human beings: if you prick them, they will bleed, a fact that had been unbearably absent in the tedious, petty, rule-obsessed bureaucratic debate that had shot the best part of a fine Spring morning and soured the mood of everyone except the two students - who unlike most political prisoners were spared having to listen to the ugly details of their own show-trials.
Does this have anything to do with the use of information technology in education? Well, it better. (Or what's the point of information technology?)
Technologists - some of them - got a bad name in World War II for claiming that "we just sent the missiles up, we didn't know where they were supposed to land." But that won't do. Delivery systems are important, but consequences are even more important, and the consequences of information technology should be to make education better (not just delivered by a different crowd of people - "the computer people" rather than "the non-computer people" or "the pre-computer people").
Can computers replace the mentoring function of an excellent, caring teacher able to give each student close personal attention? Of course not. But can a computer be used to replace the hideous bureaucratic curricula imposed in academic institutions of all types? Yes, yes, a thousand times yes!
It's time to start talking less about information infrastructure and more about information metastructure: less about protocols and more about purpose: less about the where and when of education (breaking down walls of time and space) and more about the what and why of education (breaking down walls of bureaucracy so that individuals are treated as individuals rather than as cattle).
The curriculum has run its course. Not in the sense that it isn't useful as a recommended path to certain goals ("citizen," "educated person," "librarian," "internist," "mechanical engineer" or whatever); but it's insane to reduce those goals to a mumbo-jumbo of rules, prerequisites and conditions - or to continue imposing cattle-chute curricula on human beings, as though they were somehow all going to learn the same stuff! What someone knows is as idiosyncratic as a fingerprint; there are no two people on earth who know exactly the same stuff! Why pretend otherwise?
It's time to stop confusing the goal (learning a given body of knowledge) with a particular management technique (herding masses of students into curricular holding pens).
In the age of the computer, lock-stepping educational programs are at best quaint and at worst stultifying. The curriculum is dead. Long live the age of the individual - and the computer. Let's let students build their education the way they build their resumes and the way they build their lives - as unique human beings.
John Gehl is editor and publisher of Educom Review. [email protected]