A challenge to the imagination is like a challenge to a duel - it catches one's attention. That's especially true if the challenge comes from a genius like the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, who wrote in his book Six Easy Pieces: If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis (or the atomic fact, or whatever you wish to call it) that all things are made of atoms - little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. In that one sentence, there is an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied.
So let's try to rise to the challenge by applying "just a little imagination and thinking."
For starters, let's ask whether the atomic hypothesis (we won't call it a fact) has an application beyond physics. Might it provide - at least by way of analogy - an explanation of various kinds of social phenomena as well?
We needn't pretend that the idea can be worked out rigorously in order to accept the general notion that the "pulling together" in the pull/push interactions of human "atoms" has something to do with explaining such things as community and nation-building and urbanization and courtship; and that the "pushing apart" has something to do with social dysfunction and warfare and urban disintegration and couples breaking up. The general conclusion being: attractions make the world go around - unless and until they become stultifying.
Alternatively stated: Humans are beings "that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another."
Isn't that a pretty fair description of social interactions in general?
However, we'll leave that weighty question to social scientists and newspaper advice columnists, and direct our own inquiry to matters closer to home. For us, the immediate question is whether the atomic hypothesis sheds any light on how people learn and how information technology might be used to help them learn.
I think it's generally agreed that learning is a supremely social activity - and that individuals cannot learn very much without interacting with others - whether those others are "teachers" or fellow learners. So what can you do to help them learn? You have to bring them together! Good start . . . But what else?
You have to keep them apart.
You have to keep them from being "repelled upon being squeezed into one another."
Now what exactly do you have to do to "not squeeze" learners? And how is it that they would ever feel "squeezed" in the first place?
Presumably we at least know the answer to that second question, for we have all been learners (and in fact still try to be, even with flickering powers of imagination and thinking). But maybe, if we are of a certain age, a Post-Studentry age, we have forgotten what student life was really like, because now "going to school" is something we do only in recurring middle-aged nightmares: the kind when you wake up sweating because you've been applying in vain for acceptance into a Spanish-speaking law school and you don't even want to be a lawyer and you don't speak Spanish and you suddenly remember that you never passed that phys ed course (basketball!) that was preventing you from graduating from college. Why did you ever take basketball? You could have passed if you'd taken water volleyball! Who invented the rules for dribbling a basketball? They were probably the same fiends who invented the undergraduate curriculum!!! . . .
Well, maybe those nightmares will serve a good purpose, if they help us recall that being "squeezed" means being jerked around. You remember how it was - squeezers and squeezees. For the most part, learners are prone to be squeezees.
Of course, being jerked around by the academic process is not all bad. It prepares you for getting jerked around in real life. In other words, what being jerked around teaches you is how to survive being jerked around. And that's a very good skill to have. But it's not the same thing as knowing physics or philosophy or computer science literature or anything else.
Far too much energy in academia is focused on (literally) thought control: on the process of specifying precisely what students must know, in precisely what quantities, in precisely what order. In the "real world" (we're back to that again), obsessive bureaucrats who specialize in monitoring minutiae are mocked as micro-managers and control freaks, yet, somewhat surprisingly, the same kind of stigma doesn't seem to apply to managers of learning and teaching.
But, in fairness, there have been many great educators who have had no such obsession. An example? The great Richard Feynman himself. Feynman, a legendary teacher, was remarkably humble about his ability to know how someone else should learn something. He confessed in an interview with documentary film-maker Christopher Sykes: "I don't know how to teach a large class - 20, 30 students, and everybody comes with different interests. Should we teach science by describing the history of how things are discovered? For some students, that's very interesting, for others not at all - they want to know what the facts are, and never mind how they were discovered." And of course those were just two of countless other possibilities. Other students might be interested in applications to social problems, others may have pure delight in the magic and mystery of mathematics, and so on. So what conclusion should be drawn? Here's Feynman's:
My theory is that the best way to teach is to have no philosophy, to be chaotic and confuse it in the sense that you use every possible way of doing it. That's the only way I can see, to catch this guy or that guy on different hooks as you go along, so that during the time when the fellow who's interested in history is being bored by the abstract mathematics, the fellow who likes the abstract mathematics is being bored another time by the history - if you can do it so that you don't bore them all, all the time, perhaps you're better off.
Feynman, of course, realized that it was a modest goal: not to bore all of the students all of the time: just hope to excite all of the students some of the time. Well, what else can we do if we have large numbers of students in the cattle-chutes and they have to be moved from one "place" to another - a different part of the curriculum?
Hmm. For one thing, we can stop looking at it as a traffic problem of moving crowds of students through the busy intersections of curriculum requirements, and instead use technology to give them (finally!) individual attention, individual power, individual direction and individual freedom.
In the next century, "mass education" will (finally!) be seen as the oxymoron it has always been. Education is an atomistic process, conforming to the atomic hypothesis. And individual learning is what happens when one human atom interacts intellectually with other human atoms without being bored, intimidated or otherwise squeezed dry.
John Gehl is editor and publisher of Educom Review. gehl@educom.edu