Part 17 (1/2)

We have seen that the broader necessity of language, from which the necessity of literacy is derived, is not defensible outside the process of huether with other sign systeain an understanding of the entire process: natural instincts are transeneration does not occur, in the interaction ans takes newborns from the domain of nature and eventually places them in the realm of culture In this realy 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 (h the existence of others, and in relation to others Established before us and bound to continue after us, culture absorbs newcoh 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 i from comparisons, imitation of actions, and forical characteristics Only e, of adjectives, adverbs, and the generation of conventions and metaphors, soes, such as the visual With the constitution of the fains, and so does another phase in labor division The initial phase probably marked the transition from a very small scale of noe 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 fro of objects, co When the scale of hu to incipient literacy was reached, literacy beca experiences coherent with the experience of language and its use This account is inserted here as a su historic awareness, show no real instinct for history

This sues 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 fra education to the requireain and again, that e are we had to learn to becoh e do in the context of our individual and social existence To speak, write, and read means to understand e say, rite, and e read It is not only the mechanical reproduction of words or sound patterns, which ra, and writing is manifested in all human interactions To learn how to speak, write, and read , writing, and reading It also e this context

To educate today rate 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 ematic framework that ine functioned in order to ith different eneity 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 e need become more important than the infore takes a back seat; what counts is access, paralleled by a good understanding of the new nature of huly, prepare people to handle infor devices It has to help students develop a propensity for understanding and explaining the variety in which cognition, the raw ines, 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 ourand feeling At some moment in time, after the division between physical and intellectual work took place, this thinking beca, 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 e shape theard to the coeneration, it is hile to exae, the evolution of the university

Tee

Education became the institution, the eneralized instrument of communication and coordination was established This happened simultaneously with the reification of ion, 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 apprenticeshi+p The university, more than schools (in their various forms), extended its influence beyond its walls to assu role in the spiritual lives of the population, while stillan aura about itself This was not just because of the religious foundation of universities The university housed i theories of science and hu educational concepts These documents emphasized the role of a universal education (not only as a reflex of the Church's catholic drive) in which fundae frohout the Western world Through its concept and affirmed values, the university was intended as a model for society and as an iuages (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 ti 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 accooals 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 ould 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 for ideas and ideals associated with per the doctrine of per it part of the social texture Religion insinuated itself into the sciences and huto 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 exeinated from the Supreh its entire prograanization, it adopted a structure ration and less to differentiation It constituted a counter-power, a critical instruh e is poith 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 eos and of the Ro the past was summarized in the university and projected as aand coerationality

Based on these premises, the university evolved into an institution of enerating and experi 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 circu 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 i element was practical expectations As people eventually learned, they could not buildlitanies, but by knowing e came from Greek and Latin texts preserved by Mosle the fall of the Rooals, and communicate a plan to those ould transfors, and much more Humans could not rely on Aristotle's explanation of the world in order to find new fory became necessary Access to such doh each of these areas of interest started developing its own language Machines were conceived and built asThey e 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 becaeneous, as did social life Once the potential of literacy reached its li the onlybehind 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 fro physics of the cosmos In the latter, a different scale and scopeproblenitive explanatory e are not adequate The say, chey, econo that scale, and co 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 praged- coether 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

Co one of education's underlying structures The late-in-coe 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 notpertinent to past pragnitude of change, in which their reason for being disappears

In soh schools, students can already access the computer network from terminals in their dor tined for specific class work,Too many educational outlets have only adet 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, ould hear an uproar Co should become as pervasive as electricity

This view is not necessarily unaniuments about whether education needs to be corated across the board go on and on a 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 neledge They become instead the darkroom for pictures taken elsewhere, by people other than their professors, researchers, and graduate students Such institutions fatho of the past, but a disputable notion of the present and the future, es to literacy-based structures of thought and activity, even when they use coe means to share in the experiences which are built into it Natural language has a built-in experience of space and tiical inference or of object-oriented functioning of the world These experiences represent its pre-understanding frae built into our so-called natural languages was for a long tis It resulted in coe, the practical experiences through which the community members constituted thee and its permanence reflected continuity of experience and per of experience were uage experience was added to practical experience and used to differentiate such an experience in new for, art, social activisher speeds, and incremental mediations affected the condition of self-constitutive huressively ceased to represent the optih it maintains , for a bridge, for engines, for many artifacts cannot be expressed in literate discourse, no h the level, or hoell literate competency is served by education or ieneralized 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 lin systems, some extremely well adapted to rationalization and autoration in(in particular infor) The process can be exey: In order to explore in depth the experience ee of ancient Greek In order to study the legal texts of the Roman Empire, one needs Latin, and probably ebra-the word co union of broken parts-one really does not need to be fluent in Arabic

Literacy enificant 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 exae 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 afundamentally based on past experience to realms of human constitution that do not repeat the past Rather, such new experiences negate it altogether,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 newstructure

Searle, a many others, remarked that, ”Like it or not, the natural sciences are perhaps our greatest single intellectual achievelects this fact is to that extent defective” What is not clearly stated is the fact that sciences eed as such achievee and literacy was overco, the focus on con aspects of huy, business, law,to alternative modes of explanation that make literate speculation less and less effective They also opened new horizons for hypotheses in astrononitive skills are required in the new pragnitive skills: how to control one's own learning, for exae, variety, distributed effort, eneity

We do not yet kno to express and quantify the need for education, how to select theperforenerate attitudes of respect for tradition and to iment, then the result is the emulation of e 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-progra basic and advanced skills in 50,000 schools, progra advanced technology, scholarshi+ps, and support for loans-quantify the Federal part of the su for 5,000 to 12,000 per student If a class of 25 students is supported by 250,000 of funding, so education does not add up The return on invest that close to one -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 Ger 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(230 per year compared to 212 in Gerulates even pre-school, maintains 15 years of education

Still, 40 of French students coo, Richelieu introduced (unthinkable for the Auardian of the language, little did he know that a tie, French or any other, would no longer dominate people's life and work, and would not, despite money invested and time spent to teach, matic 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