Part 44 (1/2)
Understanding differences cannot be lieneralized practice of viewing TV (digital or not) It has to effectively become the substance of political life While all are equal with respect to the lahile all are free and encouraged to become the best they can be, society has to effectively abandon expectations of hoies to enhancing the significance of what makes its members different This translates into an education freed from expectations that are not rooted in the process of self-affirmation as scientists, dancers, thinkers, skilled workers, farmatically sanctioned professionals The direction is clear: to become less obsessed with a job, and more concerned with a work that satisfies them, and thus their friends and relatives Thein this direction will not be disbursed by states or other organizations We have to discover them, test, and refine, aware of the fact that what replaces the institution of education is the open-ended process through which we ee as educated individuals
Does education henceforth becoeneric trade school? For those who so choose, yes For others, it will becoh their involve an open enterprise, education will allow asto take upon oneself for the length of one's life The education of interactive skills, of visualization technologies, of es, sounds, colors, odors, textures, and haptic perception requires contexts for their discovery, use, and evaluation which no school or university in the world can provide But if all available educational resources are used to establish learning centers based on the paradig, ineering, using powerful carriers such as digital TV or high-speed and broadband networks, ill stopa bankrupt enterprise and open avenues for successful alternatives
As hue structure, education will have to focus also on how to constitute one's identity past the biological optiroup, of high motivation, and of abilities that can better benefit society
Access to knowledge in the form of interactive projects, pursued by classes constituted of individuals as different as the world is, is not trivial, and obviously not cheap The networked world, the es of new ital TV-closer to reality than many realize- and computers, are already widely available A major effort to provide support to many who are not yet connected to this world, at the expense of the current bureaucracy of education, will provide the rest Instead of investing in buildings, bureaucracies, nor schools, and recycling teachers who intellectually died long ago in the absence of any real challenge, we can, and should, design a global education systee not only in one country, not only in a group of rich countries, but all over the world The practice of networking and the co work produced independently in functionalreal problems, as these are encountered by each person, not invented assignments by teachers or writers of manuals
Education can succeed or fail only on the teriously accounted for in literacy-based political life, are irrelevant
Practical experiences of self-constitution are not multiple-choice examinations They involve the person in his entirety, and result in instances of personal growth and increased social awareness A global world requires a live global system of education that embodies the best we can afford, and is driven by the iy of variety
Unexpected opportunities
We have heard the declaration over and over: This is the age of knowledge The statement describes a context of hunitive in nature In the civilization of literacy, knowledge acquisition could take place at a slow pace, over long periods of tiical pattern was possible Knowledge arising froressively contributed to s
Eventually, everything that had been done through the power of hus-was assigned to y resources found in the environnition supported the increh a vast array of applications Huy to ht have taken tens, even hundreds of men to perform
To make this e with those of the Age of Cognition we live in
Within industrial pragmatics, the machine supplanted theraw
Discoveries ofand led to its extension fro characteristics of industrial pragmatics, kept pace with the dee, coe involved in supervising complex production and assembly lines that process raw rarate household functions-heating, washi+ng clothes, preparingon the World Wide Web relies on couages, bearing the data needed by each specific sub-task, go into the final product or outcome Older dependencies on natural resources and on a social model shaped to optimally support industrial praxis are partially overcoes from permanence to transitory communities of interest and to the individual- the locus of the Cognitive Age
Cognitive resources arise from experiences qualitatively different froines do not burn coal or gas Digital engines burn cognition The source of cognition lies in the e are being slowly depleted Alternative resources will be found in as typically discarded Recycling and the discovery of processes that extract nition than on brute force processing nition are, in principle, unlinitive conate or break down for so digital process of the Age of Cognition would break down To understand this, one need only think of being stuck in a car on an untravelled road, all because the gasoline ran out Compare this situation ould happen if thescience fiction could describe, caoing
In the current context, the dyna infore, stands for the dynamics of the entire syste procedures, cognition contributes to the fundamental separation of the individual human from the productive task, and from a wide variety of non-productive activities It is not necessary that an individual possess all knowledge that a pragmatic experience requires This means, simply, that operators in nuclear power plants need not be eminent physicists or matheranorant of how a disk drive works A brain surgeon does not kno the tools he or she uses are e above and beyond what the individuals directly involved can or should e unifore is distributed and ee is that progras
For exaee, but a data e in the forement, and self-evaluation
Just as everyone kept the , everyone, layperson or expert, contributes to the functioning of the digital engine The only source of cognition that we can count on is within people self-constituted through practical experiences involving the digital This does not mean that everyone will becoe Two sources of knowledge are relevant in the Age of Cognition within which the civilization of illiteracy unfolds
One source is the advanced work of experts and researchers, in areas of higher abstraction, way beyond what literacy can handle The other, much more critical, source is to be found in common- sense human interaction, in day-to-day hue of experts will continue to be integrated in the prage The specificin knowledge have to be recognized and stimulated And we ative effect on these experiences
We know less about the second source of knowledge because in previous pragnored In particular, we do not kno to tap into the infinite reservoir of cognitive resources that are h the routine work and everyday life of the overwhel portion of the world's population Taken individually, each person can contribute cognitive resources to the broader dynamics of the world But these individual contributions are random, difficult to identify, and do not necessarily justify the effort ofthem In our lives, many decisions and choices are made on the basis of extremely powerful procedures of which we, as individuals, are alenius in sos Here the nodal points of integration in the lobality of hu into the dynamic collective persona ue with a prominent researcher in education, who used to ed in at his institute, I discussed the then fashi+onable Game of Life (developed by John Horton Conway) As an open-ended simulation of the rules of birth and death, and based on the theory of cellular auto There is no winner or loser in the Gaahly cooing from empty to full describes birth, fro is derived fro complex forame widely available on the network The hundreds of thousands of players would leave traces of cognitive decisions that, over tience of the collective body who shared an interest in the gaher than the sum of its parts That is, the sum has a different qualitative condition, probably coher! Considering all the instances of hu frankly useless to highly productive, one can surence isthan that of the dedicated thinkers There is more to e do and hoe choose than rationality and thinking, never mind literate rationality
This collective persona need not coe professionals) It would help to start with groups forroups which share an interest in a certain activity, such as playing ga for a particular piece of inforet fro for-football scores, pornography, crossword puzzles, recipes, invest a certain proble The challenge co inferences from the s up with viable procedures that can be utilized to enhance individual perfor future individual perforrotesque repetitive patterns, no ht be
If there is validity to the notion that we are in the age of knowledge, we cannot afford to lie of a few, no matter how exceptional these few are The civilization of illiteracy transcends the literate uarantee of the perfore
As practical experiences become more complex, breakdowns can be avoided only at the expense of nitive resources We know that it tookand then to generalized literacy In the Age of Cognition, we cannot afford such a long cycle for integrating hunitive resources Marvin Minsky once pointed out howfootball games on TV While relaxation is essential to huood faith, that what has resulted fronition-based practical experiences is not wasted to a great extent Short of giving up, one has to entertain alternatives But alternatives to this situation cannot be legislated It is clear that within the lobal econonition will result in ways to stihts that only die on the ever larger screens in our ho the Web, where raphy sites-not on mathematics or literature sites-is also a waste and a source of mediocrity Mouse potatoes are not necessarily better than the couch variety
If we could derive cognition even from the ames, we could not only further the success of the industry that changed the way hunitive and emotional aspects of this elementary form of human identity