I wish that every time I typed the words “the future” they would go all wiggly like the TV did when Ernie was remembering something on Sesame Street. In “the future”, that might be easy to do. All Wiggly is what I get when I think about the future, and what I get when I hear news that makes me think we’re already in it – like this article about sending thoughts to devices across distances. Oooooh! The future!
The future is also my second-favourite setting for thinking about education – because in the future, of course, we’ll have collectively realized that it isn’t possible to spend too much money on schools, that schools are the heart of culture and community and society, and that full and inclusive, individualized education would be good for, well, everybody.
My info-pusher just sent me a link to a righteous website – Research Channel – that shares and streams educational videos. And coincidentally, I was just re-pondering a utopian school idea I’ve been kicking around for a while, which would resemble Research Channel (in the same way a modem resembles an iPhone). It goes something like this:
I was Completely Unable to conceive of Cells when I was a kid (and through high school). I could see the drawing, and the little rectangular onion skin thing under the microscope – but I could NOT understand how a little thing like that related to me, nor begin to fathom how small it was. It wasn’t an across-the-board problem with abstractions – I think I just needed to really see a thing to get it. Relatedly, I absolutely hated Science classes, which always seemed unbelievably abstract, unrelated to my experience and boring.
I did eventually become very interested in science, at about the age 20. I was selling magazines and naturally skimming through most of them, and found Discover magazine, with its short but informative articles and great photos and illustrations. Once the scope of what “science” was became clear to me, I was pretty hooked. It was – like my major, English Lit – a subject about Everything! Part of this personal evolution was just preparedness – the articles I chose to read were answering questions I was bringing to the table. But it also made starkly clear how terrible my education in Science classes had been. How do we take a subject so broad, so relevent, and make it boring? (This irate, fist-shakey resentment came pretty naturally to me at that age, so it wasn’t uncomfortable – just empowering.)
Once science became “real” to me I began to take all the opportunities that came along to learn what I could. Most of the self-guided education relied on videos – documentaries and The Nature of Things and Nova episodes and Bill Nye on PBS. Microcosmos, the film, was a pretty big deal for me – finding out that bugs were really, truly “alive” and fully interesting opened up my mind.
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So – back to cells – it was once I was able to SEE cells in action that I got a handle on them. When I was nearing thirty, I found a documentary called Death By Design: Programmed Cell Death at the local amazing video store, and watched it about five times in a row. Not only did it show cells of many sorts and explain them and their behaviour, it also showed them as the shockingly, profoundly beautiful life that they are and how they fit into my experience – through visual metaphor and clear explanation. It’s among my favourite films, still. You can see it (small, and in bits) on Google video by clicking this link. Just for fun, here’s a clip (from elsewhere) of a cell hunting food.
The blossoming of computer graphics and tiny film capabilities allowed me to view the things I was wondering about, which allowed me to really conceive of them. I don’t think I’m alone in this – I doubt the Human Genome Process Project would have gotten all the TV news time it did if there weren’t all the sweet moving pictures of helixes unwrappying themselves. And visualizations of, say, geographical processes are really helpful – witness the recent prime-time Suzuki series on Canadian geology (that’s right, series! Which is really good!). And both video and CG visualizations have recently become ultra-easy to find thanks to broadening bandwidth and sites like youtube and Google Video.
Which all got me thinking: if it’s true (and I suspect it may be) that kids won’t need to know facts so much as where to find them and what to do with them, and if it’s also true that individualized education is the best option for more kids … maybe schools in The Future will be less top-down “do this” and more of kids asking questions and finding answers (having been taught how, with constant encouragement, in an atmosphere where that would be rewarded and rewarding) – multimedia, multimodal answers from anywhere in the world, in any form, geared to any style of learning? A child wondering about cells (perhaps because they’ve been playing Spore 6)* might watch relevent information, and then have access to teachers who could discuss what they saw, and experts with whom they might consult, who might suggest further resources and consolidating exercises…
All of this would require supercomputers – already on the way – and a rethinking of copyright – already underway. If rather than accessing info on the sly, with the constant tug of war between owners and users, it were understood that making any and all information available for education would benefit humanity – well, isn’t that idea already embedded in the Public Library?
It would also require a paradigm shift in the way we look at education. It’s a complicated idea. How will schools create curricula? Where do all the awesome computers come from? What do teachers do in this model? How do we make kids Do What We Tell Them? But we don’t need to have the answers to this yet – this is all way off in the wiggly future. We don’t even know what sorts of people humans will be by the time any of this could happen.
Where it could start, though – where it is starting – is right here, on the magical information highway, with sites like, for example, Research Channel and youtube. With free and easy access to previously aired radio shows like Quirks and Quarks, and with the many free and available lectures available at university websites all over the place, and short films of cells catching lunch made available for fun.
What would be an awesome next step would be having this sort of stuff made openly, legally, widely and freely available for kids/youth. If teachers were free to show and share and clip and copy and reformat documentaries, news shows, feature films, games, books, magazines, in the same way people are doing on youtube all the time, you’d increase the effectiveness of teachers by a long shot. Instead – here anyway – teachers worry about the cost of photocopying, don’t have time to write, and feel sneaky when they show videos to their classes. Rectifying this stuff would be a great step – the screen gets all wiggly here – on our way to … The Future…!
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* Check out video of the upcoming video game Spore for previews of the most educational video game I’ve ever heard of – and a hint of how interesting schools could be if we put our minds to it. Watch video of Will Wright talking about the game at length at The Long Now here. We’ll argue about video games as a Good later on.
A Different Fish 