by
Pedro Hernández-Ramos 
A
few short decades ago, relatively few people were concerned with learning
while many were with “education”. Education was, by and large,
seen as a process of exposing people to content in a structured way (the
curriculum) because this was good for them and would provide them with
the intellectual tools and knowledge needed for lifelong, productive employment.
It was assumed that “school [education] prepares people for life”
and that, once people left the system, they had everything they needed
for gainful employment in their chosen field or profession for the rest
of their lives.
Ah, the bad old
times!
When knowledge was being created by society at a relatively slow pace
-up to and including the 19th century- it was indeed the case that many
doctors, lawyers, engineers, architects, historians, school teachers,
accountants, bankers, merchants, publishers, farmers, priests and nuns,
nannies, university professors, politicians, and just about anybody else
could, indeed, rest assured that the knowledge base they had with them
upon graduation from high school and college would be adequate for the
rest of their working lives. After all, the level of research in many
of these fields was fairly low, dissemination of new information was slow
(usually by print), and social attitudes toward innovation and change
did not begin to shift toward the positive until the second half of the
19th century. Case in point: Darwin’s theory of evolution was hotly
debated when it was first published, and not just because of the “horrid”
thought that man could be related to primates, but also because it went
fundamentally against beliefs that had been held with religious fervor
for centuries.
Education was
seen as a process through which ignorant people were provided, through
several years of schooling, with the intellectual tools (mainly reading
and writing) to become “productive members of society”. In the
late 19th and early 20th century the current paradigm of schooling was
set, responding in part to the economic demands of the times for workers
that could be trained more easily for jobs in assembly lines. Not being
able to read and write made a job at the factory impossible and even dangerous
for others -for example, from not understanding warnings.
Higher levels of education (measured as average years of schooling) have
been linked to increased levels of economic activity and social well-being.
The equation calculated around the world has been fairly simple: As more
people stay in school longer, increasing their knowledge base and ability
to learn, the higher the chances that a country's economy will flourish.
This has been the fundamental reason for the massive levels of investments
in educational infrastructure around the world, particularly in the second
half of the 20th century.
Regardless of their location, educational institutions everywhere have
followed closely the evolution of the mass media. With each new medium,
"techno-enthusiasts" have made bold statements about their power
to transform (for the better) education and learning. Radio was going
to overcome all distance barriers. Films (movies) would add the richness
of visual communication. Television would overcome distance and time by
allowing the best teachers (in the typical scenario) to be seen and heard
by students anywhere. Computers, starting in the 1970s, were going to
transform the way every subject was taught because of their ability to
process and present large volumes of information. And over the last 5
years, the Internet is said to be changing the way we work, play, communicate
AND learn -according to the tag line used by Cisco Systems, one of the
major providers of Internet-related hardware.
While
each medium has seen its glory days come and gone as THE education and
learning medium of choice, we're only at the beginning of the cycle for
the Internet. However, there are some reasons to believe that all the
hype surrounding this latest medium may amount to something more. First
of all is the Internet's unprecedented ability to integrate the media
that came before it. Text and image (print), voice (telephone), audio
(radio), and video (film and TV) are available to Internet users using
computers at home, at work, and pretty much anywhere they can find an
access point to the telecommunications networks. Second, it's a medium
that decentralizes the production capabilities, so that instead of the
one-to-many of the mass media we now have many-to-many. Third, the nature
of the medium itself encourages interaction not just with the content
presented but also with the producers and with other consumers. Fourth,
much of the content is available for free (after the users have made the
not-insignificant investments in computers and access fees). Fifth, access
to content from outside one's borders is not an issue (in most cases),
since the network does not stop to recognize national boundaries.
There are many other reasons, of course, but I'll stop there because those
first five support the key argument I would like to make in closing. Learning
is about curiosity, and by giving us the ability to recognize ourselves
as immensely curious beings, the Internet will have a profound impact
in our attitudes to what we don't know. For the first time, perhaps, since
the printing press allowed the masses access to knowledge and information
that had been limited to a few, the Internet will be the driving force
that changes educational institutions around the world, and what people
expect they will be able to do in order to gain access to learning opportunities
wherever they are, at times convenient to them, and -most crucially- regardless
of who they are.
Pedro Hernández-Ramos
You can contact Pedro Hernández-Ramos at: pehernan@cisco.com
or write in our forum section at ZoneZero