A change in the scale of education

A change in the scale of education

Mass access to education is a prodigious social phenomenon in itself, but it does not ensure the quality of education. How is quality to be maintained in the face of a flood of candidates, overflowing demands from work and social pressures? Nobody knows for certain how to progress sensibly in this field, but nothing prevents the possibility that some time in the future quantity and quality should not merge in new forms still difficult to imagine.

We know that education is a service for which demand is growing rapidly. This is the moment to create new "education impresarios" to pull down the walls that continue to isolate the various educational communities of the world, thus making better use of so much scattered talent. We can imagine perhaps a new type of globalized educational undertaking, although we are clearly opposed to the idea of converting education into a mere subsidiary of the media and communications corporations. What is needed is educators with a genuine business capability, not businessmen seeking to provide any kind of education.

We must recognize that the mass introduction of new digital technologies has not much altered the intimacy of the educational process, although in many countries, including our own, the number of computers in homes exceeds the number in schools. This is a good start for launching a globalized education. Who would have imagined this distribution of computers only a decade ago? But there is a difficult problem to be resolved: computers in homes do not always have useful educational tools and are rarely connected to schools. Once again we run the risk of admiring the statistics instead of evaluating the profound educational changes that are desirable.

At the most fortunate schools "when enrollment increases, so does the number of computers" but children continue to learn as before and adults teach in essentially the same manner, with or without computers. This is equivalent to evaluating a society by the number of persons who know how to drive a car, which does not tell us much about their behavior behind the wheel and even less about the quality of life of the motorized world. As an example, when the educational system began to be computerized some of us realized that there was no sense in blindly increasing the number of computers in schools, and that it was necessary to make use of the computers at home. To do so we created a digital network, almost a subversive notion in traditionally centripetal schools, where the rule is that "students should learn in the classroom". A network of computers acts as a centrifuge of ideas, intermixing them, making them flow along rarely travelled paths, allowing "the school to go to the student". It can be understood that it is not easy to implement a proposal that runs counter to centuries of classroom education, but the advantages are obvious. Now we can demand distributed education, before it was necessarily concentrated.

Piaget used to quote physicist Ch.E. Guye who stated that "the scale creates the phenomenon". In effect we should be aware that any change of scale provokes new phenomena both in matter and the mind, where a change in magnitude frequently generates a "cognitive catastrophe" as described by René Thom. This means that what is perfectly valid on one scale ceases to be so on another, which does not exclude the possibility that this transition might not be a happy catastrophe. Change of scale in education requires a change of attitude towards communications. For this reason it is sad to see that vain hopes are often encouraged in school environments, and marvelous resources are trumpeted that in practice are no such thing as they are limited to occasional access to the digital network at an extremely high operating cost. It is best to begin more modestly, awakening true interest for the internal networks in schools, at zero cost, followed by local communications into the home, until gaining access to the world of Internet, with millions of users in a planetary network that expands exponentially. These changes in scale are hard to measure. Who can honestly imagine an international network of a million schoolchildren if there are already problems that are absolutely new involving a few hundred students? How can such a colossal network be used sensibly, creatively and worthily?

Educators tend to defend "controllable" communications systems. The educational consequences of this mental inertia are serious. Teaching continues the same, with or without networks, when what is required is the invention on a scale of new global communications of matters that are impossible to imagine of carry out on a local scale. This requires a step-by-step preparation, trying and testing continuously until the scale one is in is mastered. This will take years. This is the new frontier: the gradual conquest of new scales of connectivity and interactivity. This will be the most appropriate way to enter the new digital era.