[...]I, Cringely » Blog Archive » Collaborize, Rinse, Repeat – Cringely on technology[...]…

Who are you, Gordon Shumway? Do you really live in a world where only Americans are real and the rest of us are just shadowpuppets?

Thank God you’re just the cliche that proves the rule and not the reality of America, or the world would be in big trouble.

We had no plans to home school our one and only. But in the 1st grade he ran into the normal negatives at school – and the twinkle in his eyes started to fade – and he started not wanting to go to school. We went full action – talked to the school folks – sought alternatives and decided on home school. My wife quit her job, and we started. Each year for 7 years he made the decision – home or the formal school – and choose home. In two hours a day, one on one, you can accomplish as much as they do in 5 or 6 hours of school. Socially, we discovered many other home schoolers for field trips and common special tutored classes – such as language. Life was a blast. My computer consulting allowed me to schedule for many special activities. The kid is now 27 and the owner of his own business. Robert, check out the stats on home schoolers – and who the famous ones are and what they say about it. Just outstanding.

You’re really only interested in how well educated your own 3 sons are (you said). Fair enough but why then devote a column to it as nobody else is going to be much interested in how well your sons are educated (no offence intended). No point inciting general education unrest when you just need a quick personal solution!!!

In any case, with a focus on just 3 young people, nobody is going to change the system either for you or in time!!!

Despite your comment (“You could, in theory, turn a Model T into a Ferrari, but sometimes it’s better to start from scratch”), you (and most of your readers) are still fixated on “Teachers”! Scrap them (=start from scratch). They are not required in a fit for purpose education paradigm. Instead of starting with “teachers” so as to build an education model that they fit into, why not do what makes sense, identify one’s education aims and build a model that meets it (in which “teachers” won’t figure, they’re an illogical role)!!!

Problem really is – too many teachers and education “professionals” (school heads, government funders, etc) with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo! It’s a win(teachers)/lose(students) situation.

Sorry. Cut-and-pasted before thinking.

Humanity has invented six distinct “languages” since the beginning of civilization:

1- Oral language.
2- Written language.
3- Mathematics.
4- Science.
5- Computers.
6- The Internet.

Each “language” is dependent on and springs from the previous one, and cannot emerge independently.

In a nutshell, he says our education system is broken because it tries to teach all of the above, but especially computers and the Internet, as SUBJECTS instead of treating them as the MEDIA through which other concepts flow.

Here’s the link to the Sixth Language on Amazon: http://amzn.to/yRRupE

And here’s my review of the pre-Internet edition, The Fifth Language, as published in the Canadian booktrade magazine Quill & Quire in 1994:

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The Fifth Language
Reviewed by Mark Shainblum

Originally published in Quill & Quire, December 1994

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Anyone who went to high school in the 1970′s had a gut-level awareness that all was not right with the world. Our education seemed weirdly out of tune with reality – not in the prosaic way adult and teenage cultures always differ – but in the everyday nuts-and-bolts sense of how things worked. Our teachers often seemed like emissaries from another culture, well-meaning Peace Corps volunteers unable to fluently speak the lingo or figure out the local customs.

The gut instinct gave way to certain dread when I took a one-year teaching diploma at McGill University in 1991-92. My baby-boomer university professors and my post X students in practice teaching no longer seemed like foreigners; they seemed like aliens. Like residents of different parallel universes with no points of convergence.

And there I was, a Generation X cliché, the lunch meat sandwiched between them. Being Spam has never appealed. I decided high school teaching wasn’t for me, just as someone in the 1890′s might have decided that there was little future in the carriage manufacturing trade.

Robert K. Logan, professor of physics and communications theory at the University of Toronto and the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, may not have put the final nail in the coffin of the traditional teacher/desks/blackboard classroom, but he has certainly purchased the hammer. In his remarkably lucid book The Fifth Language: Learning a Living in the Computer Age, Logan continues the work of Canadian communications pioneer Marshall McLuhan and applies it to the interface of microcomputing and education.

To those not steeped in current communications and educational theory, Logan’s basic contentions are staggering. He views the computer as not simply a tool, not simply a medium, but as an entirely new language form, the fifth after verbal language, the written alphabet, mathematics, and science. This language builds upon and incorporates its predecessors, but is as fundamentally different from them as written language is from spoken, as rational science is from pure mathematics.

Logan contends that the educational system has not yet made the ideological leap that our rapid adoption of this new language requires. We are, he claims in his clean, lucid prose, still trying to educate our children for the 1950′s. Schools as we know them are the educational paradigm of the factory, still spewing specialists and middle managers and clock-watchers into a culture which demands generalists and renaissance thinkers and flexibility.

Logan doesn’t preach evolution, he preaches revolution. The education system, in his view, is simply broken, out of date, out of step not just with the times but the new evolving world culture. Simply plopping a few PC’s into the classroom will not solve the problem because PC’s aren’t simply a tool, they are an utterly new way of seeing the universe. There are as radical a paradigm shift, in their own way, as the introduction of written language or the scientific method.

The Fifth Language is an extremely successful book for several reasons. Logan eschews the convoluted non-linearity of Marshall McLuhan’s Toronto School and explains his contentions in remarkably clear and taut prose. He explains the basic principles of McLuhanesque thought better than any third party I have ever read, and his extensions of Toronto School philosophy into the educational and microcomputer domains are, frankly, brilliant.

No one who has stood at the front of a classroom in the last twenty years has any illusions that the current educational system actually functions. Now, perhaps, with Robert Logan’s help, we can begin to understand why.

The moral, of course, is not that computers can save the classroom. It is that computers – or his hand-me-down professional A/V equipment, etc. – used properly by the right teachers can focus the attention of even the most out of control kids. But ultimately what saved his classroom was that he was a former college football player with a reputation for not taking any shit. The kids first respected him, and only then was learning possible.