Liberal Education in the Twenty-First Century
"MUDs make me more what I
really am. Off the MUD, I am not as much me."
from Life on the Screen
by Sherry Turkle
In the past where the value of a "liberal education" was based on its ultimate goal of nurturing
an enlightened populace, and consequently of creating well-ordered societies, the tools and technologies of
learning including texts, books, numbers and writing, were all absorbed thoroughly to become a natural adjunct of education.
In the last two decades, the introduction of new technologies, especially computers and the internet,
has raised many questions as to how the traditions of liberal education will be redefined in the twenty-first century.
Technology and its rapid integration into all aspects of human life according to Neil Postman, will redefine words such as "freedom,"
"truth," intelligence," "fact," "wisdom," "knowledge," "history," and memory."1 Likewise, technolog, and particularly
the internet, simulation games including MUDS and MOOS, will force us to rethink the meaning of words such as "selfhood," "identity,"
and "reality."
The rapid invasion of technology into human life will also pose questions as to the what an ideal society might look like
in the twenty-first century where the term diversity--construed in the previous century solely in terms of race gender and class--
will be based on multiple levels of delineations. As Don Tapscott has identified in his book Growing Up Digital:The Rise of the Net Generation
there is already what he calls a "digital divide" between the Baby Boomers and the 80 million children--many of whom are
still in diapers as of this writing--who will represent the digital or internet generation.2 The so-called "net generation" are children
who,in 1999, will be those between the ages of two and twenty-two. For them, technology has already made inroads into
their sensibilities to the point where they are markedly different in attitudes, behaviors, and values from the generations before them.
In her work Life on the Screen Sherry Turkle, a professor of the sociology of science at MIT, describes how children who have grown up
in the cultures of simulation--i.e.,devotees of simulation games, internet chat and game rooms--have vastly different languages, codesi
and different approaches to problem solving. As a seasoned researcher, she gives a striking example between her approach to learning and that of a thirteen year old named TIm.
Both she and Tim she reports are engaged in a video game when they come across an unfamiliar word. Like a good researcher, Professor Turkle cannot proceed with the game
until she finds out the meaning of the word. Tim on the other keeps asuring her that finding out the meaning of the word is unimportant and to simply move on with the game.
While busies herself trying to find the meaning of the unkown word, Tim moves on, and manages to learning the
maning of the word and finish the game. As a seasoned game player, Tim according to Turkle,has learned that
"in video games, you soon realize that to learn to play you have to play to learn."2 Turkle's observation is that that
those of the net generation thus think and deal with complexities (including life) in active, dyanmic, evolving modes as opposed
to the passive, receptive, and singular modes of those who are not invovled with simulation games or the interactive modes of the itnernet.
One of the most critical areas in which life has and will continue to change as a result of the digital revolution
is the fact that the multiplicities of communities--will challenge the older notion of centralized societies.
To many adolescents in the "net generation" belonging or identifying with a single community is a quaint and bizarre
notion and life away from a "dungeon," MUD or MOO is no more "real life" than the lives they lead in chat rooms,
video games or MUDs. For them real life or "RL" is just one plane of existence among several they may occupy at
any time of the day. Likewise who they are may vary depending upon whether they are in some virtual space or in what
others term "Real life." Indeed for some like twenty-four year Thomas, it is only in a MUD that he feels most "real;" and
in "real life" he states that "I am not as much me."
The grounds for justice, truth, goodness--the bases for decency and a just society in past times--
are, more likely than not, thus subject to negotiation and renegotiation in the different contemporary realities and identities
that net-geners travel through in their daily lives. In these ongoing negotiations, MUD occupants question and work out their own political agendas
quite unbeknown to the rest of the world. They wrestle with questions as to what democracy may mean in
cyber reality and taking off from the ancient Greek ideal, debate whether wizards--the new elites of virtual reality--
should rule. They function in terms of their own protocols and are rewarded or censured in accordance to their
own codes of "netiquette."
How the net-geners will shape the future world we live in is uncertain, but their
involvement with technology has already begun to make it clear that institutions
and institutional structures will undergo drastic changes. Both in the areas of government and in families,
hierarchical orders, power and authority are challenged by the fact that net-geners have come to expect access to information,
responsiveness, and interactivity. Accustomed to working in dyanmic, multi-modal situations, they are, and
will be, according to Tapscott, become increasingly dissatisfied with older paradigms of teaching and learning,
and with traditional methods of resolving conflicts.
For teachers and educators in particular Tapscott states that "the very concept of education is also changing
from the paradigm of teacher as transmitters of informtation to students learning through discovery and through new media."3
Teachers, he notes, will continue to be important, but their roles are rapidly changing. No longer can it be assumed that teachers
are authorities and sole custodians and disseminators of information. Educators increasingly need to be those who structure the
learning experience and who provide meaningful contexts.5 They have to offer ways and insights into the integration
of vast resources of information, and to provide directions as to distinctions between spurious and valuable facts. Above all, educators will need to be in the
forefront of those who to teach the differences between information and knowledge, and more importantly between wisdom and mere knowledge.
Much of education in the next few years can veer toward a de-centered hodge-podge of subjects that passes
for an education. Neil Postman's recommendation is that the best education that a technologically oriented world can offer the young is one that offerss
them "a sense of coherence . . . a sense of purpose, emaning and interconnectedness." The worse than can be done would be foster a curriculum which is no curriculum
but a smorgasbord of subjects "with no clear idea as to what constitutes an educated person, unless it is a person who possesses 'skills'. In other words, a technocrat's
ideal--a person with no commitment and no point of view but with plenty of marketable skills."6
Ultimately, Postman warns that technology is not only a state of culture but that "it is also a state of mind."
This state of mind he adds, "consists in the deification of technology, which means that the culture seeks its authorization in technology,
finds its satisfaction in technology, and takes its order from technology."7 The escape from being taken over completely or surrendering mindlessly to technology, however, does not involve taking
a Luddite head-in-the-sand condemnation of technology--as if a retreat from the inroads technology has made into life were either possible
or desirable. Instead, Postman offers us the metaphorical position of what he terms the "loving resistance fighter." By such a term he asserts
"inspite of the confusion, errors and stupidities [we] see around you, keep close to your heart the narratives and symbols that once made the United State
the hope of the world and that may yet have enough vitality to do so again."8 In evoking the narratives and symbols of American democracy,
Postman thus touches the tip of long and even ancient traditions of liberal humanism that comes back again and again to the notion of the enlightened individual
who, no matter what community s/he lives in is free to make informed and wise choices--choices, incidentally that are made not simply for selfish ends, but
for the good of the whole. In such a spirit, Postman's "loving resistance fighter" lives amidst techology, but is not swallowed up by the American Technopoly.
_______________________
1Neil Postman, Technopoly:The Surrender of Culture to Technology, p.8.
2Don Tapscott, Growing up Digital:The Rise of the Net Generation, chapter 1.
3Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen:Identity in the Age of the Internet, p.70.
4Tapscott, p. 290.
5_________, p.290
6Postman, p. 186.
7_________, p. 71.
8_________, p. 182.
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