Rethinking the revolution

A vision of progress or disintegration?

In a recent NY Times piece, Thomas Friedman writes about a “revolution” of university education, a revolution he is very excited about. This revolution is a technological revolution. He presents a vision of free, top-tier higher education beamed across cyber space to anyone in the world. This vision is in the works, with MIT and Stanford pumping out coursework to millions of students.

According to Freidman, “Nothing has more potential to lift people from poverty—by providing them an affordable education to get a job or improve the job they have. Nothing has more potential to unlock a billion more brains to solve the world’s problems.”

The solution, perhaps, to the world’s problems is to plug more people into the internet and hope to produce more sophisticated ideas. Perhaps hiding in one of those billion brains “locked” by lack of an elite American college education is the golden ticket to Utopia. Perhaps we can pretend that computerized education can solve the problem of poverty, overlooking the rate at which human jobs get replaced by machines (just don’t get an online degree in education).

(On an ironic side-note, Friedman just published another column explaining that in our new hyper-connected future, with technology replacing low skilled jobs, we are “exacerbating our unemployment problem.”)

The notion of unbounded education is thrilling. I don’t deny the miraculous possibilities. Although I question the pedagogical efficacy of mass-producing education to be consumed on isolated computers, this development would level the playing field and open up diverse lines of communication.

But as we charge blindly into the global digital age, we are disconnecting from nature, from ourselves, and from each other. The long-term consequences need to be weighed as heavily as the possibilities.

In this instance, the universities are taking human relationships—the classmate relationship and the student-teacher relationship – and putting them behind the glow of a computer screen. The importance of real, face-to-face interaction gets ignored.

Sure, there is no other way to bring Princeton into an Egyptian village (to use an example Friedman provides) but is this really the solution to the world’s problems? What about Egypt’s problems?

This technological development would also take away the responsibility of communities to provide the type of education needed to meet their own means.

In essay “Word and Flesh,” author and farmer Wendell Berry presents as the myth the concept “world” problems, seeing only local problems getting intertwined and exacerbated. Writing from the perspective of personal and ecological health, he writes:

“Though we now have serious problems nearly everywhere on the planet, we have no problem that can accurately be described as  planetary…The problems are our lives. In the ‘developed’ countries, at least, the large problems occur because all of us are living either partially wrong or almost entirely wrong.

 “The planetary versions—the heroic versions—of our problems have attracted great intelligence. But these [local] problems, as they are caused and suffered in our lives, our households and our communities, have attracted very little intelligence.”

We sometimes forget we are biological creatures, subject to the laws of nature, dependent upon the land for our daily bread. We would like to escape the confines of our humanity and look beyond, to the “future,” where the streets are lined with gold,  no natural disasters strike our people, no one gets sick or old, everyone living in harmony, living forever. To chase this dream we throw our hopes into the latest innovations, the newest technologies.

That all of humanity might have access to the pinnacles of human thought would of course be a triumph. But let’s not be so deceived to think that the solution to our problems lies in this or any other technological achievement.

I also share a vision of a happier, more peaceful, more loving future. But the only means toward this future is by injecting into each person a forgiving, loving, patient, and generous spirit.

Before we look toward global technological solutions, let’s worry first about the welfare of our children, our neighbors, and our personal impact on the environment. Instead of increasing our scope of influence, let’s narrow it and focus on the problems in front of our noses—problems that can best be addressed with real human warmth and love.

Let’s look within ourselves and our communities, and change the world from the inside-out.