Back to the Future of Learning

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John Seely Brown, whose SOCIAL LIFE OF INFORMATION remains one of the seminal texts of the digital era, recently advocated that the future of learning might be the one-room school house. In a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education, he suggested that the kind of participatory, non-hierarchical, collective, process-oriented, problem-solving learning enabled by digital affordances could be a model for learning in face-to-face environments as well. That model, where individuals correct one another, build upon one another's ideas, and work towards a final end process, instructing one another from whatever knowledge or insights or strengths they have, was very much the one-room-schoolhouse philosophy, and not a bad model for all kinds of new learning.

I've been thinking about that in terms of university education and am trying to think about what such a model might look like as applied to a research university. Here are some of my preliminary thoughts. First, highly specialized research, written in whatever precise language is necessary to communicate among one's peers, is essential and remains essential. Not just in the sciences and social sciences but in all fields. I don't believe in trickle-down any more in research than I do in economics. I by no means think all the best ideas originate from those most geared to the most specialized new work in a field. The process often happens in other directions, where paradigms in one field are adopted, sometimes metaphorically, into another or where a general book or essay or address becomes such a sensation (tipping points, blinking, omnivore's dilemmas, flat worlds, Descartes' errors and on and on) that specialists then take it up and begin to test it and refine it according to the rules, methodologies, and protocols of their disciplines. I think the new paradigms (from whatever source) are as important as the precise studies and analyses. And like the affective qualities that draw one person to computer science and another to art history, working micro or macro is also an affective decision. It's not better to do one than the other. It is a preference and sometimes a skill set. Anyone who thinks writing for a general audience, for example, is "dumbing down" has never successfully written for a general audience. I personally find I do ten times more research to make one very lucid, clear, conclusive argument for a general audience on a major topic than I would do writing for my peers who share a history, a language, a set of traceable assumptions that can all be "shorthanded" in a discussion.

The point of that? Not everyone should write for a general audience. One of the stupidities of the Culture Wars (surely one of the most muddled, inane, illogical, and indefensible of "wars" on any topic) was assuming that everyone should always "write clearly" all the time. Your doctor writing a prescription for the pharmacist? Of course you want the handwriting legible but you also want her to be using the most precise, communicative, technical language to succinctly convey that X and not Y is the medicine required for the job. Explaining what the medicine is and what it will do may be the physician's job in talking to me---but it is not her job in talking to my pharmacist. Same with research. I want to communicate in one way among peers with whom I share certain traditions and scholarly interests. I most certainly do not assume that people outside my field share that history, that vocabulary, or that interest. If I'm writing for a general audience, I want to be able to translate some of the key issues of my field into a language but also into a set of interests more widely shared. It is not just not using so-called "jargon." It is attending very carefully to the public discourse to find points of intersection between interests in that arena and in one's own specialized arena and then communicating in such a way that those interests are highlighted and illuminated by the kind of specialized research in the field that may or may not share that particular set of interests.

This blog, for example, will have extremely limited interest beyond the academy. I am writing it with a presumed audience of other academics. it doesn't matter that my vocabulary is pretty clear. It's baseline assumptions about how disciplines work within research universities is quite specific to the concerns of those working in research universities.

Now, the larger point is that I believe that, given recent history, it is hugely important for the specialized work of academics to be communicated. We live in a globally-connected world where most citizens (no matter the country) and most of those denied citizenship (no matter the country) do not know much about one another. We academics have much that we can share and that is entirely vital to the world.

Not all of us are good at sharing that information. Not all of us wish to. But some part of every institution of higher learning should be set aside for the communication of important ideas to a larger public. Universities have been so badly mistreated in our society of late. Chris Newfield attributes this to the assault on and deliberate shrinking of the middle class and that may well be. It also seems part of the general dumbing down of politics, the assumption that none of us know, none of us care, none of us are paying attention. Clearly, if we look at the world economic shambles, that's meant deregulation so that the foxes could, well, steal our chickens. They are stolen now and, guess what: many many people are suddenly learning about derivatives and feeling that it is important to be informed. This election cycle also saw an hour-long (or was it even longer) address on race that was as serious and thoughtful as any academic paper. Various politicians get accused of sounding like "professors" and then the world starts to collapse and, guess what, professors start looking better and better----and a professor turned public intellectual (Paul Krugman) even wins a Nobel Prize for Economics. Interesting.

I'm fortunate to have my academic residence in the John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and International Studies. It's named after a 94-year old historian and civil rights activist who has never stopped believing in the importance of historical scholarship or in the importance of activism, and who understands you need both. When I think about what the Franklin Center does best, I think about a program called Wednesdays at the Center where every week you can stop by the Center and get a free lunch and a free earful of conversation about some scholar's specialized work, translated for a general audience. It might be digital youth (my talk a few weeks ago) or Dr. Franklin speaking about the beginnings of African American scholarship or human rights or globalization and the economy or any other topic.  It is accessible, urgent, important.

Every university needs its John Hope Franklin Center. Every university needs a center not only where scholars speak to a general public but where they speak to one another across departmental and disciplinary lines. Not every scholar needs to participate in such a "one-room-schoolhouse" version of a research university; not every scholar is interested or even able. But every institution needs such a place of translation.

Why? Because what universities offer is utterly vital for navigating a complex world. This is, of course, a return to a foundational "humanities." "Humanities," for Aristotle, included many things we would now call social science, the arts, and even mathematics and some of the natural sciences or what we might now call history or philosophy of science. Not all work that all humanists do is "foundational." Not all work that those in other disciplines do is "humanistic." But there is a broad humanistic category of translational knowledge that seems to me an essential part of learning in the twenty-first century and an essential charge for universities in this century.

The future of learning isn't only this. But crucially, fundamentally, the future of learning must include this world of translational and transformative ideas.

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Special thanks to Flickr community member G-Static-7 for posting this photo of a one-room school house. Please click on the image for more photos and full documentation.