So this morning it’s David Weinberger that’s got me thinking. No doubt, David has been one of my favorite Web philosophers for a long time, someone who almost always seems to open the window just a bit more for me. Today, it’s this:
…we knew all along that atoms were never up to the job. We knew that the world doesn’t boil down to even the best of newspapers, that it doesn’t fit into 65,000 articles in a printed encyclopedia, that there was more disagreement than the old channels let through. (What they called noise, we called the world.) We knew that the crap pushed through the radio wasn’t really all that we cared about, or that we all cared about the same things within three tv channels of difference. The old institutions were the best fictions we could come up with given that atoms are way too big.
And I’m wondering, deep down, have we known all along that this idea of an “education” was really a fiction, something we created out of necessity with the implicit understanding that in a world limited by atoms, it was never really the end all, be all, but it was the best we could do under the circumstances? And if we didn’t know that, can we admit that now?
The circumstances have changed. We’re no longer constrained by atoms. For 125 years we’ve been making the learning world small, and now the world is all of a sudden big…huge. All of a sudden, the walls have been obliterated. Learning is unbound, and “an education” is next.
The work now is in making the transition happen in ways that don’t hurt the kids or teachers currently in our schools. In ways that prepare our kids for a learning world where atoms still matter, but for very different reasons.  A peaceful revolution of sorts that starts…where?