Marc Prensky response to Douglas Rushkoff

"Are we tinkering with some essential part of ourselves?" Doug asks.

No offense, Doug, but posed like that it's a trivial question, because the answer is "of course." That's what tools do. Clothing tinkered with our essential nakedness. Horses, cars and planes tinkered with our essential on-footedness. Medicine tinkered with our essential 'be sick a lot and die at 35'-edness. Eyeglasses tinkered with our essential 'old people can't see close'-edness. Given the slowness of evolution, our best strategy to improve as humans has always been to tinker, relentlessly and continuously, with the essential parts of ourselves that can be improved.

Anyone want to go back?

We also tinker with our brains and minds, which some consider even more "essential" parts of our humanhood. Here again, there are already plenty of tools which most accept without question: Aspirin tinkers with our essential tendency to headachy-ness. Mediation tinkers with the essential tendency to loss-of-centered-ness. Alcohol tinkers with our over-inhibitedness. Mushrooms and LSD tinker with our 'connection to the universe'-ness. Marijuana (used almost universally In most creative professions) tinkers with our limited imagination. Adderal and Ritalin tinker with (and enhance)our ability to perform mental functions. (A group of eminent brain researchers and ethicists recently recommended in Nature giving these drugs to all healthy people.) ...

Computers (and other machines) tinker with our minds as well, compensating for our human brain's limited abilities (despite all it can do). These include our essential inability to consider all the available data when making a decision, to see into the minds of others, to construct highly complicated what-if scenarios, to deal with great complexity, to see, hear, touch, feel and small beyond the range of our senses , to hold multiple, conflicting perspectives simultaneously, to separate emotional responses from rational conclusions.

If we can improve these, why shouldn't we?

Consider now another task that many would argue is essentially human: recording, preserving and sharing ideas, experiences and stories. We are always tinkering with this task, looking for better ways to do them. Even if those things are essentially human, the ways we do them are certainly not. They have changed several times in the past (and are in the midst of changing currently.) Once upon a time , we recorded, preserved and shared ideas, experiences and stories through memory--and the more you remembered (there was clearly a scale of ability here) the more that was available. Then writing appeared. This allowed us to triage, and stick much of the less useful, or more arcane, stuff in a library and let people ferret it out if and when needed. Then the printing press brought the wider dissemination of ideas and stories, leading, in some cases, to long, printed books. At a time where there often wasn't much to do, those provided useful pastimes for many, (who, as Jim says, read them over and over). But the more complicated the ideas and the stories, the fewer the people who could "ferret out" their meaning, and burrow into whatever arcane "depths" they may have contained. So we developed a separate "scholar class" (and in religion a priesthood) to do this. "In-depth" became a specialized thing (with its own language, like "exegesis.") But universal education of the masses, to the extent it was ever proposed and implemented, was for basic communications, not "in depth" studies.

Now to books and writing. While many worthwhile (and even great) books have certainly been written, there is certainly no need to genuflect to books, or to consider books--or even writing-- any kind of a pinnacle of how high human intellectual or artistic development can go (as opposed, Jim, to how far it has gone.)

We should certainly be tinkering with books. For all the nice things some people have said about them, books (and writing) are primitive tools, that accomplish relatively little of (and mostly clumsily) what humans really ought to aspire to in terms of exchange of ideas. Books and writing are just what we have used recently and up until now faute de mieux.

My sense is that a great deal , if not most, of truly great thought, and certainly writing, actually appears as short bursts -- the Gettysburg Address, the preambles to the Declaration of Independence and Constitution , sonnets, haikus, and other short poems, monologues, paragraphs, columns, essays, and perhaps, occasionally, a chapter. Anything longer can almost always be chopped without much fear of loss, as can almost anyone's oeuvre. Very little writing is consistently great over several hundred pages, except, perhaps, for the arc of its story, which can be told in much shorter bursts. (Artistic works should exist, of course, in the form the author created them, but that doesn't mean we all have to experience them like that. Most stage directors seriously abridge Shakespeare. Having slogged through War and Peace, I would have far preferred an abridgement. Music is similar--only the very greats wrote long pieces that need listening to in their entirety. And even with the absolute best, few care--or need to-- about the latter movements of the Moonlight Sonata.

Most books --fiction and non-fiction--are incredibly padded (despite what their authors' might say), compared to their essential ideas and thoughts--publishers typically require a given number of words. Books contain no special "truth" just for being published (as the teachers at an expensive private school I spoke at taught their kids), certainly no more than the Internet. Many books are published totally unread by any editors, even at major publishers, as was my first. Almost all of what we read in books is quickly forgotten, as are most of our margin notes if we write them. A great many book authors are horrible writers and hate doing it (which is one reason why even many academics have to be forced to write through "publish or perish" policies.) Most books either ignore the relations to other books and ideas or provide them only in the relatively unhelpful way of notes (I can't wait for Web 3.0!). Old books--other than Chaucer and a few others-- are rarely updated to fit modern language and ideas (Spark Notes actually does this with Shakespeare--"No Fear Shakespeare"--what a great idea!) Most of what is written and published in our books today will quickly pass into the dustbin of history.

So why do many people value "books" so much? Because up to now there was little alternative for someone who cared about ideas than to read books voraciously. But doing so is often wasting one's valuable time looking for gems in piles of manure--hence all the recommendation lists that exist. At Oberlin in the 1960s almost every course I took had a reading list of 15-20 books in addition to the text. I still have many of those books, with the margin notes I took, most never consulted again in 40 years. Maybe that was a good way to learn then (based on what I still remember today, I'm not sure.) But is this amount of reading as necessary for a 21st century education as it was for a 20th century one? Today the keys, the links, the notes, from everyone can all be linked together, ranked and rated. With computers and digitization, we have, much more ability to triage and find the best.

Even though I read a lot, out of both professional necessity and pleasure, I do not mourn at all the passage of books into other forms (audio and video, for example, and often speeded up). I am hopeful that for most of the people in the world the written word will be supplanted in my lifetime by other means, with writing becoming a only niche method of communication. Books particularly are a pain to have and carry, and I am ecstatic to see them pass on to electronic visual and audio readers. I observe that the great majority of people, even in the U.S. read and write very little at work or at home, and that short video is becoming a mainstream method of learning and communication even among the well-educated (TED, Big Think.)

I am certainly for the dissemination of, and teaching about, great ideas and art to as many people as possible. But I do think that forcing today's students to confront a long novel , against their will, as "education", is counter-productive--even if at some point in their life they might enjoy it. I can attest that --even as a French literature major-- I never truly enjoyed a novel , French or English, until I didn't have to read it for a class.

So given all this what should a student know, and be able to do today? Does technology help or hurt one's education, and, as Doug also asked, "What should we keep in mind as we go forward"?

First, what a student should know, and be able to do, clearly depends on which students we are talking about. Our expectations for the top ten percent (please take these divisions fluidly), are not-- and should not be -- the same as for the rest. Those of highest ability (however you measure it) are the carriers of our deep and most meaningful culture. Within that group, a good education should expose them to a lot, push them hard, challenge them constantly, and, ideally, help them pursue whatever they are passionate about to the summit of whatever profession or direction they choose, using all appropriate tools, past and future. That is your basic "Ivy League" (and its peers) education. Correct me if I'm wrong, but here (i.e. with our top students) I think we still do pretty well. I don't know much about the current rating of Emory, but I would guess that its top students are not hurting for a good education, nor are they failing to produce, as are the students at Harvard and our other top schools. Those MIT students in the video who produced great but disconnected paragraphs bother me not at all--longer arcs of thought, whether in literature or music or other things, come naturally with age.

The top percentage, it is important to note, includes most of our college teachers. When they complain about their current students, as Mark reports, are they really just mourning the fact that, because we have extended college to include a larger chunk of the population, many of the students they teach are no longer their (younger, unformed) intellectual peers, as they almost all were in the past?

Because a much more difficult question--one we ignore by unhelpfully lumping together "college students today" into a single group-- is how to deal with the large number of students who are in college today but probably wouldn't have been 40 or 50 years ago (for intellectual reasons, not social ones.) Now that we have opened up the doors to them (a good thing, in my opinion), we must ask, as we have not done to any great extent, "What does it mean for this group of students to be 'educated'"? What should they know/know about? Is it the same as for the first group? At the same level of depth? Should they be pushed and prodded in the same way? Should the same demands be made of them? And what should be the role of technology in their education?

(Our high schools have the same problem. We deal with the top end reasonably well though advanced placement, and the lower end reasonably well through special education. But we have very little idea of what to do with, and how to reach, the large group in the middle.)

I would argue that the key for these students is not to push them, in the name of "education" or anything else, in directions they don't want to go. Rather we should strive to excite and inform their own individual interests and passions, so that they demand more and more from us. We should expose them, by all means, to what we think is "valuable", but we shouldn't force them into it "in depth" until or unless they want to. The educators' role should be to help students succeed at what they want to do, not what we want them to do. Instead of teaching or assigning them a 300+ page book (or bemoaning the fact that we can't), we'd be far better off using technology to find something great in the literature (or the world) that relates to whatever their passion may be and inspires them to go forward on their own. (E.g. Hugo's descriptions of the Paris sewers--for me interminable-- might be really interesting to a budding civil engineer)

This means putting infinitely more flexibility in our curricula, and, at the limit, creating a separate curriculum for every student. This is something that, in the long run, technology is highly capable of helping us with--the biggest boons that technology brings to education are the possibilities of individual motivation, individual curriculum, and individual pacing. As the world's information expands, it is also becoming clear that less and less of it is essential for anyone to have in their head-- another argument for individual curricula and fewer of the long-form experiences of the past. One might even question whether long-form experiences, like reading Great Expectations, are really necessary for a good education, or for life in general . I never read Great Expectations (too thick.) But I have seen the movie more than once, know the story, and have just read the Spark Notes, which are remarkably good, and reminded me of several things I had forgotten. The themes, the movie, the Spark notes and possibly a few excerpts, may be more than enough for anyone, unless any of that motivates them to want to read the book. If that seems wrong, think, if you will, of some long major work (in English, or another language, or an opera) that you are unfamiliar with, but someone else decided suddenly that you should discuss for some reason, even though you have no liking, interest, or time for it. The Spark Notes (and maybe a movie) would probably do you just fine.

While this involves perhaps a bit more time than the "five minutes" the student described spending on Romeo & Juliet, I think he was talking relatively and metaphorically. For my money, having that student see the Baz Luhrmann film (or the Zefferelli) and read and discuss the Spark Notes would be perfectly adequate. And if that quick initiation leads him (or you, in the case above) to want to read or see the entire work , great, but if not, no loss. Except in rare cases, or in the case of highly quotable passages (typically provided and explained in the Spark notes),the actual words of writers are far less important than their ideas, and the place that the writers and works fall in the canon. Bayard's How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read expresses this nicely and accurately.

Here's a thought: Maybe it is time, particularly with this second group (it is hard to concoct a politically correct name for it, but it exists, nevertheless), to argue for quality over quantity, and eliminate teaching long forms altogether. Maybe their education should be to analyze (and memorize) only the great short pieces, poems paragraphs of all time, and then for them to try, with their teacher's encouragement and guidance, to create their own, of the highest quality of which they are capable. And we should have them create their quality short forms in the real world, about real stuff, for real peers, i.e. on the Internet. This will serve them far more in the coming world of "shorter and faster" (which, I argue is--or should be--far better) than going into the longer stuff. Serve the "long stuff" only to those passionate about it, (there will always be small groups who are, as with opera.)

Outside the top 10 percent of students and people, I don't think much of the so-eagerly-mourned "deep reading" (no one ever explains what this actually is), exists, or ever existed. The number of works considered "essential" by the world to be even known, over centuries and millennia, is miniscule compared to what has been produced. Charles Murray's Human Accomplishment shows how less than 5000 people are responsible for all human culture in the world's arts and sciences. Mostly, for a decent, or even a good education--particularly for whatever we call the second group, those people and works need to be known about. The truly important key ideas should be stripped to their essentials and taught and learned related to passions and the real world. Art and beauty should certainly be taught and appreciated, but in unfamiliar areas it is best administered in small doses (not long books), especially at the beginning--people rarely learn to appreciate things done by having their noses rubbed in them.

So, unlike Mark, I'm not for going back in the least in education--I believe the past methods were useful for only a relatively small group (which, though, includes many of today's teachers, which is, perhaps, why they are for them.) But, as we are seeing, those methods almost totally fail with the rest. I believe the best we can do in education is surely yet to come, and far from going back, we need to push forward into the future fearlessly. Even given the things far over-inflated by the press and the nay-sayers, I see little danger or loss, and incredibly much to gain.

If, indeed, there exists a "Bauerlein Room" in schools 20 years, from now, let's make sure it contains all the other "lost" things: teachers who only lecture--and only in Latin and Greek --to their students, books only in "non-vulgar" languages, leaky quill pens (and perhaps only cuniform tablets -- think of how long those have lasted), and plenty of strong corporal punishment for those who don't toe the line. And, of course, only problems that the teachers already know the answer to. Oh, and since we are removing modern tools, everyone in there will be naked, and in terrible health. And unfortunately--with no eyeglasses--few of the teachers will be able read any pages at all :-) .

Any volunteers?