An Historical Perspective. The metaphor I choose to use, to aid or inhibit understanding, is to view the world as emerging from the Industrial Dark Ages into a New Renaissance that is driven by new technologies, particularly those of an electronic nature, especially those that relate to information and knowledge. What these present and future information technologies permit or will permit is the immediate storage and retrieval of vast amounts of data that

can be accessed and reconfigured in an infinite number of ways. Moreover, such information can and will address all the senses either directly or indirectly. Multi-media environments will be the rule rather than the exception. The old cliche' " the next best thing to being there" possibly needs to be changed to read " the next best thing to being everywhere or anywhere" What real effect are these technologies having or will they have upon individuals? Several observations can already be made. Constant ubiquitous change is everywhere. Everyone's life is becoming increasingly more complex. A major cause of illness is stress. The stress individuals feel from the uncertainty and complexity of life often leads to destructive distress. Where does this pressure come from? It comes from information or misinformation overload. One could postulate that the old maxim holds, "Where ignorance is bliss tis folly to be wise". With so much information available or at hand, few if any decisions are simple. So if individuals are to grow and prosper then they must acquire some powerful skills regarding information. They must acquire skills that allow them to access, examine, evaluate and manipulate information as they design and build their own knowledge. In essence they become "Knowledge Architects". Van Dam (1988) supports this position when he asserts: One of the most important things... taught me was that this is a new medium and you really can't be constrained to thinking about it in old ways. Don't copy old bad habits; think about new organizations, new ways of doing things. p.88 Possibly we are looking at a world where "knowledge" is highly idiosyncratic and is assembled by each individual for their own needs. Still there will need to be a commonly shared knowledge. This, however, will not take the form of dogma. For dogma cannot exist without constant challenge in an information rich world. Therefore, what is commonly held will lean more toward knowledge rather than belief. Common understandings might well be developed to allow individuals to work together in a state of mutual interdependence while each is flourishing independently. In short, the whole structure of society will be effected. When we emerged from the Dark Ages the major controlling institution in the Western World was the Church. Today, as we emerge from the Industrial Dark Ages the major controlling institution is school. The medieval church was fully aware that by controlling information and thus knowledge it could maintain control over the faithful. Free access to information and increasing literacy among the masses was synonymous with a loss of power and control. The Renaissance was a time where secular access to information and knowledge grew exponentially. This rebirth of learning led to the splintering and forcible reformation of the Church. Today, the movement in Western nations is still towards the secular and away from the sacred. The secular movement of the Renaissance was driven by then new technolgies. New knowledge paved the way for the Industrial Revolution and the Industrial Age. Here, emerged a new controlling institution, the public school. Modelled after private schools that had been the exclusive preserves of European aristocracies, these new public schools offered "education" to the masses. However, the "education" offered was replete with dogma and carefully censored for social, political, and religious acceptability. Fantini et al (1971) contend that: Public education is the place in which the nation sets out most formally to secure the allegiance of young people to the system p.216 Therefore, it can be argued that even today, public education is more of an indoctrination than a liberation. What school is about is inherent in its process. Its process relies heavily on authority and compliance. What each of us learns most thoroughly as we pass through the system is how to do what is expected of us. We learn to comply or the system withholds its social rewards from us; rewards that are valued highly in our society. School brooks not rebellion. If we become somewhat educated and literate during our stay in school so be it. If we keep our individuality and our inquisitiveness we have survived. In viewing public education in such a harsh light we must realize that this institution like the Church served society well. When life expectancies were short and many serfs were needed to work the fields and willingly give most of the fruits of their labours to a privileged few, doctrines that described life as a trial and human suffering as a test imposed by a diety were useful. Apparent rewards of immortality and abundance were enough to acquire absolute power and control over the ignorant peasantry. When many people were required to spend their lives doing repetitive tasks in factories or factory-like environments, the promise of even marginal security for reliable behaviour was powerful. The suggestion that through dedicated compliant behaviour one could actually rise through the hierarchy and that class structures could be breached was overwhelming. The carrot that everyone might have the opportunity to acquire wealth and power was held out. The conditioning institution that replaced the church was the school. Schools have long been the repositories of doctrines, dogmas and standard practises. All of which have been sanitized and censored. In schools you find the appropriate and acceptable. You find the status quo. Institutionalized education seeks to maintain societal homeo-statis. It is the stabilizer. Moreover, it is what society expects, no, demands of schools and when schools fail to deliver the public complains bitterly. The normalizing function of schools is understood by publics and looking fixedly rearward they demand that what was done to them must be done to future generations only more efficiently. As we approach the 21st century, public education might easily be described as the medieval Church of the Industrial Age. It is indeed an anachronism. As Illich (1972) observed: Classroom attendance removes children from the everyday world of Western culture and plunges them into an environment far more primitive, magical, and deadly serious. School could not create such an enclave within which the rules of ordinary reality are suspended, unless it physically incarcerated the young during many successive years on sacred territory. p.47 Therefore, it must reform or eventually reform will be forced upon it. To continue the historic metaphor, we might concern ourselves with is the New Reformation, the reformation of the place we call school. Hopefully, we can examine this notion without fear for I do not believe that heresy is a capital crime in the educational community. What drives the need for educational reform? Well the current forces were preceded some twenty years ago by a period of social indigestion that seemed to pass for a time. Yes, the sixties, a period when significant segments of particularly, the American population began to question the social status quo. Individuals and groups came to realize that sometimes what society demanded of them was neither reasonable , ethical, moral, acceptable or safe. The great American educational debate of the time centred around the issue of whether public education should liberate or control. Most school reforms of the time were humanistic in nature. They failed or apparently did. They failed because the tenents they were founded upon were not generally understood by educators or students or the public at large. They failed because society evaluated them in terms of what had been not what might be. For nearly two decades public education in North America has struggled to put its house in order basing its actions frequently on hazy recollections of an ideal past. However, hard educators try they realize something is wrong. A basic conflict has emerged between the school and the community it serves. Both sides find the other wanting. The community complains that they are funding schools; that are not doing the job; that are not meeting the needs of children. The school complains that families and the community are failing the young. They are sending ill-disciplined young people to school. Moreover, they unreasonably expect the school to deal with a wide range of children's physical, emotional and social problems far beyond what is historically understood as education. Both perceptions are accurate. Schools are struggling and unreasonable demands are being placed upon them. If school and community remain in conflict then both sides will take a protectionist stance and energies will be wasted in a most unproductive way. At best blame will be laid and someone or something will be held responsible. Then where are we? Perhaps it is time for schools and communities to come together to build a common cooperative vision for the future and together nail their manifesto on a figurative "Wittenberg Gate". The Information Age has burst upon us because new information and communication technologies have been and are being developed at an exponential rate. Nothing is simple anymore. What appears correct today could be "a worst case scenario" tomorrow. Monolithic views are hard to hold in a pluralistic world where much conflicting information is readily available to everyone. The stress we feel comes from ambivalence and uncertainty. It permeates our lives. The Medieval Church conditioned the starving ignorant masses to endure their suffering and in some manner provided them with some peace of mind. The public school as we have known it has provided a somewhat literate compliant population able to spend its time carrying out the repetitive tasks of the Industrial Age. In comparison to those who went before them the peoples of this age in the Western world are much more prosperous, educated, and literate. The schoolhouse has served Industrial Society well. However, the Industrial Age is gone. Its shrines lie in decay across the landscape. Derelict factories and mills are everywhere in the North American Industrial heartland. The factories of the Information Age are cleaner, smaller and much more efficient. The most striking feature of them, however, is the absence of people. Many of the repetitive tasks that required thousands of compliant workers are performed quickly and with infallible efficiency by machines. Machines that are fed the information to operate by other machines. In fact one of the primary resources of all activities of the Information Age is information, an abundance of information. The educational reforms of the sixties recognized the phenomena that schools were educating people to preserve a dying age rather than inspiring them to create a new order that might allow individuals and groups to prosper in a multitude of ways yet to be conceived.Possibly the greatest mistake reformers of the time made was to see technology almost invariably as a dehumanizing influence. Hence, they turned to more pastoral models. Models found in the past: and by so doing fixed their gaze in the same direction as those they opposed and dreamt of the future while looking fixedly backwards . One might accuse this writer of falling into the same trap since I am indeed struggling with historical metaphors and am basing a vision of the future on assumptions about the past. Let me be clear that it is not a view of history that troubles me. For we must know where we have come from if we are to know, in any way, where we are going. Instead, it is the believe that in the past there were ideal times. In this case hindsight fails us. So lets turn ourselves around and dream of the past while looking fixedly forward. We might then use the lessons of the past to assist us in conceptualizing the future. With this view, what needs to change about school if it is to reflect the complex emerging needs of an Information Age society? First, educators must come out of their cloisters and view the world as it is rather than how they would have it. With this should come the realization that there are greater and better sources of information available to children beyond the school. Mecklenburger (1990) writing in the Phi Delta Kappan indicated that he thought it was time to stop thinking about technology in education and start thinking about education within the context of the new technologies. What the school speaks to children of; is a monolithic authoritarian world where the schoolhouse is the source of all valuable knowledge and useful skills. Unfortunately, many children know this is not so, even before they enter. In school, teachers are still seen as the purveyors of skills and knowledge to an increasingly reluctant and truculent captive audience. They wonder why in spite of all their efforts children frequently fail to learn. Perhaps it is because much of school may not be relevant to the learner. What can the teacher do when the learners refuse to learn. Not much! A sense of powerlessness among educators will grow if this developing situation does not change. How can it change? Can educators expect children to come to school with a more passive and accepting attitude? No, children will come with an even more rebellious and irreverent outlook if schools do not change. There has been a great social change and perhaps schools and other institutions have not noticed. Gone are the days when parents conditioned their children to blindly respect authority and position. Educators must realize that there is little or no respect left for position. In truth, the position may indeed heap disrespect on the most respectable. Respect is only available to people and to gain it one must come out from behind the cloak of position and join the company of humanity. Hence, educators must discard outmoded practises and begin to develop a vision that allows the institution of public education to meet the needs of children in an Information Age society. Educators must understand that most learning takes place without teaching. Humans are learners. Illich (1972) contended: A second major illusion on which the school system rests is that most learning is the result of teaching...most people acquire most of their knowledge outside school p. 18 The focus of schools must be on learning rather than teaching. Learning comes first. Teachers must be there as guides and resources when the learners need them. On Learning. Children are intuitive learners before they enter school. They learn the most complex skills without being taught. They learn to walk and talk. No one has to demand that they do this. No tests are given. Their learning is self-evaluative. They know they can and their growing awareness of their personal strength is wonderful. A colleague of mine once observed that the first time children would fail to learn to walk would be the first time we tried to teach them; gave them tests; and evaluated their progress. Perhaps one of the major misdirections of late Industrial Age Education is the effort to make teaching and therefore learning a scientific and clinical activity. By dividing learning and knowledge up into psuedo-scientific categories we have most certainly taken the wonder out of it and for the massive effort we have seen small result. I am mindful of watching the scientific community's efforts in helping paraplegics to walk. With massive scientific and technological intervention they are able to have the patient ambulate in a most spastic way for a short way. All of this scientific effort is required to crudely emulate what most humans are able to do so fluidly and so easily. Don't be mistaken, I am not critical of scientific efforts to help the crippled nor of the efforts of dedicated educators to assist so-called at- risk children. What concerns me is the emphasis on pedagogy, and methodology; on teaching. Its as though educators can do a "better job" if they understand such nomenclature as synthesis, kinesthetic, metacognition, visual, auditory, application, comprehension, inference and analysis. Perhaps we simply are figuratively dissecting the learner and speaking in tongues while we are doing it. Children are not raw materials to be shaped. They as well as all humans are learners and it is the learning that is important. Far more important than the teaching. As I pause, the word "Darstellung" echoes in my memory. It is a term used by the conceiver of the "kindergarten",Friedrich Froebel to describe what he considered to be the process that satisfied the innate urge of the human organism to move to greater life: to learn. Froebel saw learning as a much more intuitive and spiritual activity than many apparently do today. He believed that each child was born with a set of uniquely wonderful attributes that needed to be nurtured. In his view, teaching was not to be imposed on the child but was there for support and guidance. Of Organizing For Learning. Such a notion did not sit well in an Industrial Age world. Individuals needed to be disciplined not nurtured. They needed to conform, and be compliant. External conditioning to this end was provided by school. The children were indeed shaped to be very much the same. Then came the 1960's. In the United States, the Johnson Administration sponsored a massive infusion of federal money into "The War On Poverty." Never before in history had such resources been supplied to Health, Education and Welfare. The educational reforms that followed were humanistic. They were founded on tenets that honoured learning and each individual. They were employed in a world that still honoured the normative ethics of the Industrial Age. There was, in the words of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, " Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding". Society sat back and waited to receive an even more disciplined, successful, happy and compliant generation as it emerged from schools. What it got was idiosyncratic and irreverent at best. Young people blatantly failed to do what was expected of them. Moreover, they often failed to honour the society itself and the schools were blamed. Surely, this could have been predicted. For when you liberate, rather than indoctrinate individuals you free them to think and express themselves. You free them to question and to hold everything and anything up for scrutiny. You empower them. True this kind of citizenry may prove detrimental to an industrial society. But in today's light industrial society has been grossly detrimental to the world. As we enter the Information Age we might at last realize that what occurred in schools in the sixties may have been somewhat premature but now it is long overdue. Educators and the public always question the effectiveness of schools.What we have failed to question is the enterprise itself.We have failed to question whether what we are forcing all children to undergo is useful or necessary. Is information about the "Age of Pericles" essential for the successful conduct of everyone's life? What would we do if we could not discern the difference between the rhymes schemes of Petrachan and Elizabethan sonnets? In today's world, we need inquisitive irreverent unfettered thought. We need young people free of dogma and doctrine. We need people who can handle a surfeit of conflicting information in order to make thoughtful decisions that may indeed be necessary to assure the survival of this planet. Instead of conditioning children to be passive and compliant could schools provide an environment that stimulates learning while preserving the inquisitivenes and uniqueness of every individual. Schools have often had this as a goal. However, it was largely unattainable because the conditioning process always placed the group before the individual. Individuals have to give something away to belong to a group. That is sad. Possibly schools could develop a social organization, an organization for learning, that allows individuals to develop their uniqueness and still gain group acceptance; an organization that fosters independence and mutual interdependence at the same time. Paul Goodman in proposing the reform of universities conceived of cadres of learners gathering with their teachers. Such were the Medieval universities. To utilize the historic metaphor once more, let's look at the organization of Medieval and Renaissance craft guilds. These were groups of individuals who came together to mutually learn and pursue a craft. Craftsmanship was a goal as was competence and excellence. Let's conceive then of schools being organized into guilds of learners with the same ethics. NEXT PAGE