30: In a historical perspective, the present juncture is a time in which powerful cultural tools are permeating all sectors of daily life. What basic worldview accords with the sense that people form as they experience this process? What overall perspective, from which people see and interpret the world, does it suggest? This question will offend those still preoccupied with the post-modern debunking of the metaphysical pretensions of Western rationalism. We ask the question here, not as metaphysicians but as historical sociologists. George Santayana, immersed in slightly earlier variations on these themes, recognized the ineluctable condition in his wonderful essay, Scepticism and Animal Faith. As humans unable to escape the burdens of living in history, we must recognize that life offers us simultaneously the vocation of science--the relentless questioning of all things apparent--and the vocation of politics -- the willingness to act purposefully and consequentially, uncertain what the outcome will be. [Note 15] The human enterprise imperfectly embodies diverse principles that we need to be aware of and committed to. In thought, all things must be tentative and relative; but in action, they become definitive and final. When ideas conflict in the realm of action, it is the political vocation of the scholar to reflect, weigh, and take a stand on controlling principles. Such situations give rise to the effort of academic theory, and however unfashionable, the conflict of ideas in action is still fundamental to resolving the historical dilemmas of our time. As educators engage the emerging realities, where will they stand?
31) Historically, the?contemporary academic enterprise has its roots in enlightenment ideals.[Note 16] As educators work with the new technologies, they will revitalize these ideals -- a commitment to reason, to progress, to universal rights and betterment, to combating superstitions and ignorance. ?crasez l'inf?me! A major theme of 20th-century Western culture has been a sustained and many-sided critique of this commitment, yet the work of the enlightenment is far from finished. The great destabilizing tragedies that potentially loom are rooted in sectarian clashes and collective ignorance. Ideals of universal education are woefully far from fulfillment, and if we measure education as mastery of the knowledge and skills requisite for coping effectively with the complexities of human circumstances, people everywhere may be rapidly receding in their educational attainments.[Note 17]
32: Fashionable critiques of enlightenment aspirations persuade thoughtful observers who start with a largely tacit sense that further and further application of enlightenment principles has been doing more harm than good. Good principles in excess become destructive. Too much schooling, too much bureaucracy, too much material production, too much environmental intervention, too much health care, too much consumption of resources--it all will exhaust, enchain, and disenchant. Such reasoning may be true as far as it goes, but the critique assumes that the human repertoire of action is essentially fixed and unchanging. The historical impasse is at hand, so the worry goes: those familiar agencies, which we risk exercising too much, are the only possible agencies with which we might advance towards enlightenment ideals. Therefore, we must turn toward some other fundamental goals or suffer historical shipwreck.
33: Here the point is not to argue against this diagnosis and prescription, but instead to make an observation. As educators increasingly work with the new technologies in the extended present, they experience a basic that runs counter to the pessimistic view, at once so weary and wary. Current innovations insinuate into daily circumstances the grounds for recognizing that the relevant agencies of action are not finite and fixed. The new information technologies provide powerful, underutilized tools for pursuing the ideals of universal education and the right of all to engage as equals in the common pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness. Engaged with emerging possibilities, people who are working to apply digital technologies to education experience a sense of historical empowerment; they assert views about the value of their effort to improve the character of the human enterprise--namely, the view that people can and should use these new tools of communication to carry the work of enlightenment forward to unprecedented levels of fulfillment. In the common sense of this experiential world, digital technologies are an expression of the power of reason in human life, making plausible the hope and expectation that reason is still becoming an ever-more effective asset in the service of human life. Educators are far from having made their mission obsolete, and the digital technologies provide an important new means to advance towards unfinished enlightenment aspirations.
34: In the natural order of things, humans are the beings who enter into the struggle to survive with individual awareness of their personal mortality. This personal awareness of impending death has deep effects on the struggle for survival. It has two great cultural consequences. First, it makes humans naturally social and political animals, for the individual aware of its mortality can achieve survival only through the future of its collectivity. The person who knows that his or her death impends must either despair or sublimate the sense of self into some enduring grouping. Second, this commitment to a social self entails a cultural and educational commitment to one's progeny. Humans take many years to develop from infancy to maturity; to ensure survival through the collectivity, members of the species must nurture the young and impart to them the distinguishing characteristics of the group. The great variations on human culture are complex constructions through which mortal individuals create transcendent selves, for the betterment of which we live.
35: This sense of a collective self that binds mortal individuals into an immortal enterprise represents a culture of enlightenment, and it might best be called the progressive contract with posterity. It is the most powerful of the cultural constructions that humans have yet devised to deny personal death through the life of the collectivity.[Note 18] In this version, rational individuals who struggle to survive, knowing they will die, naturally develop a progressive commitment to posterity, through which they try to pass to their progeny the possibility of a more secure, productive life than they themselves have enjoyed.[Note 19 ] This progressive commitment to posterity is the essential principle of enlightenment aspirations, and in espousing these, educators give their work meaning with respect to the basic human condition and help to construct the collective effort at survival even as they face personal mortality. In coming decades, people must extend this construct as they cope with tremendous difficulties to achieve global ecological and geopolitical stability. The educational challenges are stupendous, and full historical use of the digital technologies is essential to meet them.
36: Critics who complain that digital tools are not culturally neutral are correct.[Note 20] These t?ols are expressions of enlightenment reason, the work of abstraction in operation, but should we therefore shrink from them, as these critics imply? The digital tools renew the opportunity to reach out to all persons with the glorious challenge--"Sapere aude! Have the courage to use your own reason!"[Note 21] The world, as it is, is not in equipoise. Educators working with the new technologies command powerful tools, historically significant tools. Educators need to look beyond the myopic topic of computers in education to the question of what they can and should accomplish as educators making full use of digital tools. Educators should use these wonderfully powerful tools to pursue historically challenging goals--fulfilling basic human rights; securing the physical well-being of all in a sustainable global environment; eliminating prejudice, poverty, despair, and disease. Progress is neither automatic nor secure. By the same token, it is neither impossible nor illusory. It is a work achieved through intelligent effort, a measure of fulfillment in life. That is the hope and aspiration one pursues in working to fulfill the progressive contract with posterity.
37: To read the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen[Note 22] as preparation for watching the nightly news or reading the daily paper is humbling: human behavior, locally and globally, is far from meeting the measure of such principles. Higher criticism easily deconstructs the language with which thinkers asserted the abstract universals of our political heritage. Thus, "the rights of man" is a self-deflating locution for critics modestly alert to gender biases. Nevertheless, its principles, imperfectly phrased, have life-and-death import, depending on whether they do or do not control the formation of intention as persons equipped with powerful instruments of destruction engage in social action in the heat of hate, resentment, and fear. Humans use abstractions to enable action, to determine controlling intentions, and to adhere to defining restraints. In the social construction of a new educational system, educators need to possess and to impart principles suitable for determining intentions in a world in which the instruments of action are global, complex, and massive in effects. Our world is the posterity of people who pursued demanding visions, initiating a rule of law, industrial production, systematic science, effective medicine, universal schooling. They asserted these possibilities often while living under atrocious conditions, and the measures of dignity, comfort, and well-being that we enjoy derive largely from their efforts. But that well-being is neither stable nor universal. As educators now exploit the pedagogical power of digital tools, we need to be equally bold and deep, extending to our posterity a fundamental advance in the historic potentials of the human enterprise.
38: "Enlightenment," and labels like it, are retrospective characterizations. They come into use because people historically engaged substantial problems and opportunities, accomplishing results of enduring significance. To construct a new educational system, educators need to engage the great problems and opportunities of our extended present with substantial, epochal effort. If educators using digital technologies can be no more effective in addressing the fundamental challenges of time than we could be without those tools, our historic meaning will prove marginal.
Next: [From Cultural Scarcity to Profusion]
Previous: [Towards a New Education]
This page last updated February 8, 1999 (saw).