is thus essential for seeing the trajectory teaching should take in the coming years. To begin, information, and particularly the information we learn in school, is often initially outside of our experiences, embodied in the teachers who will impart that information. Whether directly through interpersonal encounters or more abstractly as mediated through text or image, that information has to be made available so we can make it our own. And prior to 1439, this process was incredibly difficult. For most of human history, the movement of information was severely constrained. Rather than information being able to travel freely, people had to travel — sometimes considerable distances — to visit the information. Whether we encountered it in another person or via a book, the only way to encounter information, and the only way to duplicate it, was by hand. As a learner, I had literally to be within a hand’s reach of the informational source. If I wasn’t, the information simply wasn’t accessible. This was the core challenge of the “Age of Hands”: access. Teachers worked to minimise the impact of this problem by creating a particular educational practice: lecture. In the first version of this practice, which gives it its English name, teachers performed “lectura”: reading a book out loud so students could make their own copies of it. This way, as they moved into their lives and professions, they could carry the requisite information with them.
complex and daunting new challenge: how do you find what you’re looking for amid that sea of books? This, then, was the core challenge of the “Age of Books”: finding. Teachers worked to minimise this problem’s impact by creating a whole range of new educational practices. They trained students scrupulously to decode (and to incorporate in their own writing) complex citational procedures; they introduced informational tools like indices, bibliographies, and the “card catalogue”; and they transformed lecture into a crystallisation and reporting of basic research, saving their students hours of individual searching.
However, we soon invented a technology that displaced this educational practice, solving the problem of the first age. In 1439, goldsmith and tinkerer Johannes Gutenberg introduced movable type printing, engendering an informational revolution. For the first time, information no longer needed to be reproduced by hand. The “Age of Books” introduced us to the world’s first informational explosion, but it also introduced us to a new problem. Whereas the largest libraries of the Middle Ages contained perhaps a few hundred books, libraries now began growing to sizes hard to conceive, and they started popping up all over the landscape. While a library of a million volumes represents an unprecedented opportunity for learning, as many nineteenth and early twentiethcentury philanthropists recognised, it also creates a
Most of us grew up in this second informational age or were trained by teachers who did, and we’ve therefore internalised the goals of these educational practices: to smooth and facilitate the flow of information. Doing so was necessary, and thus good pedagogical practice. However, in the age we now inhabit, such facilitation is not only unnecessary; it’s counterproductive. In my descriptions of the first two ages, you’ll note that I’ve focused on informational consumption.
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