Survival__ Structuring Prosperity for Yourself and the Nation - Charles George Smith [208]
This notion was traumatically abused, subverted, and interrupted by a late 19th century ideological push that the institution of education could use formal schools to "cram in" rather than lead out. "Learning" became identified with "training," especially for the profit and use of a small minority of extremely wealthy and influential industrialists and "administrative elites."
Efficiency experts and other clerks to power in the late 19th century and early 20th century advocated for a formalized system of training to advance industrial development and expansion. Education became identified almost solely (and soullessly) with job and professional preparation. Life-long learning and learning for character, learning for its own sake, and learning as an act of creativity were not only ignored but militated against as dangerous and counter to a factory-like "quality" control. We are now being forced by global circumstance and personal and social opportunity to return to the original meaning of education, but one brought forward in a very new context.
The second thing to understand is that learning (and thinking) have always been viewed (until the Industrial Era) as social, public intellectual acts and not simply as individual, cognitive acts or as institutional cogs in an efficiently running social engineering scheme. We are entering into a return to learning as a social act and not simply a cognitive act.
The late 18th century marked the rise of not only industrialism but specialized professions in the social sciences like psychology, sociology, and education, often patterned after the quantitatively-tilted natural sciences, economics, and mathematics. These professions took the metaphors of industrialism-- that everything was a complex machine that could be broken down by Reason into principles, natural laws, and tiny parts, that could be examined, and reassembled in wondrous and Utopian ways.
[This had a double-edged effect. Eugenics sprang out of this mentality as did some truly amazing inventions-- like radios and airplanes.] Intelligence, as a result, became understood as an output of a complex, but knowable, cognitive machinery located in the brain of an individual. Learning and education because a way of modulating the doors of perception "swinging inward" to the individual mind.
If you look at the development of artificial intelligence and research, even to this day, they almost all rely on this largely outdated individual, cognitive model.
The emerging interconnected, global and technological world has produced a new and fast accelerating form of practical and theoretical intelligence, what I call the "social mind." The social mind is a distributed intelligence accessed, and added to by individuals, but possessed by no "one." In this understanding of intelligence and the learning that must spring from it, the doors of the individual mind "swing outward" in communication with others almost as neurons within neural networks. Our social neural networks are communities of neighbors, shared interest, profession, and so forth. These linked together form the global "brain" much like computers can be arrayed to hyper-charge computing power.
The world wide web, search engines, and filtering, referencing, and organizing devices like Wikipedia are a perfect demonstration of this kind of distributed accessible, powerful, intelligence and information system. It is highly democratic by NATURE not by conviction. In other words, it is in the very design and being of this emerging form of intelligence to be necessarily democratic to operate at all. It is not an ideological commitment (though it certainly could be helped by the democratic liberalization of rigid social systems).
There is much research and work that needs to be done to understand this emerging new way of understanding and developing intelligence, but in the interim it might be helpful to