The Rebirth of the City as a Classroom
With more information outside the classroom than inside, with the tools to program and access the total environment for discovery and learning, our cities and institutions can be reborn: or disappear.
The following thoughts are all the more odd or revolutionary as they are coming from Marshall McLuhan, a teacher and lover of literature and education, who taught poetry and literature in universities for his entire career, with a side hustle study of culture and technology. And they are coming from over half a century ago.
“I don’t explain, I explore.”
Marshall McLuhan, ‘Life’ Magazine, 1966
“The time has now come to put the questions inside the school, rather than the answers. In other words, it is now possible to make the schools not a place for packaged information, but a place for dialogue and discovery.”
Marshall McLuhan, ‘The End of the Work Ethic,’ 1972
“In today’s rapidly changing environment, people have two major concerns: to discover the new problems this environment poses, and to develop ways of coping with these problems.”
‘City as Classroom: Understanding Language and Media’ Teacher’s Guide, 1977
“If you’re in an information environment instead of a jungle, the way you explore is with questions. Instead of answers, we had to train the students in how to ask questions. The moment you know the right question, everything falls into place. But the question is the way you move – as everybody knows who works on the internet. The kind of training you now need isn’t of concepts and ideas, it’s the training of perception. We’d spent a lot of time with certain of them – the poets – and they had changed their techniques about a hundred years earlier. They were that far ahead of everybody else. We build this book with questions. Every chapter is page after page of questions.”
Eric McLuhan, on ‘City as Classroom,’ 2011.
Marshall McLuhan realized very early on that the education model was broken. This is something many, if not most, accept today but it was in the 1940s and 50s that Marshall McLuhan understood what we’re just beginning to accept and contend with: today’s model of education, based on obsolete understandings and models, is more harmful than helpful in the 21st century.
A thousand years ago, when the university as an institution was developed, information was scattered and gate-kept and difficult to come by. The answer was to bring all the various disciplines, and their experts, together in one place. The university was born.
A major disruption of this model happened about 500 years later with the innovation of moveable type and the printing press which broke many barriers against access to information, changing us and our world forever. The university was no longer the only game in town. It now became much easier for someone to educate themselves.
In the mid-20th century Marshall McLuhan realized that, with vastly more information and learning available outside the classroom than in, school was now actively interfering with education. He decided to do something about it.
“It seems necessary in a world where everything happens at once and in which the daily environment is alive with messages and meaning that the training of perception becomes the necessary work of any school.”
Marshall McLuhan, ‘Education in the Electronic Age,’ 1967
“The function of the arts is training in perception. It is not instruction. It is to train your ability to see and use your senses.”
Marshall McLuhan, ‘Education in the Electronic Age,’ 1967
“Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they’re used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the ‘content’ of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.”
Marshall McLuhan, ‘The Medium is the Message,’ 1964
“The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance.”
Marshall McLuhan, ‘Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man,’ 1964
‘Education in the Electronic Age’ was a speech Marshall McLuhan gave to a government body in Ontario, Canada, in 1967. This committee was looking at the changing education landscape, trying to come up with responses to the challenges they were facing, and decided to bring in McLuhan to give them some advice… which they proceeded to ignore. The advice, still be useful today, is likely as unwelcome. It would seem that institutions would rather publish and perish romantically in their obsolescence, like some captain going down with the ship, than try to salvage what’s useful from their beautiful structures and maybe live another few centuries.
McLuhan made several attempts to show and lead the way. The last major one was ‘City as Classroom: Understanding Language and Media,’ published in 1977 with his son Eric McLuhan and a high school teacher, Kathryn Hutcheon.
With information and answers more plentiful and accessible outside the school than within, the role of the teacher quite obviously shifts if they are to ‘save the student’s time,’ which my father insisted was their ultimate job – essentially, to help you learn what you need to know faster than you could on your own. Today, when most schooling is a frustrating time-suck keeping students from the learning they have to do outside of class hours if they want to be prepared for life, rather than saving it would seem they are wasting their students’ time – and charging them ridiculous sums of money for the privilege.
This would seem an absurd and simultaneous reversal of and return to the dark ages.
Knowing that if he wanted to have an impact he had to do things differently, McLuhan’s response was to leave the classroom behind: he became what we now think of as a ‘public intellectual’ (while remaining a university professor.)
Likewise, his books became perceptual training manuals, less to change your opinion than your mind, your senses.
The above quotes are this case in point: our technologies reshape us as a side effect of their use and the consumption of their content. The content is actually the delivery mechanism for fundamental individual and social change on a primal sensory level, as it keeps us engaged which the change happens beneath our awareness. We only realize something has happened when we no longer recognize who we are, then wonder how that happened. It is no wonder.
When so much happens beneath our notice, our awareness,
one solution is to become more aware.
Advertisers long ago learned that the environment can be programmed for education – advertising used to be called ‘commercial education.’
Today’s technologies, mobile computing and ‘augmented reality’, make it relatively simple to likewise program the environment for exploration and discovery and truly turn our cities into classrooms.
It may be worth asking what is stopping us from doing the obvious? It’s been a long time since most people valued the education establishment as more than organized socialization and a fancy ticket (diploma) to a career. That seems a steep price to pay today when even the diploma doesn’t carry more more value than as a line item on your resume that might get you an interview.
Employers are more interested in what you can do, and smart kids know that if you want to learn how, school is not where.
Beauty. I lapped that up like a thirsty man.
However, I disagree with your characterization of the diploma; you said it might get you an interview, but I would say it is essential to getting an interview.
It’s more than a quibble . Education is dubious, as you say, and mostly facile. But the diploma is an essential part for getting the interview.
That’s a practical matter I think I have insight into this . I’m the owner of paragonsecurity.ca. We have five thousand employees. I would love to show you how it works. An elevator pitch. Nothing too painful.
I’m back in Toronto and will be in Milford next weekend . Maybe we could have a coffee over there in Bloomfield or at you in Wellington.