We stand on the brink of a technological revolution that will fundamentally alter the way we live, work, and relate to one another. In its scale, scope, and complexity, the transformation will be unlike anything humankind has experienced before.~~Klaus Schwab, chairman of the World Economic Forum, 2016
We often hear or read that the ongoing cloud tools revolution will change everything. But what does that mean, really?
As noted, education in the US often resembles forms we can trace back to the needs of the British Empire for standardized bureaucrats…who thought and worked all pretty much the same way, within narrow parameters…to keep the mechanisms of empire running smoothly. We’ve also seen schools in US compared to the forms of mass production, which requires standardized employees that fit into the mechanized and narrow parameters of assembly line work.
But what might we make of images of the school William Shakespeare is said to have attended in Stratford-upon-Avon, a small market town of 2000…starting around 1570? This school he is thought to have attended from age 7 to 14, was established in 1295!
1295: The Guild of the Holy Cross establishes the School. It appoints a priest called Richard as ‘rector scholarum’ (schoolmaster) to teach Guild members’ sons the basics of reading, writing and the Christian faith.
What might educational theory have consisted of in 1295, and was it different by 1570? In 1295, what did they use for textbooks, as the printing press had yet to be invented? How different was learning in 1295, pre Renaissance, than it was in Plato’s Academy?
McLuhan thought the period where Homer and Socrates were being written down, was part of a huge transition from an all-senses face to face experience of story “performed” as oral and physical art, accompanied by music in real-time…to the sole emphasis on sight and not face to face and not real time experience of writing and reading. He said the change to a phonetic alphabet enabled a new form of knowledge, that then transformed the civilization of that age.
But by Shakespeare’s time, the printing press had been invented, setting off a revolution in knowledge that had enormous impact on civilization, and the way the institutions and forms of government and forms of commerce worked, or didn’t work. So we have an example there, of what happens when the forms of knowledge evolve, and disrupt everything.
For example, knowledge of how to do practical things in the world was tightly held within Guilds, who shared only with the apprentices they brought in, the “how to step by step” make things. With the printing press, such knowledge was much much harder to keep narrowly distributed…such as today where many “trades” are becoming more DIY activities because of access to YouTube knowledge.
While writing had been around for thousands of years, and while scrolls of ancient texts of Greeks and Romans had been resurrected laboriously in monasteries during the Renaissance from scrolls brought to the west during Constantinople’s collapse, and the fall of the Eastern Roman Empire, such knowledge was limited to those who might have access to the handmade books of great value.
But by 1571, not only had the Renaissance taken place spreading new and very old thinking across Europe (from Constantinople) and including new ideas from worldwide new trade routes, but the printing press had made “books” into a different form…. one where quantity was now practical, and which spread knowledge in ways previously inconceivable.
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The point here is that knowledge is like all “content”, a creature of the forms used to embody it; and as the forms change, knowledge changes, in many essential ways, that then changes civilization. As printed books began to be more widely distributed, and as printed cheap one pager sheets spread quickly far and wide, parts of civilization changed in ways few might have foreseen.
For example, access to print versions of the bible, was a huge engine for wild disruption in the most stable institution of europe, the one size fits all Catholic Church. As were one page sheets with Luther’s demands. Suddenly, people wanted a size that fit them, in their own language, controlled by their own local institutions.
Shakespeare’s education in school equipped him with some knowledge of the Greeks, and their powerful philosophers, as well as their powerful dramatists. Which, so enabled by knowledge of both critical thinking and dramatic thinking, he shot, as it were, out of the cannon of his small town, to create towering works of unfettered imagination. Demonstrating for all, what can happen when knowledge evolves into new enabling forms which set minds free to be all they can be.
Are there parallels between Shakespeare’s time of disruption, where knowledge evolved into new dynamic forms that released immense possibilities, and our own time where knowledge is again making evolutionary leaps, taking on new dynamic forms and opening new worlds of possibilities?