Devices of the Soul (Hardcover)

Chapter 11. Who’s Killing Higher Education?(Or Is It Suicide?)

When the emerging Internet began re-shaping the public consciousness during the 1990s, a strong consensus within the online community held that the new information technologies would bring an end to higher education as we have known it. I suspect this was true. Its truth, however, is not that the technologies are positively revolutionizing education. Rather, what we are watching is more like the end—the final perfection and dead-end extreme—of the old regime’s shortcomings.

For a long while now we have slowly been reconceiving education as the transfer of information from one database or brain to another. Access to information is the universal slogan, and by “information” we demonstrate with countless phrases every day that we mean something routinely transferable between containers.

What we haven’t so clearly realized is that this factshoveling model of education renders both teachers and schools superfluous. It’s true that many colleges and universities have struggled mightily to convert themselves into more efficient vehicles for information delivery. But they can hardly hope to compete successfully with the computer in this game.

I recently spoke with a representative of the struggling publishing industry. He told me that, for the distinctly non-bookish young people of today, what can’t be “Googled” simply doesn’t exist. It’s not easy to imagine how universities can reasonably adapt themselves to the coming generation ...