Lots of folks are buzzing about the decision of Cushing Academy’s headmaster to empty the school’s library of all of its books. Twenty thousand volumes have gone out the door of the Massachusetts prep school’s library to make way for a half million dollar “learning center” where reading will be done on Kindles, giant TV screens, and computers. Fully wired study carrels designed to accommodate laptops sit where the stacks were once located, and the former reference desk is now a coffee shop outfitted with a feature that practically begs for lampoon: a $12,000 cappuccino machine.
Cushing’s decision has met with both applause and derision. Some have hailed Headmaster James Tracy as a cutting-edge visionary who has the courage to ride the winds of change. The death-of-print crowd has, in essence, embraced Bob Dylan’s dictum “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” Book lovers reacted to Tracy’s decision with scorn, contempt, and sadness. A dear friend wept when she heard the news; like many, she has an emotional attachment to books. Tracy hardly helped matters when he dismissed books as “an outdated technology, like scrolls before books.” (One can only hope his technological savvy is greater than his flair for public relations!)
Here’s another take. Yesterday I taught my first class in a new course I’m teaching on the history of utopian experiments in America. I’ve spent much of the summer reading—both in electronic and is processed pulp form—futurist visions. That experience confirmed a deep suspicion: that everyone who predicts the future gets it wrong. The most famous American vision was that of Edward Bellamy, whose 1887 novel Looking Backward predicted what the city of Boston—90 minutes from Cushing Academy--would look like in the year 2000. Bellamy was amazingly prescient and anticipated many things that did not exist in his world: radio, credit cards, shopping malls, e-shopping…. Pretty good, yes? But here’s what he got wrong: everything else! Boston was supposed to be a perfect society that had banished crime, divorce, poverty, unemployment, sexism, racism, and inequality. I was in the area last weekend and insofar as I can tell, Bellamy struck out on those prognostications.
Examples such as this make me suspect that Tracy has placed Cushing Academy on a runaway track to nowhere (or Erewhon for those who get the reference). He presumes that he has seen the future and knows where it will lead, quite a gamble given the speed with which technology changes. What if, just five years from now, Kindles, flat-screen TVs, and Web browsers are as obsolete as, say, scrolls before books? Presumably people will still enjoy cappuccino, but that might be all that’s left of Tracy’s brave new world.
Should Tracy have catapulted Cushing’s library into the future? For embracing the inevitability of change Tracy deserves kudos, but his true arrogance was not in being so mean to books, rather in assuming that he knows what tomorrow will bring. If hubris strikes him down, it will be because he violated a very old proverb: Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. I first encountered that phrase in an old book.
Cushing’s decision has met with both applause and derision. Some have hailed Headmaster James Tracy as a cutting-edge visionary who has the courage to ride the winds of change. The death-of-print crowd has, in essence, embraced Bob Dylan’s dictum “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” Book lovers reacted to Tracy’s decision with scorn, contempt, and sadness. A dear friend wept when she heard the news; like many, she has an emotional attachment to books. Tracy hardly helped matters when he dismissed books as “an outdated technology, like scrolls before books.” (One can only hope his technological savvy is greater than his flair for public relations!)
Here’s another take. Yesterday I taught my first class in a new course I’m teaching on the history of utopian experiments in America. I’ve spent much of the summer reading—both in electronic and is processed pulp form—futurist visions. That experience confirmed a deep suspicion: that everyone who predicts the future gets it wrong. The most famous American vision was that of Edward Bellamy, whose 1887 novel Looking Backward predicted what the city of Boston—90 minutes from Cushing Academy--would look like in the year 2000. Bellamy was amazingly prescient and anticipated many things that did not exist in his world: radio, credit cards, shopping malls, e-shopping…. Pretty good, yes? But here’s what he got wrong: everything else! Boston was supposed to be a perfect society that had banished crime, divorce, poverty, unemployment, sexism, racism, and inequality. I was in the area last weekend and insofar as I can tell, Bellamy struck out on those prognostications.
Examples such as this make me suspect that Tracy has placed Cushing Academy on a runaway track to nowhere (or Erewhon for those who get the reference). He presumes that he has seen the future and knows where it will lead, quite a gamble given the speed with which technology changes. What if, just five years from now, Kindles, flat-screen TVs, and Web browsers are as obsolete as, say, scrolls before books? Presumably people will still enjoy cappuccino, but that might be all that’s left of Tracy’s brave new world.
Should Tracy have catapulted Cushing’s library into the future? For embracing the inevitability of change Tracy deserves kudos, but his true arrogance was not in being so mean to books, rather in assuming that he knows what tomorrow will bring. If hubris strikes him down, it will be because he violated a very old proverb: Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. I first encountered that phrase in an old book.
I’d like to play devil’s advocate here ☺
ReplyDeleteThis article reminds me of an interview Bob Ballard, the deep-sea explorer who discovered the Titanic gave to Alan Alda once, for Scientific American Frontier. Here are his words:
All my life, I've had these ideas, and people say, "you're nuts." 'Til I do them. Then you know what they say? "You know, actually, that wasn't a bad idea, but it's the new one you have that's nuts." And then I go on with the new one and I do it, and then they go, "Well, actually it wasn't such a bad idea but it's the next one." This is the one they think I'm nuts on right now.
One has to make room for mavericks, people who will try terrible ideas, as long as it is on a small scale and doesn’t affect too many people. Successful terrible ideas are an important part of progress.
Unsuccessful terrible ideas too!
Scale is important. Cushing Academy has about 450 students at all time. A fraction of this graduating each year. That’s small.
The goal is important too. We’re not talking about banning or censuring books, just making them available in a different format.
Another important parameter in this equation: the age group of the people affected: younger generation.
The article reminded me of my own saga with programming and my inability to debug a long program unless it is printed on paper. Only when a program is printed can I be fully effective at figuring out its logic, and where a nasty bug might hide. I tried to enforce this with my students, for a while. Then I saw how much quicker and more agile they were than me at zipping all up and down programs on the screen, at switching windows, at understanding structure of text passing in front of them at twice the speed of sound… I had to admit that I was not capable of working with computer technology (what I teach) the same effective way they were.
And while talking about younger generation, I was there once, and right at the time when another debate was taking place, this one on a much larger scale: the debate over whether students should throw slide-rules out the window and be allowed to use calculators in class. The danger, opponents said, was the creation of a generation of students lacking important quantitative skills. But we did switch. And we did switch also with computers, allowing them in the classroom too. So yes, the younger generations gain new skill sets, different from those of the previous generation, maybe lacking in some area, but they also more adept at using the new tools. So, they work differently. They adapt. Progress requires allowing others to work differently from the way we do. It’s not because we can’t adapt to a new technology that we should prevent others from trying it, at least on a small scale. And Cushing Academy is definitely small scale.
Let a 1000 flowers bloom and pick the seeds of the ones that did best, then plant your garden with these next year. ;-)