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Education Unlimited: Electronic
Planetary consciousness, today the privilege of an elite, will tomorrow be commonly realized through an electronic technology. Ten years of worldwide television, and the seeing of one's village, country and planet in a new perspective will suffice to bring about a global generation. Twenty-five years of worldwide television and not much will remain of national frontiers or national languages; like the medieval romances, the written literature of the 19th and 20th centuries will have become a subject of study for a few scholars.
When we live in a a fully-developed electronic age, each human being will be able to be in direct visual communication with every other human being, with every research centre and centre of culture. And since every man's ‘say’ will be recorded for all legislative and consultative bodies, for the first time in history each person will be able to participate directly in the government of the planet.
Everywhere the movements of the noosphere will circulate freely with the speed of light. Planetary consciousness will have become a common fact.
Today sixty specialists in solar physics, or in Hittite calligraphy, or on the hormones of a moth chrysalis, can meet only in a world conference every ten years or so, but tomorrow they will need only to select a code number in order to meet through television. Every child will enjoy the best teachers on earth. A teacher might live, for example, in a cabin in the high Himalayas and his students on different continents; but they will be connected by three-dimensional television as if they were in the same room and will be able to ask each other questions and exchange written papers. All universities will be united in one single planetary university.
This electronic, planetary university will have at its disposal not only a formidable telecommunications network, but also cerebral centres, the computers, which will replace our libraries now almost choked with their own treasures. The computers will be able to keep the knowledge of humanity up to date, at the disposal of each person according to his choice and his capacities.
The programming of the huge educational computers, and the planning of the world-wide television programmes, will be the responsibility of this union of universities, which will help everyone to develop the limitless possibilities of the new consciousness.
In times past only a king could command as tutor for his son the wisest sage in the kingdom; thus the young Alexander of Macedon as educated by Aristotle. Tomorrow not only will television transmit directly to the children lessons worked out for them with their collaboration by the greatest teachers and scientists, but each child, thanks to an increasingly sensitive and intelligent computer of his own, will be able to receive personally, intimately, an education suited to his own line of development and in accord with his genius and preferences.
No longer will all children solve the same problems, or be given the same explanations. But each child will be considered as a unique being and will receive a unique education which will lead him without interruption towards his own plenitude.
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