“Harvard and M.I.T Team Up to Offer Free Online Courses”

                                                                        (NYT May 3, 2012)

Reading this headline reminded me of what I wrote in a short article published in September 1991 in the faculty’s bulletin of UNCW:

“As is the case with almost all revolutions, this one is also going to start in the library; in a second floor room that has been adapted for a two way audio and visual communication with some local high schools…With the offering of this modest service we lose the advantage of locality. The same service can be dispensed from any place, all over the world…The trend is new, and with the installation of new two-way videos and with better understanding of the wide manifestations of this step, we can pioneer new ways in using the system and push way ahead of dinosaurs like Harvard, Duke of Stanford…Today  everything is accelerating so fast that, unlike in the not so distant past, whoever stays behind stand no chance of ever teaching the front-line again. Do we have the courage to shed the skin of old patterns and survive in the new age? It shouldn’t take too long to find out what is going to be our answer to this question.”

The last line in another article in the same bulletin of February 1990 I wrote: “Emulating the mold of what are fast becoming ossified and petrified structure may be securing for our students a good place on the lower rungs of the newly emerging social order.”

I got only one response: “you are crazy!”

(Nevertheless I'm placing the two articles in a new section on education on this website)

I’m quite sure that such “you are crazy” is also the response of many who read my articles on globalization: The end of sovereign states? No more representative systems?  No more national governments? Democracy demoted?  The USA constitution is outdated?  Transition to a system based on the swarm principle?

To all those I would like to cite the first paragraph of my 1995 article: “Towards a World With No Yesterdays.”

We are now in the midst of such a radical transition in human evolution that patterns and symbols from the past can no longer furnish us with a viable foundation for the twenty-first century. The transition is so rapid that the majority of the global population does not yet fully comprehend the nature, magnitude or the inherent consequences of the changes. Most people still tend to follow the same road signs and ground rules that proved effective in the past, view the world through the prism of tradition, pose the same questions, and expect to find the same answers. Severe crises exist in almost every sphere of human affairs -- in economic, education, religion, government and ecology. Each of those crises seems to stem from a common cause -- the incongruity between the old patterns and the new reality. Although the old forms were constructed for a completely different setting we are still trying to squeeze a gigantic and all embracing stream of new information into clogged arteries built to support a system with very different problems on a much more diminutive scale. If we don't see the light at the end of the tunnel it is because the tunnel has been constructed in the world of the dead shadows of the past, and its road signs lead therefore to false hopes and illusory expectations. A new phoenix can rise out of the ashes only if the old one has been fully disintegrated. This is where we stand today -- between birth and annihilation, between the beginning of a new period and the death of the old one. The task that confronts us today is therefore not to revitalize the dilapidated forms of the past but to reinvent ourselves:

I hope you’ll find all my articles worth reading and also enjoy my stories and photographs.