In the industrial model of student mass production, the teacher is the broadcaster. A broadcast is by definition the transmission of information from transmitter to receiver in a one-way, linear fashion. The teacher is the transmitter and student is a receptor in the learning process. The formula goes like this: "I'm a professor and I have knowledge. You're a student, you're an empty vessel and you don't. Get ready, here it comes. Your goal is to take this data into your short-term memory and through practice and repetition build deeper cognitive structures so you can recall it to me when I test you."... The definition of a lecture has become the process in which the notes of the teacher go to the notes of the student without going through the brains of either.
J. Peder Zane:
Upon graduation, we must devote ever more energy to mastering the floods of information that might help us keep our wobbly jobs. Crunched, we have little time to learn about far-flung subjects.
The narrowcasting of our lives is writ large in our culture. The Internet slices and dices it all into highly specialized niches that provide mountainous details about the slightest molehills.
When people only care about what they care about, their desire to know something more, something new, evaporates like the morning dew.
The notion of an aspirational culture, in which one endeavors to learn what is right, proper and important in order to make something more of himself, is past.
