multiply, artistic output diversifies.
The push for diversity, meanwhile, is igniting bitter conflict in education. Ever since the rise of industrialism, education in the West, and particularly in the United States, has been organized for the mass production of basically standardized educational packages. It is not accidental that at the precise moment when the consumer has begun to demand and obtain greater diversity, the same moment when new technology promises to make destandardization possible, a wave of revolt has begun to sweep the college campus. Though the connection is seldom noticed, events on the campus and events in the consumer market are intimately connected.
One basic complaint of the student is that he is not treated as an individual, that he is served up an undifferentiated gruel, rather than a personalized product. Like the Mustang buyer, the student wants to design his own. The difference is that while industry is highly responsive to consumer demand, education typically has been indifferent to student wants. (In one case we say, 'the customer knows best'; in the other, we insist that 'Papa – or his educational surrogate – knows best.') Thus the student-consumer is forced to fight to make the education industry responsive to his demand for diversity.
While most colleges and universities have greatly broadened the variety of their course offerings, they are still wedded to complex standardizing systems based on degrees, majors and the like. These systems lay down basic tracks along which all students must progress. While educators are rapidly multiplying the number of alternative paths, the pace of diversification is by no means swift enough for the students. This explains why young people have set up 'para-universities' – experimental colleges and so-called free universities – in which each student is free to choose what he wishes from a mind-shattering smorgasbord of courses that range from guerrilla tactics and stock market techniques to Zen Buddhism and 'underground theater.'
Long before the year 2000, the entire antiquated structure of degrees, majors and credits will be a shambles. No two students will move along exactly the same educational track. For the students now pressuring higher education to destandardize, to move toward superindustrial diversity, will win their battle.
It is significant, for example, that one of the chief results of the student strike in France was a massive decentralization of the university system. Decentralization makes possible greater regional diversity, local authority to alter curriculum, student regulations and administrative practices.
A parallel revolution is brewing in the public schools as well. It has already flared into open violence. Like the disturbance at Berkeley that initiated the worldwide wave of student protest, it has begun with something that appears at first glimpse to be a purely local issue.
Thus New York City, whose public education system encompasses nearly 900 schools and is responsible for one out of every forty American public school pupils, has suffered the worst teachers' strike in history – precisely over the issue of decentralization. Teacher picket lines, parent boycotts, and near riot have become everyday occurrences in the city's schools. Angered by the ineffectiveness of the schools, and by what they rightfully regard as blatant race prejudice, black parents, backed by various community forces, have demanded that the entire school system be cut up into smaller 'community-run' school systems.
In effect, New York's black population, having failed to achieve racial integration and quality education, wants its own school system. It wants courses in Negro history. It wants greater parental involvement with the schools than is possible in the present large, bureaucratic and ossified system. It claims, in short, the right to be different.
The essential issues far transcend racial prejudice, however. Until now the big urban school systems in the United States have been powerful homogenizing influences. By fixing city-wide standards and curricula, by choosing texts and personnel on a city-wide basis, they have imposed considerable uniformity on the schools.
Today, the pressure for decentralization, which has already spread to Detroit, Washington, Milwaukee, and other major cities in the United States (and which will, in different forms, spread to Europe as well), is an attempt not simply to improve the education of Negroes, but to smash the very idea of centralized, city-wide school policies. It is an attempt to generate local variety in public education by turning over control of the schools to local authorities. It is, in short, part of a larger struggle to diversify education in the last third of the twentieth century. That the effort has been temporarily blocked in New York, largely through the stubborn resistance of an entrenched trade union, does not mean that the historic forces pushing toward destandardization will forever be contained.
Failure to diversify education
We see here, therefore, a major cultural force in the society – education – being pushed to diversify its output, exactly as the economy is doing. And here, exactly as in the realm of material production, the new technology, rather than fostering standardization, carries us toward super-industrial diversity.
Computers, for example, make it easier for a large school to schedule more flexibly. They make it easier for the school to cope with independent study, with a wider range of course offerings and more varied extracurricular activities. More important, computerassisted education, programmed instruction and other such techniques, despite popular misconceptions, radically enhance the possibility of diversity in the classroom. They permit each student to advance at his own purely personal pace. They permit him to follow a custom-cut path toward knowledge, rather than a rigid syllabus as in the traditional industrial era classroom.
Moreover, in the educational world of tomorrow, that relic of mass production, the centralized work place, will also become less important. Just as economic mass production required large numbers of workers to be assembled in factories, educational mass production required large numbers of students to be assembled in schools. This itself, with its demands for uniform discipline, regular hours, attendance checks and the like, was a standardizing force. Advanced technology will, in the future, make much of this unnecessary. A good deal of education will take place in the student's own room at home or in a dorm, at hours of his own choosing. With vast libraries of data available to him via computerized information retrieval systems, with his own tapes and video units, his own language laboratory and his own electronically equipped study carrel, he will be freed, for much of the time, of the restrictions and unpleasantness that dogged him in the lockstep classroom.
The technology upon which these new freedoms will be based will inevitably spread through the schools in the years ahead – aggressively pushed, no doubt, by major corporations like IBM, RCA, and Xerox. Within thirty years, the educational systems of the United States, and several Western European countries as well, will have broken decisively with the mass production pedagogy of the past, and will have advanced into an era of educational diversity based on the liberating power of the new machines.
In education, therefore, as in the production of material goods, the society is shifting irresistibly away from, rather than toward, standardization. It is not simply a matter of more varied automobiles, detergents and cigarettes. The social thrust toward diversity and increased individual choice affects our mental, as well as our material surroundings.
Of all the forces accused of homogenizing the modern mind, few have been so continuously and bitterly criticized as the mass media. Intellectuals in the United States and Europe have lambasted television, in particular, for standardizing speech, habits, and tastes. They have pictured it as a vast lawnroller flattening out our regional differences, crushing the last vestiges of cultural variety. A thriving academic industry has leveled similar charges against magazines and movies.
While there is truth in some of these charges, they overlook critically important counter-trends that generate diversity, not standardization. Television, with its high costs of production and its limited number of channels, is still necessarily dependent upon very large audiences. But in almost every other communications medium we can trace a decreasing reliance on mass audiences. Everywhere the 'market segmentation' process is at work.
A generation ago, American movie-goers saw almost nothing but Hollywood-made films aimed at capturing the so-called mass audience. Today in cities across the country these 'mainstream' movies are supplemented by foreign movies, art films, sex movies, and a whole stream of specialized motion pictures
