“The restructuring of human work and association was shaped
by the technique of fragmentation that is the essence of machine technology.
The essence of automation technology is the opposite. It is integral and
decentralist in depth, just as the machine was fragmentary, centralists, and
superficial in its patterning of human relationships.”
“Our education has long ago acquired the fragmentary and
piecemeal character of mechanism. It is now under increasing pressure to acquire
the depth and interrelation that are indispensable in the all-at-once world of
electric organization. Paradoxically,
automation makes liberal education mandatory.”
Marshall McLuhan
What is 3D printing?
For example: custom-fit titanium horseshoes printed by 3D
process
The increasing use of automation in factory production: http://www.economist.com/node/21552897
Self-assembling cube robots:
In the age of robots and computers assembling and
disassembling themselves, additive manufacturing (3D printing) making
small-scale, customized and even intensely complex production possible, and
automation increasingly taking over the essential production of goods, the
contemporary person finds himself in a position similar to that of the ancient
Greek citizen. In that world, production was done by others (slaves and menial
laborers) freeing up the citizen for creative and civic action. Only a few
received this ‘liberal’ education since the great majority were needed for
basic production and only the few could afford the luxury of education; the
majority were trained for production.
We find ourselves in just such a world, except that now the
majority are increasingly no longer needed for the production of basic needs,
or even luxuries. The general standard of living rises with less and less
actual production work required of fewer and fewer people. This does not mean
that people are not needed, but that their time will increasingly be spent in
other pursuits, that work will change to resemble more and more that of the
artist. (We will all, as McLuhan says, become
artists. While this may be hyperbole, the artist is a type of the kind of worker
who will be the norm rather than the exception.) Creative and integrated work
will increasingly fill our work days. And for this kind of work, training in specific
‘job skills’, which become obsolete with the next generation of machine or
software, is completely inadequate.
The calls for more technical training, more math training—while
in themselves not wrong—entirely miss the greater point. Mere training in
technical proficiency without a broader understanding of the world, people, and
self, risks relegating the student to merely serve the function or task he has
been trained to do. It is only a liberal arts education that can free people for
other things. They may, of course, choose to use their education in technical
fields, but they will only have the choice if they have a liberal arts
education. All other mere training will condemn them to servitude alongside the
mechanisms they will service—indeed, in many ways they will only be trained to
be servants of the machines.
The kind of education we need now is focused on broad and
flexible learning, probing deeply into questions of meaning and connection,
rich in developing across-the-board tools of learning including memory, logical
thinking, and effective communication. This education then, rather than being
for the few, must be for the many. It is like the ancient world in that education
is for the free citizen with time and creative energy and the ability to
contribute to his community, except that now this could, and must, include the majority.
The grim alternative is a training that prepares people for a life of service
to the productive mechanisms, punctuated only by periods—increasingly long as
automated processes grow more productive—of amusement (entertainment, politics,
and even religion) designed by others, to be consumed by the unaware.
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