Let us consider the “glacial” twentieth century for a moment. The authors write that “[t]hroughout the twentieth century, particularly after the Second World War…[s]tability, continuity, and maintaining the status quo defined our culture, and progress was carefully controlled.” (39) I am dumbfounded by this statement. In the period after WWII, our culture experienced the upheaval of the civil rights movement, the effects of women going work, the NASA space program and its countless scientific advances, radical changes in travel and cities due to the development of commercial aviation and widespread automobile ownership, changes in communication brought about by television and fax machines, the development of the drug culture, the adoption of the microwave oven, the emergence of the environmental movement, and the adoption of the personal computer, not to mention the restructuring of the whole economy from an industrial to a service-based one. Glacial change? Stability and continuity? Maintaining the status quo? I think not. Innovation, creativity, and the ability to adapt to and embrace change were just as important in 1965 as they are today.
Even if “change” were defined narrowly as technological change only, there was a rapid pace of change in the latter half of the 20th century. Thomas and Seely Brown compare the rate of adoption of color television to the rate of internet adoption in arguing that the 20th century was slow. (40-41). Yet they ignore the early history of the internet and fail to recognize that the internet, just like color TV, took about 40 years to go from conception to universality in American homes. See http://www.livescience.com/20727-internet-history.html for an internet history. And although the rate of development of new internet tools today is indeed very rapid, not all of these new tools have the capacity to change society in important ways.
Faulty premises notwithstanding, the authors rightly argue that we, as educators, should reject the “teaching-based approach, [where] students must prove that they have received the information transferred to them.” (38) Instead, students should be encouraged to “embrace what we don’t know, come up with better questions about it, and continue asking those questions in order to learn more and more….” (Id.). This “new culture of learning” makes good sense today, and it also would have made good sense 10, 25, or 50 years ago.