Tag Archives: educational transformation

Mud Wrestling with McLuhan Part 3 – Youth and Education

In my previous pieces based on Playboy magazine’s extensive 1969 interview with Marshall McLuhan, I looked first at McLuhan’s ideas on how revolutions in our communication technology – particularly the inventions of phonetic literacy, later printing, and most recently electronic media – have fundamentally changed how we perceive the world and thus organize our society. Second, I focused on his idea that people who have grown up in an age using electronic media – radio, movies, television, computers and now the Internet – are becoming in his words “post-literate” and “retribalizing”, which involves moving away from individualism and back to a more collective experience of the world.

For my fellow Baby-boomers, this post-literate retribalization would be most stereotypically seen in the whole hippie subculture with its at times paradoxical conformist non-conformity, including the whole sex, drugs, rock and roll, long hair, bell-bottoms and tie dye thing, the collective focus on “peace, love, joy” and sense of solidarity, as the band The Who sang, “talkin bout my g-g-g-generation”. Think thousands of young people at an anti-war rally holding hands and singing in unison, “All we are saying is give peace a chance”.

For my kids in the Millennial generation, with their developmental milieu of computers, cell phones and the Internet, their “hive mind” of connections with each other through their ubiquitous electronic devices would seem the most obvious evidence of perhaps an even higher level of the same retribalization. A blank stare at times to their parents or other adults, masking a complicated web of virtual “kinship” with each other.

So in this third installment of my messy tussle with the ideas of this “metaphysician of media”, I want to look at the issues he raises regarding the development of retribalized youth in a culture that still has not come to grips with its post-literate zeitgeist. My fellow Baby-boomers these days cavalierly throw around the term “gone viral” like we’re still hip and all, but I don’t think we fully understand what it means when our entire culture is in the grips of such virtual infections spread by our ubiquitous electronic media.

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Millions Marching to One Great Command

American Educational Pioneer Horace Mann (1796-1859)
American Educational Pioneer Horace Mann (1796-1859)
A Jehovah’s Witness comes to my door and tells me that there is only one way to find peace and salvation… through Jesus Christ the Lord. Arne Duncan comes on my TV telling me that every youth in America needs to follow one set of national standards for education, to achieve economic salvation of sorts. A noted journalism professor is interviewed by NPR saying that the decline of newspapers is robbing us of the ability to all read the same editorial at the same time so we as a country can all talk about it together.

In a world of now seven billion people, with any number of religions, languages, cultures, rich veins of varied wisdom, and exploding amounts of knowledge that can not even begin to be encompassed by any learning content standard, many of us still seem to long for the unity of the one path and the power of millions marching to the same command. When the all-powerful deity, enlightened leader or best-practice expert sounds the call, everyone should have the common grounding to understand and appreciate that it is time to march and answer that call. Continue reading →