39: Throughout the history of educational efforts until the current juncture, the problem of policy has been to deploy and allocate scarce information and educative resources. This condition is shifting in our extended present. What we see now with the World Wide Web is a hint at the fullness of cultural participation that is becoming the birthright of each and every child. Educational policy as it has existed has been a complicated system for allocating differential access to the cultural assets of the world's civilizations and for legitimating the results. Soon, educational policy will need to be redefined to take into account a completely novel starting point--all the resources of the world's cultures will in principle be available to any person at any place at any time.
40: Cultural scarcities will surely persist because some people will choose for religious or cultural reasons to forego access, because some political regimes will impose censorship and limitations, and because some individuals and organizations will have sufficient commercial leverage to price access to some resources beyond the means of many. Such retrogressions notwithstanding, the bulk of cultural resources are becoming available to anyone at any place and any time, and the problem of policy shifts significantly with that new condition. Of course, this new condition is becoming a reality for all people, over an extremely extended present time period.[Note 23] But for very large numbers of people living in the more developed sectors of the world, it is taking a very short time to become an approximate reality. As people in advantaged societies start to enjoy random access to unlimited cultural resources, the policy problem shifts from one of allocating scarce resources to managing relatively abundant ones. Let us explore the character and consequences of such a shift.
41: In many different ways, traditional educational policy has served to allocate scarce resources so that preferential access will benefit society and seem legitimate to its members. Policy issues have turned on a fundamental trade-off between people and cultural resources. Under a regime of scarcity, educational institutions can avail a narrow selection of the culture to all people and a full representation of it to a few. In every polity and society throughout the world, formal educational systems consist of pyramidal structures in which very large cohorts receive instruction in basic subjects--reading, writing, and arithmetic. As cohorts move upwards from that base, their numbers dwindle as the selection of the culture that they receive becomes fuller and more complex, and as testing, counseling, and the subtleties of suggestion make many stop the academic ascent. At the apex, a very few gain command of comprehensive research and professional collections. The regime of scarcity seems a natural necessity, for those comprehensive collections were both fragile and costly, and universal participation in advanced cultural activities was a practical impossibility. The whole structure of educational opportunity necessarily identified and prepared a limited number who could make optimum use of the exhaustive resources while endowing others, in due measure, with lesser educational opportunities correlated to their aptitude and need.
42: Digitized cultural resources will have very different economies from those of printed cultural resources. With printed texts, the bulk of production costs are absorbed in the costs of physical reproduction, along with the costs to libraries of storage and preservation. The curve of supply and cost for printed information rises steadily, perhaps even accelerating as large collections require special buildings and staffs for their maintenance. The developing curve of supply and cost for digital resources is different. It has a very steep initial threshold, which is becoming lower as the information infrastructure becomes fuller and more efficient. But above that threshold, both the cost of adding more resources to the set of those available and the cost of making the set accessible to more and more people is low. Legitimizing harsh differentials in the degree of access ceases to be a significant policy problem when everyone has nearly unlimited access to the full stock of assets of the world's cultures.
43: One can find diverse examples of the way in which cultural and educational policies turn on determining and justifying exclusions, or what is the same thing, legitimating inclusion of a few out of many. Such a policy emphasis holds within informal education, as well as in formal.
Let us abstract from such instance, an ideal-type polarity in which the ambiguities of actuality have been set aside: with constrained media, policy enables authorities to make choices on behalf of users, and with digital media, policy shifts the power of choice to users and authorities work to facilitate and assist users in exercising that power.
44: A movement from the pole of constraint towards its opposite is having profound effects on the formation of curricula. Traditionally, curricular resources in schools represent highly constrained choices, and policies determining who teaches what to whom, the methods they use, and the means for assessing the performances of students, teachers, and schools all serve to manage and legitimate these constraints. These policies result in tenaciously ridiculous judgments of cultural worth, as educators have had to rationalize a cramped canon and a sample of historical interpretations that have been simplified to the point of stupidity. In field after field, the range of cultural resources that have substantial educative worth has far exceeded what publishers could cram into textbooks or schools could purchase for their libraries. Thus, the great paradox arose that, except at its most elite pinnacles, education has been a consistently anti-intellectual profession.
45: As digital resources become the basis of the curriculum, the need for these exclusions disappears and the policy problem in education increasingly becomes one of ensuring that all resources are optimally represented in the system and that the navigational tools available to teachers and students dependably enable them to identify and activate the resources that advance their power of cultural participation at the moment when they engage a seminal question. What sorts of policies will conduce to these developments?
The list might go on, but let it for now suffice.
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