CYBERSPACE -- THE ULTIMATE SCHOOL 

What can we learn from the educational aspects of cyberspace? Let us count the ways.

We have all learned a lot from our ability to drive cars. But the most we learned came not from the car per se, but because vehicles took us to places and people we had never known before. We have driven to mountain tops, below sea level in Death Valley, beside rivers, along coastal plains, through city streets and under bridges. All that data input stored in our craniums gave us insight and perspective, gave us what we didn't have before... the ability to think differently.

During the past hundred years or so people flying airplanes or helicopters and space shuttles have been acquiring additional data, perspective and insight. When we see something from a height, we see it differently and we think differently.

Spend some time in a submarine and watch how quickly new thinking patterns surface. The same, in a greatly reduced state of apprehension, occurs in scuba diving. Every exploratory experience changes or at least encourages a change in thinking. Schooling is supposed to prepare us for handling the working world we will enter as adults. But that world has changed faster than teachers can be trained. In many cases today, the kids are better experts in some subjects than their teachers. Things like computer operation, video games, television and pattern recognition. Isn't this telling us something?

We are still pushing the old three R's, (not even the new three R's -Ram, Rom and Run), even when the parents of today's school children are already receiving 70 percent of their information from television. Kids watch a war directly. In many cases they understand the world they are going into better than adults. Isn't it time adults were seen and not heard? At least in subjects where some kids know better?

A cyberspace exploratory world... one in which piezoelectric vibro-tactile actuators respond to every physical feeling possible in any "real" world and more... allow us to learn at a speed and a level never possible before. Let's study a simple situation... a hot stove. Every adult knows a stove is hot. That's because they got burnt once. In a cybernetic world of virtual reality you don't have to go through the pain to understand. You experience the burn, perhaps even the pain but without the damage. But will remember well because you felt the high heat. It's the same with everything else in these other realities. How many kids have stuck their fingers into a light socket? A great thrill if you live to tell about it. Now you can. You will receive the same apparent shock but it won't kill you, yet you will experience it in a "virtual room" with a "virtual light socket". Your mind will indelibly imprint that experience so you'll know better in the future. Now isn't that a sensible way to learn?

We all did the dissect-the-frog-in-biology-class bit. Not popular anymore because of enhanced sensibilities and the environment movement. But how about the dissection of a "virtual frog" in a "virtual laboratory? Now that's painless learning for all -- including the frog. History used to be a bore, right? Not if you are high in the rigging of a pirate ship about to plunder Kingston, Jamaica or in parliament hearing Disraeli speak or in Philadelphia listening to Ben Franklin describe his electrical experiment with a kite. All this is possible now to some extent, and will soon be more realistic in the future. When virtual reality and holographic projection merge, not unlike the marriage of television to the VCR, stand back. The world will change faster than during any previous technological merger. This, as has been said by others, will be the biggest thing in education since the alphabet.

The swiftly moving world of computers, the current and coming political changes and the wide range of new technology in electrical products are our training ground for tomorrow. These changes will revolutionize our people, our environment, our earth and perhaps even its rotation and role in the universe.

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