Alvin Toffler - Future Shock

It is significant, for example, that one of the chief results of the student strike in France was a massive decentralization of the university system. Decentralization makes possible greater regional diversity, local authority to alter curriculum, student regulations and administrative practices.

A parallel revolution is brewing in the public schools as well. It has already flared into open violence. Like the disturbance at Berkeley that initiated the worldwide wave of student protest, it has begun with something that appears at first glimpse to be a purely local issue.

Thus New York City, whose public education system encompasses nearly 900 schools and is responsible for one out of every forty American public school pupils, has suffered the worst teachers' strike in history – precisely over the issue of decentralization. Teacher picket lines, parent boycotts, and near riot have become everyday occurrences in the city's schools. Angered by the ineffectiveness of the schools, and by what they rightfully regard as blatant race prejudice, black parents, backed by various community forces, have demanded that the entire school system be cut up into smaller "community-run" school systems.

In effect, New York's black population, having failed to achieve racial integration and quality education, wants its own school system. It wants courses in Negro history. It wants greater parental involvement with the schools than is possible in the present large, bureaucratic and ossified system. It claims, in short, the right to be different.

The essential issues far transcend racial prejudice, however. Until now the big urban school systems in the United States have been powerful homogenizing influences. By fixing city-wide standards and curricula, by choosing texts and personnel on a city-wide basis, they have imposed considerable uniformity on the schools.

Today, the pressure for decentralization, which has already spread to Detroit, Washington, Milwaukee, and other major cities in the United States (and which will, in different forms, spread to Europe as well), is an attempt not simply to improve the education of Negroes, but to smash the very idea of centralized, city-wide school policies. It is an attempt to generate local variety in public education by turning over control of the schools to local authorities. It is, in short, part of a larger struggle to diversify education in the last third of the twentieth century. That the effort has been temporarily blocked in New York, largely through the stubborn resistance of an entrenched trade union, does not mean that the historic forces pushing toward destandardization will forever be contained.

Failure to diversify education within the system will simply lead to the growth of alternative educational opportunities outside the system. Thus we have today the suggestions of prominent educators and sociologists, including Kenneth B. Clark and Christopher Jencks, for the creation of new schools outside of, and competitive with, the official public school systems. Clark has called for regional and state schools, federal schools, schools run by colleges, trade unions, corporations and even military units. Such competing schools would, he contends, help create the diversity that education desperately needs. Simultaneously, in a less formal way, a variety of "para-schools" are already being established by hippie communes and other groups who find the mainstream educational system too homogeneous.

We see here, therefore, a major cultural force in the society – education – being pushed to diversify its output, exactly as the economy is doing. And here, exactly as in the realm of material production, the new technology, rather than fostering standardization, carries us toward super-industrial diversity.

Computers, for example, make it easier for a large school to schedule more flexibly. They make it easier for the school to cope with independent study, with a wider range of course offerings and more varied extracurricular activities. More important, computerassisted education, programmed instruction and other such techniques, despite popular misconceptions, radically enhance the possibility of diversity in the classroom. They permit each student to advance at his own purely personal pace. They permit him to follow a custom-cut path toward knowledge, rather than a rigid syllabus as in the traditional industrial era classroom.

Moreover, in the educational world of tomorrow, that relic of mass production, the centralized work place, will also become less important. Just as economic mass production required large numbers of workers to be assembled in factories, educational mass production required large numbers of students to be assembled in schools. This itself, with its demands for uniform discipline, regular hours, attendance checks and the like, was a standardizing force. Advanced technology will, in the future, make much of this unnecessary. A good deal of education will take place in the student's own room at home or in a dorm, at hours of his own choosing. With vast libraries of data available to him via computerized information retrieval systems, with his own tapes and video units, his own language laboratory and his own electronically equipped study carrel, he will be freed, for much of the time, of the restrictions and unpleasantness that dogged him in the lockstep classroom.

The technology upon which these new freedoms will be based will inevitably spread through the schools in the years ahead – aggressively pushed, no doubt, by major corporations like IBM, RCA, and Xerox. Within thirty years, the educational systems of the United States, and several Western European countries as well, will have broken decisively with the mass production pedagogy of the past, and will have advanced into an era of educational diversity based on the liberating power of the new machines.

In education, therefore, as in the production of material goods, the society is shifting irresistibly away from, rather than toward, standardization. It is not simply a matter of more varied automobiles, detergents and cigarettes. The social thrust toward diversity and increased individual choice affects our mental, as well as our material surroundings.

Of all the forces accused of homogenizing the modern mind, few have been so continuously and bitterly criticized as the mass media. Intellectuals in the United States and Europe have lambasted television, in particular, for standardizing speech, habits, and tastes. They have pictured it as a vast lawnroller flattening out our regional differences, crushing the last vestiges of cultural variety. A thriving academic industry has leveled similar charges against magazines and movies.

While there is truth in some of these charges, they overlook critically important counter-trends that generate diversity, not standardization. Television, with its high costs of production and its limited number of channels, is still necessarily dependent upon very large audiences. But in almost every other communications medium we can trace a decreasing reliance on mass audiences. Everywhere the "market segmentation" process is at work.

A generation ago, American movie-goers saw almost nothing but Hollywood-made films aimed at capturing the so-called mass audience. Today in cities across the country these "mainstream" movies are supplemented by foreign movies, art films, sex movies, and a whole stream of specialized motion pictures consciously designed to appeal to sub-markets – surfers, hot-rodders, motorcyclists, and the like. Output is so specialized that it is even possible, in New York at least, to find a theater patronized almost exclusively by homosexuals who watch the antics of transvestites and "drag queens" filmed especially for them.

All this helps account for the trend toward smaller movie theaters in the United States and Europe. According to the Economist, "The days of the 4000-seater Trocadero ... are over ... The old-style mass cinema audience of regular once-a-weekers has gone for good." Instead, multiple small audiences turn out for particular kinds of films, and the economics of the industry are up-ended. Thus Cinecenta has opened a cluster of four 150-seat theaters on a single site in London, and other exhibitors are planning midget movie houses. Once again, advanced technology fosters dehomogenization: the development of in-flight movies has led to new low-cost 16 mm. projection systems that are made to order for the mini-movie. They require no projectionist and only a single machine, instead of the customary two. United Artists is marketing these "cineautomats" on a franchise basis.