Ladies and gentlemen,

You have hired me to perform an impossible task. Envisioning education and society in the 21st century is no picnic.

On the other hand, just as I said that, it occured to me that, ideally, education in the 21st century ought to be a picnic, just like it was in ancient Greece when Socrates taught in the market-place among olives, cheeses, and goats. Socrates took no attendance, didn't care who sat at his feet -- though he prefered the more muscular boys-- and cared not a whit whether his audience wandered off to crack a melon or take a swig of mead chased by a black olive and a chunk of feta.

What mattered to Socrates was that the electricity of the mind that makes it possible for someone to take interest in the life of the mind be present. The engagement of the listener's mind mattered to him because he wanted to elicit from that mind something that might spark off his. These sparks then travelled from mind to mind and they created what some people are fond of calling Western Civilisation.

When I say, "some people," I think of people like Bill Bennett and others, who like to enclose what was left behind by the Greeks into an all-encompassing canon meant to restrict the mind to a definite time period. A time period for which the year 2,000 has a significance akin to a cattle-gate. Two thousand years of Western Civilisation conceived as a Texas ranch full of canonical longhorns. What lies beyond this rancho in the next millenium is for the nostalgists and the canonizers just further acquiring of ranchland for Western Civ, until the future is only more grazing land for canon cattle.

Did they tell you I was a poet? Anyway, to get back to the picnic, it is not very useful in the end to use such definitions as Western Civ. Socrates' picnic remains the basis of education. The electricity generated between the teacher and the student is only a metaphor too, because the teaching in the agora took place before the discovery and universal use of electricity. When night fell over Athens and Socrates was still speaking, the attention of his listeners may have wandered toward the stars, and the passing around of the amphora full of spirits may have given the sharing of knowledge an exploratory and poetical cast that it lacked in the daytime. There were no set limits to the teaching, nor was there any fear of darkness or nonsense. The class may have well erupted into song around midnight and, while we have no record of the tunes or the words, you may be sure that they were filled with sentiments we still experience in the same form.

There is a particularly sad time of the day, true now as it was then, namely twilight. This is the time when day turns into night and snakes die. This is also the time when the wedge between life and death is thinnest & our souls fill with melancholy. The Socratic injunction to "know yourself," is particularly poignant at this time, because this is the time when we realize that the more we know about the world the less we seem to know about ourselves. We have done our best since the advent of electricity to banish night, but twilight remains a vulnerable time. I would argue that twilight is the greatest challenge to pedagogy in our time, and will remain so in the next century.

For all our new vocabularies, which have been trying to replace the feeling of twilight melancholy with apt psychological and neuro-chemical terms, there is still something that eludes us. This precious "something," which may be called variously, the search for oneself, poetry, dreamtime, unquantifyable reverie, unproductive daydreaming, or plain wandering, is the key to our development. The existence of this unstable and undefinable substance is essential to our survival, hence to our education. But this substance is diminishing. There is less and less of it.

Our need to procreate and to know originate in what other Greeks called Chaos. Chaos was not an emptiness, but a rich, generative source from which all form proceeded. All creation stories, including our scientific ones, begin in a fertile Nothingness from which the world springs into being. This creation, moved by the original demiurgic force, continues to create in turn increasingly specialized products, imbued with increasingly attenuated portions of the demiurgic substance, or the original Chaos. Populating the world with people and with ideas is, seemingly, our mission as a speciae, but these activities are impossible without periodical dips in the restorative waters of the original Nothingness. Getting back there would seem to be more difficult the farther away we get from those beginnings. And yet, it is only the manner in which we conceive of time that gives this necessary return a chronological and impossible appearance. In reality, it is no more difficult to get back to Chaos than it is to close your eyes and disappear to an indescribable, undefinable, and unlocatable place inside or outside yourself. Children are there quite often and it is from that place that we bring them back, quite unpleasantly, when we need to train them.

It will not do to minimize the alienating nature of time, which has become the one undeniable ruler of our world. But we must not forget Neitzche's injunction, "one must have a bit of Chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star."

Two major forces made possible Socrates teaching: democracy and free time. You can reduce these two forces to one, namely democracy, and argue that the natural product of a functioning democracy is free time, time that belongs to oneself, not to the state or to a master. Since we seem to have less and less time, we might want to ask ourselves what kind of democracy we live and whether the time we do have is really ours.

We live, I believe, in a paradoxical democracy. In the three decades since since I've been in America I've seen some tremendous changes: the social fabric of our country has been changing. The latest waves of immigrants have brought their energy and hopes here and proceeded to do what every generation of new Americans has done: do either the jobs the natives no longer want, or supplement native workers in areas where there are not enough of them. The social life of immigrants has also had a visible impact. Today, food is spicier, our cities are more interesting, and in certain places one can hear ten languages in half a block. At the same time, the fears of displaced blue collar workers in a time of vanishing manufacturing jobs is easily focused by demagogues in the direction of immigrants. Immigrants are more flexible, more adaptable, and still have, for the most part, a firm grasp on those "family values" that our social conservatives bemoan the loss of in the natives.

The ability of the majority of Americans to ignore the xenophobes is not proof of altruism or a better nature, but a simple recognition that our booming economy needs labor and is predicated on speed, efficiency, and long hours. This economy is where the more overt challenges to educators come from. The economy needs all hands on deck as quickly and as well trained as possible and speaking English -- at least enough English to read the software instructions. The new American economy does not, for the most part, need philosophers, poets, or people given over to long bouts of twilight melancholy; it will take a well-trained engineer over Fred Neitzche any day.

But there is a paradox here: the expanding economy would like us to train machines, but the fundamental reason for the growth of this economy lies in inventiveness, unconventional thinking, and self-knowledge. It depends on change, turbulence, and a certain degree of chaos to stimulate creativity. In this country we no longer have a sturdy, middle-aged capitalism that delivers an idealized version of the American dream, which consisted of a house in a suburb with lots of free time to do with as you pleased.

The new American economy is an economy for those willing to put their entire life into the workplace, to sacrifice every minute of their time to the company. In other words, it's an economy for the young and hungry, and for immigrants obsessed with the need to succeed. Such sacrifice of time works on the one hand, but on the other, it subverts the very efficiency of the workplace by taking away the reflective twilight from which discovery springs.

This contradictory need for both robots and philosophers may lead to a new class split in American life and education. The two new classes may be: drones and free spirits. From a practical viewpoint, the Corporate State would like the public school system to train machines, while elite, private, or corporate schools would encourage spontaneity, critical thinking, and flexible management.

Educators are pulled into two opposing directions, one that requires them to train obedient technocrats, and another that demands the cultivation of creativity. The training of technocrats is, however, the main job and, consequently, humanities are on the wane, while the discussion of ethics is severely discouraged. But in a true democracy, everyone would have the right to critical thinking and self-knowledge, the right to the Socratic agora, and every one should be able to ask fundamental questions.

Here are a couple: is the cultivation of self-knowledge possible in the coming world? Will there even be such a thing as the "self," in the future? Was there ever such a thing?

In order to make the training of technocrats a pleasant task, the corporate world dangles before us the wonders of technology. Computers in every classroom. The Internet at the students' fingertips. Classrooms wired for everything except escape!

In this context, we might also want to ask ourselves about the relationship between technology and democracy, and between education and technology. There are a number of schools of thought about these matters. Some people believe that technology has brought about more democracy, and some think that technology is bringing about a new form of corporate oligarchy. Everybody, with a few quaint exceptions like Wendell Berry, agrees that technology is inevitable, therefore the question is not fundamental but breaks down, rather, into questions about specific technologies and whom they affect.

There are also does who believe that there is something called Values, which must be taught independently of any technology. These Values, according to them, exist in an Eternal State of Suspension somehow, ever since they were handed down by God on some tablets. Unfortunately, these Values refer only to human beings as we've known them until now, and have scant relevance to the Human Beings of the Future, who may or may not be like us. In the 21st century, one must think about what values pertain to Cyberbeings, Intelligent Machines, Chimeras, and Clones. The debate about whether we should even allow these beings into existence has already started. It's a hopeless debate, however, because we live in a capitalist democracy. Chimeras and clones are profitable. Only an autocratic religious state might prevent the birth of such beings and if one is deadset against them, one can always move to Iran.

The problem of attaching an ethical caveat to knowledge is that it must be enforced. Socrates in his primitive democracy did not teach Values, but rather value. He taught the value of seeing, noting, and behaving as one saw fit, once in possession of knowledge. This teaching of value cannot be done by listing rules and enforcing them. It can be done only by the living example of a lively interest in phenomena, an interest that can be communicated only from living teacher to living student. A machine, excitingly programmed, might provide a simulacrum of excitement, but it will lack the melancholy of twilight which, as I've mentioned, is indispensible to genuine knowledge. And, as it turns out, to the latest capitalism.

Many optimists are relieved now that one-way media, such as television, have given way to interactive media. They believe that the passivity of the spectator has now been challenged by interactivity and that this interactivity stimulates thinking and action. I would argue that one form of passivity (television) has been replaced by another form of passivity that is disguised by interactivity to look like activity. The ingredient I am tracking, namely personal liberty and free time, is not increased by the so-called interactivity of the new media. The liberty gained by having access to the circuitry of the world wide web or to one's own web of relationships is only virtual.

Think of a child strapped into Virtual Reality gear: he or she is experiencing all the excitement of an adventure. Yet, his or her body goes nowhere and the adventure is pre-programmed. Who gains from this experience? Not the child, who has just gained fifty pounds by not moving, and has exhausted all her energy by following the parameters of the program. The only one who gains from this virtual exchange is the programmer, who has just extorted two hours from the child and has taught this young brain the rules of a game whose purpose is the selling of more such games.

Let's say that this software is educational, not frivolous. Instead of blowing away unknown entities, the program guides the kid up the Nile, introduces her to ancient Egyptians, and has her dissect a lion who springs miraculously back to life to demonstrate lovely hunting techniques. Unplugged from the software, she then trains vigorously for the Olympics, using the latest body-efficient techne, and then becomes an excellent member of society and a dynamic force in the community.

Is there anything wrong with this picture? Nothing, on the face of it. But remember the ingredient I am still tracking: free time, personal liberty, unstructured reverie. None of it is present during this beneficial interactivity. We are already asking our children to absorb a tremendous amount of training and are pushing to the limit their capacities for information-absorbtion and organization. In the future, thanks to our interactive technology, we are going to colonize every corner of their young minds with the increasingly hungry demands of our society.

The true enemy of future education is truancy. Yet, paradoxically, truancy may be the only way to save the future. As a society, we have expended a great deal of anxiety trying to figure out where our children went after 11 PM, and where their minds were, if they were at home. Being absent, in body or mind, is the one thing that our grownup society will not tolerate in children. Spacing out, being truant, floating in space, tripping, going without a plan -- all these things have negative connotations now, and they will have increasingly negative connotations in the future.

The great American poet Frank O'Hara entitled one of his books, "Meditations in an Emergency.' It's an apt title. O'Hara, who worked a dayjob, found that the only way to write poetry, or simply exist, for that matter, was to learn how to meditate in an emergency. Our world is very good at creating the illusion that we live in midst of a constant state of emergency. The media creates an atmosphere of urgency and catastrophe. "News," the byword for anxiety, makes sure that all emergencies, local and global, are everybody's business every second of the day. Wars and massacres are, of course, ideal for this business, but small disasters, if reported with a sufficient degree of gravity, can be equally distressing. Education, in all its blythe post-enlightenment ineluctability, creates another kind of urgency, namely that you can never learn enough and there is never enough time to learn. The political system, fed by huge advertising budgets, creates a constant citizenship emergency from which no individual is exempted. Political choices are made to appear essential to the survival of our democracy, and rivers of anxiety and guilt are directed at those who somehow fail to exercise what once was called "privileges," but is now mandatory. Add to these emergency-generating systems, the greatest one of them all: the demands of capitalism for higher production and consumption. It is a heresy these days to deride the idea of a "job." Having a job is the highest virtue in the republic. Not wanting one is tantamount to a crime. Even crime, if it is going to be worthy of respect, must meet the backbreaking standards of professionalism and efficiency common to all other productive members of the Emergency Society.

None of these urgencies and emergencies were mandatory in Socrates' Athens. They were not even mandatory fifty years ago. Some of you will doubtlessly remember when things like washing machines and microwaves were touted as liberators of housewives. These machines were going to allow them more free time for themselves. Right. You may remember also the time when a telephone was a luxury not a necessity. Only dire news was communicated by means of this obnoxious apparatus. As I am speaking now, there are doubtlessly people in this audience, who can't wait to get to their cell phones and beepers in order to receive or transmit communications that seem vitally important. Every technology, from cars to computers, began as a luxury that promised liberty and ended up by being indispensible and stripping us of the very thing promised.

Some of you may think that I sound like Ted Kozchinsky, and you may be right. The only difference is that I see little gain in being a Luddite. I am describing a fait-accompli, and my hope is that within the world that we have made for ourselves, the antidotes to it are already coming into being.

Escaping the confines of a demanding society in which both education and amusement are heavily invested in full-time attention, may be the only way to think beyond the present. In the future, escape itself is going to undergo change, in response to the demands of education and entertainment. Already, the means of escaping adult detection are making use of the very technology we would like to employ for "beneficial" purposes. (It's "beneficial," between quotes, as in "Drink this, it's good for you!) The hacker sub-culture is subversive in the employ of "slack," which is another word for "downtime," or reverie. Using the same technology used to confine them, hackers carve new electronic pathways back to Chaos.

The merging of neural and cybernetic networks is no longer science fiction. Genetic and electronic research is reaching a point of convergence. The 21st century will doubtlessy see the appearance of the first tentative Immortals. Organ replacement, cloning, and digital duplication will allow some human beings to live as long as they want. By the end of the 21st century the world may be ruled by a few hundred-year old beings able to live for four more centuries. Such longevity, combined with the accumulation of wealth and power, can make these people de facto tyrants and a real threat to whatever electronic, direct democracy might exist by then. It is possible that hackers may get there at the same time and provide a chaotic alternative to such will to power. But I doubt it.

A teaching imperative in the 21st century would be, it seems to me, the fundamentals of democracy in the context of as-yet unimagined threats to it. Ethics in an age of chimeras, cloning, and digital wars, becomes both necessary and difficult. We are back to the slippery ground of Values and Value. I believe that the distinction between the Conservative plural of this word and its singular usage is going to be the greatest challenge of the 21st century, its battle for twilight.

To reprise my earlier argument, Values cannot be imposed by fiat on minds in the process of discovery, without freezing that process in its tracks. There is something indecent, unhinged, unbound, downright obscene in the surrender to exploration. The dread underlying the need to impose Values is a fear of what the student might discover by going to unauthorized places. The student might get to know him or herself, a prospect that is far from benign. A student might find within a potentially destructive power capable of undoing God's creation. Which has, of course, already happened, because of the socratic insistence of self-knowledge, which led directly to the triumph of unethical sciences, not to speak of the triumph of militarized mediocrity... etc. The 21st century is not going to be an enlightened time. The burning of books, the V-ing of chips, the cybercoding and meta-coding and audience-rating is going to increase -- all in the name of Biblical Values adapted to a techno-jungle.

And then, there is the Singular: value, which is born of understanding the importance of discovery and knowledge, and has, I believe, an organically beneficial effect. The understanding of what value is will have to be discovered from within the evolution or changing definition of human beings in the future. Understanding the value of one's own voyage in the coming bio-cyber world depends entirely on the socratic teaching of self-knowledge with all its gaps of slack & spacing-out.

Some of you may be already angry at me for a simple but complex reason, namely for presenting you with a seemingly impossible paradox. How do you incorporate Chaos in the curriculum? Aren't they structurally incompatible? How do you institutionalize something that is seemingly anti-institutional?

Here are some of my suggestions, some of them poetic, granted:

1) Get rid of computers in the schools. Forbid any technology in the classroom, including paper and pencils. Every student will have enough technology at home already, which they can use at home. In this way, the classroom will be a place of freedom, while home and the outside world will be a place of obligatory learning. By reversing the traditional relationship between school and not-school, you will have your students' undivided attention.

2) Train teachers in the Socratic method by training them to be full-time teachers and by that, I mean, teachers all the time, not just during school hours. This kind of teacher is a kind of monastic creature, of course, but not a cloistered monastic. As we are often fond of saying, without knowing what we are saying, "Learning is a life-long prcess." Well, let that apply to teaching. To bring about such teachers, we must pay them as much as the best-paid computer geeks.

3) Value the humanities, particularly poetry, because the humanities are best suited to deal with the paradoxes born out of the tension between changing definitions of human beings.

4) Teach naked. Insofar as clothes are an ideology, reflecting the values of the world, you would be greatly advantaged by their lack. Besides, students might be smuggling computers inside their clothes. A lack of clothes will make it impossible for anyone to carry weapons into the schools, thus eliminating a pesky 20th century problem. Also, the savings realized by eliminating uniforms could be applied to teachers' salaries. The Naked Classroom of the 21st Century is the heir of the Open Classroom of mid-20th century.

5) Teach outside, wherever possible. If this is impossible during cold weather, use portable heated classrooms which can be moved to different locations very quickly. The nomadic school of the 21st century should be entirely portable, and students should be able to pack the school on their backs and transport it and themselves to whatever place might seem appropriate for the day's learning. Institutions of higher learning will, likewise, be decentralized, each discipline practicing its discourse in midst of its practical field.

6) Eliminate the educational bureaucracy -- beginning with the Department of Education, standardized tests, school boards, school principals, curricula handed from above, mandatory textbooks, and all the rest. Base the entire enterprise on the teacher.

7) Quote to yourselves this line of poetry, by John Ashbery, and I paraphrase: "Take care of value, the rest is shopping."