3 Emergent Humanity: Its Environment and Education

3  Emergent Humanity: Its Environment and Education

2An educational revolution is upon us.

3 One of the most important events of this peaceful but profound revolution is our dawning discovery that the child is born comprehensively competent and coordinate, capable of treating with large quantities of data and families of variables right from the start.¹

4 Every well-born child is originally geniused, but is swiftly de-geniused by unwitting humans and/or physically unfavorable environmental factors. ‘‘Bright’’ children are those less traumatized. Of course, some children have special inbred aptitudes and others, more crossbred, are more comprehensively coordinated.

5 But the new life is inherently comprehensive in its apprehending, comprehending and coordinating capabilities. The child is interested in Universe, and asks universal questions.

6 This propensity of the child toward comprehensivity, given a properly patterned environment, is attested in such works as Benjamin Bloom's Stability and Change in Human Characteristics,² and Wilder Penfield and Lamar Roberts's Speech and Brain Mechanisms.³

7 Through electro-probing of the human brain, we are beginning to understand something of its energy patterns and information processing. We apparently start life with a given totalbrain-cell capacity, component areas of which are progressively employed in a series of events initiated in the individual's brain by chromosomic ‘‘alarm clocks.’’ Put your finger in the palm of a newborn baby's hand and the baby will close its tiny hand deftly around your finger, for its tactile apprehending organism is operative in superb coordination. Soon the ‘‘alarm clock’’ calls the hearing function into operation, and on its own unique schedule the baby will also see.

8 In a stimulating environment, the brain's chromosomic alarm clocks and ‘‘ticker tape’’ instructions inaugurate use of the child's vast inventory of intercoordinate capabilities and faculties. Children are not in fact taught and cannot be taught by others to inaugurate these capabilities. They teach themselves—if given the chance—at the right time. This provision of environmental experience conducive to the child's intellectual development has been termed the ‘‘problem of the match’’ by J. MeV. Hunt, in his Intelligence and experience,⁴ he also speaks of ‘‘motivation inherent in information processing.’’

9 Bloom finds that environment has its greatest influence on a human characteristic—such as intelligence—during the period of time in which the characteristic is undergoing its greatest rate of growth or change. Thus, by age four, 50 percent of the child's total capacity to develop its I.Q. is realized.

10 If not properly attended to and given the chance to function, despite the brain's alarm-clock inauguration of progressive potentialities in the first four years, the brain mechanisms can be frustrated and can shut off the valves of specific capacities and capabilities to learn, then or later on, in the specific areas. The capabilities need not necessarily be employed to an important degree immediately after being triggered into inception, but must upon inception be put in use and kept in use as active tools in the human coordinating capability, else they will squelch themselves, ‘‘shut themselves off,’’ not necessarily irreparably, but usually so.

11 Piaget has said: ‘‘The more children have seen and heard, the more they want to see and hear.’’ I add: ‘‘The more children have coordinated, the more they want to coordinate.’’

12 By age eight, 80 percent of the child's total capability to selfimprove I.Q. in learning how to learn is activated. By age thirteen, 92 percent of this capability is self-started into usability and by seventeen, the final 8 percent of the total capacity to coordinate and apprehend, to comprehend and teleologically employ input data, has become operative.

13 Traditionally, the great bulk of government educational funds has been applied after the critical birth-to-eight period during which 80 percent of the child's educational capacity is being established. In the light of recent research findings, our input of personnel, funds, and energy into education must be reversed.⁵ A powerful case can be made for inverting the educational structure—for paying parents or other people responsible for the most important, formative years more than college professors—in due ratio to their greater responsibility. O. K. Moore, of ‘‘talking typewriter’’ fame, has made a similar suggestion.⁶

14 Let us focus our efforts to help the new life on the critical first thirteen years, when approximately 92 percent of brain function is progressively and automatically ‘‘turned-on,’’ ‘‘tuned-in,’’ ‘‘tuned-out,’’ or ‘‘shut-off,’’ in direct response to the positives or negatives of the individual's environmental experiences and potentials, keeping in mind that by age four 50 percent of brain function is realized, which must be properly set in use and kept in use.

15 Not only intelligence is developed during these formative years, but also the basic characteristics determining much of the individual's personality and behavior as well.

16 Will the older, adult life demonstrate that it really wants more life by designing an environment to foster the new child-life adequately—to nourish the unfolding flowers of the ‘‘cortical gardens?’’ As I predicted in the Saturday Review:

17

18In the next decade, society is going to be preoccupied with the child because through the behavioral sciences and electrical exploration of the brain we find that, given the right environment and thoughtful answers to his questions, children have everything they need educationally right from birth. We have thought erroneously of education as the mature wisdom and over-brimming knowledge of the grownups injected by the discipline pump into the otherwise ‘‘empty’’ child's head. Sometimes, parents say ‘‘don't’’ because they want to protect the child from getting into trouble. At other times when they fail to say ‘‘no’’ the child gets into trouble. The child, frustrated, stops exploring. It is possible to design environments within which the child will be neither frustrated nor hurt, yet free to develop spontaneously and fully without trespassing on others. I have learned to undertake reform of the environment and not to try to reform humanity. If we design the environment properly, it will permit children and adults to develop safely and to behave logically.⁷

19 The work of Bloom, Erikson,⁸ and others reveals that this environment must promote trust, autonomy, and initiative. The human newborn remains helpless longer than the young of any other species. It is in trust to the adult's competent care, and should experience no breach of basic trust.

20 The child needs to have an area that is really its own—just as individuals of other species need a minimum regenerative territory. The child's room should be its ‘‘autonomy area’’—the new life's learning lab complete with the expendables needed for testing tension, cohesion, etc., by tensing and tearing techniques.

21 This leads into initiative—the third element of critically controlling importance during the first four years. Psychologists have long told us that children need to touch to get basic information. But they also need to conduct all manner of experiments, as with gravity and inertia when they knock objects off a table. Likewise, children require experiences which indicate the coherence of things. After tearing newspapers apart and finding they give poor tensional support they will want to explore silk and other materials. As W. Gray Walter has observed, ‘‘What the nervous system receives from the sense organs is information about differences—about ratios between stimuli.’’ ⁹

22 Children, first taking apart and then putting together, learn to coordinate spontaneously. They learn about the way Universe works.

23 Children mustn't be stopped thoughtlessly as they go through their basic explorations. If parents break up that exploratory initiative by too many ‘‘don'ts’’ or punishments, or by having things in the child's environment that are dangerous and by which the child gets hurt too frequently, spontaneity will be stifled, probably permanently. Fortunately, a few determined and reinspired individuals whose spontaneous employment of innate capabilities has been curtailed or abandoned due to childhood frustrations, manage to later ‘‘find’’ themselves, but these cases are rare.

24 In experimental work at Southern Illinois University, we have learned that the maturing student, like the younger learner, wants privacy—a special place. We have developed a little, individual, private room-booth with a windowed door which ‘‘belongs’’ to each student in our project. When the students first enter they find in their private ‘‘room’’ all kinds of desirable items: a telephone directly and privately connected to the teacher; a good dictionary; wall charts of the periodic table of the elements; a world globe; a wall-mounted chart of the electromagnetic spectrum; a private typewriter, and other items conducive to thought and study. It becomes an obviously realized privilege to be allowed to go into this private study, where their reflexes become progressively conditioned, by association with that environment, and the students give themselves spontaneously to study, calculation, and writing. They find themselves producing. Their minds really begin to work.

25 As Southern Illinois University's President Delyte Morris—a true leader—has pointed out: ‘‘The assumption here is that 'dropouts' indicate inadequacy of the educational system and not of the human individual.’’

26 In my Ideas and integrities: a spontaneous autobiographical disclosure¹⁰ I have said that education, in the sense of man's being educente (led out from) the monological fixations of ignorance, involves also being led into, intro-ducente, (introduced to) the new awareness of the dynamic fluidity of the infinite persistence of complex-yet-systematic interaction of universal principles.

27 I consider the primary concern of education as exploring to discover not only more about Universe and its history but also about what Universe is trying to do, about why human beings are part of it, and how they may best function in universal evolution. We are finding ways to help children coordinate their spontaneous comprehension of the whole instead of becoming specialists without losing any of the advantages gained by yesterday's exclusive specialization.

28 Our present global civilization requires an educational approach embracing at the outset the most comprehensive review of fundamental ‘‘generalized’’ principles. As these are progressively mastered, the approach should continue through their subdivision and application to separate localized cases. Having established this order from ‘‘the whole to the particular’’ we need to take all of the advantages afforded us by the latest communications developments through which the complex patternings and behavior of Universe may be brought within reach and made part of humanity's working everyday experience.

29 Today, the vastness, complexity and detail of our knowledge requires restructuring into assimilable wholes, to be imparted even at the most elementary levels in terms of whole systems. We can no longer think in terms of single static entities—one thing, situation, or problem—but only in terms of dynamic changing processes and series of events that interact complexly.

30 Despite their venerated status, a large part, if not all of our educational institutions and their disciplines are obsolete. Virtually everything we thought we understood concerning education is fast becoming useless or worse. For example, because experiment invalidates most of the axioms of mathematics such as the existence of solids, continuous surfaces, straight lines, etc., much of the mathematical curriculum sanctioned by mathematical educators, adopted by school boards, and taught in all elementary schools is false, irrelevant, discouraging, and debilitating to the children's brain functioning.

31 We are going to develop an environment in which the new generation is so protected from the lovingly administered nonsense of grownups that it can develop naturally just in time to save humanity from self-annihilation.

32 Half a century ago, in 1917, I found myself thinking that nature didn't have separate departments of physics, chemistry, biology, and mathematics requiring meetings of department heads in order to decide how to make bubbles and roses!

33 I decided nature had only one department and only one arithmetical, angle-and-frequency, modulating-and-coordinating system. I am quite confident that I have discovered an importantly large area of the arithmetical, geometrical, topological, crystalographic, and energetically vectorial coordinate system employed by nature itself. It is a triangular and tetrahedronal system. It uses 60-degree coordination instead of 90-degree coordination. It permits kindergarten modeling of the fourth and fifth arithmetical powers, i.e., fourth and fifth dimensional aggregations of points and spheres, etc., in an entirely rational coordinate system. I have explored the fundamental logic of the structural mathematics strategies of nature which always employ the six sets of degrees of freedoms and most economical actions.

34 The omnirational coordinate system whichI have named synergetics is not an invention. It is purely discovery. With the complete and simple modelability of synergetics it will be possible for children at home with closed-circuit TV documentaries coming to them, and making their own models, to do valid nuclear physics formulations at kindergarten age. With this fundamental structuring experience, and sensing through models, children will discover with experiments why water does what it does. They will really understand what a triangle is and what it can do and does.

35 I agree with Jerome Bruner, whose report of the 1959 Woods Hole Conference advanced the hypothesis that ‘‘any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development.’’¹¹

36 As Margaret Mead has indicated in her classic, Coming of age in Samoa, we must direct our educational efforts to preparing children for coping effectively with the choices and changes which are confronting them. We should design a Curriculum of Change, not merely a changing curriculum.’’ ¹²

37 Obviously, one of the reasons why scientific education has seemed too difficult for many is the fact that much of its mathematics is founded upon experimentally unprovable myths which must greatly offend the intuitive sensitivity of the lucidly thinking new life.

38 When we combine our knowledge that the period from birth to four is the crucial ‘‘school’’ opportunity, with the discovery that entirely new mathematical simplicities are at hand, we must realize that educational theory is entering a period of complete revolution. Excepting the mathematical-physicists, the revolution about to take place in mathematics education may be amongst history's most violent academic reforms. You will not have to wait long to discover that I am right.

39 It is very clear to me that when children stand up, breathing and coordinating exquisitely complex patterns by themselves, get their own balance and start drinking in the patterns of cosmos and earth, they are spontaneously interested in coordinating the total information—the total stimulation. Children crave to understand—to comprehend. That is why they ask their myriad questions.

40 New tools will make it easier for the young to discover experimentally what really is going on in nature so that they will not have to continue taking so much nonsense on experimentally unverified axiomatic faith.

41 Computers, suddenly making human beings obsolete as specialists, force them back into comprehensivity functioning, which they were born spontaneously to demonstrate.

42 Computers as learning tools can take over much of the ‘‘educational metabolics,’’ freeing us to really put our brains and wisdom to work. A recent report by the President's Science Advisory Committee recommends that the government underwrite a program to give every college student in America access to a computer by 1971. I suggest that we give every preschooler access first!

43 One device I have invented to provide total information integration is the ‘‘Geoscope’’ or miniature Earth. After sixteen years of experimentation and development, I can describe it as a 200-foot diameter sphere with 10 million electric light bulbs—each with controllable light intensity—evenly covering the entire surface and hooked up to a computer to provide, in effect, an omnidirectional spherical television tube which when seen at a distance, will have as good resolution as a fine mesh halftone print. The Geoscope, accurately picturing the whole earth, will be used to communicate phenomena presently not communicable, and therefore not comprehended by the human eye-brain relay. For example, we could show all the population data for the world for the last 300 years, identifying every 1,000 human beings by a red light located at the geographical centers occupied by each 1,000 human beings. You would then be able in one minute to develop the picture of the world's population growth and geographical spread trends of recent centuries. You would see the glowing red mass spreading northwestward around the globe like a great fire. You would be able to run that data for another second or two to carry you through three or four more decades of population growth. While the edge of the data would be unreliable, the gravity and momentum centers of population would be quite reliable. Or all the cloud cover and weather information around Earth can be shown and accelerated to predict the coming weather everywhere.

44 If we were to flash a red light for each 1,000 ‘‘reading problems’’ in U.S. urban school systems, our metropolitan areas, including the nation's capital, would flicker in distress.

45 According to a March 1967 Washington Post, ‘‘At least one out of three public school students in Washington is reading two grades or more below where he should be…Many are reading five, six, or seven grades behind.’’¹³

46 The question I would ask of the ‘‘reading readiness’’ advocates is: ‘‘When are these children going to be ready to read?’’

47 In The Case for Early Reading, the authors have assembled considerable and convincing evidence that preschool children [Why not call them ‘‘school-at-home’’ children?] want to and will learn to read at home given the opportunity.

48 Their argument that the ‘‘before-age-six’’ period is the naturally optimum time for language learning—reading included—is increasingly supported by recent research disclosures in diverse disciplines which, coupled with the historical evidence cited, merits the closest consideration.

49 Of current relevance is the March 1967 NEA Journal report of the Denver study of 4,000 school children designed to determine whether beginning reading could be taught effectively in the kindergarten.

50 The experimental kindergarten group who were given special reading instruction twenty minutes a day and an adjusted program in the first and later grades showed the greatest initial and long-range gains in both reading comprehension and vocabulary. They also read faster than any of the other groups at the end of the third grade. Early reading instruction was shown, in short, to have ‘‘a positive, measurable, continuing effect.’’ ¹⁴

51 Stevens and Orem would agree that kindergarten as the time for introducing reading instruction¹⁵ is preferable to first grade.

52 But, they argue, prekindergarten children must be provided an environment which epigenetically enhances early reading, for they have the prime potential for language learning—a potential which, they say, will prove to be of revolutionary significance for educational strategists.

53 I am confident that these authors are going to win their ‘‘case,’’ for it is increasingly evident that the child's neurophysiology is on their side.

54 What we must plan now, on an even more comprehensive scale than the important Denver project, are imaginative and innovative studies to determine the optimum school-at-home combinations of these elements: (1) home environment, with enlightened parents; (2) TV, computers, and other tools and technology conveying the most cogent content; and (3) young child's motivation and sensitive period for symbol systems mastery—and communication-computational competencies.

55 Another device which I have invented to encourage comprehensive thinking is my Dymaxion map, originally published in Life, March 22, 1943, and the first projection system to be granted a U.S. patent as a cartographic innovation. Dr. Robert Marks has described it as ‘‘the first in the history of cartography to show the whole surface of the earth in a single view with approximately imperceptible distortion of the relative shapes and sizes of the land and sea masses.’’ ¹⁶ This map, whichI now call my Sky-ocean World Map, is an aid in effectively conceiving the totality of world (and Universe) events.

56 Because three-fourths of Earth's surface is covered by water, I have developed a ‘‘fluid geography’’ approach to the study of geography, to correct the ‘‘landlubber’’ bias prevalent in our schools.

57 I have also been engaged over the years in writing a comprehensive maritime reconstruction of history—a saga of the world's sailormen ‘‘seeding’’ civilization by ship.

58 When I talk about changing obsolete, ineffective, and debilitating school patterns, the established reflexive conditioning of our brains tends to expect a lag of another 100 years to bring about that change. But the rate at which information is being disseminated and integrated into our current decision-making regarding the trending topics I am discussing indicates that the changes are going to happen quite rapidly. My advice to educators who are thinking about what they may dare undertake is, ‘‘Don't hesitate to undertake the most logical solutions. Take the biggest steps right away and you will be just on time!’’

59 Individuals are going to study at home in their elementary, high school, and college years. Not until their graduate-work days begin will they take residence on campus. Inasmuch as the period of greatest educational capability development is before age four the home is the primary schoolhouse—and kindergarten is the high school.

60 As John McHale, Executive Director of the World Resources Inventory, has noted: ‘‘It is now literally and technically possible to have the equivalent of the school (or even college) actually in the home dwelling. This may very well be the indicated direction for educational and training development in the emerging countries. It is not really a new concept. The home/family dwelling as the prime educational environ and its re-integration as a fully advantaged unit are new.’’ ¹⁷

61 One may already ‘‘tune in’’ on knowledge through the radio, TV, and telephone. With more sophisticated systems, now available, one may individually select, and follow through, complex sequences and instructional programs.

62 Advances in educational technology have now made available a number of measurably efficient, self-instructional programmed materials, which are swiftly developing into presequenced ‘‘packaged learning’’ devices employing video tape, film, book texts, plus the remote computer linkages via libraries and control centers.

63 As I have forecast in Education Automation¹⁸, we are faced with a future in which education will be the number one great world industry, within which will flourish an educational machine technology providing tools such as the individually selected and articulated two-way TV and an intercontinentally networked, documentaries call-up system, operative over any home two-way TV set.

64 In my 1938 Nine chains to the moon, ¹⁹I outlined a number of predictions including, ‘‘Broadcast Education: the main system of general educational instruction to go on the air and screen.’’ Frank Lloyd Wright, reviewing the book for Saturday Review, agreed: ‘‘Dead right. The sooner the better.’’²⁰

65 With two-way TV we will develop selecting dials for the children which will not be primarily an alphabetical but rather a visual species and chronological category selecting device with secondary alphabetical subdivisions, enabling children to call up any kind of information they want about any subject and get their latest authoritative TV documentary. The answers to their questions and probings will be the best information that is available up to that minute in history.

66 The ‘‘lecture routine’’ which most teachers look forward to with as little enthusiasm as their students, will give way at all levels to the professionally best possible filmed documentaries by master teachers with hi-fi recording. Southern Illinois University's film production division at Carbondale, in collaboration with independent producer Francis Thompson, is completing a moving-picture series on my comprehensive anticipatory, designscience explorations.

67 While I confined my discourse to those unique aspects of my comprehensive thinking which provide pioneering interpretation of humanity's total experience as distinguished from the formally accepted and taught academic concepts, it required fifty-one hours to exhaust my inventory of unique experience interpretations and their derived patterns of generalized significance conceptionings. The fifty-one hours represented my net surviving inventory of unique thoughts which have been greatly modified and amplified by my progressive world-around university experiences.

68 (Over the years I have accepted more than 350 separate, unsolicited appointments or invitations to visit or revisit as a ‘‘Visiting Professor’’ or Lecturer at nearly 200 different universities or colleges in over thirty countries.)

69 Children must be allowed to discipline their own minds under the most favorable conditions—in their own special private environment. We'd better consider mass producing ‘‘one pupil schools’’; that is, little well-equipped capsule rooms to be sent to all the homes; or we can design special private study rooms for homes. There are many alternatives but the traditional schoolroom is not one of them. I was invited by Einstein to meet with him and talk about one of my earlier books. I can say with authority that Einstein, when he wanted to study math and physics didn't sit in the middle of a schoolroom ‘‘desk prison.’’ That is probably the poorest place he could have gone to study. As do any logical humans when they want to truly study, he went into seclusion—in his private study or laboratory.

70 Much of what goes on in our schools is strictly related to social experience, which, within limits, is fine. But we will be adding much more in the very near future by taking advantage of children's ability to show us what they need. When individuals are really thinking, they are tremendously isolated. They may manage to isolate themselves in an airline terminal, but it is despite the environment rather than because of it. The place to study is certainly not in a schoolroom.

71 The red schoolhouse—little or big—is on the way out. New educational media are making it possible to bring the most important kinds of experiences right into the home. With television reaching children in the privacy of their homes everywhere, we should bring education—school—to where the children are. This is a surprise concept—the school by television always and only in the home—if possible in a special room in the home. Ralph Waldo Emerson was right—‘‘The household is a school of power.’’

72 TV is the number one potential emancipator from ignorance and economic disadvantage of the entire human family's residual poverty-stricken 60 percent. Even in the world's slums, TV antennas bristle. There is thus a wireless hook-up directly to the parents and children who watch their televisions avidly. Whatever comes over TV to the children and parents is the essence of education, for better or worse. What is now needed are educational TV advancements of high order.

73 Photographs I have taken of my grandchildren (without their awareness) as they looked at TV illustrate the fabulous concentration of the child.

74 Give children logical, lucid information when they want and need it, and watch them ‘‘latch on.’’ Dr. Maria Montessori designed her ‘‘method’’ to tap the child's powers to attend and absorb.²¹

75 While great knowledge and ingenuity are being put into research on the channels through which education is conveyed, relatively little consideration has been given to what is conveyed in the communicated content. The magnitude of the task demands a most rigorous examination of ‘‘what’’ knowledge is to be imparted and in which order, amount, and forms it is to be conveyed.

76 So the home is the school, education is the upcoming major world industry, and TV is the great educational medium.

77 All of this has been made possible by industrialization which I define as the extracorporeal, organic, metabolic regeneration of humanity. Industrialization consists of tools, which, in turn, are externalizations of originally integral functions of humans. I divide all tools into the two main classes—craft tools and industrial tools. Craft tools consist of all those that can be invented and produced by one person starting and operating alone nakedly in the wilderness.

78 Industrial tools are those which cannot be produced by one person, such as the steamship Queen Mary, the giant dynamo, a concrete highway, New York City, or even the modern forged alloy-steel carpenter's hammer, with electro-insulated plastic handles, whose alloyed components and manufacturing operations involve thousands of people and the unique resources of several countries of Earth.

79 Words are the first industrial tools, for inherently they involve a plurality of people and are also inherently prior to relayed communication and integration of the respective experiences of a plurality of individuals. This is reminiscent of the scriptural account, ‘‘In the beginning was the word,’’ which we may modify to read, ‘‘In the beginning of Industrialization was the word.’’ Crafts are limited to a single person and involve only very local resources and very limited fragments of Earth and time, while industrialization, through the relayed experience of all people—permitted through the individualization of the spoken and written word—involves all experiences of ail people everywhere in history.

80 As I stressed in my keynote address to the 1966 Music Educators' National Conference,²² the speech pattern of the parents exerts a critically important formative influence during the child's early years.

81 If the parents take the trouble to speak clearly, to use their language effectively, to choose appropriate words, the children are inspired to do likewise. If the parents' tones of voice are hopeful, thoughtful, tolerant, and harmonious, the children are inspired to think and speak likewise. If the parents are not parroting somebody else, but are quite clearly trying to express themselves, nothing encourages more the intuitions of the young life to commit itself not only to further exploration but to deal competently in coordinating its innate faculties. However, if the parents indicate that they are not really trying, or relapse into slang cliches, slurred mouthings, blasphemy, anger, fear, or intolerance, indicating an inferiority complex which assumes an inability of self to attain understanding by others, then the children become discouraged about their own capability to understand or to be understood.

82 If the proper books are on the family shelves, if there are things around the house which clearly show the children that the parents are really trying to educate themselves, then the children's confidence in family is excited and the children too try to engender the parents' confidence in their—the children's—capabilities.

83 The child's verbal ecological patterning is a fascinating process. My granddaughter Alexandra was born in New York. She was brought by her parents from the hospital to their apartment in Riverdale, just across from the northern end of Manhattan, which is quite a high point of land directly in the path of the take-off pattern for both of New York City's major airports, La Guardia and (now) Kennedy. The planes were going over frequently, sometimes every few seconds. There was the familiar roar and, on such a high promontory, it was a fundamental event to a new life.

84 The interesting result was that my granddaughter's first word was not Mummie or Daddy, but air—short for airplane.

85 How we see the world depends largely on what we are told at the outset of life before we unconsciously or subconsciously lock together our spontaneous brain reflexings.

86 Children can most easily learn to see things correctly only if they are spoken to intelligently right from the beginning.

87 As I was quoted in the New Yorker ‘‘Profile’’:

88

89I've made tests with children—you have to get them right away, before they take in too many myths. I've made a paper model of a man and glued him down with his feet to a globe of the world, and put a light at one side, and shown them how the man's shadow lengthens as the globe turns, until finally he's completely in the shadow. If you show that to children, they never see it any other way, and they can really understand how the earth revolves the sun out of sight.²³

90 We are learning to test experimentally the axioms given to us as ‘‘educational’’ springboards, and are finding that most of the ‘‘springboards’’ do not spring, if they exist at all!

91 There is growing awareness that we have been overproducing rigorously disciplined, game-playing, scientific specialists who, through hard work and suppressed imagination, earn their academic union cards, only to have their specialized field become obsolete or by-passed swiftly by evolutionary events of altered techniques and exploratory strategies.

92 Biological and anthropological studies reveal that overspecialization leads to extinction. We need the philosopher-scientist-artist—the comprehensivist, not merely more deluxe-quality technician-mechanics.

93 Artists are now extraordinarily important to human society. By keeping their innate endowment of capabilities intact, artists have kept the integrity of childhood alive until we reached the bridge between the arts and sciences. Their greatest faculty is the ability of the imagination to formulate conceptually. Suddenly, we realize how important this conceptual capability is.

94 Spontaneously, painters, dancers, sculptors, poets, musicians, and other artists, ask me to speak to them; or they look at my starkly scientific structures, devices, and mathematical exploration models and express satisfaction, comprehension, and enthusiasm. The miracle is that the artists are human beings whose comprehensivity was not pruned down by the well-meaning but ignorant educational customs of society.

95 Artists are really much nearer to the truth than have been many of the scientists.

96 In a beautiful demonstration, Gyorgy Kepes, of M.I.T., took uniform-size black-and-white photographs of nonrepresentational paintings by many artists. He mixed them all together with the same size of black-and-white photographs taken by scientists of all kinds of phenomena through microscopes and telescopes. He and students classified the mixed pictures by pattern types. They put round-white-glob types together—wavy-gray-line-diagonals, little circle types, etc. together. When so classified and hung, one could not distinguish between the artist's works and scientific photographs taken through instruments. What was most interesting was that if you looked on the backs of the pictures you could get the dates and the identities. Frequently the artist had conceived of the pattern or parts in infra-or ultra-visible realms. The conceptual capability of the artists' intuitive formulation of the evolving new by subconscious coordinations are tremendously important. Science has begun to take a new view of the artist.

97 Philip Morrison, Head of Cornell's department of nuclear physics, talks about what he terms ‘‘right-hand’’ and ‘‘left-hand’’ sciences. Right-hand science deals in all the proven scientific formulas and experiments, while left-hand science deals in all of the as-yet unknown or unproven, that is, with all it is going to take intellectually, intuitively, speculatively, imaginatively, and even mystically, by inspired persistence, to open up the as-yet unknown.

98 We have been governmentally underwriting only the righthand science, making it bigger and sharper. How could Congress justify appropriations of billions for dreams?

99 Pride, fear, economic and social insecurity, and the general reluctance of humanity to let go of nonsense in order vastly to reorganize are basic to the problem of education.

100 We adults must learn about our universe and how to modify the environment in order to permit life to operate and articulate the innate capabilities of humanity, the range and richness of which we are only beginning to apprehend. Innate cerebral and metaphysical capabilities have been frustrated by negative factors of the environment—not the least of which are the people in it who surround every individual. Today, the young people really want to know about things, they want to get closer to the truth, and my job is to do all I can to help them.

101 What I describe as positive design-science reformations of the environment must now be undertaken with the intent of permitting our innate faculties and facilities to be realized with subconscious coordinations of our organic process. Reform of the environment undertaken to defrustrate our innate capabilities, whether the frustration be caused by the inadequacies of the physical environment or by the debilitating reflexes of other humans, will permit humanity's original, innate capabilities to become successful. Politics and conventionalized education have sought erroneously to mold or reform humanity, i.e., the collective individual.

102 I have thought long and hard about architectural education and its potential for promoting environmental reform. I envision an utterly revised education of the architect, enabling successful students to operate on their own initiative in dealing both comprehensively and in effective depth in mathematics, chemistry, physics, biology, geology, industrial tooling, network systems, economics, law, business administration, medicine, astronautics, computers, general systems theory, patents, and the whole gamut of heretofore highly specialized subjects.

103 This ‘‘comprehensivity curriculum’’ will prepare the graduating architects to gain the design initiative, performing thereafter not as economic slaves of technically illiterate clients and patron despots but as comprehensivists, integrating and developing the significance of all the information won by all the respective disciplines of the specialized sciences and humanities, converting this information into technical advantages for world society in completely tooled-up and well-organized comprehensive anticipatory livingry systems.

104 When President Eisenhower was first confronted by the strategic data on atomic warfare he said, ‘‘There is no alternative to peace,’’ without defining the latter or indicating how it could be secured. Professor John Platt, Chicago University physicist and biophysicist, in a thorough survey of the overall shapes of a family of trend curves which comprehensively embrace science, technology, and humanity in Universe, said in 1964, ‘‘The World has become too dangerous for anything less than Utopia,’’ but did not suggest how it might be attained. Jerome Wiesner, head of the department of nuclear physics at M.l.T. and past science adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, wrote in a recent issue of the Scientific American that ‘‘the clearly predictable course of the arms race is a steady downward spiral into oblivion.’’

105 So far, the only known and feasible means of arresting that spiral, by elimination of the cause of war, is the program of the World Students Design Decade. This ten-year plan of world architectural students is divided into five evolutionary stages of two years each. Phase One, ‘‘World Literacy Regarding World Problems,’’ was on exhibit in the Tuileries Garden in Paris, France, for the first ten days of July 1965 (under the auspices of the International Union of Architects' Eighth World Congress). Emphasizing the central function of education and communication in overall planning, it dramatized the need for an informed world society to cope with the global nature of our problems.

106 It confronted the world with those basic facts leading the students to the research conclusion that human survival apparently depends upon an immediate, consciously coordinated, world-around, computerized, research marshalling and inception of the theoretically required additional inventions and industrial network integrations for the swiftest attainment and maintenance of physical success of all humanity.

107 Phase Two, ‘‘Prime Movers and Prime Metals,’’ focusing upon the design of more efficient energy and metals utilization, was exhibited with the ‘‘Tribune Libre’’ section of the Ninth World U.LA. Congress in Prague, Czechoslovakia, June-July 1967.

108 There is a new dedication on the part of the world's young. Students are corresponding with each other all over the globe. These young people are about to seize the initiative, to help us make humanity a success on Earth.

109 What I call ‘‘The Third Parent’’—TV—is bringing babies half- hourly world news as well as much grownup-authored, discrediting drivel. The students in revolt on the university campus are the first generation of TV-reared babies. They insist on social justice the world around. They sense that imminent change is inexorable.

110 On Southern Illinois University's Carbondale campus, we are setting up a great computer program to include the many variables now known to be operative in world-around industrial economics. In the machine's memory bank, we will store all the basic data such as the ‘‘where’’ and ‘‘how much’’ of each class of physical resources; location of the world's people; trendings and important needs of humanity, etc.

111 Next, we will set up a computer feeding game, called ‘‘How to Make the World Work.’’ We will bring people from all over the world to start playing the game relatively soon. There will be competitive teams from all around Earth, testing their theories on how to make the world work. If a team resorts to political pressures to accelerate their advantages and are not able to wait for the going gestation rates to validate their theory, they are apt to be in trouble. When you get into politics, you are very liable to get into war. War is the ultimate tool of politics. If war develops, the side inducing it loses the game.

112 Essence of ‘‘success in making the world work’’ will be to make all people able to become world citizens free to enjoy the whole Earth, going wherever they want at any time, able to take care of all the needs of all their forward days without any interference with any other person and never at the cost of another person's equal freedom and advantage.

113 I think that the communication task of reporting on the computerized playing of the game ‘‘How to Make the World Work’’ will become extremely popular all around Earth. We're going to be playing the game soon at S.I.U., and you'll be hearing more about it!

114 So, 1967 is the year of The Case for Early Reading.

115 Fortunately, the authors did not wait for ‘‘official permission’’ to use their initiative in exploring innovative approaches to answering the question: ‘‘When and under what circumstances should reading instruction begin?’’

116 No one licensed the inventors of the airplane, telephone, electric light, and radio to go to work. It took only five men to invent these world transforming developments. The license comes only from the blue sky of the inventor's intellect.

117 The individual intellect disciplinedly paces the human individual, who disciplinedly paces science. Science disciplinedly paces technology by expanding the limits of technical, advantage generating knowledge. Technology paces industry by progressively increasing the range and velocity inventory of technical capabilities. Industry in turn paces economics by continually altering and accelerating the total complex of environment controlling capabilities of man. Economics paces the everyday evolution acceleration of man's affairs. The everyday patterning evolution poses progressively accelerating problems regarding the understanding of the new relative significance of our extraordinarily changing and improving degrees of relative advantage in controlling our physical survival and harmonic satisfaction.

118 In 1927, I gave up forever society's general economic dictum that every individual who wants to survive must earn a living, substituting instead a search for the tasks that needed to be done that no one else was doing or attempting to do, which if accomplished, would physically and economically advantage society and eliminate pain.

119 By disciplining my faculties, I was able, as an individual, to develop technical and scientific capability to invent the physical innovations and their service industry logistics.

120 Seventeen of my prime inventions in a wide range of categories have been granted a total of 145 patents in fifty-six countries around the world; incidentally, these patents in late years have produced millions of dollars of revenue. There are over 200 licensees, a number of which are industrial ‘‘blue chip’’ corporations, operating under these patents.

121 I've never had an ‘‘expert’’ who ever comprehended in significant degree the importance of any new development on which I was working. While this is deplorable, it's also understandable in the big corporations because research and engineering heads, confronted with something from the ‘‘outside,’’ become very defensive, believing that acquiescence or approval would imply an admission that they are not alert themselves.²⁴

122 1967 is also the year of Canada's World's Fair, EXPO 67; the United States Pavilion is a 250-foot diameter Geodesic Skybreak Bubble.²⁵ I invented the geodesic dome in 1947, and today can count over 6,000 of my structures in fifty countries, ranging from play domes to the 384-foot diameter dome which rose in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, as the largest clear span enclosure in history.

123 A U.S. government citation describes ‘‘air deliverable geodesic structures’’ as the ‘‘first basic improvement in mobile environmental control in 2,600 years.’’ I can assure you I have never waited for any Bureau of Breakthroughs to grant me my permit to ponder, produce, or prognosticate.

124 Forty years ago, after my pioneering studies had revealed the low technical advance in everyday dwelling facilities as compared with transport and communication developments, I invented my 1927 Dymaxion²⁶ House to function as part of my concept of an air-deliverable, mass-producible world-around, new human life protecting and nurturing, scientific dwelling service industry to transfer high scientific capability from a weaponry to livingry focus.

125 Children, born truthful, learn deception and falsehood from their elders' prohibition of truth. Much of this prohibition arises from a great, largely unconscious, parental selfishness born of drudgery and dissatisfaction (visibly rampant in the slums). The housing of children during their upbringing is the fundamental function of the home. If we solve the problem of the home, we can erase much of this unenlightenment.

126 The same year (1927), I published my conviction that two billion new era premium technology-dwelling devices would be needed before 2000 A.D., requiring a whole new world-encompassing service industry. I predicted it would take twenty-five years to establish that new industry. In 1952, right on theoretical schedule, the Ford Motor Company purchased the first of my large geodesic domes, which are the prototypes of the new era premium technology structures.

127 I anticipate that full scale industrialization of the livingry service industry will be realized by 1977, or just 60 years after the model ‘‘T’’ inaugurated the major world mass-production industry. Henry Ford, Sr., pioneered the long-range, world-around historical development of the application of the tools-to-make-tools system of mass production to larger end-product tools, with his motorized road vehicle in 1907.

128 My structures, as reported in engineering and scientific publications, can cover very large clear span spaces more economically than by any other rectilinear or other shaped systems—for example, 1,000-fold more economically weight-wise than accomplished by the dome of St. Peter's in Rome, or thirty times more efficiently than by reinforced concrete.

129 The New York Herald Tribune in February 1962 reported that Dr. Horne of Cambridge University had announced, at a world conference of molecular biologists, the discovery of the generalized principles governing the protein shells of the viruses. ‘‘All these virus structures had proved to be geodesic spheres of various frequencies. The scientists reported that not only were the viruses geodesic structures, which latter had been discovered earlier by Buckminster Fuller, but also that the mathematics which apparently controls nature's formulations of the viruses had also been discovered (1933) and published by Fuller a number of years earlier (1944).’’ ²⁷

130 Although the words ‘‘genius’’ and ‘‘creativity’’ have been employed to explain my being ‘‘well known,’’ I am convinced that the only reason I am known at all is because I set about deliberately in 1927 to be a comprehensivist in an era of almost exclusive trending and formal disciplining toward specialization. Inasmuch as everyone else was becoming a specialist, I didn't have any competition whatsoever. I was such an antithetical standout that whatever I did became prominently obvious, therefore, ‘‘well known.’’

131 Luckily, as a special student at the United States Naval Academy in 1917, I had been exposed to a comprehensive educational strategy fundamentally different from the then-prevailing ivy league model. The potential I have since developed, every physically normal child also has at birth.

132 What, if anything, is hopeful about my record is that I am an average human and therefore whatever I have been able to accomplish also can be accomplished, and probably better, by

133 Humanity is beginning to transform from being utterly helpless and only subconsciously coordinate with important evolutionary events. We have gotten ourselves into much trouble, but at the critical transformation stage we are reaching a point where we are beginning to make some measurements—beginning to know a little something. We are probably coming to the first period of direct consciously assumed responsibility of humanity in Universe.

134 Human beings sort, classify, and order in direct opposition to entropy—which is the law of increase of the random element—increase of disorder. Human beings sort and classify internally and subconsciously as well as externally and consciously, driven by intellectual curiosity and brain. Human beings seem to be the most comprehensive antientropy function of Universe.

135 Human beings, as designed, are obviously intended to be a success just as the hydrogen atom is designed to be a success. The fabulous ignorance of humanity and our long-wrongly conditioned reflexes have continually allowed the new life to be impaired, albeit lovingly and unwittingly.

136 Our most important task is to become as comprehensive as possible by intellectual conviction and ‘‘self-debiasing,’’ not through ignorant yielding, but through a progressively informed displacement of invalid assumptions and dogma by discovery of the valid data. In this development, the young will lead the old in swiftly increasing degree. The child is the trim tab of the future. Let us respect in our children the profound contribution trying to emerge. The Bible was right: ‘‘…and a little child shall lead them.’’

137 As one who has spent his own lifetime comprehensively putting things together in an age of specialized taking apart—as a poet—I close with these lines—

138 And with Industrialization a uniformly beautiful

139 world race emerges

140 as does the fine chiseled head

141 from the rough marble block certifying the god-like untrammeled beauty of a perfect human process

142 implicit in the dynamic designing genius of the mind…,²⁸