The University of Alberta

            Convocation Address, Dr. Herbert Marshall McLuhan,
                       November 20th, 1971

        It is nice to be home. I left here when I was four and have
vivid memories of Edmonton that I can date exactly. Having been born
here I have gradually fought my way East through smog and smugness
(familiarity breeds consensus). Diligent local research--maybe it is
the undercover wild-life agents who were responsible--has actually
uncovered the old homestead of the McLuhans. I haven't seen it; per-
haps I will get to see it before I go.

        I am going to comment on the biggest disease of our time
being unwanted. The sort of diagnosis that I sometimes render of the
situation in which we exist has often been challenged  in the style
of "Doctor, your diagnosis is different from all the other doctors",
to which one can only say "Well, the autopsy will show that I was
right." The December issue of PLAYBOY magazine is going to carry an
article entitled "The Coming of the Psychopath". It opens with the
statement "psychopaths were once considered moral imbeciles; now they
may be the only ones truly in tune with the times." We have moved in-
to the age of the rip-off as a kind of a personal art form. What had
formerly been an entrepreneurial way life in the 19th-century hard-
ware world; the world of strip-mining and compulsive scrapping of re-
sources, has now become an art form, a psychological software pattern.
The same pattern of shift from hardware to software has occurred in
politics: instead of the political machines and policies, politics has
moved to the age of public relations and image-making.

        Already in the 19th century there has been the loss of
human community to the speed-up of transportation. E. R. Leach, the
Anthropologist, in his RUNAWAY WORLD, describes how the English
communities were liquidated by the railway trains, leaving opportun-
ities for whole communities to emigrate, and, when all the cousins,
uncles and aunts had left, leaving the nuclear family stark and iso-
lated. The plays of Ibsen are a familiar example: groups of human
figures are starkly presented to the audience minus any social ground
or human community. This, in a word, is abstract art: figures without
ground. Speed-up pushes all work and living towards specialism that
is the dissolution of community.

        The specialist, whether a workman or a scholar, looks for
a place to fit into. He is a figure against the ground of the mar-
ket. Unemployment has, itself, become a social ground for the fi-
gure of the welfare recipient. The stark human figure minus the
social ground, whether Nora's doll's house or Babbit's America, or
the specialist's skills starkly outlined against the ground of un-
employment--these are basically 19th century images. What has hap-
pened today is that there is a new hidden ground of all human en-
terprise, namely, a world environment of electric information.
Against this new environment the old ground of 19th century hard-
ware, whether at school or factory, whether bureaucracy or enter-
tainment--all these stand out as incongruous.

        The biggest contemporary disease is, as the headline put
it, "being unwanted". Everybody now grows up in accordance with old
pat terns of training which offer no means of relation or interface
with the new information environment. Electric information has now
become as indispensable to people as water to fish, but people can-
not yet accommodate to this rarefied environment. A NEW YORKER car-
toon showed two fish on the sand, one said to the other "this is
where the action is." This is now a universal delusion, people now
living in a new element of electric information still seek to find
the action in the old solid element of specialist goals and educa-
tion and job training. In the world of management and decision-mak-
ing, the successful executive is an automatic drop-out. As he mounts
the ladder of promotion, he quickly looses touch with the new sur-
round of information as his work becomes more and more dependent
on the advice of specialists. He, too, is a figure without a ground.

        It is this situation that Ivan Illich addresses himself to
in DESCHOOLING SOCIETY. He is vividly aware of the irrelevance of
current curricula, drills and certification. He knows that these can
no longer help us relate to the new world, and he frankly appeals to
the forms of preliterate, and even prenatal experience as models for
the training now needed. As Coleridge said "If you wish to acquire a
man's knowledge, first start with his ignorance." Illich is unaware
of the new all-inclusive surround of electric information which has
enveloped man, but it is his instinctive response to this new ground
that in some measure validates the figure or image he suggests for
the new school. For example, he says,

    Since most people today live outside industrial societies
    - most people today do not experience childhood . In the
    Andes you till the soil once you become useful - before
    that you watch sheep - if you are well nourished you
    should be useful by 11, and otherwise by 12. Recently I
    was talking to my night-watchman, Marcos, about his 11
    year old son who work s in a barber's shop. I noted in
    Spanish that his son was still a 'nino'. Marcos answered
    with a guileless smile - 'Don Ivan, I guess you are
    right'. I felt guilty for having drawn the curtain of
    childhood between two sensible persons.

What Illich has in mind, although he does not state it, is that
childhood was unknown in the Middle Ages and was a renaissance
invention that came in with printing, and is ending very rapidly now
in the television age. The television child skips childhood, leaps
into adulthood without benefit of schooling.

        The electric environment has, in effect, restored us to a
paleolithic age of the hunter. The hunter is the man who must use
all his faculties to read the total environment. In the electric
age, by far, the biggest human occupation has become man-hunting. It
is the age of 007, espionage, counter-espionage and  credit ratings,
of the F. B. I. and the C. I. A. In a word, it is the age of the
Cyclops. All that Ivan Illich postulates as an ideal state for
education has already happened, The man-hunter and the job-hunter
have succeeded the hunter, and warfare and welfare merge into a way
of life as completely as any paleolithic or Stone Age society. In
preliterate society warfare and welfare are one and the same form of
life. While we move into the age of etherealization discerned by
Toynbee, as Buckminster Fuller stressed, we do more and more with
less and less. Man himself becomes discarnate data, a sort of
disembodied spirit coexisting and functioning simultaneously in
diverse locations, whether by telephone or by television: on the
telephone you are there, they are here. We traverse eons of human
development in minutes, and live in an inclusive present which
assumes all pasts and futures are one. The Anthropologist, E. S.
Carpenter, has performed experiments in New Guinea in which, by the
use of photographs and movies made on the spot, he carried
people--these very paleolithic people--through countless centuries
of evolutionary cultural development in a few hours. It is not only
the academic or scientific specialist who finds himself in a
freakish position in a world of instant information.

        The service environments available to ordinary persons,
whether of travel or general consumer services, far exceed the power
of any private wealth to provide for itself. The richest men have
become hotel hermits, unable to find any more conspicuous means of
consumption than those that are adapted to their personal or commer-
cial security. If personal wealth has become a comic and frustrating
encumbrance in a world of universal public services, the school and
university are in an equally paradoxical situation insofar as they
are committed to providing packaged information on a wide variety of
subjects. Today the general public has access to every kind of infor-
mation--quite independently of our educational programs.

        This new electric access to information has suddenly cast
the audience in the role, not of spectator or consumer, but of ex-
plorer and investigator. The immediate need and future of education
is not in the dissemination of knowledge, but of ignorance. The open
university of the U. K. made the ordinary mistake of putting the old
curriculum and old classroom on the new TV media. The immediate need
is for these media to bring to the microphone and the studio people
from every field of knowledge and endeavour to explain to the public
not their knowledge but their ignorance, not their expertise but their
hang-ups, not their breakthroughs but their break-downs. The universi-
ty and school of the future must be a means of total community partici-
pation, not in the consumption of available knowledge, but in the crea-
tion of completely unavailable insights. The overwhelming obstacle to
such community participation in problem solving and research at the top
levels, is the reluctance to admit, and to describe, in detail their
difficulties and their ignorance. There is no kind of problem that baf-
fles one or a dozen experts that cannot be solved at once by a million
minds that are given a chance simultaneously to tackle a problem. The
satisfaction of individual prestige which we formerly derived from the
possession of expertise, must now yield to the much greater chores and
satisfactions of dialogue and group discovery.

        The task yields to the task force. If Ivan Illich is unaware
of the new electric ground, or environment, which has rendered obso-
lete the ancient figures of curriculum and classroom, there is another
circumstance relating to the American educational process which he ig-
nores to his cost. He is a European unacquainted with the basic North
American fact that we, alone, in the world, go outside for privacy, and
inside for community. Europeans, on the other hand, go outside for com-
munity and inside for privacy. For North Americans to be at home is to
have open house. For Europeans, to be "chez nous" is to be incommunica-
do.

        North Americans go out to dine or to shows to be alone.
Europeans do the same things for the opposite reasons. They wish to
socialize, to dialogue, to be observed. North Americans are unable
to "put on the public" when they go out unable to conduct symphonies.
This syndrome reverses every feature of education as processed. The
American institution serves opposite ends to European ones, just as
does American business. We go out to work to the office to be alone.
The ultimate privacy for us is the motorcar. By the same token the
traffic jam affords a kind of inviolable solitude unreachable by tel-
ephone from home or office. Parallel to this, may not the bureaucratic
jams of administrative congestion afford refuge from the urgent pres-
sures of educational process?

        A friend, a professor of History, was recently driving down
a one-way street the wrong way in New York, and a policeman stopped
him and said: "Where do you think you are going?", and my friend apo-
logized, and the policeman said: "What do you do?" "Oh, I'm a pro-
fessor of history" "Oh ... a professor, eh? ... Well, go ahead, do
the best you can." *

        Thanks very much.

* Private note: this actually happened to Harley Parker,
  during the "Fordham Year." E.M.