A while back, I read Buckminster Fuller’s little 1962 book Education Automation. It’s a collection of presentations that he gave to scholars and administrators at Southern Illinois University about the future of education.  It is pretty interesting, and includes a neat little prediction about a spherical, visual data stream machine that sounds a lot like the internet.  Fuller had high hopes for the way we could innovate education using science.  But his approach didn’t take off, perhaps because it reads like a treatise on widget production instead of human education.

Of course, the education automation dreams of yesteryear are still around.   Unfortunately, some of today’s education technology pundits seem to be having as hard a time as Fuller understanding the thing they want to transform.

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