Science Fiction is something of a didactic literature, keeping readers
up-to-date with the latest advances in science and technology and offering a
vision of what might be possible in our near and far-flung futures. But The Diamond Age is didactic in a literal
way. A teaching primer is tied into the narrative arc of the book. Not only is
the book a bildungsroman—Nell grows up and out of a life of abuse at the hands
of her mother’s degenerate boyfriend, Bud—but Nell’s development comes as a
result of an interactive teaching primer aided by a ractor, a virtual teacher
that takes on roles of personalities in the book to better interact and
instruct the reader.
When I first read this book, I thought the interactive primer was the future of education. I wished that I could have had a book that analyzed my social and cognitive abilities and constructed lessons tailored to my needs. Perhaps AI-enhanced primer-based learning will be the future of education, but if it is, it is simultaneously part of the past’s conception of education in sci-fi.
Stephenson isn’t the first sci-fi writer to consider an
interactive teaching module. Orson Scott Card had Ender learn about his own
psychology on a personal computer in Ender’s
Game, and that was the early ‘80s. Before that, Philip K. Dick considered
the future of education would consist of AI historic personalities as ideal
teachers. Computer intelligence is patient, can have complete knowledge of all
subjects, and is unbiased, not given to paying more attention to either sex or
to gifted or non-gifted students or to wealthy or non-wealthy students. It
might sound odd to question a teacher that pays undue attention to not
especially clever students, but this sort of thing is encouraged in public
school systems, where teachers are supposed to aim to the middle, since gifted
students will supposedly excel no matter what instruction they do or do not receive
and students at the bottom end of the curve are often on their own unalterable
trajectory. But consider learning civics from Abraham Lincoln, physics from
Albert Einstein, economics from Adam Smith. Do better teachers exist than the
geniuses of history? Still, Dick was just playing with the genre's megatext. Isaac Asimov’s
robots with their positronic brains functioned as leaders and teachers and
before Asimov, A.E. Van Vogt conceived of a computer as governmental authority
and archive of all information in The
World of Null-A.
A.E. Van Vogt et al aside, Stephenson’s idea is worth considering because of its
scale and because we currently aren’t using
our technology all that well. The primer is a copyable program. The hardware is
the expensive part, but something like an iPad or Galaxy would perform more
than adequately as host to an interactive teaching primer, especially since electronic
devices are nearly ubiquitous, at least in the first world. It wouldn’t be all
that hard to give students a series of learning tasks that they can complete
for credit toward various learning goals. With instruction on a handheld
device, oversight is easy enough. Teachers can see who completes their work and
who falls behind. And with lessons at students’ fingertips, physical schools can
be done away with, saving enormous sums. Rather than providing the maintenance
for school buildings, students can receive a per diem for groceries. Instead of
paying out large sums for effete administration and teachers-as-babysitters,
students can receive funding for educational trips and research materials. But
these are pipe-dreams. In the US at least, the education system exists more to
give the 3.2 million educators a salary than to educate students.
And Stephenson’s primer in The Diamond Age isn’t a
teaching tool that most people would want students to adopt. Why? Because the
primer’s function is to guide students in resisting conformity, in recognizing
the shortcomings of popularly accepted social norms. Though the primer isn’t a reality,
not even a quarter century after The
Diamond Age’s publication, science fiction does talk back to power. SF
teaches us skepticism of authority. It teaches us how to question what we’re
told, and it teaches mathematical and astrophysical concepts while it’s at it.
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