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In this assignment, you will review clips exerpted from a 1960s television show called "The Prisoner":

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"Fans of THE X-FILES will find that paranoid series'  spiritual stepfather in THE PRISONER, Patrick McGoohan's 1967 fantasy series about a secret agent who, on resigning his job, is kidnapped and taken to a seaside resort town called The Village. The happy Villagers, dressed in colorful garb, are known only by numbers. (The ex-spy is Number Six.) Over the course of a 17-episode run, the hero, played by McGoohan, faces relentless attempts to find out why he resigned his job: Was he selling out? Was it a matter of principle? The efforts include various mind games and technological trickery, all usually spearheaded by the Village leader, Number Two (played by a different actor in most episodes, showing that puppet leaders may change but the totalitarian song remains the same)." Source 

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The episode in question -- The General -- is "a warning about educational methods. A form of subliminal speed learning deposits information into the mind, but what is  the value of facts without understanding? Number 6 foils the "General" -- a  room-sized computer -- in a manner reminiscent of Capt. Kirk and Star  Trek" (Source).

Please watch the below exerpts (you will need to click on your browser's "back" button after viewing a video segment to continue with this page):

What _is_ SpeedLearn?

"The story deals with two important questions: education and trust. The question it asks about education is that of its aim. What is education all about? One obvious answer to that is that it is the imparting of facts into a willing mind. Socrates saw the mind as a blank slate, waiting to be written on, and this theory of education corresponds to his theory. You write the required facts on the brain, and educate it. This is the main basis behind virtually all systems of education. A curriculum is laid out, a set of items that a student must know by the end of a course. if he can parrot back the information at the end of the course, then he's a great student.

 Quite. But are learning facts and education synonymous?"  Source

(NOTE: you will need to scroll down about 2/3s of the way on this link to read the relevant part of this website).
Our hero -- the doubting Thomas -- clearly is skeptical; skeptical that it _can_ be done, as opposed to whether or not it _should_ be done.

A Marriage of Science & Mass Communications

Sound familiar?  Shades of Thomas Edison and Distance Learning.  The technology may be new but the claims are not.

A Giant Leap Forward...
A Revolution in Education

Who doesn't want to move forward?  Progress is an unqualified good thing, right?   Especially in education, where the age-old "kill and drill" methods are deadly dull and require time and effort.  Is the proof in the pudding?

What happened in 1878?

Truly remarkable!

History's not my subject.... Or, is it?

The skeptical hero is suddenly very 'knowledgeable' about European military history.  But is it an illusion?   Our hero is concerned and calls his equivalent of a help desk:

The Help Desk

Why is he concerned?  What is/are the implication(s)?

I asked you what it was, not when it was.

Hmmmm...

What it is satirizing....

The 1960s witnessed an era in new educational theories; could computer-assisted learning be one of them?

Faith in technology

The technology, not unlike today's Google and Guttenberg.org initiatives, seeks to marry computer technologies with the expansive wealth of human knowledge, the marriage of both worlds.

The Technology: How it "works"

"The Professor" -- a human being after all, synthesizes and distills human knowledge into factoid, typewritten form.  The typed pages are then fed into a massive analog computer, which spits out the computerized format that a machine will embed directly into the student's minds.  And, what results?

No more tedious learning!

We'd all like that, right?  But, can it be done?  What is it about computer technologies that suggest to us that, because  a computer is fast that learning should be fast and easy?  Is it the computer that is learning?  Our hero disagrees and attempts to use the technology to spread a message of his own:

The freedom to learn, the liberty to make mistakes...

Is it "reactionary drivel"?  Is there anything that the computer cannot do? Any answer it cannot provide?

Man versus Machine

The hero claims that "Why?" is 'insoluble, for man or machine,' but the distinction between man and machine is that man is able to posit the question of "why?".

As John Peel notes, "To assume that it is just a silly question creating a breakdown in a computer, you have to ignore the fact that the show is an allegory. It is not the computer that is destroyed by a question, but what the machine represents... are learning facts and education synonymous? ... Unless we can apply the knowledge, we may as well not have it. Education cannot simply be the imparting of facts, can it? "

Can it?

Please create a discussion entry in the "SpeedLearn" forum in which you examine the following with respect to the exerpts you have just viewed:

What parallels or analogies can you draw between the SpeedLearn clips and modern education's reliance on computer technologies? With respect to Postman's observations that we tend to be blindsided by technology's unanticipated downsides, are there any cautionary tales foreseen by The Prisoner's creators more than 40 years ago that it is not too late for us to heed now?

What parallels could you draw between The General and, say, deriving our "knowledge" from the web or wikipedia? How can these be problematic for society?

What is the purpose of education in western society? Why should society continue to invest the considerable amount of money it does in a free public education?

Distance learning, like SpeedLearn, seeks to use computer and telecommunications technologies to make education easier and faster. But is there a trade-off as Postman would argue? What is that trade-off? And how much should that trade-off matter with respect to society's interest in having an educated public?