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When Martin Segal asked me to join this conversation, I thought immediately about young Robert Benchley who -- in a final examination at Harvard College -- was asked to discuss the conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States over "off-shore" fishing rights. Hopelessly unprepared, Benchley wrote: "I know nothing about this crisis from the Soviet perspective. I know even less about the U.S. position, so I'd like to discuss the conflict from the viewpoint of the fish," which pretty well sums up my assignment here today.
Specifically, I've been asked to comment briefly on how the intellectual "property rights" debate relates to public interest, to the larger, educational social context. And the answer is, of course, that the two are inextricably interlocked, since nothing in a free society is of greater consequence than how information is gathered and transmitted.
A half century ago, MIT Professor Norbert Weiner observed that society can be understood through a study of the messages and the communication facilities that belong to it. And we are here today precisely because the new "information age" has, during the past 50 years, quite literally transformed the way we live and they way we work and even, perhaps, the way we think.
In the spring of 1946, I made my first trip to New York City with my high school graduating class. And a highlight of that visit was a tour of the NBC Studios, where I saw -- for the very first time -- blurred images on a ten-inch television screen. The guide who led the tour called TV a novelty, as I recall it. And my classmates and I agreed that television was -- at best -- a fascinating gimmick.
As coincidence would have it, it was that very same year, 1946, when -- just down the road --the nation's first electronic digital computer was unveiled at the University of Pennsylvania. It weighed 30 tons, it filled the space of a two-car garage and it cost half a million dollars. A half century has passed and today, 94.2 million American homes -- that's 98 percent of all households -- have at least one television set.
And today, the nation's 19 million preschoolers watch television 15 billion hours every year. So much for the NBC gimmick! As for computers, the power of that first clumsy model in Philadelphia can now be packaged in a pea-sized silicon chip. And when these two great inventions -- computers and televisions -- were married in the 1980s, millions of Americans had, for the first time, unprecedented access to new forms of art and education with a quality of transmissions virtually indistinguishable from the real.
Today, ordinary citizens as well as students in our schools can take field trips electronically to the Smithsonian. They can watch lift-offs at Cape Kennedy, travel to the bottom of the sea, peer inside a human cell, and spend an afternoon at the Louvre in Paris.
Students of all ages are now able to browse in the world's great libraries, tour New York's American Museum of Natural History, listen to the Philharmonic, watch cheetahs in their natural habitat, be online with classmates in Australia. And in such a world, learning -- quite literally -- has no limits.
And, incidentally, by expanding access to information, support for libraries, galleries, and museums will increase rather than decline. But it's also true that, for most students, this vision of a global classroom is still largely a potential.
The harsh truth is that, while we talk about CD-ROMs, most classrooms within minutes of this meeting have only chalkboards, outdated maps, and broken-down projectors. The good news is that, today, an estimated four and a half million computers are installed in the nation's schools; from 1992 to 1993 CD-ROM use increased 93 percent. And nearly 30 percent of the nation's schools are now connected to at least one online service such as Internet.
Still, it's sad but true that if all of the technology were suddenly removed from most of the nation's schools, few would hardly notice. Perhaps schools are, sadly, the only consequential institution in our culture where that is true. And I'm convinced that the first and most compelling challenge we confront is to assure that the new technology will close rather than widen the gap between the privileged and the disadvantaged.
James Agee wrote on one occasion that with every child who is born, under no matter what circumstance, the potentiality of the human race is born again. And if we fail to achieve in this country both access and excellence for all students, not just the most advantaged, I'm convinced that all of the other information issues will be largely academic. What we need, it seems to me, is a concept of fair use, not only for creators, but also for consumers.
This leads me to say just a word about intellectual property rights, the subject of this conference. As everyone here knows, the idea of information as property was sewed into our Constitution two centuries ago. It was built deep into our laws, out economy, and our political psyche. It's built into the way we have organized our schools and libraries and museums -- pulling together, in one place, information that is then cautiously passed on to others.
So long as original works were packaged in books and films and records and paintings, the notion of owning brainwork seemed to hold. But when it became possible to send digital signals, effortlessly and instantaneously, from one hard drive disk to another, information began to slip past the traditional gatekeepers of the culture.
An early version of this shift occurred in my own family, about 25 years ago, when our youngest son came home from school and announced, "I learned the alphabet on Sesame Street, but my kindergarten teacher thinks she taught it to me." What are kindergarten teachers to do in a world where they no longer own the alphabet -- which is a parable for all managers of information.
Five years ago, former Federal Appeals Judge and our first Secretary of Education, Shirley Hufstedler, observed that, with limited exception, knowledge and even information are by their very nature incapable of exclusive possession. An this is especially true in an electronic age when ideas have been reduced to a form that can be read by computers and transmitted by wireless, satellite or lasers. In such a world, she said, it is increasingly difficult to distinguish the medium from the message or to control either one.
Technology is, Hufstedler concluded, moving us toward a global information network that may transform itself into a global information commons -- where information is owned by everyone; a commons where, in this case, the resource is not depleted, but endlessly renewed.
Frankly, as an outside looking in, I have no idea where all of this -- legally -- will lead, except perhaps to what one lawyer friend of mine approvingly described as "vistas of endless litigation." What is clear, however, is that the main thing we must hold onto -- and uncompromisingly insist upon -- is the need for creativity to be rewarded, so that great writers and great artists are not lost to the public good.
Einstein is often quoted as saying, "no problem can be solved from the same conclusions that created it." We must, he said, learn "to see the world as new" -- a challenge that seems especially relevant at a time when information has become highly portable, always leaking, and, I suspect, almost impossible to own.
What I've been discussing this far is a world Peter Drucker calls "the knowledge society," one in which information is, in fact, our most precious resource, and in this world, education should empower everyone, not the few. But for information to become knowledge, and ultimately, one hopes, wisdom, it must be organized. And, in this new climate, the public interest challenge, beyond access and equity, is, I believe, sorting and selection. The challenge of educators is to help students make sense of a world described by some as "information overload."
Recently this matter of overload was put neatly in perspective by my friend Harlan Cleveland, president of the World Academy of Art and Science, who wrote, "When I was growing up, I was taught that the key to stuffing my head with useful insights was access to the information I would need. But my very first visit to a great library as a teenage tourist -- it happened to be the Library of Congress -- cured me of that illusion. Confronting the endless stacks of books," he said, "I quickly figured out that my problem would never be access, but selection." Digital technology, of course, simply exacerbates Harlan's problem.
Consider Internet, a dazzling gold mine of information which they say is doubling every year. But navigating through this sea of data is becoming more complicated every day. And without highly developed skills, millions of Americans may become intellectually unempowered -- and specialists in one field increasingly may lose contact with those in others.
When Victor Weisskopf was asked on one occasion what gives you hope in troubled times, he replied: "Mozart and quantum mechanics." I'm convinced that what our students urgently need today is not just more information, but coherence -- the capacity to gain a more coherent view of knowledge and a more integrated, more authentic view of life.
I'm suggesting that, beyond access, the second challenge of technology is the urgent need to create a new level of literacy, one that empowers students not only to have access, but to be more selective and more integrative in the information they receive. This leads to one final observation. Beyond access and beyond selectivity and beyond integration, perhaps the most challenging public interest issue we confront is credibility. Can the messages we receive in the new information age be trusted?
Consider words. In the world of scholarship where texts can now be endlessly reshuffled, whose works are they anyway? In music, a technique called "sampling" manipulates snippets from many compositions, a technique which has led to a multibillion dollar morass, according to the New York Times.
In the visual arts, a recent Scientific American story declares that "digital technology has subverted the certainty of photographic evidence." To prove the point, a cover illustration of the magazine presents Marilyn Monroe and Abraham Lincoln in a cordial arm embrace. William J. Mitchell concluded this article with this warning: "The information superhighway will bring us a growing flood of information in digital format. But we will have to take great care to sift the facts from the fictitious and the falsehoods."
When I was growing up in Dayton, Ohio, I'd occasionally hear skeptics say: "Believe half of what you see and nothing that you hear." Is it possible that we now must tell our children, "Believe nothing that you either see or hear?" Is it not ironic that the very technology that brings us "virtual reality" may also be the source of "non-detectable deception?" In such a world, how can we teach students to be skeptical and discerning, while also urging them to keep faith in our ability to communicate authentically with each other, since without such trust civility is lost?
In the summer of 1938, E.B. White said television would become either "a saving radiance in the sky" or an "unbearable disturbance." And these are precisely the same choices we confront today. And I'm convinced that whether the new technologies become radiant or disturbing will, in the end, have far less to do with legalisms than with education.
In the century ahead, we urgently need schools and colleges and museums and galleries and libraries and newspapers, that now only extend access to information, as crucial as that is, to most especially help students become more selective, more integrative , and more discerning in their education. And for this to be accomplished we need, above all else, gifted and inspired teachers.
When I was United States Commissioner of Education, I walked unannounced into an inner city classroom in New Haven. At the front of the room I observed students crowded around the teacher's desk. At first I was alarmed. But I then observed that what appeared to be crisis was, in fact, a cameo of exquisite education. These inner city students had just finished reading Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist. And they were vigorously debating whether little Oliver could survive in the neighborhood where they lived. After much back-and-forth discussion, these sixth graders concluded that, while Oliver had outwitted the bad guys in far-off London, he'd never make it in New Haven -- a much tougher city.
The students in this classroom had read the text, their vocabulary had expanded, but an elegantly gifted teacher had helped them relate great literature to the realities of life.
The simple truth is that almost all of us are here today because of the influence of an inspired teacher. And in the new information age, public interest is best served, not only by building new electronic highways, but, most especially, by giving new dignity and new status to the sacred art of teaching.
Technology can instantaneously transmit information all around the world. But technology, with all of its dazzling effects, cannot convey wisdom. For this we need educational institutions that help students of all ages become more discerning, teaching the capacity to separate the shoddy from that which is elegant and enduring.
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