The Web of Knowledge: Vision, Design and Practice: "Even within the same discipline, industry, company, or lab, people are creating things having no idea what the person at the next bench is up to, or how these different products might interrelate in great or frightening ways. Perhaps more ominous, ordinary people, and even their political representatives, throw up their hands, content to leave the decision to these 'experts.' Since this system has given us massive environmental degradation and alienated most of the people on the planet, we clearly need to think systemically--especially in this transitional period (from a national industrial to an international information based economy).
This transformation may well be the reason our schools are now often seen as not doing their job--because that job has changed but without our noticing it consciously. We forget (or perhaps we remember too well) what a phenomenal success the schools were in the last century: a free ubiquitous national system which united people from all over the world, and gave them the literacy to be competent citizens and workers. Granted, we had a lockstep one-size-fits-all approach, but it was an industrial model suited to an industrial age. Fortunately, technology gives us the ability to tailor education just as surely as it can allow you to order a laptop or car to your specifications and needs. Reductionism and specialization worked well in the machine age, but now our students need twenty-first century skills; creative problem solving, communication and people skills, technology, and the ability to stand back and see how fragments can be unified.
We noted above that sometimes an idea will lie fallow for a while until a piece comes along to enable it, and so it was with the Knowledge Web. Burke found himself doing a good bit of traveling, especially to the"
