Egyptian Funerary Stela
Because networks laws naturally and eagerly organize knowledge, essentially all (yes all) knowledge studied in a K-20 superior education has made its way into the open internet — and students who are not allowed to use the net knowledge are cheated. Knowledge locked away in a textbook or behind a firewall, grows stale by not linking into the open network for its subject. Knowledge chiseled into print cannot form patterns for students to mirror into their minds — as open, online study subjects can.
NOTE: Knowledge (as the word is used here) and a textbook, a standard, a curriculum are not the same thing. Knowledge is stuff like how cells divide, the life of Lincoln, or the conjugation of a French verb. The way educators think knowledge can be taught is a place they embed knowledge; educators embed knowledge in textbooks, standards, curricula. Educators do their embedding at such enormous cost in institutions where kids are embedded for years, that we tend to think the knowledge is part of all that is going on under the name of “education.” But knowledge is not education. Knowledge is the sum total of what is known by humankind — like about cells, Lincoln, and French grammar.
Knowledge itself is a network. Knowledge now has a new medium — the open internet — that is an elegant place where knowledge can do what comes naturally. What comes naturally to knowledge is to link into patterns. And there is something mThink about cells, Lincoln, or French and you will experience patterns arising from the network format of your mind. The fact that there is a new open network out there (the internet) where knowledge patterns can emerge has made any none-network way to organize what is known by humankind obsolete.
The situation is much like the change that devastated the powerful ancient Egyptian scribes when the Phoenicians invented their alphabet. Suddenly, by inventing just 26 symbols to represent sounds of words, the Phoenicians rendered their highly paid scribes obsolete. The thousands of pictures the scribes learned, during years at scribe school, to represent ideas using hieroglyphics could not do nearly as good a job of writing down ideas as the 26 phonetic symbols could.
The invention of the alphabet caused a simple new method to leapfrog communication into an entirely new era. The simple fact that knowledge is embedded openly only has leapt learning into a golden age. All that is left is for the scribes education bundlers (textbook, standards, curricula folk) to access knowledge online (which is happening more and more).
The embedding of what is known by humankind into the open internet — where knowledge can emerge in dynamic patterns of ideas as students study — has been held back by the education establishment. Like the scribes of ancient Egypt, most textbook makers, standards devisers, curriculum authors, content managers, and other knowledge content managers dug in early on against the open network. The scribes did the same thing: they stuck a few phonetic symbols among their hieroglyphs and, for hundreds of years, refused to abandon their picture writing. In the meantime, Egypt slipped from power in the Mediterranean, as countries which adopted the new alphabet method grew powerful and rich through communication supporting commerce across their Sea.
Proprietary and otherwise locked-away is — like hieroglyphics — clumsy. It is disconnected in a connecting age. The living human knowledge now is unbundled into its smallest nodes, which which have been released into the internet as freely linkable urls, forming the global knowledge commons where everything is organized and vetted by network laws.
The walled gardens of early internet knowledge have become graveyards.
