Information delivery has always been intimately associated with well-defined, effective procedures—algorithms. That is, information is designed more for manipulation and doing than for understanding, and this helps to explain the convergence of business and education today. The convergence, which has drawn considerable comment and hardly needs documenting, includes these developments:

All this worries a growing contingent of educators, who fear the corporation’s crushing solicitude. I share this fear, but it seems to me that the more fundamental issue often goes unnoted: our changing notions about what education is make it inevitable that business and industry should step into the picture aggressively. If you want efficient delivery of effective facts and procedures, then business—already attuned to such computationally rigorous training—will far outperform the university.

In other words, having increasingly accepted their role as training grounds for business—which is what the information-transfer model of education implies—universities are now finding that business is better situated to train its own employees than schools are. Many schools will, at best, simply hire themselves out to corporations.

But I seriously wonder about the long-term survival of the university in any form. How long before the students rebel? If someone handed me $40,000 a year for four years and said, “Go get yourself an education,” could I possibly choose to blow it all at a university? Unthinkable.

Why should I pay a school $160,000 for a vocational education when I can almost certainly find a business or agency or laboratory or nonprofit organization willing to hire me for nothing, assign me some useful chores, and give me an opportunity to start learning my desired vocation? Even if I had to pay something to the business at first, it would be well worth it. Long before I would have graduated from school, I’d be earning an income in my chosen field.

Actually, I would be tempted to follow this path even if I wanted much more than a vocational education. The options are unlimited. Nothing prevents me from obtaining the best textbooks the world has to offer. Nothing prevents me from approaching a first-class researcher or business manager or teacher with the proposition, “Will you give me an hour per week for a year in exchange for a couple of thousand dollars?” In such a highly motivated context, the mentoring will likely prove more valuable, more humane, and more intense than several college courses put together. And, in general, nothing prevents me from going wherever the “action” is in my field and plunging in with the aid of some of that $160,000.

The irrelevance of our educational institutions today has been summarized by the philosopher Albert Borgmann:

The most damning testimony against higher education today may be that students have not rebelled; they are evidently incapable of it. Two things prevent such rebellion. One is the inability of high school graduates to take their own education in hand. We do not teach them to become self-learners. I am continually amazed at the number of adults who assume that, if they are to learn anything new, they must “take a class.”

The second obstacle, pointed out in Borgmann’s analysis, is the fact that, for extraneous social reasons, we insist on the academic degree. It is one of the revealing facts about the Information Age that it is the supreme Age of Credentials. Not just credentials as such (about which I have no complaint), but wooden credentials—degrees, certificates, diplomas, and licenses based solely on “measurable outcomes,” such as credit hours and standardized test grades, with scarcely any reference whatever to the actual inner accomplishment and capability of the certificate bearer.

Being married to a registered nurse, I have been able to note the unfortunate inferiority complex within that wonderfully humane profession. (I think “doctor-envy” might be a good name for it.) In order to raise the standard of respectability for nurses, the governing bodies try to define an ever more proprietary training that can be seen as the nursing profession’s own. They pile on credit-hour requirements in vacuous subjects. (You haven’t seen gobbledygook until you’ve tried to read three consecutive sentences in the typical “nursing theory” book.) And they continually raise the barrier for “outsiders” who might have traveled by a slightly unconventional route.

So it is that a nurse who has worked in a particular field for fifteen years and may be one of the best healers around can find himself blocked from advancement, while someone else whose sensibilities were sufficiently dulled to endure endless hours of post-graduate make-work marches straight ahead. And a nurse trained in Switzerland has no hope of practicing in this country without going back to school for a couple of years to duplicate his education.

The same syndrome afflicts virtually every profession. (Was it Mencken who said, “Every profession is a conspiracy against the public”?) Just think of the educational establishment, with its obstacles for non-credentialed outsiders, and its protection of incompetent insiders. In general, the closed professional circle, protecting itself through artificial requirements, is one of the pressing social ills of our day.

The credential problem threatens quickly to become even more acute with the aid of new information technologies. A few years ago the European Commission was trying to create a smartcard-based European Accreditation System. According to Joe Cullen of the Tavistock Institute, which assisted with the project, the idea was to “set up permanent and accessible skill accreditation mechanisms that will allow individuals to validate their knowledge however it has been acquired.”

Central to this vision is the use of new technologies such as personal smart cards that will allow citizens to record their training and experience on portable, computer-readable curriculum vitae. Another set of applications involve the use of remote, electronic assessment and testing systems that can allow individuals to obtain qualifications and credentials that in turn can be recorded on their personal skills card, perhaps via existing frameworks such as the European network of chambers of commerce, or even at home (Cullen 1997).

The goal is admirable. But, as with so many cases of computer-enabled “flexibility,” the flexibility easily turns out to be a higher-order rigidity with a vengeance. At the very least one can say this: electronic credentials are not likely to lessen the importance of numerically scored, standardized tests.

An element of standardization is inescapable in all social interaction. Lacking it, we would be helpless to connect with each other. Language itself represents a kind of standardization. But so long as language and society are healthy, there is a creative tension and balance between the standard (lexical) meanings of words and the speaker’s individualized meanings. (It turns out that you can’t say anything very meaningful without this individualized element, but that is a larger topic.) In this play of stasis and invention, all human growth, all new understanding, is incubated.

In the business of establishing credentials today, where is the recognition of a principle to set against standardization, to prevent its becoming tyrannical? A one-sided pursuit of standardization (which, incidentally, coheres wonderfully well with the pursuit of information as shovelable fact) means neither more nor less than the obliteration of everything individual. In a valuable set of reflections upon educational standardization, sociologist Phil Agre casts the issue in terms of diversity:

Agre urges us to “preserve the institutional conditions for a diversity of intellectual approaches.” I will suggest what this might mean shortly. Meanwhile, to summarize:

The central focus of information technology upon the reliable, precise, and quantifiable transmission of well-defined bits from one place to another, and the emphasis upon algorithmic procedures for manipulating this information, accord perfectly with

But, in the end, this model of education leaves little room for schools or, ultimately, students.

Everyone disowns fact-shoveling education. And yet the computer and its databases, into which we pour information, have emerged utterly triumphant as the reigning metaphors for learning. The metaphors that powerfully grip us are more indicative of what’s going on than our much too frequent protesting.

I know of a school in Europe—it happens to be a seminary—where there is no fixed term of study. The sense of calling is high, the demands upon students are remarkably heavy, and students graduate whenever they are ready. This averages out to something like three or four years, but, depending on prior experience and qualification, may be as little as two years—or, not infrequently, never at all. I have heard of one student who was still trying after seven years.

I do not understand how a human-centered institution of higher education—one not conceived as an assembly-line or information-transfer system—could operate without at least some of this flexible, individual-centered character. If, as I indicated above, standardization tends to obliterate everything individual, the principle we need to set against standardization in order to hold the balance is recognition of the individual. Every individual follows a unique path through this world, and the teacher’s failure to enter upon that path with the student is a failure to teach. This failure also makes any profound assessment of the student’s performance impossible.

Inevitably, though, the objection is voiced that an individual, qualitative assessment of students is not even desirable, since it eventuates in merely subjective and often biased judgments. After all, who has not heard of doctoral students suffering irremediable loss at the hands of willfully antagonistic thesis advisers?

Nothing is more symptomatic of our age than this objection, with its implicit argument for unmitigated standardization. It would eliminate from consideration everything not measurable, which is to say, everything qualitative, which is to say, everything giving individual character to the human being.

Yes, educators can lose their objectivity; they can yield to biases of one sort or another. But in no domain do we solve this by denaturing human relationships so that the opportunity for bias and subjective error does not arise. We can overcome our subjective limitations only by . . . overcoming them, only by seeing more truly, more deeply.

We can, and should, try to build some checks and balances into the arrangement (there is a place for standardization), but to eliminate the decisive role of profound and healing insight because it may fall short is like eliminating the institution of the family because there will inevitably be instances of child abuse. It is to say, in effect, “Let’s cease our striving toward higher things, since to be human is to err.” And it is to lose sight of the fact that an unduly zealous drive toward “objectivity” and standardization is a drive to erase ourselves. We are, after all, not only objects but also subjects, and our subjectivity is essential to our highest potentials.

A teacher can genuinely assess a student’s achievement—but only by meeting the student, by traveling along the path with him. This is likely to prove wrenching, and there is great risk: the experience may transform the teacher fully as much as the student. The difficulty in it is the difficulty in confronting another human spirit, and it’s all too easy to pull back in fear. Without a doubt, it’s simpler to disengage from the individual and resort to the comfortingly definitive testimony of the standardized test.

All this bears on the transfer of credits between institutions. We do not have to impose diversity-killing standardization to enable student movement between institutions. If teachers know what it means to have a grasp of their own subject matter, and if they must eventually determine their students’ adequacy before conferring a credit or a degree—well, then, they must learn to determine their students’ adequacy. Why do they need the reassurance of a certain number of standardized credit hours on a transcript? Is it that, like convicts putting in prison time, students must “pay their dues”?

Certainly a record of “dues” paid may be of some help. But the point is that personal knowledge, as well as standard measures, must be applied so far as possible from the very beginning. This introduces a balancing principle of flexibility, preventing a standardized system from simply crushing individual students.

But there is one final piece of the puzzle of higher education. If the university is sinking into irrelevance, and if the student is disappearing from view, so, too, the subject matter of education is evaporating, leaving only the informational dregs of what once were living subjects. If, as I said above, we’ve been reconceiving education as the transfer of information from one database or brain to another, this is because what passes for knowledge within the various disciplines has more and more been reduced to the kind of decontextualized fact fit for such transfer.

This is a huge assertion—as huge as the entire range of academic subjects. I can hardly justify it here. All I can essay now is to point at one particular symptom of the denaturing of what we call “knowledge.” The world we ought to be engaging has disappeared behind a tissue of brittle, yes-or-no abstractions. Just as we have ignored the student in favor of an array of measurements, so also we have turned our faces away from the world itself, as qualitatively given—the world that might, unnervingly, speak to us. From the scientist’s instrumentation to the sociologist’s surveys, we have perfected the means for ignoring the immediate, expressive presence of the people and the natural phenomena around us, and therefore we have no meaningful context in which to anchor our swelling cascades of data.

If the efficient transfer of information is what educational institutions are all about, and if measuring the transfer of information is what credentials and certification are all about, and if gaining information in the first place is what the various academic disciplines are all about, then you’d think we must have some reasonable understanding of information. What is this stuff we are so busy gaining and transferring and measuring?

A few years ago I opened an address to over five hundred librarians in Washington, D.C., by asking, “Can anyone here tell me what information is?” Seeing no takers, I asked how many in the audience, given several minutes to think, imagined they could write down a serviceable definition of “information.” Not a single hand was raised.

Subsequently I put the same question to over three hundred librarians in Calgary, Alberta, and again no one raised a hand. Surely this should provoke some reflection in us (as I think it did in many of those remarkably good-humored and sensible librarians). Anyone looking at the contemporary educational scene with its ceaseless invocations of information as the source of enlightenment, empowerment, and efficiency is fully entitled to stand up and shout: “What the hell is going on?”

Instead of this, however, an official respondent to one of my talks ventured this remark:

Unfortunately, this doesn’t quite do it. Coal miners, McDonald’s employees, and dentists are also in the business of providing what their customers need. Does this make them information workers?

Actually, though, I think the respondent came as close as one can come to the substance of the prevailing usage: information is “stuff”—whatever that is. Which makes him, I suppose, a stuff worker, and our age the Age of Stuff.

But there’s another side to information, represented by the prestigious halo it has borrowed from the technical theory of information. The problem here is that, by design, the theory’s purely statistical formulations exclude content and meaning. In terms of the theory, that is, information doesn’t have any meaningful content at all. The theory is simply not concerned with content—which is why it can bring perfect mathematical precision to its analyses.

So we have a notion of information that is so vague and all-encompassing that it means just about everything—“stuff.” And we have a companion notion that parades wonderful precision by abandoning all consideration of content. Should we wonder that the institutions aspiring to train tomorrow’s “information workers” lack any profound sense of their own mission?

Perhaps you think I exaggerate the confusion surrounding information. If so, just look at one of the fields where the concept of information figures most centrally: genetics. Science historian Lily Kay has documented the “contradictions, misapplications, slippages, circularities, and aporias in the usages of the concepts of information, message, code, and language” within genetic research—“problems acknowledged already in the 1950s.” By 1968, she points out,

This misleading and completely obscure usage has gone a long way toward convincing the public that genetic engineers actually know what they’re doing when they juggle and splice snippets of genetic “code.” After all, the code is being “deciphered,” yielding its precise content of “information”—isn’t it? And aren’t we already experts at information processing—moving bits of information around in a sensible fashion?

As any honest genetic engineer will tell you, the problem of understanding gene expression—how specific genetic alterations will actually affect an organism—is one we scarcely have a clue about today. The work proceeds, but it’s largely trial and error. All the information talk only obscures this fact, in addition to being the purest gibberish in its own terms.

A penchant for gibberish is not exactly what one hopes for in those who propose to rewrite our genetic destinies. Nor is it what one hopes for in the academy. But, when it comes to the presumed informational core of the academic mission, gibberish is what we have. Recognizing this fact seems to me the first step in re-visioning education. I don’t see any hope for educational reform until we can either get some reasonable clarity into our information talk, or else abandon it.