A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations
Compiled by William Kuhns
©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate
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“Learners are doers, not recipients.”
Walter J. Ong
“McLuhan as Teacher: The Future Is a Thing of the Past”, in Journal of Communication, Summer, 1981, p 129
Year: 1981
Chapter:
Education
"America is, in fact, the leading case in point of what may be thought of as the third great crisis in Western education. The first occurred in the fifth century B.C., when Athens underwent a change from an oral culture to an alphabet-writing culture. To understand what this meant, we must read Plato. The second occurred in the sixteenth century, when Europe underwent a radical transformation as a result of the printing press. To understand what this meant, we must read John Locke. The third is happening now, in America, as a result of the electronic revolution, particularly the invention of television. To understand what this means, we must read Marshall McLuhan."
Neil Postman
Amusing Ourselves to Death (New York: Penguin, 1987), p 145
Year: 1987
Chapter:
Education
Education is war declared on the young. You’re going to imprint violently on the young a certain pattern. That is war. I would suggest that if you were to put TV in the classroom, it would blow the classroom to bits. Then the teaching process should be completely transformed, it would be exactly like bringing the “Trojan Horse”, inside the walls of Troy, it would simply alter the entire pattern and procedures of the classroom and create an altogether new educational form.
Marshall McLuhan
“Out of Orbit: The Life and Times of Marshall McLuhan” Video (1999)”, transcript, 19:19 ff
Year: 1999
Chapter:
Education
We are entering the new age of education that is programmed for discovery rather than instruction.
Introduction to the Second Edition of Understanding Media (Signet paperback edition, 1966), p x.
Year: 1966
Chapter:
Discovery
The metropolis today is a classroom, the ads are its teacher. The traditional classroom is an obsolete detention home, a feudal dungeon.
“Five Sovereign Fingers Taxed the Breath”, in Shenandoah The Washington And Lee University Review, Vol.VII, No. 1, Autumn (1955), p 50, reprinted in Explorations 4, (1955), p 31, Explorations in Communication: an Anthology (1960), p 207, Also appears in alternative format as part of Verbi-Voco-visual Explorations, (1967), Counter Blast (1969), p 12, Essential McLuhan
(1995), p 210
Year: 1995
….as war is an accelerated and compulsory education program for friend and foe alike, so education today has become an all-out technological war on our culture and psyches.
Culture Is Our Business (1970), p 40
Year: 1970
One of the scandals of our age: vast expenditures on “new” educational hardware of nineteenth-century relevance.
Culture Is Our Business, (1970), p 40
Year: 1970
Chapter:
Rear View Mirror
The educational task is not only to provide basic tools of perception, but to develop judgment & discrimination with ordinary social experience.
“Classroom Without Walls” (1957)
Year: 1957
In the same way that industry now makes the consumer the producer by means of motivation research, do not educators now recognize the education problem to be motivation rather than consumption of packaged information?
“Electronic Revolution: Revolutionary Effects of New Media”, (1959), speech reprinted in Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews, (2003), p 9
Year: 1959
The printing press was the ultimate extension of phonetic literacy: Books could be reproduced in infinite numbers; universal literacy was at last fully possible, if gradually realized; and books became portable individual possessions. Type, the prototype of all machines, ensured the primacy of the visual bias and finally sealed the doom of tribal man. The new medium of linear, uniform, repeatable type produced information in unlimited quantities and at hitherto impossible speeds, thus assuring the eye a position of total predominance in man’s sensorium. As a drastic extension of man, it shaped and transformed his entire environment, psychic and social, and was directly responsible for the rise such disparate phenomena as nationalism, the Reformation, the assembly line, and its offspring, the Industrial Revolution.
“Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan: A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Media”. By Eric Norden. Playboy Magazine, March (1969), p 60, reprinted in Essential McLuhan (1995), p 243
Year: 1969
Drawn to McLuhan #14
Growing up – that is our new work, and it is total. Mere instruction will not suffice.
“Address at Vision 65”, 1965, p 4
Year: 1965
Chapter:
Youth
One item that has come much into focus here at the Centre concerns graduate studies. It can be put very briefly this way: whereas for centuries the Universities have been the main processing plants for young minds, they have become in the electric age, the principal organs of perception for the entire community. The undergraduate division still carries all the marks of the older University, being mainly verbal in its approach to the training of perception and judgment”.
Letter to Ernest Sirluck December 2, 1963, in Letters (1987), p 293
Year: 1963
Chapter:
Training of Perception
“In the age of information, both work and learning tend to approximate one another. Both take on more and more the character of pattern recognition and of discovery and of insight.”
From an untitled, unpublished, 2-page essay dated February 20, 1964, p 1
Year: 1964
The City as Classroom began out of Ivan Illich. Deschooling Society [1971] had challenged me. Illich was quite right in suggesting that we live in a new environment in which all the answers are now outside the school room and therefore he suggests, why don’t we close the schools? I say, why not put the questions in the classroom? If the answers are now outside, let’s get the questions inside and set up a dialogue between the outside and the inside. So our book The City as Classroom [1977] is really designed to get students in small teams to go outside, to study the setup of the situations that they live with every day and to discover what they’re made of. I call it the figure-ground approach — to study sort of Ralph Nader style what is developing in this environment.
City as Classroom Interview with Carl Scharfe, 1977, opening question
Year: 1977
PLAYBOY: Why do you think they aren't finding it [new identities] within the educational system?
McLUHAN: Because education, which should be helping youth to understand and adapt to their revolutionary new environments, is instead being used merely as an instrument of cultural aggression, imposing upon retribalized youth the obsolescent visual values of the dying literate age. Our entire educational system is reactionary, oriented to past values and past technologies, and will likely continue so until the old generation relinquishes power. The generation gap is actually a chasm, separating not two age groups but two vastly divergent cultures. I can understand the ferment in our schools, because our educational system is totally rearview mirror. It's a dying and outdated system founded on literate values and fragmented and classified data totally unsuited to the needs of the first television generation.
“Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan: A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Media”. By Eric Norden. Playboy Magazine, March (1969), p 62, reprinted in Essential McLuhan (1995), p 249-250
Year: 1969
PLAYBOY: How do you think the educational system can be adapted to accommodate the needs of this television generation?
McLUHAN: Well, before we can start doing things the right way, we’ve got to recognize that we’ve been doing them the wrong way—which most pedagogues and administrators and even most parents still refuse to accept. Today’s child is growing up absurd because he is suspended between two worlds and two value systems, neither of which inclines him to maturity because he belongs wholly to neither but exists in a hybrid limbo of constantly conflicting values. The challenge of the new era is simply the total creative process of growing up—and mere teaching and repetition of facts are as irrelevant to this process as a dowser to a nuclear power plant. To expect a “turned on” child of the electric age to respond to the old education modes is rather like expecting an eagle to swim. It’s simply not within his environment, and therefore incomprehensible.
The TV child finds it difficult if not impossible to adjust to the fragmented, visual goals of our education after having had all his senses involved by the electric media; he craves in-depth involvement, not linear detachment and uniform sequential patterns. But suddenly and without preparation, he is snatched from the cool, inclusive womb of television and exposed—within a vast bureaucratic structure of courses and credits—to the hot medium of print. His natural instinct, conditioned by the electric media, is to bring all his senses to bear on the book he’s instructed to read, and print resolutely rejects that approach, demanding an isolated visual attitude to learning rather than the Gestalt approach of the unified sensorium. The reading postures of children in elementary school are a pathetic testimonial to the effects of television; children of the TV generation separate book from eye by an average distance of four and a half inches, attempting psychomimetically to bring to the printed page the all-inclusive sensory experience of TV. They are becoming Cyclops, desperately seeking to wallow in the book as they do in the TV screen.
“Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan: A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Media”. By Eric Norden. Playboy Magazine, March (1969), p 62, reprinted in Essential McLuhan (1995), p 250
Year: 1969
PLAYBOY: Might it be possible for the “TV child” to make the adjustment to his educational environment by synthesizing traditional literate-visual forms with the insights of his own electric culture — or must the medium of print be totally unassimilable for him McLUHAN: Such a synthesis is entirely possible, and could create a creative blend of the two cultures — if the educational establishment was aware that there is an electric culture. In the absence of such elementary awareness, I’m afraid that the television child has no future in our schools.
“Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan: A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Media. By Eric Norden. Playboy Magazine, March (1969), p 62, reprinted in Essential McLuhan (1995), p 250
Year: 1969
In the 17th and 18th centuries as the bourgeoisie got going they tended to pull their kids out of the environment and put them in school rooms where they could be given highly specialized training of what is now called literacy. But that sort of training had been alien to the studies of, say, the Middle Ages. Young people [then] became workers from the age of seven — they were fully qualified workmen, up to a point, by the age of seven. Today in the electronic environment a person of three years of age can be senile, grey, with excess information.
City as Classroom Interview with Carl Scharfe, 1977
Year: 1977
Finnegans Wake is quite aware that anybody who learns to speak a proper tongue or dialect has acquired vast information and vast skill. A child who at the age of one speaks English or his native tongue has learned more than he will ever learn again in all his life put together. That is because the language itself is a vast store of information and when a child has learned to speak English or Polish he has learned more than he will ever learn again in all his life put together. Well that is because language has this peculiar character: it is a storehouse, it’s like a databank. Language is a vast databank stored with the impressions and knowledge of countless millions of people. Anybody who can speak any language has access to this huge databank of a language. Now electronically we are more and more aware of this and we’re more and more trying to simulate these databanks. We’re trying now mechanically as it were to store in databanks things which are already inherent in any language.
City as Classroom Interview with Carl Scharfe, 1977
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Language
The young can only conclude that we are not serious. And this is the meaning of their decline of attention.
“The Electronic Revolution”, 1959, reprinted in Understanding Me (2003), p 3
Year: 1959
[I]f education has now become the basic investment and activity of the electronic age, then the classroom educator can recover his role only by enlarging it beyond anything it ever was in any previous culture. We cannot hope simply to retain our old prerogatives. Our bridges are gone and the Rubicon is yet to cross!
“The Post-Literate Man”, 1973, Cycle 7: Essays, Short Stories, Poems for Freshman English, ed. by James Burl Hogins and Robert Earl Yaber, p 231
Year: 1973
Education today is totalitarian because there is no corner of the globe or of inner experience which we are not eager to subject to scrutiny and processing.
“The Post-Literate Man”, 1973, Cycle 7: Essays, Short Stories, Poems for Freshman English, ed. by James Burl Hogins and Robert Earl Yaber, p 231
Year: 1973
To expect a ‘turned on’ child of the electric age to respond to the old education modes is rather like expecting an eagle to swim. It’s simply not within his environment, and therefore incomprehensible.
“Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan: A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Media. By Eric Norden. Playboy Magazine, March (1969), p 62, reprinted in Essential McLuhan (1995), p 250
Year: 1969
All of my recommendations, therefore, can be reduced to this one: study the modes of the media, in order to hoick all assumptions out of the subliminal, non-verbal realm for scrutiny and for prediction and control of human purposes. Such a program can most readily be instituted today at the level of secondary education.
Recommendations, in NAEB Report on Understanding New Media, June, (1960) p 3
Year: 1960
As we extend our educational operation by television and videotape we shall find that the teacher is no longer the source of data but of insight. More and more teachers will be needed for the type of depth instruction that goes naturally with television, with light through rather than light on.
“Electronic Revolution: Revolutionary Effects of New Media”, (1959), speech reprinted in Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews, (2003), p 10
Year: 1959
[Secondary school students] …have very great experience of media, but no habits of observation or critical awareness. Yet they are the best teachers of media to teachers, who are otherwise unreachable.
Purpose of Project 69, NAEB Report on Understanding New Media, June,(1960), p 4
Year: 1960
Our educational process is necessarily geared to eliminate all bone. The supple, well-adjusted man is the one who has learned to hop into the meat grinder while humming a hit-parade tune. Individual resistance to that process is labeled destructive and uncooperative.
The Mechanical Bride, (1951), p 128
Year: 1951
In providing the first complete mechanization of an ancient handicraft, print created an explosion in learning in the sixteenth century. But the technology by which the mechanization of writing was achieved also invaded every phase of teaching and learning during the past five hundred years.
“The New Media and the New Education”, in The Basilian Teacher, December 1961, p 94, Portions originally published as “Grammars for the Newer Media.” In Communication in General Education: College Composition and Communication, (1960)
Year: 1961
The portability of the book, shared with its repeatability and cheapness, created on the one hand the habit of privacy and silence, and on the other hand made possible the classroom in which all have ready for use the same data and texts.
“The New Media and the New Education”, in The Basilian Teacher, December 1961, p 95. Portions originally published as “Grammars for the Newer Media.” In Communication in General Education: College Composition and Communication (1960)
Year: 1961
The artists have told us that there will be no more consumer packages in education – not at least if education is to have a relevance to our new world. The dialogue will replace the guided tours of data provided by the book as teaching machine. In the dialogue there is no maintaining a point of view, but only the common participation in creating perpetually new insight and understanding in a total field of unified awareness.
“The New Media and the New Education”, in The Basilian Teacher, December, 1961, p 97, Portions originally published as “Grammars for the Newer Media.” In Communication in General Education: College Composition and Communication (1960)
Year: 1961
Radio and TV aren’t audio-visual aids to enhance or to popularize previous forms of experience. They are new languages. We must first master and then teach these new languages in all their minute particularity and riches. In so doing we have available on an unprecedented scale the resources of comparison and contrast. We can compare the same play or novel or poem or news story as it’s changed artistically in passing onto the movie form, the stage, the radio and TV. We can note the precise qualities of each medium, as we would compare the the various degrees of effectiveness of a thought in Greek or French or English. This is what the young are doing sloppily and helplessly outside the classroom every day. This holds their attention automatically as the classroom does not.
“The Post-Literate Man”, 1973, Cycle 7: Essays, Short Stories, Poems for Freshman English, ed. by James Burl Hogins and Robert Earl Yaber, p 231
Year: 1973
Chapter:
Media Study
To try to defend our civilization against itself by trying either to warn or to encourage the young about the surrounding chaos and vulgarity would be like the Eskimo trying to defend his culture against ours by taking a vow of silence.
“The Post-Literate Man”, 1973, Cycle 7: Essays, Short Stories, Poems for Freshman English, ed. by James Burl Hogins and Robert Earl Yaber, p 231
Year: 1973
This also means that we shall tend as they [pre-literate societies] did towards homogeneity both of experience and organization. Perhaps, therefore, we have in our post-literacy come to the age of the classroom without walls.
“The Post-Literate Man”, 1973, Cycle 7: Essays, Short Stories, Poems for Freshman English, ed. by James Burl Hogins and Robert Earl Yaber, p 230
Year: 1973
Chapter:
Retribalizing
Learning, the educational process, has long been associated only with the glum. We speak of the “serious” student. Our time presents a unique opportunity for learning by means of humor – a perceptive or incisive joke can be more meaningful than platitudes lying between two covers.
The Medium Is the Massage, with Jerome Agel and Quentin Fiore, 1967, p 10
Year: 1967
Chapters:
Living Unity | Dropout
The business of the critic is to get the reader into contact then to mold him, to constrain what he contacts. This is to assume no more for literature than for music. The critic-teacher has to know at least as much about the technologies and forms of literature as a symphony conductor about scores and instruments.
Jotted onto a page addressed “Dear reader” found in the U of T Quarterly, January, 1950, in Eric McLuhan’s library, retrieved and published by Andrew McLuhan
Year: 1950
Chapters:
Literary Criticism | Training of Perception
It is easier to teach the arts (especially contemporary arts) to those who are participants in our technological culture than to those who sit on the sidelines registering distaste and incomprehension.
Letter to Norbert Wiener, May 28, 1951 (LAC)
Year: 1951
Chapters:
Teaching | Technology
[I]f education has now become the basic investment and activity of the electronic age, then the classroom educator can recover his role only by enlarging it beyond anything it ever was in any previous culture. We cannot hope simply to retain our old prerogatives. Our bridges are gone and the Rubicon is yet to cross!
“The Post-Literate Man”, 1973, Cycle 7: Essays, Short Stories, Poems for Freshman English, ed. by James Burl Hogins and Robert Earl Yaber, p 231
Year: 1973
People panic when invited to alter habitual ways of seeing, and looking, and hearing, and feeling. They are quite right in supposing that an effort is being made to alter their identity. The teacher is satisfied with nothing less than that.
Letter to Michael Barkway, Editor of Financial Times, Sept. 11, 1972 (LAC)
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Surveillance
“It is like setting up a distinction between didactic and lyric poetry on the ground that one teaches and the other pleases. It has always been true that whatever pleases teaches much more effectively.
“Classroom TV,”. Study Pamphlets In Canadian Education (1957), p 4
Year: 1957
Chapter:
Teaching
The ivory tower becomes the control tower of human navigation.
Counterblast, (1969), p 143
Year: 1969
Chapter:
Anticipating Change
The implication of discarnate, disembodied existence in an information world is one for which our educational system has not quite prepared us.
Man and Media,” lecture delivered at York University, Toronto, (1979), in Understanding Me (2003), p 288
Year: 1979
With a parallel increase of accessibility of all cultures to all cultures and of all subject matters to all others, the redesigning of the educational establishments of the Western world is equally urgent not as an ideal but as a necessity.
“Popular / Mass culture” (1960), in Understanding Me (2003), p 19
Year: 1960
Chapters:
Hardware / Software | Today’s Transition
Until recently our institutions and arrangements, social, political, and economic, had shared a one-way pattern. We still think of it as "explosive," or expansive; and though it no longer obtains, we still talk about the population explosion and the explosion in learning. In fact, it is not the increase of numbers in the world that creates our concern with population. Rather, it is the fact that everybody in the world has to live in the utmost proximity created by our electric involvement in one another's lives. In education, likewise, it is not the increase in numbers of those seeking to learn that creates the crisis. Our new concern with education follows upon the changeover to an interrelation in knowledge, where before the separate subjects of the curriculum had stood apart from each other. Departmental sovereignties have melted away as rapidly as national sovereignties under conditions of electric speed.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, pp 35-36
Year: 1964
Chapters:
Hardware / Software | Today’s Transition
What we have called education in recent centuries has consisted in visiting or in stimulating as many earlier environments and cultures as possible. Language is unrivaled in providing the actual sensuous modalities of other environments, with their unique ground rules. Electric circuitry can become a means to bypass language and plug directly into other modes of consciousness.
“The Emperor’s Old Clothes” , (1966),reprinted in McLuhan Unbound #20 (2017), p 11
Year: 1966
The entire planet becomes a little round schoolhouse. The whole environment becomes a teaching machine.
“The Marfleet Lectures” , March 16-17 (1967), reprinted in Understanding Me (2003), p 130
Year: 1967
Globally mankind is now a community of conscious learning.
“The role of mass communications in meeting today's problems”, in Proceedings of Conference on Educational Television circular, nº 574 (1958), p 15
Year: 1958
It is, of course, mistaken to suppose that education in any important sense is connected with the schoolroom. Education is the sum total of all those ideas and objects pressing in on the mind every hour of the waking day.
“Public School Education”, in The Manitoban, October 17, 1933, p 2
Year: 1933
One of the great problems in pedagogy, I think, is a kind of process of translation from one culture to another culture that we are undergoing; and an extensive medium revolution such as the electronic one, turns us all into mental DP´s. We are all displaced persons today, whether we like it or not; and we are all confronted with huge undeveloped countries of the mind where we hardly know what to do first.
“Culture is Our Business: The Meaning of the New Electronic Media”, in NAEB Journal, December, 1959, p 30
Year: 1959
[To a participant in a Monday Night Seminar] But as I said, you will never have as much leisure, during any working day of your life, as you have in school.
Undated Monday Night Seminar, 1969-1972, found on YouTube, “Marshall McLuhan 1969-1972, Full Recording of a Monday Night Seminar, Toronto University,” transcript, 26:04.
Year: 1969
Sputnik inspired a great educational outburst. Educators “rode off in all directions at once.” Education has become by many times the largest business in the world.
Dedication for Magnovia II, February, 1968
Year: 1968
We enter the age of paid learning. Learning itself creates wealth. Education is by many times the largest business in the world.
Counterblast (1969), p 37
Year: 1969
A child does not learn language as a series of classified meanings. He learns language as he learns to walk, or to hear, or to see. He learns language as a way of feeling and exploring his environment. Therefore, he is totally involved. He learns very fast because of this enormous sensuous involvement and the resulting depth of motivation. It will be possible in this generation, I hope, to program the environment in such a way that we can learn a second language as we learned our mother tongue, rapidly and totally, as a means of perception and of discovery. The future of language presents the possibility of a world without words, a wordless, intuitive world, like a technological expression of the action of consciousness. E.S.P.
“The Invisible Environment: The Future of an Erosion”, Perspecta, Vol.11, (1967), p 167, reprinted in On the Nature of Media, (2016), p 124
Year: 1967
Graduate studies could thus become more and more related to the corporate life of communal action and less and less oriented towards the preparing of young minds.
Letter to Ernest Sirluck, December 2, 1963, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 293
Year: 1963
This has been happening in big business, where all the members of the firm more and more insist on participation in decision-making at high levels, but when I mention the senior members of firms as being invaded by these teams of decision-makers from below there is no inside or outside under electronic conditions. That is the meaning of our glass buildings, the new banking services. Another way of putting it, in case I forget, is to say that under electronic conditions everything becomes a service industry, including education. Education is the biggest service industry in the world and it is only beginning. All things become service industries, banking included.
“Education in the Electronic Age,” a speech delivered January 19, 1967 to the Provincial Committee on the Aims and Objectives of Education in Ontario; published in Interchange, Vol 1, No. 4, 1970, p 2
Year: 1967
The global community has become a community of learning-around the clock and around the globe. The largest business in the world is the packaging, moving, and absorbing or consuming of information.
“Culture is Our Business: The Meaning of the New Electronic Media”, in NAEB journal, December, 1959, p 4
Year: 1959
… as teachers we have to recognize that education is no longer a monopoly of the classroom and that the young are learning as much outside as inside the classroom. Moreover, we ourselves have to face new facts and new media which are as novel for us as for our students. We have, as never before, to shape the learning process with them.
New Media in Arts Education (1956), AN ADDRESS GIVEN AT THE MARCH I956 CONVENTION OF THE EASTERN ARTS ASSOCIATION. New York City, LAC of page,
Year: 1956
Is not the emergence of a global community of learning a natural outcome of a world in which the production and transportation of commodities finally merges with the movement of information itself?
“Popular/Mass Culture (1960)”, in Understanding Me (2003), p 31
Year: 1960
Applying my principle that education must always concentrate its resources at the point of major information intake, we have merely to ask, from what sources do growing minds nowadays acquire most factual data? How much critical awareness is conferred at these points? It is a commentary on our extreme culture lag that when we think of criticism of information flow we still only use the concept of book culture, namely, how much trust can be reposed in the words of the message. Yet the bias of each medium is far more distorting than the deliberate lie.
A Historical Approach to the Media, in Teachers College Record, Vol.57, Issue.2,Nov (1955) ,p 110.
Year: 1955
Education must always concentrate its resources at the point of major information intake. Today, therefore, we have a great culture lag. We still use only the concept of book culture in our classrooms while the forms projected at us by our technology are greatly more informative than any verbal message they convey.
“An Historical Approach to Media (1955)”, Excerpts from manuscript, lecture given in Ed. 261PR·July 26, 1955, p 3
Year: 1955
One way of putting it is to say, for the first time in human history, there is more information and data outside the classroom or the school situation than inside. The sheer amount of levels of information outside in the environment far exceed the amount of data and information inside the classroom. This is not just of very recent origin. It’s occurring more and more rapidly and on a much bigger and bigger scale.
“The Medium is the Massage (1966)”, in Understanding Me (2003), p 89
Year: 1966
In the world of electric circuitry, entire environments are kept in a state of interface and dialogue among themselves to the point where we will be tempted to deal with the entire world as a college campus and to program its cultures as subjects in a curriculum.
From Cliché to Archetype with Wilfred Watson (1970), p 199
Year: 1970
If the teaching establishment wish to handle, at a single stroke, the whole environment of trash and vulgarity, they complain about, they have only to program it for weekly examination, once or twice. The young would never look at these things again, they now accord this treatment to Shakespeare and make Shakespeare unreadable, impossible for life, by simple expedient of examinations. But if they did the same for comic books, and the daily comics, and the comic books, and the magazines, the TV shows, the radio shows; they could control the young interest or deprive the young of all interest in trash and vulgarity forever.
“TV Interview with Fletcher Markle”, in CBC-TV, 1967, transcript: 14.05
Year: 1967
Modern classroom seating plans persist in the spatial layout of the moveable type which gave us the printed page.
“Inside the Five Sense Sensorium (1961)”, reprinted in Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader (2005), p 50
Year: 1961
School and classroom as we know them were the direct extension of the technology of the printed book. And the printed book was the first teaching-machine whereas the manuscript had been merely a teaching tool.
“The Electronic Age - The Age of Implosion (1962)”, in Essays media research technology, art, communication (1997), p 34
Year: 1962
The school system, custodian of print culture, has no place for the rugged individual. It is, indeed, the homogenizing hopper into which we toss our integral tots for processing.
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, (1962), p 215
Year: 1962
Mass education is a child of a mechanical age. It grew up along with the production line... [and it has] mastered the linear technique of stamping out products in mass.
“Learning in the Global Village” with George Leonard (1967), in Radical School Reform (1969), p 107
Year: 1967
Some years ago I took a cue from Malraux's 'museum without walls' and began to write about, classrooms without walls pointing to the fact that the space of the modem classroom is based on the printed book. The kind of uniform, repeatable enclosure of data from the press made it possible for the first time in history to have the same book in front of teacher and students alike.
“Inside the Five Sense Sensorium (1961)”, reprinted in Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader (2005), p 50
Year: 1961
Competition, as a matter of fact, became the chief motive force in mass education as in society, with grades and tests of all sorts gathering about them a power and glory all out of proportion to their quite limited function as learning aids.
“Learning in the Global Village”, 1969, p 108
Year: 1969
Learning should be paid because it makes wealth. Any kid watching a TV program should be paid... Literally, he's gainfully employed.
Prospect, 1962, p 366
Year: 1962
But is it not this very shift in our society which makes the young so resentful of an educational establishment in which they are consumers only? They live with a technology which insists that they be co-producers in the very act of learning. They experience only a negative motivation with regard to a curriculum which ignores the undeveloped countries of our minds and which looks on the new media as the source not only of culture but of trash.
“Our New Electronic Culture: The Role of Communications in Meeting Today’s Problems”, in NAEB Journal, October, 1958, p 25
Year: 1958
There is one huge abyss which is opened between the teacher and the student in this respect– the teacher is committed to learning processes and textbooks that are linear, while dealing with students who have very little experience with linear forms and a huge experience with the nuclear. This means loss of motivation in the classroom; it means loss of attention in the classroom– on a huge scale – terrific leakage.
“Culture is Our Business: The Meaning of the New Electronic Media”, in NAEB Journal, December, 1958, p 5
Year: 1958
The child who learns one language before another will have only one mother-tongue. He will not learn the second in the same total way as the first. Carl Orff, the Viennese composer, has a music school in which he seeks to train his pupils before they can read or write. His view is that after literacy nobody can really master the modes of music.
“The Medium Is the Message (1960)”, reprinted in McLuhan Unbound number 17 (2005), p 13
Year: 1960
For students today approach their world via languages of several media. That is to say, that they live in a world that requires of them extremely complex responses. Another way of saying this is to point to the fact that in an electronic world there can be no hidden crannies or any unarticulated experience. We cannot live with the subliminal or the inarticulate in private or group experience.
“The New Media and the New Education,” in The Basilian Teacher, December 1961, p 26
Year: 1961
The drop-out situation in our schools at present has only begun to develop. The young student today grows up in an electrically configured world. It is a world not of wheels but of circuits, not of fragments but of integral patterns. The student today fives mythically and in depth. At school, however, he encounters a situation organized by means of classified information. The subjects are unrelated. They are visually conceived in terms of a blueprint. The student can find no possible means of involvement for himself, nor can he discover how the educational scene relates to the “mythic” world of electronically processed data and experience that he takes for granted. As one IBM executive puts it, “My children had several lifetimes compared to their grandparents when they began grade one.”
“Introduction to the Second Edition”, in Understanding Media Second Edition (1966), p viii-ix
Year: 1966
Only students of high visual bias appear as superior in the Western world, and the slow learner is usually a multi-sensuous individual.
“Roles, Masks and Performances (1971)”, reprinted in McLuhan Unbound number 17 (2005), p 15
Year: 1971
Today’s television child is attuned to up-to-the-minute “adult” news—inflation, rioting, war, taxes, crime, bathing beauties—and is bewildered when he enters the nineteenth century environment that still characterizes the educational establishment where information is scarce but ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patterns, subjects, and schedules. It is naturally an environment much like any factory set-up with its inventories and assembly lines.
The Medium is the Massage with Quentin Fiore, 1967, p 18 “Address at Vision 65”, in The American Scholar, 1965, p 4
Year: 1967
But there is a real sense in which the new media today threaten the procedures of this traditional classroom instead of merely reinforcing them. It is customary to answer this threat with denunciations of movie and TV entertainment. In the same way comic books were feared and scorned and rejected from the classroom. Their good and bad features in form and content, when carefully set by side other kinds of art and narrative, would have been a major asset to the teacher.
“Classroom TV”, in Study Pamphlets in Canadian Education, Number 12 (1957), p 3
Year: 1957
Continued in their present pattern of fragmented unrelation, our school curricula will insure a citizenry unable to understand the cybernetic world in which they live.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 347
Year: 1964
A child learns to separate the senses when he learns, in class, to read silently. His legs twist, he bites his tongue, but by an enormous tour de force he learns to fragment his senses, to turn on one at a time and keep the others in neutral. And so he is indoctrinated into that literate world where readers seek silent solitude, concert-goers close their eyes, and gallery guards warn, “Don’t touch!”
“McLuhan Looks at Fashion (1968)”, in On the Nature of Media (2016), p 154
Year: 1968
Isolating one sense from all others calls for enormous training and self-control, and it is probably never fully achieved. Test this yourself: run water into the bath while switching the light on and off – the sound appears louder in the darkness.
“McLuhan Looks at Fashion (1968)”, in On the Nature of Media (2016), p 154
Year: 1968
Chapter:
Senses
Discovery, exploration, probing is much more proper to the inhabitants of an electronic environment, because the amount of information available is beyond anybody’s wish or need for instructional purposes. Nobody wants to know all. What we desperately do need is to know the pattern that structures that, this or that.
“Joyce and T(hunder)elevision (1966)”, audio-recorded lecture, transcript, pp 13-14
Year: 1966
Chapter:
Discovery
In other words, the book – with the aid of the computer and the telephone and Xerox – is becoming a completely flexible service. This pattern, as it enters the world of education, means that instruction in the older classroom sense will tend to yield, is already tending to yield, to discovery as a technique of learning.
“Information Hunt Looms Big” (1967), p 4
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Book
Today, civil defence would seem to consist in protection against media fallout. In the past, war has consisted in the movement of commodities back and forth across frontiers.
What I Learned on the Project (1959-60), in NAEB Report on Understanding New Media, June (1960), p 2
Year: 1959
Chapter:
Divided by Media
Is it not terribly wasteful of values and opportunities, as well as destructive of harmony that unwittingly men should so embroil themselves in civil feuds arising from media change?
“New Media and the new Education” (1960), p 190
Year: 1960
The transforming power of media is easy to explain, but the ignoring of this power is not at all easy to explain.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 304
Year: 1964
But with regard to the bomb and retaliation as deterrent, it is obvious that numbness is the result of any prolonged terror, a fact that was discovered when the fall-out shelter program was broached. The price of eternal vigilance is indifference.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 30
Year: 1964
Chapters:
Divided by Media | Warnings
It was James Joyce in Finnegans Wake who demonstrated that the way to overcome the fear of the present, and of innovation in general, is to make an inventory of all the effects of the new thing as it encounters all the older forms of the society. Failure to make this inventory results in the use of the present as a nostalgic mirror for the past.
“The future of morality: the inner versus the outer quest”, in “The new morality: continuity and discontinuity”, ed. William Dunphy (New York: Herder and Herder, 1967), p 176
Year: 1967
Chapters:
Divided by Media | Media Study
Not many of us are as alert as the kindergartner who said to Garry Moore, "How did you get off TV?"
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 317
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Divided by Media
Education is ideally civil defense against media fall-out.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 195
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Divided by Media
Just as we now try to control atom-bomb fallout, so we will one day try to control media fallout.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 195
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Divided by Media
We live in an information environment in which the functions of education are no longer instruction but discovery. When the total environment is made of information, then it is an absurd waste of time to spend all your time in instruction. Discovery is far more rewarding. But the children in our world know this and if you want to have a nice image or just reminder of a very nice image of this big changeover from instruction to discovery think of the ‘Go Go Girls, the discothèques. Here you have an amazing dramatization of human frustration in the great information age: the old repetitive beat, the caged, the environmental job-like cage and the repetitive beat—and all those energies are bottled up in the old culture, the old technology. The Go Go Girl is trying to tell us very loud and clear that the old mechanical technology, behind us, will not serve as a means of controlling or releasing the energies in an electronic age. Every new technology, and this is always true and it is true now.
“What the New Communications Will Mean to Public Relations”, in Public Relations Journal, January, 1967, p 23
Year: 1967
The classroom is now in a vital struggle for survival with the immensely persuasive "outside" world created by new informational media. Education must shift from instruction, from imposing of stencils, to discovery —to probing and exploration and to the recognition of the language of forms.
The Medium is the Massage (1967), p 100
Year: 1967
All left-handed people used to be taught right-handedness as soon as they went to school. The blind are mainly instructed in how to behave as if they could see. Instead of taking advantage of the fact that the blind have other senses that re very much sharper than those of the sighted...
“Contribution in Racial integration”, in Spectrum of Catholic Attitudes (1969), p 124
Year: 1969
The learning process as a model of consciousness itself has to invest every aspect of human making.
“The Man Who Came to Listen (1970)”, in On the Nature of Media (2016), p 186
Year: 1970
When radar was new it was found necessary to eliminate the balloon system for city protection that had preceded radar. The balloons got in the way of the electric feedback of the new radar information. Such may well prove to be the case with our existing school curriculum, to say nothing of the generality of the arts. We can afford to use only those portions of them that enhance the perception of our technologies, and their psychic and social consequences. Art as a radar environment takes on the function of indispensable perceptual training rather than the role of a privileged diet for the elite.
“Introduction to the Second Edition”, in Understanding Media Second Edition (1966), p xi
Year: 1966
This danger signal is only one of many now flashing in school systems throughout the world. The signals say that something is out of phase, that most present-day schools may be lavishing vast and increasing amounts of time and energy preparing students for a world that no longer exists.
“Learning in the Global Village” with George Leonard (1967), in Radical School Reform (1969), p 107
Year: 1967
When you move into a new area, a new territory and learn a new language, the language is not a new subject; it is an environment, it is total. This is the pattern of learning in the future.
“The New Education”, in The Basilian Teacher, Vol 7, No. 2, February, (1967), p 67-68
Year: 1967
Chapters:
Environment | Future
Paradoxically, automation makes liberal education mandatory.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 357
Year: 1964
We still talk and look in the rear-view mirror and think we are heading into specialization. We are heading into a highly encyclopedic world, like the world of the hunter. The hunter knew everything. He had to in order to survive.
“Education in the Electronic Age,” a speech delivered January 19, 1967, to the Provincial Committee on the Aims and Objectives of Education in Ontario; published in Interchange, Vol 1, No. 4, 1970, p 11
Year: 1967
The university and school of the future must be a means of total community participation, not in the consumption of available knowledge, but in the creation of completely unavailable insights. The overwhelming obstacle to such community participation in problem solving and research at the top levels, is the reluctance to admit, and to describe, in detail their difficulties and their ignorance. There is no kind of problem that baffles one or a dozen experts that cannot be solved at once by a million minds that are given a chance simultaneously to tackle a problem. The satisfaction of individual prestige, which we formerly derived from the possession of expertise, must now yield to the much greater satisfactions of dialogue and group discovery. The task yields to the task force.
“Convocation Address”, in University of Alberta, November 20th, 1971
Year: 1971
For a century it has been evident in North America that great frustration of mind and purpose has resulted from the gap between official and unofficial education. Official institutional instruction at all levels has tried to maintain the priority of traditional verbal and written culture. Unofficial culture has been mainly non-verbal and visual. Unofficially the young have responded spontaneously and enthusiastically to the new technological environment. Their sensibilities have been shaped by the new machine forms which are themselves the product of the artistic imagination in mathematics and physics. But these forms and the popular culture linked to them have no official recognition in the traditional curriculum of verbal culture... There does exist, then, a two-way bridge between the traditional and technological worlds which are at war in Western culture. But it has been officially ignored or condemned. To travel this bridge requires of the traveler an acquaintance with the language and techniques of poetry on the one hand, and of the language and techniques of painting, architecture, and the visual world on the other. Few are prepared to acquire both languages and so the war between these worlds continues, waged witlessly in classroom.
“Space, Time and Poetry”, in Explorations 4, (1955), p 60, (2016) reprint, p 55, reprinted as McLuhan Unbound #13, (2017), p 11
Year: 1955
Chapters:
From Tribal to Literate | Hardware / Software | Time | Today’s Transition | Training of Perception
We could do for the classroom of our century what Erasmus did for the classroom of his time. We could make it the matrix of a cultural flowering much greater than that of the Elizabethan Age. For we possess, and to some degree we already experience, the facts of media cross-fertilization. The great eras of culture occur when a large area of oral or auditory experience is invaded by a visual medium. For the Elizabethans the whole folk wisdom of oral culture, centuries of oral disputation, and a huge backlog of vocal music were cross-fertilized by the printed page. A very rich auditory heritage was exposed via a visual medium with spectacular results.
“A Historical Approach to Media (1955)”, reprinted in Teachers College Record, Vol. 57, No. 2, November 1955, p 110
Year: 1955
Erasmus was the first to act on the awareness that part of the new revolution would be felt in the classroom. He put the old oral scholasticism into his Adagia and Similia. The same situation confronts us. We are already experiencing the discomfort and challenge of classrooms without walls, just as the modern painter has to modify his techniques in accordance with art reproduction and museums without walls. We can decide either to move into the new wall-less classroom in order to act upon our total environment, or to look on it as the last dike holding back the media flood. Let us consider that the flow of information into the student mind (and our own as well) which was once oral, and then printed, could easily be controlled in the classroom. Today only a tiny trickle of the information flow into the student mind can be accounted for in the classroom. For every fact or attitude which the teacher can initiate or direct, the visual and auditory environment provides many thousands of facts and experiences.
Counterblast (1969), p 132
Year: 1969
Instead of [relying on] the teacher of a subject, the pattern shifts under implosion to a small team devoted (Operations Research style) to a live problem. The dialogue supplants the exposition and even the elementary student turns from the consumption of existing knowledge to top-level research.
“The Electronic Age - The Age of Implosion” (1962), in essays media research technology, art, communication (1997), p 34
Year: 1962
That age has passed. More swiftly than we can realize, we are moving into an era dazzlingly different. Fragmentation, specialization and sameness will be replaced by wholeness, diversity and, above all, a deep involvement.
“Learning in the Global Village” with George Leonard (1967), in Radical School Reform (1969), p 111
Year: 1967
To be involved means to be drawn in, to interact. To go on interacting, the student must get somewhere. In other words, the student and the learning environment (a person, a group of people, a book, a programmed course, an electronic learning console or whatever) must respond to each other in a pleasing and purposeful interplay. When a situation of involvement is set up, the student finds it hard to drag himself away.
“Learning in the Global Village” with George Leonard (1967), in Radical School Reform (1969), p 110
Year: 1967
The teachers must now become consultants to students who are programming the new media for instruction.
“Education and the New Media”, March 25, (1970), Televised in France, Le Monde Diplomatique, April 29, (1970), p 7
Year: 1970
Oh, I would never dream of carrying a batch of notes into the classroom, or recorded data to be transmitted to a bunch of students -- no, no, they already know far too much. What they need is to recognize some of the pattern in it.
“Society's Bones” (1967).
FLAG. Can anyone add more detail to the source?
FLAG. Can anyone add more detail to the source?
Year: 1967
Educationally we stand on the threshold of an age which will be the first to understand the effect of the media diet, both on men and also on media, new and old. Education may become civil defense against media fall-out.
“The Care and Feeding of Communication Innovation (1961)”, in Conference on 8mm Sound Film and Education, Dinner speech, Teacher's College, Nov 8, 1961, Columbia University, p 7
Year: 1961
The child who from one to six years experiences an adult world in front of a television is sent to school at six. He experiences there a carefully prepared child world for the first time in his life. This is very confusing. Most children may never recover from this traumatic experience which began only ten years ago. We refer to it as “loss of motivation”. As long as printing and industrial processes were parallel, a person could keep his bearings in the Western world. Today our educational establishment has not come into rapport with our own technology, and there is little civil defence against media fallout.
Grammars for the Newer Media, In Communication in General Education: College Composition and Communication, (1960), p 22 (24??)
Year: 1960
We are already experiencing the discomfort and challenge of classrooms without walls. Just as the moden painter had to justify his techniques in accordance with art reproduction and museums without walls. We can decide either to move into the new wall-less classroom in order to act upon our total environment, or to look on it as the last dike holding back the media flood.
“The Post-Literate Man,” 1973, Cycles 7, p 230
Year: 1973
Chapter:
Mastering Technology
And it no longer needs to be urged that radio, movie and television are not audio visual aids but special languages, with their own messages quite regardless of program “content”. The monarchy of print although archaic, has left us with the idea that education can be conducted on one plane at a time and in terms of one language or medium at a time. This may be an ideal state for educators. It did actually exist in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But it is not extant now.
Grammars for the Newer Media, In Communication in General Education: College Composition and Communication, (1960), p 25-26
Year: 1960
The challenge of the new media is total. We must face them on their own terms as new mother tongues and more vulgar forms of the old message. The young today learn the languages of the new media as they learn English. That is, they respond totally to these complex forms which we have ourselves created. Thereafter they are given no assistance or encouragement to make these forms an articulate and conscious part of our total culture.
“Our New Electronic Culture: The Role of Communications in Meeting Today’s Problems”, in NAEB Journal, October, 1958, p 25
Year: 1958
As educators committed to the processing of information flow, we have no choice but to teach the new languages through the old and the old through the new. The cinema students of Miss Cecile Starr at Columbia say to her on learning the language of film: ‘If only we had known this in high-school, how much more we would have enjoyed our literature courses.’ And if students of literature painting and music knew the profound interrelation between the technical innovations in these arts in the past century, if they were even prepared to notice the deep roots which the fine arts always have in the forms of the most vulgar and popular entertainments, they would be less alienated by formal instruction in the arts today.
“New Media in Arts Education”, an address given at the March 1956 Convention of the Eastern Arts Association, New York City (1956), LAC
Year: 1956
Today our natural temptation is to regard the new media as aids to or distractions from the older studies. We have not dared to see them as themselves, new art forms which can become direct objects of study.
“Our New Electronic Culture: The Role of Communications in Meeting Today’s Problems”, in NAEB Journal, October 1958, p 25
Year: 1958
In the early days of print people were taught to read and write, and then they were left to make use of these basic skills. Today, there is the syntax of the movies which the student has to be taught so that he might be able to study in the theatres. There is the syntax of the ads, with their psychological overtones. There is the syntax of the newspapers with their store of information built around the theme of TODAY: an interesting logic that calls for the simultaneous perception of the whole world at the moment and for a keen power of interpretation.
“Communication and Education”, in The Basilian Teacher, March, 1958, p 11-16
Year: 1958
The business community itself is becoming more and more a community of learning and of relearning, so that the huge industry expenditure on education today arises from a constant need to keep executives apprised of new information necessary for decision-making. And this is characteristic of all people in business, no matter what stage or level they are operating at, so that learning and the absorption of information in business itself has become a major part of the business operation.
“Culture is Our Business: The Meaning of the New Electronic Media”, in NAEB journal, December, 1958, p 4
Year: 1958
Let me mention that the characteristic form of the electronic age is the simultaneous, the instantaneous -not the sequential, not the segmented, not the fragmented. The new media are inclusive, total, and instantaneous.
“Culture is Our Business: The Meaning of the New Electronic Media”, in NAEB Journal, December, 1958, p 33
Year: 1958
I think, therefore, that the study of the media themselves and of their powers, quite independently of the cultural or utilitarian purposes that they have served, has been imposed upon us as a new task.
“Culture is Our Business: The Meaning of the New Electronic Media”, in NAEB Journal, December, 1958, p 34
Year: 1958
The future of work consists of learning a living in the automation age.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 346
Year: 1964
When you watch a ball game on TV, you are working for that program.
“Watergate – Participatory Torture”, 1973, p 4
Year: 1973
Chapter:
Tools We Shape, Reshape Us
Under electric technology the entire business of man becomes learning and knowing. In terms of what we still consider an "economy" (the Greek word for a household), this means that all forms of employment become "paid learning," and all forms of wealth result from the movement of information. The problem of discovering occupations or employment may prove as difficult as wealth is easy.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 58
Year: 1964
Whereas in previous ages higher education was a luxury or a privilege, it has become today a necessity of ordinary production and perception, and since knowledge has become the source of wealth and power, all those engaged in learning anything at all, from kindergarten onwards, are eligible for full adult payment. Indeed, without such paid learning our new economy is quite unable to release its riches for communal use.
“The Electronic Age - The Age of Implosion” (1962), in essays media research technology, art, communication (1997), p 35
Year: 1962
And just as industrial production now depends entirely on higher education, and as culture has become the main business of the globe, so learning and not teaching may well become the most highly paid profession. As we begin to learn for participation, rather than for specialist, applied knowledge patterns of action, we can look back and see how the growing habit of conferences already forecasts this change in the roles of teacher and learner. Applied knowledge for production is now taken for granted and knowledge shifts to the global role of community and participation in a way commensurate with the roles of the new media.
“Popular/Mass Culture” (1960), reprinted in Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews (2003), p 10-11
Year: 1960
Automation is “learning a living.”
“Culture and Technology” (1971), reprinted in On the Nature of Media (2016), p 89
Year: 1971
Chapters:
Living Unity | Dropout
In the Eighties, both curriculum and job shortages are phased out by a shift to “learning a living”.
“Living at the Speed of Light” (portions of which were published in Macleans, January 7, 1980); original 1979 typescript, p 14
Year: 1980
Automation: “Learning a Living” [Chapter title of the book's final chapter]
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 346
Year: 1964
Chapters:
Living Unity | Dropout
It seems reasonable to assume, therefore, that students should be encouraged to see the ground of English itself as the necessary inspiration and nourishment of every aspect of the arts and science of their age.
“Roles, Masks and Performances” (1971), reprinted in McLuhan Unbound number 12 (2005), p 25
Year: 1971
Earlier I listed some of the basic characters and consequences of printing in teaching and learning. It seemed a useful way of moving from the know to the less well known. I have insisted that any new structure for codifying experience and of moving information, be it alphabet or photography, has the power of imposing its structural character and assumptions upon all levels of our private and social lives, even without benefit of concepts or of conscious acceptance. That is what I've always meant by "the medium is the message." Moreover, a new medium bombards older media and awareness, stripping the older forms of experience to their bare bones or basic codes.
New Media and The New Education, Paper presented at the DAVI convention March (1960), reprinted as (Exhibit 1) in NAEB Report on Understanding New Media, June (1960), p x
Year: 1960
We have designed schools as anti-environments to develop the perception and judgement of the printed word. There are no means of training provided to develop similar perception and judgement of any of the new environments created by electric circuitry. This is not accidental. From the development of the phonetic script until the invention of the electric telegraph human technology had tended strongly toward the furtherance of detachment and objectivity, detribalization and individuality. Electric circuitry has quite the contrary effect. It merges the individual and the mass environment.
“The Relation of Environment to Anti-Environment,” The University of Windsor Review, Vol. 11, No. 1, (1966), p 3, reprinted in Through the Vanishing Point with Harley Parker (1968),p 244 , and McLuhan Unbound #4, (2017), p 8
Year: 1966
The computer in education is in a very tentative state but it does represent basically speeded up access to information and when it is applied to the telephone and to Xerox it permits access to the libraries of the world, almost immediately, without delay. And so the immediate effect of the computer is to pull up the walls of the subjects and divisions of knowledge in favor of over-all field, total awareness–Gestalt.
“The New Education”, in The Basilian Teacher, Vol 7, No. 2, February, (1967), p 67
Year: 1967
Where student interest is already focused is the natural point at which to be in the elucidation of other problems and interests.
“Classroom Without Walls”, in Explorations in Communication. An anthology with co-edited with Edmund Carpenter (1960), p 3
Year: 1960
Just as higher education is no longer a frill or luxury but a stark need of production and operational design in the electric age, so the artist is indispensable in the shaping and analysis and understanding of the life of forms, and structures created by electric technology.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 65
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Language of Forms
Until the electric age, higher education had been a privilege and a luxury for the leisured classes; today it has become a necessity for production and survival. Now, when information itself is the main traffic, the need for advanced knowledge presses on the spirits of the most routine-ridden minds. So sudden an upsurge of academic training into the marketplace has in it the quality of classical peripety or reversal, and the result has been a wild guffaw from the gallery and the campus. The hilarity, however, will die down as the Executive Suites are taken over by the Ph.D.s.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p103
Year: 1964
The telephone: speech without walls.
The phonograph: music hall without walls.
The photograph: museum without walls.
The electric light: space without walls.
The movie, radio, and TV: classroom without walls.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 283
Year: 1964
Education must always concentrate its resources at the major point of information intake, we merely have to ask, from what sources do growing minds nowadays acquire most factual data? How much critical awareness is conferred at these points?
Counterblast (1969), p 119
Year: 1969
The President needs me. I don’t know what our President would do without me. Claude Bissel that is, the President of dear old Toronto University, not Iike the President of the United States, who by the way I do not like. Claude has asked me to give his advisory group of senior academics the benefit of my views on the changes in higher learning necessitated by the electric age. It pains me to think of the changes sweeping through our leather-patched, tweed-ridden, and chalk-dusty world of which this august body is totally oblivious. No matter, it is my duty to tell them what they do not know. In short they are obsolete. I wonder how they will take the news.
Letter to Claude Bissel, Jan 4, 1961, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 279
Year: 1961
Chapters:
LOM 2 - Obsolesce | McLuhan on McLuhan
Instead of going out and buying a packaged book of which there have been five thousand copies printed, you will go to the telephone, describe your interests, your needs, your problems, and say you're working on a history of Egyptian arithmetic. You know a bit of Sanskrit, you're qualified in German, and you're a good mathematician, and they say it will be right over. And they at once xerox, with the help of computers from the libraries of the world, all the latest material just for you personally, not as something to be put out on a bookshelf. They send you the package as a direct personal service. This is where we're heading under electronic information conditions. Products increasingly are becoming services.
“Predicting Interactive Communication via the Internet”, TV Appearance on This Hour Has Seven Days, CBC-TV with Robert Fulford (1966), in McLuhan Speaks Transcript, p 3, reprinted in Understanding Me (2003), p 101
Year: 1966
The goal of science and the arts and of education for the next generation must be to decipher not the genetic but the perceptual code. In a global information environment, the old pattern of education in answer-finding is of no avail: one is surrounded by answers, millions of them, moving and mutating at electric speed. Survival and control will depend on the ability to probe and to question in the proper way and place.
Laws of Media: The New Science with Eric McLuhan, (1988), p 239
Year: 1988
No, this is an age in which the New Criticism or psychology or anything else, the word used in all these forms is depth. Reading in depth. Psychology in depth. Everything now is in depth.
“The Communications Revolution (1960)”, in Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews (2003), p 41
Year: 1960
Specialization won’t work any more as a means of learning. The only technique today for obtaining depth is by interrelating knowledge, whether it be in physics or anthropology or anything else. When a man attempts to study anything, he crosses the boundaries of that field almost as soon as he begins to look at it.
“Electronics & the Psychic Drop-out”, in This Magazine Is About Schools, April, 1966, p 37
Year: 1966
In such matters, people retained some sense of the whole pattern, of form and function as a unity. But in the electric age this integral idea of structure and configuration has become so prevalent that educational theory has taken up the matter. Instead of working with specialized "problems" in arithmetic, the structural approach now follows the lines of force in the field of number and has small children meditating about number theory and "sets."
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 13
Year: 1964
The moving of information itself has become by far the largest industry in the world. The consuming of information, electronically processed, is by far the largest activity today. Globally, mankind is now a community of conscious learning. Our industrial establishment is setting up higher and higher education programs for its top executives. Decision making today calls for exact knowledge of almost universal group dynamics.
“The role of mass communications in meeting today's problems”, in Proceedings of Conference on Educational Television circular, nº 574 (1958), p 15
Year: 1958
One obvious comment on my subject title would be to say that today's problems are the new media. We are now mainly engaged as spectators in watching a 500 - year old educational cultural achievement go down the drain. Somebody pulled the plug! A way of life based on the primacy of the printed word is dissolving in front of us. It may even prove to be the case that the entire tradition of phonetic writing, which is coextensive with our Western world and the Graeco Roman tradition, cannot sustain the electronic impact -- because, since the rise of literacy at least 2,500 years ago, our world has not been subjected to information moved everywhere, instantly and simultaneously. Let us not fail to ponder that dimension of the instantaneous, for it is the shape and meaning of the spoken word. Today information moves around the clock and around the globe in that instantaneous, simultaneous pattern. And whereas such a pattern has previously been known only to small, closed oral cultures, today it is the shape and experience of the global community of mankind. On what terms can the oral and electron coexist with the written and the consecutive?
“The role of mass communications in meeting today's problems”, in Proceedings of Conference on Educational Television circular, nº 574 (1958), p 14
Year: 1958
In other words, we're going to have to re-program the whole of our educational establishment for discovery rather than for instruction. Instruction is something that will have to be taken for granted under the new conditions of electronic information and movement.
“Electronics & the psychic drop-out”, in This Magazine is about Schools, April, 1966, p 38
Year: 1966
We have to realize that more instruction is going on outside the classroom, many times more every minute of the day than goes on inside the classroom. That is, the amount of information that is embedded in young minds per minute outside the classroom far exceeds anything that happens inside the classroom in just quantitative terms now.
“Electronics & the psychic drop-out”, in This Magazine is about Schools, April, 1966, p 38
Year: 1966
In the future basic skills will no longer be taught in classrooms.
“Electronics & the psychic drop-out”, in This Magazine is about Schools, April, 1966, p 38
Year: 1966
Chapter:
From Tribal to Literate
When video tape becomes available to the ordinary household as it will shortly, there will be a revolution in education comparable with that which took place with the coming of the printed book. As long as education depended upon access to manuscripts, it was a very slow and painful process. With the coming of the portable privately-owned printed book, the whole educational process took on a new character. This is going to happen with video tape machines, because it means that anyone can have top-level surgeons, biologists, physicists, philosophers, poets – anything for his own private use on all subjects and at his own time, his own leisure and his open space.
“Electronics & the psychic drop-out”, in This Magazine is about Schools, April, 1966, p 38
Year: 1966
That is why all the talk about instructional aids in the classroom from electronic means is nonsense. You cannot introduce electronic forms into the classroom without rescheduling the whole process of instruction, and this is impossible under our unwieldy, fragmented conditions of classroom use. But we're on the verge of a complete decentralization of instruction.
“Electronics & the psychic drop-out”, in This Magazine is about Schools, April, 1966, p 38-39
Year: 1966
We now have to teach literacy on many levels; pictorial and electronic forms of knowledge have to be imparted in order to enable people to live and work.
“Electronics & the psychic drop-out”, in This Magazine is about Schools, April, 1966, p 40
Year: 1966
They are now an under-developed country that have to be brought into the picture. It means educationally, of course, that our whole system of grading is useless in the schools. Because if you live in a community where the information levels are very high - just in the sense of the amount of data moving on the radio and TV and movies and so on - then the idea that you should use your school system as a means of eliminating half or three quarters of the community from higher education is ludicrous.
“Electronics & the psychic drop-out”, in This Magazine is about Schools, April, 1966, p 39
Year: 1966
We relate everything to the fixed point of change. An educational system that tries to hold a line is making the Maginot Line mistake. What happens to Maginot Lines is that people ignore them and go around them. The dropouts are just people who are going around the Maginot Line of our educational system, looking for some other source of entry into the territory of their times.
“Electronics & the psychic drop-out”, in This Magazine is about Schools, April, 1966, p 41
Year: 1966
Canada is still almost entirely a 19th century country. It has very little relation to the 20th century. Its educational system is anachronistic: students are still being processed through the old fragmented specialist chopper and they might as well be on a carousel or a merry-go-round in some entertainment park. Our youngsters at school are reacting to this, and dropping out of school is one response. The youngsters coming out of a highly integral electronic environment go to school and are confronted by a fragmented, specialist environment of subjects and hours and instructions which baffle them. They know that this form of fragmentation does not correspond in any way to the world they’re living in. They’ve already been deeply imbued with this new electronic world from the cradle, from the time they begin to look at TV. When the school fails to make sense of their environment, they drop out, either physically or psychologically. The psychic dropout far outnumbers the physical dropout which also is on the increase. The psychic dropout is probably about 100%.
“Electronics & the psychic drop-out”, in This Magazine is about Schools, April, 1966, p 40
Year: 1966
A PROBE, NOT A PACKAGE. Education on all levels has to move from packaging to probing, from the mere conveying of data to the experimental discovering of new dimensions of experience. The search will have to be for patterns of experience and discovery of principles of organization which have universal application, not for facts. An example of this, if you like, is the psychopathology of everyday life: every child now understands the patterns of the Freudian slip - this is a probe, not a package. In some circles this is called "mature learning", a learning for discovery rather than mechanical learning. This kind of learning, in the end, has nothing to do with an age level: there is nothing to stop small children from becoming very adept experimenters, graduate probers, explorers. It is the orientation of the society that matters, and our whole world, in shifting from the old mechanical forms to the new electronic feed-back forms, has already shifted from data packaging to probing of patterns.
“Electronics & the Psychic Drop-out”, in This Magazine Is About Schools, April, 1966, p 41-42
Year: 1966
Specialization and standardization produced close resemblance and, therefore, hot competition between individuals. Normally, the only way a person could differentiate himself from the fellow specialists next to him was by doing the same thing better and faster. Competition, as a matter of fact, became the chief motive force in mass education, as in society, with grades and tests of all sorts gathering about them a power and glory all out of proportion to their quite limited function as learning aids.
“Learning in the Global Village” with George Leonard (1967), in Radical School Reform (1969), p 108
Year: 1967
Then, too, just as the old mechanical production line pressed physical materials into preset and unvarying molds, so mass education tended to treat students as objects to be shaped, manipulated. “Instruction” generally meant pressing information onto passive students. Lectures, the most common mode of instruction in mass education, called for very little student involvement. This mode, one of the least effective ever devised by man, served well enough in an age that demanded only a specified fragment of each human being’s whole abilities. There was, however, no warranty on the human products of mass education.
“Learning in the Global Village” with George Leonard (1967), in Radical School Reform (1969), p 108
Year: 1967
Already it is becoming clear that the main “work” of the future will be education, that people will not so much earn a living as learn a living. Close to 30 million people in the U.S. are now pursuing some form of adult education, and the number shoots skyward. Industry and the military, as well as the arts and sciences, are beginning to consider education their main business.
“Learning in the Global Village” with George Leonard (1967), in Radical School Reform (1969), p 114
Year: 1967
It's misleading to assume there is any basic difference between education and entertainment. This distinction merely relieves people of the responsibility of looking into the matter.
“Classroom without walls”, in Explorations in communication. An anthology with Edmund Carpenter (1960), p 3
Year: 1960
Chapters:
McLuhanisms & Zingers | Media Study
We must maximize rather than minimize the various features of our new media. It’s easy now to see that they are not mere vehicles for already achieved experience and insight. We have move far beyond mechanization. Let us not lose ourselves by supposing that we have merely to contend with new forms of mechanization. Ratio and TV aren’t new ways of handling manuscript and book culture. The motor-car wasn’t a substitute for hte horse. It did what the horse could never do. Radio and TV aren’t audio-visual aids to enhance or to popularize previous forms of experience. They are new languages. We must first master and then teach these new languages in all their minute particularity and riches.
“The Post-Literate Man”, 1973, Cycles 7, p 231
Year: 1973
In terms of the learning and educational process, The Gutenberg era of our Western world saw the suppression of dialogue in favor of visual systems and blueprints of knowledge laid out in “subjects” and “fields” packaged in varying degrees of processing and predigestion. Our Gutenberg technology enabled us to “apply” knowledge freely; that is, we learned how to translate every sort of knowledge into single planes of homogeneous kind. Applied knowledge is a process of translation and reduction of varied forms into a single form.
“We Need a New Picture of Knowledge,” in New Insights and the Curriculum (Washington, DC: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, (1963), p 62
Year: 1963
If, however, we are to effect the new "closure" that electronics has brought by its ablation or suppression of the older mechanical procedure of "one-thing-at-a-time," we must understand both the old and the new thoroughly. For our involvement in the older segmental and sequential patterns of perception and process is so extensive that our establishments of law, education and politics have been wholly shaped by the dynamics of lineality and of Euclidean space as it were. We are now, by our new technology, compelled to live a century or more ahead of our established models of perception and judgment. This is not a pleasant or comfortable situation. Let us take a single, but by no means modest sample of the force exerted upon our older habits of perception and experience by electronic technology.
“We Need a New Picture of Knowledge,” in New Insights and the Curriculum (Washington, DC: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, (1963), p 63
Year: 1963
After centuries of packaged learning and visually organized curricula, men suddenly rediscover the primacy of dialogue and interplay of mind as indispensable to insight. Insight, itself, is a revolutionary demand, the typical "closure" of man experiencing the TV image.
“We Need a New Picture of Knowledge,” in New Insights and the Curriculum (Washington, DC: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, (1963), p 64
Year: 1963
The gap between the sensibilities of young students (the new TV generation) and their educational programs is very great. The students have already undergone great changes, and they are confronted by teachers and educational procedures that have scarcely changed at all. Yet culture-lag is a factor that cannot be tolerated at all, under electronic conditions of simultaneous “field awareness.”
“We Need a New Picture of Knowledge,” in New Insights and the Curriculum (Washington, DC: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, (1963), p 64-65
Year: 1963
The idea of the ‘content’ of education as something to be lodged in the mind as a container thus belongs to the preelectronic phase and to the era of Euclidean space and Newtonian mechanics. A structure cannot be contained.
“We Need a New Picture of Knowledge,” in New Insights and the Curriculum (Washington, DC: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, (1963), p 66
Year: 1963
That means the technique of understanding process in such a way as to avoid its consequences. We can now avoid "closure" because we understand it, in some areas at least.
“We Need a New Picture of Knowledge,” in New Insights and the Curriculum (Washington, DC: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, (1963), p 67
Year: 1963
With regard to understanding the meaning of dialogue, as it returns to the educational scene, it is especially noteworthy that the so-called "teaching machine" has served to reveal two aspects of our educational situation. First, we can see now that the printed book was a "teaching machine" rather than a mere tool like the manuscript. We can also see now that the new "teaching machines" have less the character of book than of private tutorial dialogue. They have been badly named, somewhat after the fashion of the "horseless carriage."
“We Need a New Picture of Knowledge,” in New Insights and the Curriculum (Washington, DC: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, (1963), p 69
Year: 1963
The free interplay of models of perception and knowledge releases the student into new depth awareness, even of existing structures of knowledge. But the educational process will thus shift from the imparting of information to the critical training of perception. The various structures of knowledge that have been devised by the numerous languages, arts and technologies of mankind can be resolved or inspected almost at the speed of motion picture frames. At such speed would not the unity of human culture and experience become manifest as a single spectrum?
“We Need a New Picture of Knowledge,” in New Insights and the Curriculum (Washington, DC: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, (1963), p 69-70
Year: 1963
Has not something like this already occurred as our technology reduces the entire planet to the scope of a very small global village? In terms of the accessibility of all knowledge of all cultures, are we not experiencing the earth as a single campus? Has not the interplay of information on that global campus become both humanly and commercially the main business of the world?
“We Need a New Picture of Knowledge,” in New Insights and the Curriculum (Washington, DC: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, (1963), p 70
Year: 1963
I am suggesting that as simultaneity of information structure substitutes insight for point of view and active participation for passive consumer appreciation, not only do the subjects disappear from the curriculum, but all the familiar boundaries and spaces between social groups and even age groups disappear. Education ceases to be a processing of the young for adult tasks and becomes the total lifetime task of all members of the community.
“We Need a New Picture of Knowledge,” in New Insights and the Curriculum (Washington, DC: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, (1963), p 70
Year: 1963
The specter of the workless society is a mirage bouncing off the vanishing form of the mechanical age. In the electronic era which succeeds the mechanical age, the real work of mankind becomes learning and teaching in a timeless process of exchange and enrichment by the human dialogue.
“We Need a New Picture of Knowledge,” in New Insights and the Curriculum (Washington, DC: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, (1963), p 70
Year: 1963
When we have stretched instant electronic webs around the globe, all the cultures of the world, past and present, become simultaneously accessible. The world becomes a museum without walls.
“The Crack in the Rearview Mirror”, in McGill Journal of Education (1966, Spring), p 32
Year: 1966
Chapter:
Present [The]
Depth involvement comes with the decline of visual orientation. It comes with the end of the monopoly of the visual power that long held sway under the ages of the phonetic alphabet.
“The crack in the rearview mirror”, in McGill Journal of Education (1966, Spring), p 32
Year: 1966
Paul Goodman’s book title Growing up Absurd mean that young students today have already adjusted to the new world of electric circuitry. The absurdity of their lives consists in being instructed and guided by people for whom the receding mechanical and fragmented world is the prime reality. It is as though astronauts could only be launched into space by veterans of the Boer War.
“The crack in the rearview mirror”, in McGill Journal of Education (1966, Spring), p 33
Year: 1966
Perhaps the reason that the ends and means discussion never got off the ground was that the earnest moralists who carried on that discussion never paid any attention to technology. That blindness still persists among educators who imagine that they can pursue the old ends by the new means.
“The crack in the rearview mirror”, in McGill Journal of Education (1966, Spring), p 33
Year: 1966
Personally, I am not the least attracted to any of the new technologies except in so far as I can see quite clearly that they threaten our entire way of life. The only conceivable defence against the distorting effects of the new environments created by new technologies is a patient and total understanding of their powers and influences.
“The crack in the rearview mirror”, in McGill Journal of Education (1966, Spring), p 33
Year: 1966
It appears to be a fateful sensory trait of mankind that he be quite unaware of the environmental, while always having a vivid image of the preceding environment.
“The crack in the rearview mirror”, in McGill Journal of Education (1966, Spring), p 33
Year: 1966
In 1936, when I arrived at Wisconsin, I confronted classes of freshmen and I suddenly realized that I was incapable of understanding them. I felt an urgent need to study their popular culture: advertising, games, movies. It was pedagogy, part of my teaching program.
“The hot and cool interview”, in Essays media research technology, art, communication (1997), p 47
Year: 1997
The concept of history of the philosopher Heidegger recommends itself as a natural model for the humanities in the electric age. It is the idea of the poetic of history, of history as a kind of unified language, the inner key to the creation of which can be grasped by a deepening sense of the spiritual energy encompassed in the ceaselessly growing life of words. The ideal Marriage of Mercury and Philology, of spiritual values and perfected method, will be consummated, if ever, in the electronic age.
“The Humanities in the Electronic Age”, reprinted in Marshall McLuhan Unbound number 7, 2005, p 18
Year: 2005
It is these people who constitute the mass audience, because mass is a factor of speed rather than quantity, although popular speech permits the term mass to be used with large publics.
“A Last Look at the Tube”, in The man and his message (1989), p 197
Year: 1989
The psychiatrist’s couches of the world are sagging with people who have lost their sense of identity. They used to feel they were clearly defined entities; they had cards of identity, they knew who they were. Now they go to psychiatrists to be told or to find out, “Who am I? What should I be doing?”
“Take Thirty”, in CBC Television, 1965
Year: 1965
TV has taken over. It has wiped out private ego and put people into a collective or tribal state. Private identity has almost disappeared from North America. That's why people go to psychiatrists. They want to know: "What's happening to me? Tell me what to do." The tribal man listens to voices that tell him exactly what to do so he doesn't have to make up his mind.
“Speaking out. Marshall McLuhan on the evils of TV”, in US, July 12, 1977, p 13
Year: 1977
In the eighties, as we transfer our whole being to the data bank, privacy will become a ghost or echo of its former self and what remains of community will disappear.
“Living at the speed of light”, transcript, 1979, p 6
Year: 1979
Chapter:
Privacy
We now share too much about each other to be strangers to each other. For example, in the age of the information explosion, all the walls go out between age-groups, between family groups, national groups, between economies. The walls all go out. People suddenly have to adjust themselves to this new proxiMIT/Routledgey, this new interrelationship, and merely to tell them that this has happened isn’t very helpful. What they need to know is, if it is happening, what does it mean to me?
“McLuhan on McLuhanism”, in WNDT Educational Broadcasting Network, 1966
Year: 1966
Mechanical speed-ups, however radical, in their re-shaping of personal and social life, still were allowed to happen sequentially. Men could, for the most part, get through a normal life span on the basis on a single set of skills. That is not at all the case with electric speed-up.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 355
Year: 1964
We may be approaching the time when political and executive figures may have to be recruited on the same basis as was formerly used for movie stars. Alternatively, it might be possible to transfer the Paul Newmans or the John Waynes from the entertainment sphere to the political sphere directly in order to satisfy the need of people to be reassured by images that remind them of all the people they might have been in some ideal existence.
“The President Who Was Not in Touch with the Present Getting Rid of the Electronic TAPE worm” (1974), p 1-2
Year: 1974
The sheer quantity of information conveyed by press-magazines-film-TV-radio far exceeds the quantity of information conveyed by school instruction and texts. This challenge has destroyed the monopoly of the book as a teaching aid and cracked the very walls of the classroom so suddenly that were confused, baffled.
“Classroom without walls”, in Explorations in communication. An anthology with Edmund Carpenter (1960), p 1
Year: 1960
All situations comprise an area of attention (figure) and a very much larger area of inattention (ground). The two continually coerce and play with each other across a common outline or boundary or interval that serves to define both simultaneously. The shape of one conforms exactly to the shape of the other. Figures rise out of and recede back into, ground, which is con-figurational and comprises all other available figures at once. For example, at a lecture, attention will shift from the speaker's words to his gestures, to the hum of the lights or to street sounds, to the feel of the chair or to a memory or association or smell. Each new figure in turn displaces the others into ground. Ground provides the structure or style of awareness, the ‘way of seeing’ as Flaubert called it or the terms on which' a figure is perceived. The study of ground ’on its own terms' is virtually impossible: by definition it is at any moment environmental and subliminal. The only possible strategy for such study entails constructing an anti-environment: such is the normal activity of the artist, the only person in our culture whose whole business has been the retraining and updating of sensibility. In the order of things, ground comes first and the figures emerge later. Coming events cast their shadows before them.
Laws of Media: The New Science with Eric McLuhan, (1988), p 5
Year: 1988
An artist has a role rather than a job because he must use all his faculties at once. In the older fragmented and mechanized world of specialisms we tended to use only a part of our faculties at any one time. This was called ‘work’. When, like the artist, we use all our faculties at once, we are recognized to be playing and are at leisure. A man must work very hard at his hobby, but just because he uses all his faculties while playing, he is thought to be at leisure. The electronic information environment tends to create this new configuration of leisure via total involvement.
“Environment as Programmed Happening” (1977), p 8
Year: 1977
Centuries of specialist stress in pedagogy and in the arrangement of data now end with the instantaneous retrieval of information made possible by electricity. Automation is information and it not only ends jobs in the world of work, it ends subjects in the world of learning. It does not end the world of learning. The future of work consists of earning a living in the automation age.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 346
Year: 1964
Energy and production now tend to fuse with information and learning. Marketing and consumption tend to become one with learning, enlightenment, and the intake of information. This is all part of the electric implosion that now follows or succeeds the centuries of explosion and increasing specialism. The electronic age is literally one of illumination. Just as light is at once energy and information, so electric automation unites production, consumption, and learning in an inextricable process. For this reason, teachers are already the largest employee group in the U.S. economy, and may well become the only group. The very same process of automation that causes a withdrawal of the present work force from industry causes learning itself to become the principal kind of production and consumption. Hence the folly of alarm about unemployment. Paid learning is already becoming both the dominant employment and the source of new wealth in our society.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 350-351
Year: 1964
The acquiring of new basic knowledge and skill by senior executives in middle age is one of the most common needs and harrowing facts of electric technology. The senior executives, or "big wheels," as they are archaically and ironically designated, are among the hardest pressed and most persistently harassed groups in human history. Electricity has not only demanded ever deeper knowledge and faster interplay, but has made the harmonizing of production schedules as rigorous as that demanded of the members of a large symphony orchestra.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 355
Year: 1964
With the electric technology, the new kinds of instant interdependence and interprocess that take over production also enter the market and social organizations. For this reason, markets and education designed to cope with the products of servile toil and mechanical production are no longer adequate. Our education has long ago acquired the fragmentary and piecemeal character of mechanism. It is now under increasing pressure to acquire the depth and interrelation that are indispensable in the all-at-once world of electric organization.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 357
Year: 1964
Men are suddenly nomadic gatherers of knowledge, nomadic as never before, informed as never before, free from fragmentary specialism as never before—but also involved in the total social process as never before; since with electricity we extend our central nervous system globally, instantly interrelating every human experience.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 358
Year: 1964
Walter J. Ong, S.J.:
One reason [Marshall McLuhan] is so hard to account for is the vast range of his knowledge and his genius for spotting correlations between the most discontinuous phenomena. As I have earlier mentioned, his instant correlations have annoyed many and upset a few. But McLuhan seldom argued over his point of view. If you didn't like one insight, he presented you with another, and always had plenty more. He himself called the products of his thinking "probes." Whatever they were, they were certainly a way of teaching, if teaching means getting people to think. His observations created excitement. If as many of them were wrong as some people like to pretend, they could hardly have had the effect they had. Thousands of people have said they don't understand what McLuhan is talking about and yet have argued over him and his message for years. The discussion continues even as I write. He is still teaching, and always will be."
“McLuhan as Teacher: The Future Is a Thing of the Past”, in Journal of Communication Vol. 31, No. 3, Summer 1981, p 135
Year: 1981
The meaning is in the pattern. Pattern recognition becomes the sole means of learning in an electronic age of speed: you have to be able to spot patterns instantly.
Convocation Address at SFU, May 20, 1967
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Pattern Recognition
[“Media ecology”] means arranging various media to help each other so they won’t cancel each other out, to buttress one medium with another. You might say, for example, that radio is a bigger help to literacy than television, but television might be a very wonderful aid to teaching languages.
“Violence as a Quest for Identity”, in The Mike McManus Show, TV Ontario (1977), Transcript, p 4
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Media Education
So we now, you see, have a media that stresses all the senses, and we have no education to cope with the media at all. We still educate as if there were one medium, and our educational establishment is that much out of relation to what’s going on in the world.
“The Open Mind”, TV Interview with Eric F. Goldman, WNBC-TV, (1966), transcript, p 19
Year: 1966
Chapter:
Media Education
If we had the slightest consciousness of social responsibility, instead of just a sort of private subconscious totally inadequate to our technology, we would teach our children in our schools how to protect themselves against media fallout and advertising fallout.
Audio recording of a McLuhan passage used in an unidentified radio interview with Barrington Nevitt and Father John Culkin, S.J., shortly after the death and funeral of Marshall McLuhan, January, 1981, Transcript, p 9
Year: 1981
Chapters:
He’s Doubtful | Media Education
Would it not seem natural and necessary that the young be provided with at least as much training of perception in this graphic and photographic world as they get in the typographic? In fact, they need more training in graphics, because the art of casting and arranging actors in ads is both complex and forcefully insidious.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 230
Year: 1964
The TV generation of children are very depth- oriented, completely unrelated to any outer goals. TV kids have no goals in education or living. They play the total field Everything. They are hunters, not planters.
“Education in the Electronic Age,” a speech delivered January 19, 1967 to the Provincial Committee on the Aims and Objectives of Education in Ontario; published in Interchange, Vol 1, No. 4, 1970, p 2
Year: 1967
On Higher Education: At jet speed we will mount a whole series of conferences around the world, which will represent a continual learning process at a higher level. The future of conferences is related somewhat to jets.
On TV in Education: You cannot communicate our curriculum or our criticism through television. That problem did not arise with the movie period when prohibition was the big bugaboo. In the movie period it was drug addiction. But during the movie period you never heard anything about dyslexia. Dyslexia came in with TV. And reading difficulties. And attention spans being very much shattered.
On Education: The classroom is becoming obsolete. The education thing is completely up for grabs. Compulsory education will disappear. It’s meaningless. Why should people be compelled to become educated? The right-hemisphere kid, who is a classroom problem, tends to know more about the media than his teachers. But literacy has become a sort of privilege for cranks and elites. The first people who learned to write and to read were the workmen who carved inscriptions on monuments. Literacy came on the workman level before it came at the reading level.
The Lost Marshall McLuhan Tapes. Macleans. Retrieved from Peter C. Newman (Macleans, July 16, 2013)
Year: 2013
Perhaps it is not that the educator has been shouldered aside by men of action so much as he has been swamped by high-powered imitators. If education has now become the basic investment and activity of the electronic age, then the classroom educator can recover his role only by enlarging it beyond anything it ever was in any previous culture.
“The Post-Literate Man”, 1973, Cycles 7, p 232
Year: 1973
Chapter:
Teaching
The environment is increasingly programmed. And programmed much more richly than any classroom ever was. Now I think that this might not be a bad theme to meditate upon: that for the first time in human history the outside environment is richer than the inside classroom. This has never happened before as far as I know. Always in the past the inside classroom was richer than the ordinary environment of that time.
“The New Education”, 1967, p 70
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Programming the Environment
Any well-adjusted person is brainwashed. Only the artist fights against it. Jacques Ellul point out that propaganda ends where dialogue begins. What has been called brainwashing is really getting properly organized for living according to the technology available. We call it education.”
“The Brave New World of Marshall McLuhan,” 1966, p 135
Year: 1966
Chapter:
Propaganda
Would it not seem under electric conditions teaching and learning must be oriented to discovery rather than instruction?”
Letter to Gyorgy Kepes, June 22, 1965 [LAC]
Year: 1965
It is now possible to make the schools not a place for packaged information, but a place for dialogue and discovery.
“The End of the Work Ethic”, 1972
Year: 1972
The age of lecture and of teacher up front passing out data is behind us. The students must now become part of the team engaged in discovery. Discovery, not the mere accumulation of data.
The Museum as Large-Room Pinball Machine, Marshall McLuhan, Harley Parker, and Museum Professionals, 1967, full transcript of a seminar at the City Museum of New York, October, 1967, edited by William Buxton, published by U. of Alberta Press, 2026, p 88
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Discovery
HARLEY PARKER: I once gave a program in Wayne State and we did a fade-out. That is, we photographed a book page with the lines of type and the title, and then we faded that into a classroom, and there was scarcely any difference. There were still lines of type and the teacher’s desk was a title. Then we faded that into parking lots where you had all the rows of cars. Then into a supermarket shelf and it was the same thing.
The Museum as Large-Room Pinball Machine, Marshall McLuhan, Harley Parker, and Museum Professionals, 1967, full transcript of a seminar at the City Museum of New York, October, 1967, edited by William Buxton, published by U. of Alberta Press, 2026, p 118
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Pattern Recognition
And the environment has become a teaching machine. The schoolroom is not that turned on nor that thrilling; this is a simple matter of observation. You don’t have to guess about this, but it should be possible, and it is the sort of thing I work at: to try to find out the reasons why this happens. I know it is happening. I feel it happening. I see it happening, I want to find out why. Instead of telling people that it is happening, it’s more desirable to find out why.
The Museum as Large-Room Pinball Machine, Marshall McLuhan, Harley Parker, and Museum Professionals, 1967, full transcript of a seminar at the City Museum of New York, October 9-10 1967, edited by William Buxton, published by U. of Alberta Press, 2026, p 153
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Environment
How do you get the children to a point where they are absolutely amazed at the world they live in? We’re seeing it happen to our children. It never happened in any recent period in human history, as far as I know, but these children are turned on, and it gives them a sense of power. That’s one of the most noxious and nauseating things about the teenagers – power. They feel that they can do anything, so they do.
The Museum as Large-Room Pinball Machine, Marshall McLuhan, Harley Parker, and Museum Professionals, 1967, full transcript of a seminar at the City Museum of New York, October 9-10, 1967, edited by William Buxton, published by U. of Alberta Press, 2026, pp153-154
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Youth