Path: utzoo!yunexus!peter
From: peter@yunexus.UUCP (Peter Roosen-Runge)
Newsgroups: comp.edu
Subject: Usenet as an educational system
Message-ID: <327@yunexus.UUCP>
Date: 16 Feb 88 17:58:26 GMT
Article-I.D.: yunexus.327
Posted: Tue Feb 16 12:58:26 1988
Organization: York U. Computing Services
Lines: 23

From Ivan Illich's DESCHOOLING SOCIETY (Harper & Row: 1970), Chapter 6, 
Learning Webs:

"A good educational system should have three purposes:
it should provide all who want to learn with access
to available resources at any time in their lives; empower all who want to share
what they know to find those who want to learn it from them; and finally,
furnish all who want to present an issue to the public with the opportunity to
make their challenge known."  

Could there be a more apt expression of the potential of Usenet?  

While Illich has appeared more recently as a ranting 'computerphobe' 
(CoEvolution Quarterly, Winter 1983),  I suspect that his prophetic
concept of non-manipulative, spontaneously usable "convivial" tools 
and institutions have had a subterranean influence on what we might call the
implicit ethos of Usenet, and perhaps of Unix as well.

                             Peter Roosen-Runge
                             Dept. of Computer Science
                             York University, Toronto, Canada

                             Bitnet: CS100006@YUSOL