University of Oklahoma

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14026/278

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    The Post-Technological Age
    (1995-01-01T00:00:00-08:00) Cowan, Donald
    We're not certain we're yet into a technological age, so to stake out a post-technological age is somewhat like the original sooners dashing across the prairies in their prairie schooners to make first claims on the choice sites, saying "I got here first." What is implied by the title is a recognition that students presently sitting in college classrooms are the people who will be in charge of society twenty to thirty years from the inescapable present. The education presented to them now must be preparation for that time --in some way must be a foretaste or a prophecy of what society will become and what it will need. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy, of course, because as these students nudge their way toward the seats of power they will be helping to shape the very society they are to rule. How can we educate for a society we know will be different from the present?
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    The New Equality
    (1995-01-01T00:00:00-08:00) Cowan, Donald
    One of the propositions we have been pursuing in this series of lectures and seminars sets forth that techne from its inception works toward the equalization of abilities for all workers. First there is the improvisation and then the fashioning of tools and weapons--clubs, bow-and-arrows, levers, pulleys-- equalizing advantages of strength. Machinery in effect eliminates strength as a consideration. Education becomes the equalizer when skills and crafts must be learned; a person may be slow to learn a procedure but once it is learned, little difference exists in production.