The Classroom of the Future: Episode 1 Intrigo Extension

 The Classroom of the Future: Episode 1 Intrigo Extension

By T.H. Culhane

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Culhane: Welcome back! What did you think of our first class of the semester?

Raj: I said to my parents, “If the rest of the semester is going to be like this, I’m no longer upset that we moved to the United States and you put me in a public school.” I just wish our other classes were like this…

Culhane: We’ll get there. Right now you guys are the guinea pigs in a pedagogical experiment that is part of publicly funded research. But there are many teachers in this school and others who are more than a bit skeptical of the whole STEAMM approach and who might also be afraid of this new technology and what it implies.

Sarah: You mean about controlling the masses…

Dorian: (Mockingly) Down with the establishment! All you need is love, right, hippie farmer?

Sarah: Shut it, Goldfinger!

Culhane: Both of you – really? In my class? Really? This is how you demonstrate how well you can handle freedom? This is a unique opportunity and we will be watched. So we have to be careful, and I have to ask you to swear secrecy. You can tell your parents, but they can’t tell anybody else and you can’t tell anybody else, okay? That’s why you four were specifically chosen…

Dorsey: Innovative Ed met with your folks and had long deep conversations and had them sign non-disclosures before the class started, so I think we are all right. And if any other people came in the room when we aren’t here, all they would see is an unresponsive decorative table weight. We are the only ones who can activate it.

Dorian: I was thinking of playing hooky or taking sick days this semester, or joining my parents on their business trips to Europe, but this beats any of the “enrichment” they’ve been able to provide…

Sophia: But it isn’t fair. I mean, just from one session I can see all the benefits this will provide to humanity. Shouldn’t we be universalizing this technology instead of keeping it secret? We don’t need a semester of testing and some scientific study to prove what is already so obvious—

Dorian: What’s so obvious?

Sophia: Well, that … That learning with your whole mind and body, with all of your senses, in an immersive, interactive and social way is far … FAR …  superior to any other more limited modality. Why do we need to prove the obvious? Let’s get this stuff out to the world NOW! Forget this school—  this school has kids from all sorts of backgrounds, so there can be social mobility… but think of some of the inner-city schools in the ghettos where kids have no other choices and are being turned off to science and literacy every day by a boring and oppressive form of pedagogy which even John Dewey was fighting decades ago…

Culhane: Sophia isn’t wrong. John Dewey argued way back when—back in his 1896 work with students in his “Laboratory School” at the University of Chicago and in his eye opening  1916 book *Democracy and Education*—that schooling should be experiential, democratic, and tied to community life rather than rote memorization. He helped inspire what we now know as project-based and experiential learning.

Dorsey:  And here and now, in the ’70s, his ideas are being revived through “open classroom” experiments like this, with early computer-aided learning, and the rise of what we in the teaching profession call “constructivist pedagogy”.

Sophia: So with that history, why are we still lagging a half century later? Why is the pace of progress so damn slow?

Dorian: Sophia, language!

Sophia: Oh, can it, Dorian. I’m mad. You come from privilege and got to go to private schools as a kid and you’ve always had tutors and tons of trips around the world with your parents. Kids like me got none of that.

Dorsey: The goal is to universalize this, but look what happened with television…

Raj: The American “boob tube”. The promise was universal education in every living room, on call day and night. But apart from *Sesame Street* and *The Electric Company*—I mean, you have one Public Broadcasting channel and all the others are selling sitcoms and soap operas and breakfast cereals and cigarettes.

Culhane: Well, after the Surgeon General’s report and all the fights, thank God we finally got the cigarette ads off TV a few years ago — but look how long it took. For years it felt like half the shows “brought to you by” the very companies selling lung cancer. And one reason Rod Serling went the science-fiction route with *The Twilight Zone* was to sneak serious social justice themes past the nervous network censors and their sponsors. The whole system is an ecosystem of power — or what I like to call a kind of political ecology — and things move slowly, because an educated populace has always been considered a threat to those in charge. And, oops, I’m probably not supposed to say that out loud in a public school classroom… thank God the age of McCarthyism is over.

Dorsey: Well, I’m outta here — I’ve got an appointment with Innovative Ed to talk about ways to build a better bridge to USF through community gardens and community engagement. Teaching science through hands-on, project-based learning. Nothing to do with NTHARP this time… although we’re trying to get a television crew to come make a documentary about it. Problem is, these broadcast cameras and videotape decks are still so expensive and bulky. Unless you can get one of those fancy new portable rigs, you basically need a whole studio just to cut together a five-minute piece on kids planting tomatoes.

Raj: Isn’t there a way to use a cassette recorder and then somehow add the soundtrack later?

Culhane: In theory, yes. You shoot Super 8 and run sound on cassette, then try to sync it — or spring for the new Super 8 sound cartridges. But syncing or editing still takes gear and expertise we just don’t have at this school. For now, it’s a bit above our pay grade.

Sarah: I wish we had some kind of Community Access Television setup right here — studios regular people could use for free to produce our own shows.

Sophia: Yeah, can you imagine? Television “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

Raj: What if we had a school “of the people, by the people, for the people”?

Culhane: It’s exactly what we are trying to do here, isn’t it? 

Dorsey:  Keep the dream alive. We’ll get there.  Can’t wait to hear where NTHARP takes you today and sorry I can’t stay.   See y’all next time… (Dorsey exits).

Raj: Do you think America can ever get past it’s own caste system?

Culhane:  The problem is that most public schools weren’t really created to foster democracy and replace our caste system, but to give the illusion we are free while  keeping people in their place in the hierarchy … this became urgent to the elites after emancipation and during a time of large-scale immigration. We call it the “factory model”. The French postmodern philosopher Michel Foucault just published a book in French this year called *Surveiller et punir*—*Discipline and Punish*. That’s what schools do. And it was working really well for the captains of industry and the political machine until the cultural revolution sparked by the Vietnam War.

Now we have authors like Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary saying, “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” But while society is changing with civil rights, women’s rights, and environmental justice, the schools remain in the old model because it keeps the oligarchy rich. Schools have been operating according to the business-as-usual logic we call Logic 1, with those in control pursuing short-term self-interest.

Dorian: And there you go again with the “power to the people” speech. My Dad doesn’t know if he should think of you as John Lennon or Vladimir Lenin.

Culhane: Thank God for the First Amendment, right?

Dorian: Oh, I’m not going to turn you in! After working with this NTHARP thing, I’m totally on board. Maybe the machine can show us who is right! Besides, I don’t really have a clue what an “oligarchy” is…

Sarah: My Dad says we should call the power elites who control us the “Oil-igarchy”. For the past, what, 55 years, it’s all been run by those oil cartels—from the Rockefellers to the Arab sheikhs and OPEC.

Culhane: Well, to get back to schools that really walk the talk about democracy: rather than encouraging students to “drop out” of school—because a high school dropout faces enormous stigma—Leary also inspired the Free School movement, which sought to replace compulsory, authoritarian schooling with small, community-based learning centers guided by student interest and mutual respect.

Free schools like Summerhill in the UK and The Albany Free School in the US embody Dewey’s vision—students make collective decisions, practice democracy, and learn through projects rather than tests.

Writers such as A.S. Neill, John Holt, and Ivan Illich—whose *Deschooling Society* came out just a few years ago—argue that “learning webs” and informal networks could make education as natural as breathing.

And now I am following the work of an Episcopal priest and educator, a community organizer named Harrison Owen, who’s experimenting with ways to run conferences without hierarchies—just people in a circle, co-creating the agenda together. Maybe one day it’ll go global—an “open classroom” for the whole planet.

So Dr. Dorsey and I think NTHARP can help. Sophia, we DO want to see how we can use this very new technology to resurrect some very old and great ideas—going back to the Greeks, to Socratic dialog and Plato’s Maieutic Method at the dawn of democracy…

Dorian: The… my-oh-my… the what?!

Sarah: Oh, I know that word. I was taking Greek in summer school.

Sophia: Ah, the joys of white privilege!

Sarah: Yeah… so I can use my skin-suit access card to go all Robin Hood on y’all and share it with the rest of the world. Kiss me, I’m Irish!

Sophia: (gives her a big kiss) Just kidding, girl. Here’s ya kiss… Enlighten us, please.

Sarah: Maieutic means “midwife”. The Maieutic method, as done by Socrates’ star pupil Plato, was an antidote to the competitive, combative “either/or” logic of the dialectical process. Instead of “point/counterpoint”, instead of thesis/antithesis/synthesis and some big winner-take-all debate like we have in our modern US politics, every idea a person comes up with is like a baby born to the world. And like a good midwife, the teacher’s role isn’t to pit them against each other in some social Darwinist struggle to the death and survival of the fittest, , but to nurture them all, and help them get along and play better together. So the Maieutic method, which resonates today with ecofeminism, enables us ALL to have a voice without wasting time and energy in anger-inducing debate.

Dorian: Obladi, oblada, life goes on… burn the bra!

Sophia: You… are… WEIRD.

Raj: He’s a product of his environment. I like this Maieutic Method. Can we take NTHARP for a spin and see where they might be using these methods in 50 years? It’s part of Nexus Thinking, isn’t it?

Culhane: It is very much part of Nexus Thinking. McGregor — he’s a management scholar — calls it the difference between “Theory X” and “Theory Y.” Theory X assumes people are lazy and must be controlled; most schools were built on that logic. Theory Y assumes people are naturally curious and responsible if you trust them and give them real problems to solve. That’s what we’re doing in here.

Culhane: Surely in fifty years the Maieutic Method, STEAMM education, Nexus Thinking — the whole Theory Y spirit — will be as common as dandelions. Play the tones and let’s see…

(Sarah gets out her lyre-harp and plucks five strings as Sophia makes solfège hand gestures.)

NTHARP: Code received. Commencing journey. Target: Education in 2025. And… by the way… our model predicts that one day the Japanese — the very ones about to disrupt Detroit and challenge  your automobile industry with smaller, more efficient cars— will develop a healthier hybrid they’ll call “Theory Z.” It will show how much better people perform when they work with purpose as part of a mutually supportive community — something your hyper-individualistic Western society can’t quite get its mind around yet. So… off to the future!

(The room begins to spin and blur and then settles back into focus. They appear to be in the same classroom as before.)

Dorian: Well, that was anticlimactic.

Culhane: Oh shoot. Something went wrong. And Dr. Dorsey isn’t here any more today to help us. I wonder if it’s the power, or…

Raj: It could be a burned-out transistor, or a software glitch, or… oh, heck, I don’t know what I’m talking about at all…

Sophia: This is beyond anything we’re used to in computer club—we are still using punch cards…

Sarah: But… guys…

Dorian: Maybe I should have joined my parents on that ski trip…

Sarah: Guys…

Culhane: Well… we still have the chalkboard… and I can get out the slide projector…

Sarah: Are you seeing this?!

Raj: Perhaps it is the communication module—didn’t Dorsey say it has some kind of fancy TV antenna…?

Sarah: GUYS!!

(Everybody pauses, startled, and stares at Sarah.)

Culhane: You don’t have to yell, Sarah. How can we help you?

Sarah: Look… out… the window…

Raj: (mimicking the Beatles’ *Help!* in a thick Indian accent) Looook out de window… Kaieelee! Shall I get my red paint?

Sarah: No, seriously, look…

(They all go to the window. They gasp.)

Dorian: Wow. We… are… in the future. I don’t know if we advanced 50 years, but look at those cars…

Sarah: They certainly aren’t flying cars. They don’t look like something from the kind of future I imagined, but they certainly are… bigger. Like the 1950s Cadillacs met a tank. So much for the Datsun or Honda mini. Those look like gas guzzlers on steroids. What kind of future have we landed in? And why is our classroom the same?

NTHARP: Trend analysis suggests that two of the slowest sectors to change will be education and automotive. This is predicted to be what things look like right here in 50 years.

Dorian: Are you kidding me? I knew I wanted to get out of this hellhole. If it weren’t for my Dad’s job… hell, I’m outta here as soon as I graduate for sure.

Culhane: Like George Bailey, right? “I’m shakin’ the dust of this crummy little town off my feet and I’m gonna see the world…” I gotta say, if it goes this way I’ll be sorry I came back to teach in the school I went to…

Sophia: If our town ends up like this it won’t be such a wonderful life after all. Look at the graffiti, the fences, the total lack of greenspace—in fact… where did our victory garden go?

Sarah: Replaced by an asphalt basketball hoop and a parking lot? REALLY? AFTER ALL THE DAMN WORK WE PUT IN TO GET IT APPROVED AND CREATE ALL THE RICH SOIL FROM ALL THE CAFETERIA WASTE  AND DO THOSE BAKE SALES AND CAR WASHES TO GET THE MONEY TO BUILD THE COMPOST BINS AND THE RAISED BEDS AND… oh my GOD, they’ve even destroyed our performance gazebo! I’m going to go raise hell—

(She storms out of the room.)

Culhane: Sarah, where are you going? You’re in a—

(There is a long pause. We cut to commercial. When the commercial ends…)

(Sarah sheepishly reenters the room.)

Sarah: Stupid me. It’s just a simulation. Yeah, it just feels so real. 

Sophia: Where’d you go?

Sarah: I got out in the hall and looked around and… I mean, the hall monitor was like, “Where are YOU going, young lady?” and I was like, “To see the principal…” and he was like, “Where’s your hall pass?” and I glanced out the window from  there and of course everything is like it was—or is—or… okay, this is weird. I was going to try and explain what was going on, but you swore us to secrecy, and even if you hadn’t I realized I would feel like that freed prisoner coming back into Plato’s Cave… who would understand me?

Sophia:  But… Why would our school not, you know, evolve? Why would things actually go backwards?

Culhane: That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it. What about it, NTHARP? Why would schools and transportation be so resistant to change?

NTHARP: The transportation sector keeps billions of dollars in subsidies flowing to the oil industry if they keep the oil flowing for all the cars, buses, trucks and even most trains—diesel-electric instead of fully electric. So there is a vested interest there to resist change as long as possible.

Culhane: Yeah. From the look of it, most of the changes are cosmetic, not under the hood. But why bigger? Didn’t we just come out of an oil crisis? Haven’t experts predicted we’ll reach “peak oil” sometime around the turn of the century?

NTHARP: Some scientists hypothesize that oil will not simply “run out,” but will just become more expensive to extract and refine. There are also theories—especially among Soviet geologists—of deep, abiotically generated hydrocarbons, even hints of microbial processes far below the crust that a future scientist might one day call a “deep hot biosphere.” And there is work underway to tap oil locked in tar sands and methane trapped in rock formations that can be “fracked” by injecting high-pressure water to fracture the lithosphere and release it—not to mention deeper and deeper drilling on land and beneath the oceans.

Culhane: Ah… so as long as the public is fooled into footing the bill for exploration and infrastructure, through taxation and subsidies, the Oil-igarchy will never truly follow all these presidential calls to “wean us off oil”.

NTHARP: The models suggest it gets worse. Calls to “wean off foreign oil” evolve into a future in which this country becomes the world’s largest producer of fossil fuels, yet remains locked into the same carbon economy.

Dorian: So the oil never runs out and we keep running on oil?

NTHARP: And worst of all, the models show that carbon in the atmosphere—CO₂ and CH₄ and fluorocarbons, plus nitrous oxides from agriculture—rapidly warms the climate, causing polar ice to melt. Huge reserves in the Arctic become accessible. A feedback loop of dependency.

Sarah: No! This cannot be! That could lead to the… well… to the end of the world…

NTHARP: As you know it, yes.

Sarah: And what about my damn garden? My damn beautiful performance space that we struggled so hard to get built?

NTHARP: (Crackly computer sigh.) They will say “budget cuts” and the need to accommodate more students, and more cars.

Dorian: What the heck are all those ugly little buildings out there where the football field was?

NTHARP: They will call them bungalows. Cheap prefab classrooms brought in on trailers to cram in more students and increase revenue at the lowest cost.

Sophia: Hey, guys… where the hell is the beautiful old Middle School? And what the hell is that monstrosity over there—that massive block of concrete with no windows?

Culhane: Oh, that one I know about. I saw the plans. That is supposed to be built next year. The community fought it, but we were told all the beautiful windows were inefficient. With rising heating fuel and air conditioning costs, they decided that if they eliminated windows and drafty hallways and made one big insulated cube lit with “efficient” fluorescent bulbs, they’d save taxpayers money.

Sarah: (aghast) Ack! No windows? No sunlight? Are you kidding me? And this is supposed to happen when?

Culhane: Most of your parents agreed because you’ll all be graduated by the time it’s finished and the economy is tight. And, believe it or not, while designers call it “Brutalist architecture”, some people find it beautiful in its simplicity and raw geometry. They say these old buildings are too “rococo”.

Dorian: What the heck does that mean?

Culhane: A lot of expensive and “unnecessary” decorations that serve no purpose other than aesthetics. In fact, your dad was one of the board members who approved it based on cost savings. He doesn’t find it ugly. And your math teacher, Mr. Ward, told the board that no windows would be a good thing because too many of you get distracted and stare outside.

Sarah: At birds and squirrels and trees and sunshine. Yeah, why wouldn’t we? He’s so damn boring he makes most of us actually hate math.

Culhane: I’m sorry to hear that. I know he doesn’t mean to. He’s just kind of old and tired and… cranky.

Raj: Dude should retire. In my culture we have playful ways of teaching math that show the beauty of the universe. In ancient India we called it *Ganita*—it means “the science of calculation.” There’s a 14th-century text by Narayana Pandita called *Ganita Kaumudi*—“The Moonlight of Mathematics.” It treats math not as punishment, but as illumination. Here in the U.S., you make things so black and white—like a test of obedience instead of a path to wonder.

Dorian: Remember when we had that math sub and he showed us *The Phantom Tollbooth* cartoon and Disney’s *Donald in Mathmagic Land*? That was the only day I enjoyed math class. I was sorry when Ward came back. I mean, I’m sorry he wasn’t well, but I kinda wish he’d stayed sick a little longer.

Sarah: I heard that sub got pushed out because they said he wasn’t “serious enough” and didn’t follow the rigid lesson plans. I think it was because he was too creative and we all liked him. That must have pissed off a lot of the tenured faculty.

Culhane: I’m not going to comment.

Dorian: How do YOU keep from pissing off the other faculty? I saw the two of you as allies.

Culhane: I mentored him as much as I could and told him changing the system from within takes patience. He wasn’t fired; he chose to quit when he saw how long it would take. He didn’t have his credential yet, so he would’ve had to go through that process. He chose to go into the Peace Corps—on Dr. Dorsey’s recommendation—where people really appreciate his gifts. As Mr. Andreyevski said to me when I came into teaching…

Dorian: Andreyevski—the old crazy chemistry teacher who always told us stories of teaching in Uganda when Idi Amin threw his adversaries off the waterfall?

Culhane: The same. He was MY chemistry teacher when I was a student here and he mentored me when I came in as a young teacher. When I took this job and he first invited me into the teachers’ lounge, he practically begged me to go into any profession BUT teaching. “Tommy,” he said—he never could call me T.H.—“Tommy, PLEASE, you are so talented. Teaching will crush you. It will kick the joy out of you. When I got here I had so many ideas, just like you… but the system, Tommy… the system… it will block you and suck the life out of you.”

Sarah: Yet you stayed.

Culhane: I came in with a Harvard degree, some international experience with National Geographic and the State Department… and I try to be very diplomatic. They let me do things others don’t. As long as I give them good publicity and don’t rock the boat. So again—we don’t talk about what we are doing in here until we’ve built the evidence. We shut the door, we fire up NTHARP, and we visit possible futures. Then we come back and decide which nightmares we can avoid and which dreams we can make come true.

Sarah: So can you change THIS future—the one out there—and the backward condition of the classroom? Why does it look almost identical to 1975?

Culhane: In world-systems theory—and in the way power elites operate—we see how valuable stagnation can be. Especially social and technological stagnation. It maintains the status quo. Why do you think chattel slavery and other forms of bondage lasted so long? Do you think we couldn’t invent better machines earlier? Look at how the ancient Greeks had an analog computer—the Antikythera mechanism. Look at how the Library of Alexandria was destroyed, how the Crusades tried to erase Muslim science, how conquistadors burned Maya codices. Stagnation, or forced amnesia, is a political technology. Didn’t Mr. Hafner teach you that in History class?

Sophia: Hafner is great. But he only shares that stuff with his AP students. He told me it’s not really allowed in the lower-level curriculum and he has to “watch his culo”. He had me read Voltaire’s *Candide* and Thomas More’s *Utopia* and yeah, only then did he start sharing political economy stuff with us, under the guise of studying for the essay sections of the AP exam. He said that the ivy league schools were partial to students from public schools who could be critical thinkers - that one has the freedom to think for yourself once you’ve been accepted into their hallowed halls.

Raj:  Isn’t it depressing that More gets beheaded, and your beloved Socrates is forced to drink hemlock, basically for asking people to think?

Dorian: So the moral is: don’t be too good a teacher.

Culhane: (wryly) Something like that.

Sarah: NTHARP, are there places here in 2025 where the Maieutic Method is practiced with everybody?

NTHARP: Oh, heavens, yes. But usually not in public schools like yours. I showed you what is most likely to happen in your home environment to focus your attention. I wanted to, as you say, “light a fire under you.”

Sophia: But I like this little town. At least it isn’t the ghetto. I was thinking of settling down here, raising a family. I don’t want them stuck in “stagflation”, paying through the nose while their wheels spin in the mud and things get uglier and uglier…

NTHARP: You have options. One: get out, climb the ladder, train your kids to be recognized as the “best and the brightest” and put them in the “best schools” with gardens and open classrooms. Two: stay and fight.

Sophia: I’m tired of fighting.

Dorian: You can always join me at one of the summer camps my parents send me to. We do all sorts of fun things… much better than this sucky place.

Sarah: Or you could join me and my “hippie father” in the new eco-communities we’re forming upstate.

Raj: Or you could get the heck out of the US. I’m thinking of going back to India when I graduate and sharing the good and the bad, seeing what we can do in a country that is both ancient and full of future promise, now that we’ve thrown off colonial rule. There’s a place my mother told me about called Auroville, founded in 1968 by Mirra Alfassa, aka “THE  Mother”. An experimental township where people from all over the world try to live together in peace and harmony. I was planning to visit after graduation.

Culhane: You see, there is a world of possibilities. And nothing NTHARP shows us—good or bad—is inevitable. That’s the thing about democracy, freedom, and sustainability: as Franklin warned, you only have “a republic, if you can keep it.” Madison, Washington, Adams—they all said in different ways that this experiment only survives if people stay informed, vigilant, and engaged. Same with Nexus Thinking. You have to keep doing the work—or someone else will gladly do it for you. Are you ready to BE the nexus?

(We hear the refrain: “It’s Nexus Time”. Fade to black.