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"There was a time when one old eccentric guy with a notebook could do something important to science. Now even the resources of a major university are often not enough."
- Jerry Pournelle
 |
| Accelerated Schooling | ||
| Knowledge force-fed directly into the brain. |
One of the technologies that the City Fathers of the Okie cities used to bring individual citizens up to standards was accelerated schooling.
| The accelerated schooling to which the City Fathers had remanded Chris did not at first seem physically strenuous at all...
The "schoolroom" was a large, gray, featureless chamber devoid of blackboard or desk; its only furniture consisted of a number of couches scattered about the floor. Nor were there any teachers; the only adults present were called monitors, and their duties appearaed to be partly those of an usher, and partly those of a nurse, but none pertinent to teaching in any sense of the term Chris had ever encountered. They conducted you to your couch and helped you to fit over your head a bright metal helmet which had inside it what seemed to be hundreds of tiny, extremely sharp points which bit into your scalp just enought to make you nervous, but without enough pressure to break the skin. Once this gadget, which was called a toposcope, was adjusted to their satisfaction, the monitors left, and the room began to fill with the gray gas. This gas was like a fog, except that it was dry and faintly aromatic... it made it impossible to see the rest of the room until the session was over, when it was sucked out with a subdued roar of blowers... ...the torrent of facts that came from the memory cells of the City Fathers into the prickly helmet was overwhelming and merciless. |
| Technovelgy from Cities in Flight,
by James Blish. Published by Avon in 1957 Additional resources -
|
In fact, anti-convulsant drugs were administered to help students cope with the flow of knowledge.
This process also works in reverse:
Compare to the mechanical teacher from The Fun They Had (1951) by Isaac Asimov.
“Okay. Now if it had been me, I would have just stopped the boat right there, and gotten out, and told the cops what I’d heard. Let them drag it out of the guys you’d locked up. You know how the City Fathers cram all that junk into our heads in class—well, they can take stuff out the same way. Dad says it’s darned unpleasant for the victim, but they get it.”
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from Cities in Flight
More Ideas
and Technology by James Blish
Tech news articles related to Cities in Flight
Tech news articles related to works by James Blish
Accelerated Schooling-related
news articles:
- Human Academics Recommend AIs As Teachers
- China Uses Artificial Intelligence To Grade Student Papers
- China's Artificial Intelligence-Enhanced Education
- AI Tutors For Every Child - Thanks, DARPA!
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| Poul Anderson's 'Brain Wave' |
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'I went to the control room where the three other men were manipulating their mechanical men.'
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'It was a smooth ovoid floating a few inches from the floor...'
'... he thrust in his charging arm to replenish his store of energy.'
'...the terrible Jovian gravity that made each movement an effort.'
