The Medium is the Massage

Recently I read the book The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, by Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore. This book is about the media using new means to get their message across. It uses an interesting way of describing its ideas about the media. The whole idea of the book is that the new cannot do the old's job. It is impossible. As time goes on we need to figure out as a society how to keep the old ways of the media to be able to run, or find a way to create a type of media where the old is no longer needed. The concept of the latter idea is quite complex though. McLuhna states that the new cannot do the job of the old, so we must make the old useless to be able to replace it. How do we do this without replacing the old. I don't have the answer to this. It is some food for thought. I'm sure that one day the creative minds of the world will find a way to make the old useless and the now new media be the old. As of right now though we seem to need both the old and new media to be able to get messages out to the world.

The most interesting part of the book I found was the small section on education. I strongly agree that we need to redo our education system. As a future teacher I think that what we have now is not working. We need a way for students to explore and to create, not to sit and memorize. It has been shown over the years that what we have now is not that effective. The drop out rate is high and the test scores are low. We create a prison cell for students. They do not enjoy their schooling, because they are forced to memorize facts that are not relevant to them. Teach a student what they enjoy and let them find the joy in learning. Of course this will not always work. A student does still need to learn math and memorize historical facts, but let's change how they do it. Instead of memorizing the equation for  the average, let the students do a project in which they find the average of something they love. Instead of memorizing a date, recreate the day. At this point in time that kind of teaching is impossible. Students have to pass tests, so schools past tests. How can teachers focus on helping the student love to learn, when they are forced to focus on making sure their students have the content of the class memorized?