the Last School District in America

The Last Online School Sold to Omni Community
Last School District in America Disbands
by Ivan Illich JR, Trans America Times
Las Cruces NM

In the final bidding war for the last assets of the last School District in America, Omni Community beat out Foxland and consolidated their lead in the social networking wars. According to OC CEO Steve Jobs Jr, it was more of a symbolic purchase, as “the assets just weren’t worth that much anymore. Of course we didn’t want to see Foxland’s Robert Murdoch Jr get ahold of this piece of history. My dad would roll over in his cyrograve if that happened. And I want to thank the Gates foundation for stepping in big with support, it’s just the sort of thing uncle Bill would have wanted.”

Plans apparently include creating a special wing of “The History of Schools Museum” for this last chapter of the story, the rise and fall of the Online Schools, covering roughly the period between 2000 and 2012. Jobs Jr, said Youtube videos of the Las Cruces School District school board meetings will run continuously on the giant wall screen in the Museums Entrance to “give visitors some idea what the whole school thing was all about.

“That this particular school district was the very last to exist in America is a back handed complement of course. But we do want to preserve the record. After all, even today, many can hardly recall that period in American Society, and few wish to dredge up the dismal failures of those institutions. We think it’s important for the young people coming up, and for posterity, that we never forget the colossal mistakes that were made in those days.”

Just what did go wrong? How were trillions of dollars wasted in project that had the best of intentions? I asked Jobs Jr that question.

“You know, it’s funny you should ask. I’ve always been curious about that, ever since it became so obvious that schools were obsolete. I used to ask my dad, when he was alive, and he’d get going on stories about the Apple II and how hypertalk was going to revolutionize education. He’d ramble on and go off on something about his feud with uncle Bill, but eventually he’d come to a halt, shake his head, and admit he never could quite figure out why it didn’t.”

I asked Jobs Jr, if he ever reached a resolution with his dad over the intervention and take over of Apple that Jobs Jr staged some years ago now.

“Well, that certainly was a tough one. My dad wanted to leave the patents of his legacy, especially his favorite baby the iAll, to the Federation of Americas Teachers. You know… FAT. The board and I strongly suspected if that happened this terrific technology that enabled true learning with no instructors at all, and completely outside the models of school buildings and the whole thing, would just have been buried by FAT. Never seen the light of day. I just couldn’t let that happen. To this day, it was one of the hardest things I ever had to do, but you do what you think is right. I got hammered in the press at the time if you recall.”

That was certainly true. Mr. Jobs Jr. was the subject of a series of personal attacks including a bombing of his Beemermobile, the perpetrators of which were never identified. How did he manage to turn it all around to the point where his company Omni Community is the largest social network in the world and it’s tie in the iAll Mark II brain chip has over 75% of the market?

“Oh, so you never heard the story? I thought everybody had. It’s in my morgue. But you reporters are always after a “live” bit aren’t you? Tired of reruns of everything. Okay, as far as our company was able to piece it together, the idea really got going in a tiny cohort of people taking a class called CEL 460/560…some obscure part of NMSU I think it was called. Somehow the idea got going in this group that learning was something that just occurred in schools by accident. It wasn’t the schools at all.”

Really, people didn’t know that before this group, I thought to myself? I nudged Steve JR, just to see if he was actually here with me and not jacking off into the ethernet with his brain chip. Of course there’s some that say this nudgecheck habit of cyberporters should be banned, but I wasn’t taking any chances. I wanted my live feed.

“Well, I can’t say they were the only source, but clearly one source. In any event, once they posted their “Learning is community, Community is learning” manifesto the game was up. At least that was the thinking of myself, and a group of venture caps as well. It was thinking far ahead of it’s time, but if you grokked it, you just knew where the future was going to turn for learning. And it wasn’t going to be the schools. I mean, sure they tried to move online, and sort of rebuild their institutions there, but it was hopeless from the beginning.”

How so, hopeless? I asked.

“Dede. When he demonstrated his MUVE to my board, we knew. If learning happened as well in online communities that had nothing to do with schools, then online schools were doomed as well. We just read the trend, and put our R and D to work on Omni Community, and the rest is history. We supplied the instant learning environments to parents, and the schools just couldn’t keep up.

“Truth be told the parents were more than ready for a new model for educating their kids, one that didn’t cost them a treasure, and one that didn’t take the whole matter out of their hands. I mean, do you think there were any school districts that had a clue what the online change was all about? Do you think there were any in FAT, or in school administration, that understood about giving the community back control over their children’s lives? It was a walk in the park competing with that group.”

Didn’t the online schools use the new tools too? I asked Jobs, but I knew the answer.

“Sure they used some of the tools, but they just couldn’t relinquish control. They had their own pedagogy built up by years and years of working away in their isolated ivory towers, or where-ever they did it…personally I’ve never seen an ivory tower myself. They had no way to let go, to let it happen.

“That reminds me, we put that story about Pidgin in everyone’s brain chip at Omni. It flashes every 10 days into the news buffer. The story goes: You put people who speak two different languages into a room. Neither understands the other’s language. Eventually they spontaneously learn to communicate in some new third language. How does this happen? I’ll tell you, it’s that the incomplete knowledge brings about collaboration in learning, and that creates the thing that’s lacking when existing in an information rich environment. The beauty thing, an information rich environment is ubiquitous now. Perfect for a social network but death for pedagogy. Simple as that.”

Jobs Jr reached up and code tapped the side of his head, and I knew that was the end of the interview. But it had gone out live to millions, and my gameboy bucks were climbing as I deconned the feed, and checked the stat bank. Truly a historic day.