04.24.17

EDUSOFT
(a BL science fiction story continued)

.02

Our re-education began almost immediately.
In classrooms, among relics, we logged into flipped lessons that linked school buildings scattered across the shattered globe. History, science, mathematics, language arts. All subjects were accessed on softly glowing vid-screens.
No cerebral jack-ins. No sugar-calibrated lessons.
Withdrawals wracked our implants. The familiar logo of the Edusoft Corporation sponsored our headaches. We got over it.
Offline, we sat in small groups on a floor painted with the geometries of a ballgame forgotten before the Blow-Up. We chose the time-place-path-pace of our own learning. At last, we were in control. No digital brain dips spooning syrup into tween-age minds. Instead, our robed instructors strode among us, listening, observing. And sometimes explaining.
Nature—indeed, the totality of known existence—is predicated on adaptation, said Teacher Gysin one afternoon over the twitter of birds in the gymnasium. Her hand lifted. Swept to indicate nests clinging to tall backboards and vines climbing high walls. Adapt! Innovate! Survive!
“But that’s too hard!” our former selves would have chanted in unison. “That’s boring!”
Now we knew better. Now we listened.
There’s an old saying, Teacher Ballantine resonated from mid-court, his hands gathered inside his wide sleeves, “Necessity is the mother of invention.”
But we as a society inverted that natural system. A third cassocked figure had entered the gym, attracting a sprightly butterfly that alighted on one raised finger. We flipped that proverb. Invention became the mother of necessity. Tools preceded tasks. Not because it was progressive. But because—
Because it was profitable, Teacher Gysin finished for Teacher Eccles. Her robe—stitched with the same apple-shaped symbol of knowledge worn on the chests of her colleagues—swished as she shuffled through sunbeams streaming down from holes in the roof like pillars in some grand cathedral. Public education was big business.
Or it could be if it were privatized. Teacher Ballantine’s glasses flashed in his hood.
Big corporations recognized this, of course, resumed Teacher Eccles, meantime watching the scissoring yellow wings on her finger. They capitalized on it first by setting up online learning labs in shopping malls.
Teacher Gysin adjusted her spectacles owlishly. The politicians recognized it, too, she remarked. They needed taxpayers’ votes. A school building is more expensive than vacant retail space. A trained teacher is more expensive than a computer lab monitor. A monitor and even the lab itself is extraneous if the lesson delivery system can be automated and ubiquitous.
That’s how public education ended, said Ballantine.
That’s how Edusoft began, said Gysin.
And that’s how— Eccles started.
Suddenly the yellow butterfly fluttered off her fingertip. The birds rioted. The sunbeam in which Gysin stood split down the middle. Another sunbeam forked near Ballantine. Baffled, we glanced around at each other. More light rays were disrupted here and there in the overgrown gym, swathing us in darkness.
Our teachers’ spectacles turned upward.
When we, too, looked up, we saw the first pale interloper crawl headfirst through a gap in the ceiling.