The Fading away of “Asymmetry”:Electronic Media and the School’s Legitimacy Crisis

Gao Desheng, and Wang Di

East China Normal University

Abstract: The “maturity gap” between generations is an objective fact that can only be narrowed through education.The asymmetry between generations is the anthropological base for education, and thus school education originated when this asymmetry enlarged.The print media protects this asymmetry, whereas the electronic media decrease the asymmetry,causing it to quickly fade away.However, when the asymmetry between generations fades away, the legitimacy and attraction of school education will be reduced, which is the primary reason that modern schools encounter so many crises.In the age of electronic media, schools must search for a new legitimate basis and transform into a “l(fā)earning community.”

Keywords: maturity gap, asymmetry, print media, electronic media, legitimacy crisis

“Maturity Gap”: the Anthropological Base for Education

Many educators and researchers hold a view that absolute equity between the educator and the educated can be realized.However,it is exactly the difference or “asymmetry” between the two that provides the anthropological base for education.

“Maturity Gap”: an Inevitable Fact

According to Kant (2005), education is the thing that the earlier generation practices towards the later generation.Then why is it that the earlier generation can educate the later generation? The fundamental reason is that a “maturity gap” exists between the two generations (Brezinka, 2001).That is, when compared with the later generation, the earlier generation enjoys the advantage of body development, experience, knowledge, capability, sociality, etc.The maturity gap is not only a natural phenomenon; it is also “an ineluctable fact” (Dewey, 2001, p.6).The maturity gap exists in animals as well, although it is much smaller than the gap between human generations.The maturity gap between animals can be created by natural development and subconscious imitation, but for humans, the maturity gap is significant even in the mere physiology sense.Walking upright and using language, the two unique characteristics of humans, only become possible a year after birth.From this perspective, people are the creations of a “physiological early birth” (The Academic Society for Education of University of Tsukuba, 1986).Even though babies generally can walk upright and talk after their first year, the viability of human babies cannot compare with the abilities of one-yearold animals.A one-year-old baby’s potential for survival is incredibly low if they are deprived of an adult’s care and love.Moreover, the physiological maturity gap of humans leads to the possibility of a form of primary education-childcare.As Kant (2005) points out, the majority of animals certainly need feeding, but they do not need care.Care means parents should adopt preventive measures to make sure that children do not apply their capabilities negatively.

The maturity gap between human generations is not only physiological but also social.With the development of civilization, humans have accumulated a certain kind of “surpass biological experience” as they interact with their external world (Sang, 1993, p.111).This capability refers to experiences with manufacturing and the application of tools.Simultaneously, humans also develop their personal “surpass biological experience,” building social relationships and accumulating social experiences.This kind of social “surpass biological experience” is grasped by the mature members of the community, whereas the new members cannot spontaneously obtain it.This discrepancy explains how the “social maturity gap” is generated along with the “physiological maturity gap.”

“Maturity Gap”: Enabling Education as a Necessity

Undoubtedly, the maturity gap between the two generations is an objective fact.Moreover, if the human race is to successfully continue, this maturity gap should not be allowed to widen; otherwise,humanity is in danger of a decline.Therefore, how can the maturity gap be reduced between the two generations? According to Dewey, “Education, and education alone, spans the gap” (Dewey, 2001, p.7).The maturity gap is exactly an anthropological base for education.Because human cannot sorely find and create the things necessary for themselves to live in the natural, cultural, social, and national environment, we are the living creatures who depend on inheritance, need education and must accept education (Zdarzil, 2001).

In the past, the education system emphasized the capability of people to be educated and ignored the necessity of their education.Actually, no education, no humans.That is why Kant (2005) suggests that education is the only way that enables people to be people and humans are no more than the things that education had created in them.The anthropological expression of this concept is even more direct, Bollnow (1999) clearly claims that humans are the living race that can educate, can be educated, and needs education.

Due to the existence of the maturity gap, education is necessary for humans.However, it does not necessarily mean that school education is also a necessity.If the family, social institutions, and social life can remedy the maturity gap, school education does not need to exist.The historical development of humans has already proved this point.For example, in childhood, every person learns through their simple life in society.For some people, they mostly learn from the knowledge or information they gain from the surrounding environment…A major part of people’s experience and knowledge is from informal education which had already existed for the long term (Frost, 1987).The reason that the formal institutional school education originated in the first place was the enlargement of the maturity gap between the generations.

But as civilization advances, the gap between the capacities of the young and the concerns of adults widens.Learning by direct sharing in the pursuits of grown-ups becomes increasingly difficult except in the case of the less advanced occupations.Much of what adults do is so remote in space and in meaning that playful imitation is less and less adequate to reproduce its spirit.(Dewey, 2001, p.12).

Under such circumstances, neither family nor social life can shoulder the heavy burden of narrowing the maturity gap.As a result, the school as a social institution, with a clear educational consciousness was produced.The school enables children to efficiently learn in the early stages of their lives and to surmount the maturity gap between the two generations within a reasonable time range, and eventually grasp human wisdom and create a new independent life that belongs to themselves.

The Print Media’s Protection of “Asymmetry”

Abstractly, the maturity gap reflects the “asymmetry” between the two sides of educator and educatee in the education system.The educator and the educatee are unsymmetrical physiologically and mentally both in grade and class.There is no education without this kind of unsymmetrical relationship; nor is there the education that does not admit the difference between higher and lower classes (Jacquard, Manent & Renaut, 2006).Macroscopically, the basic mission of the school education is to reduce the maturity gap and the asymmetry between the generations and enable the younger generation to reach and even surpass the achievements of the former generations.Microscopically, this maturity gap produces the “sense of lacking” among young people, and this lack acts as the internal initiative and stimulus to narrow the maturity gap.In this sense, we can saythat “asymmetry” is not only the basis of education but also the mystery that preserves the charm and attraction of education.

Literacy: the Base of “Asymmetry”

The mission of education is to rebalance the asymmetry between the generations.However, the education system is not eager to obtain this goal too quickly because a rapid reduction of “asymmetry”will not only decrease the legitimacy of this system but also undermine the charm of institutional education.The foundation of modern education is the print media, and the basic characteristics of this media exactly meet the need that school education should maintain the asymmetry between the generations.In a print-media-dominated society, if a person wants to learn the necessary knowledge and communicate with others, he must have very good literacy (Meyrowitz, 2002).Adults also have a new definition as beings those who can read and write.Thus, literacy is the basis of the maturity gap between the two generations.Postman (2004) claims that the minors can only become adults by means of learning to read, to write, and then enter the print media world.For the majority of people,going to school is the only way to improve literacy.Furthermore, reading and writing cannot be grasped immediately; rather, people need to spend years of diligent study, which is why the school years are fairly long.The ability to read and write distinguishes the “easy” and “difficult” learning experiences, and the step-by-step progressive order.Concerning reading, when a student has not developed the necessary lower-level skills, they cannot jump to learn higher-level knowledge.

Usually, we believe that the grade divisions of the school system are determined by the different ages of students, but the nature of the print media’s step-by-step progressive order also plays an important role.The school’s grade structure and the print media’s characteristics are closely related because the print media allows the division and classification of the information (Meyrowitz, 2002).In summary, school education makes good use of the different abilities between generations by reducing the maturity gap between them, and by controlling the educational process as a systematic,step-by-step activity.To summarize, school education makes an effort to open the door of the adult’s world, but not to open it immediately, which means smoothly managing the educational process and using the asymmetry as the invisible hand to organize the educational system.

There is no doubt that the knowledge gap is the main characteristic of the asymmetry between generations (Postman, 2004).In the print media dominated era, knowledge existed in books and other printed materials.Compared to spoken language and hand-writing, the print media not only accelerated scientific exchange but also deepened humanity’s abilities for abstract thinking which tremendously promoted the development of modern science.At the same time, print media enlarged and accelerated the spread of art and created new opportunities for learning about the thoughts of others.In the print-media-dominated age, the wisdom of humans is hidden in the world of books.Educated adults and civilized people can enjoy this wisdom and compared to the uneducated youth,this knowledge gap is huge.Therefore, school comes to be the main or even the only place for the youth to make up for this “knowledge gap” and then to become mature adults.The different schoolgrades are like steps for climbing a mountain: the more steps students climb, the more spectacular sights they can see.

The Reading Selection: Protection for “Asymmetry”

By controlling the selection of reading materials, adults in the educational system can easily control children’s reading development.Generally, adults select the reading materials suitable for children by discarding “cultural privacy” materials that contain, or refer to, pornography, money,conspiracy, violence, slaughter, death, crime, and drugs, etc.An adult’s privilege is the right to know about these cultural secrets.Thus, when a child’s curiosity urges them to uncover these same secrets,most adults would respond by saying, “Little children should not know this.” Sometimes they say,“Why do you little kids want to learn this?” In this way, the adults not only demonstrate their sense of superiority but also purposely change the topic.

Besides controlling the access to inappropriate information for children, the school system and social life only allow children to access the appropriate information in a stage-by-stage process.In this way, the maturity gap is maintained, and the obscure side of society is hidden from children,which also helps to make up the adults’ good image.The children’s books that adults create mainly present a kind of decorative and idealistic life that displays the adults’ positive behaviors and hides their negative behaviors-such as weakness, rage, and utilitarianism-which beautifies the adults’image in children’s minds.What I would like to make especially clear is that reading is only one of the strategies that adults use to make up their image; the more usual strategy is to distinguish their positive behaviors from their negative behaviors and then only show the decorated positive behaviors.

For example, parents always try to control their words and deeds when their children are present but are more “unbridled” when their children are absent.The teacher not only uses positive behaviors to maintain the image but also builds a kind of “knowing everything” impression by preparing lectures beforehand.Even though at first glance, it may seem that the adult’s ability to prepare their positive and negative behaviors is not related to the print media, in the electronic media era, the adults can no longer hide their negative actions.Therefore, it seems that the print media provides secret support for the continuation of the adult’s “image decoration project.”

The Electronic Media and the Fading away of “Asymmetry”

In the electronic media era, the asymmetry that makes school education necessary and provides a valid foundation for both experiential education and school education is now fading away.This ongoing phenomenon has attracted the interest of many media researchers.For example, Postman(2004) describes the electronic media era as a childless time.What’s more, when taking a broad view,people can easily find that it is more and more difficult to identify adults and children based on their behaviors, languages, habits, attitudes, and desires, or even physical appearance.Meyrowitz (2002)describes the people of the electronic media era as adult-like children and childish adults, as theconvergence of the two generations accelerates.Moreover, the inappropriate topics for children are getting fewer and fewer.

Why is this transformation occurring? The answer is closely related to the characteristics of the electronic media.

Children’s Easy Entry into the Adult World

The print media is like a high wall blocking entry into the adult world.In contrast, the electronic media does not have such a characteristic and allows children to freely enter the adult world.As a representative of the electronic media, television uses visual images as the “code” to represent the world.Moreover, the visual images are not as difficult to “read” as the characters and words necessary for understanding the printed text.Children can watch and understand the visual image at a very young age.The electric signal codes of television duplicate the images and sounds in our daily life.Basically, its difficulty degree is only one.As long as you know how to watch one TV program,then you are able to watch all the other programs (Postman, 2004).That is to say, the print media includes a rank sequence, which means that a student must obtain a certain skill level before they can move to higher-level studies.It also does not necessarily mean that by mastering a typical skill for one level, a student can comprehend a whole category.More importantly, this principle does not apply to the electronic media, which presents all information at basically the same level so that mastering one skill means that you already have mastered almost all skills.Therefore, in the electronic media environment, the advantage that adults previously enjoyed in the print media era is substantially decreased.Children do not need to build up years of hard study to master the skills to use electronic media.In fact, in the earlier years of life, children can master the same capability to use electronic media as adults.

Adult Control over Information Has Shattered

In the print media era, an adult’s advantage over children depended on their control of information.Since reading is an individualized activity, adults can “seal up” adult reading materials from children so that they can only enjoy the books that are appropriate for them.Print media can easily separate children and adults, and even children of different ages.In the electronic media era,this kind of separation is no longer possible.Postman (2004) claims that it is hard for television to distinguish the information between pre-school children, Grade 6 students, and even adults.By observing the physical characteristics of television, it is obvious that its screen display can be watched by people of all ages.However, this inclusivity does not apply to the reading of books, which means that adults can read materials only suitable for them and distribute to children only the books appropriate for children.Adults can hide books inappropriate for children, but it is impossible to hide television programs.Parents can throw away books unsuitable for their children, but electronic media can come into the home and cannot be prohibited.Due to these characteristics of electronic media,both children (of all ages), and adults can access the same media and the same information system,and because of this, the asymmetry of the print media era is fading away.

Negative Adult Behaviors Are Being Exposed

The normal process of socialization is as follows: When an individual enters a certain group, they must learn the idealized behaviors (the positive behaviors), and only after accomplishing this task are they allowed contact with the negative deeds.The advantage of this procedure is that it prevents individuals from rejecting the social group at the very beginning which may lead to stagnation of socialization.However, electronic media disrupts this social recognition order, and children learn about adults’ negative behaviors at a young age.The direct and serious consequence is that adulthood loses its mystery.By watching television, children gain knowledge about the other side of adults,which usually is invisible in daily life.Moreover, the generation who grows up being accompanied by television will always watch the adults’ behaviors, sometimes imitating the deceivable and immoral ones (Postman, 2004).Many parents and teachers have experience in this regard and thus it is increasingly difficult to correct children.No matter what they say, children bear a facial expression as if they “know everything,” which undermines the confidence of parents and teachers.

The “Nude” Society

Every society has its cultural secrets and taboos that are not open to minors.These secrets and taboos can encourage the younger generation to acknowledge cultural authority, and thus to stand in awe of the culture.However, the electronic media has exposed all these cultural secrets and taboos to minors so that they are able to take in everything at a single glance, and therefore, society is becoming“nude.” Television exists for “being watched” rather than “being read” or “being considered.” The hidden logic behind this type of media is for distraction and forgetting rather than personality and reason.The quick flash and cut of electronic media imagery do not allow its audience to stop to reflect and think.As Postman (2004) criticizes, television needs endlessly new information to attract its viewers’ attention, so it must explore and use every taboo.Unhealthy media imagery like violence,bloodthirstiness, conspiracy, and pornography are all available to minors.I would say that everywhere and every moment, electronic media has stripped away the hidden layers of man’s life and presented a nude society to their children.Thus, in the electronic media age, the asymmetry between the generations, which arises from a foundation of cultural secrets and taboos, is being shaken and is quickly disappearing.

The Knowledge Gap Is Disappearing

Printed media produces a “knowledge gap” between the generations, but this gap is dispelled by electronic media.In the print media era, it is hard for young people to gain knowledge if they cannot read and write.However, with the coming of electronic media, information is available to all people due to a lower threshold or even no threshold at all.By using electronic media, young people today not only learn things that only adults knew in the print media era but also understand things thatthese print-media-era adults did not know.For adults who grew up in the print media environment,electronic media appeared like an unexpected intruder, so that many of these adults have some obvious psychological resistance to learning how to use this new media.For example, many senior adults resist using mobile communication equipment and video games because psychologically,they lack the abilities to adapt to them.The young people of today were born into an electronic environment, and thus find it natural to use this kind of media.With respect to the adaptation to,and application of, electric equipment, our current society has already stepped into a “post figurative culture” society, which implies that the adult’s problem is that they no longer possess the knowledge advantage; rather, they are behind the times in their mode of thinking and perception.In contrast, the young person’s problem is no longer the knowledge gap; rather, it is that adults are conservative in their thinking and have fallen behind the social development pace.

The Legitimacy Crisis of Schools

The Legitimacy of Schools Is Questionable

In the era dominated by print media, school education was the only way for the young generation to make up for their knowledge disadvantage.However, in the era dominated by electronic media,the “sole role” of school education has been challenged.Before the current young generation goes to school, they have already learned numerous things about the adult world.After they go to school,they still have access to electronic media, and thus, they can continuously learn about the adult world,and so the traditional asymmetry established by the print media is rapidly narrowing.Meyrowitz(2002) claims that schools must maintain a knowledge limit if they want to survive, and they should continuously let the students be aware that it is the school that enables them to learn knowledge.However, in the era of electronic media, it is difficult for schools to achieve this goal.Manabu (2003)presents that primary school pupils acquire the same knowledge at school as they have already learned by means of watching television, reading books, newspapers and journals, and talking with family members and friends.That is to say, school learning is only an approach of reviewing all this old knowledge… According to this, the school, which acts as the educational institution and“monopolizes” the knowledge and delivers the knowledge, is gradually losing its legitimism.Thus,Manabu (2004) asked a question that in a time when the public media was so popular and various learning opportunities flooded everywhere, how schools could demonstrate their value of existence.

Teachers’ Existence Crisis

After young people learn about the negative behaviors of adults and the cultural obscurity of their society, teachers, whose images used to represent adults, are degraded in the eyes of students.Besides,in an era of electronic media, the creditability of school education has been discounted, which means that teachers’ moral advantage is declining.Simultaneously, the knowledge advantage of teachers isalso declining, since schools are no longer the only place in which they gain knowledge, and what teachers know may not necessarily be broader than what students know.

In the electronic media era, teachers have encountered an unprecedented crisis.Manabu (2003)argues that this crisis is no longer the normative crisis as in “What should a teacher do?” Nor is it a real crisis as in “How to be a teacher?” Rather, it is already a kind of existential crisis as in “What is the role of a teacher?” The electronic media have pushed the teacher into an unprecedented and embarrassing situation-they can no longer articulate the role that they need to play.Manabu(2003) summarizes the three characteristics of this existential crisis as return, uncertainty, and boundlessness.These three characteristics are continuously reinforced in the electronic media just like adding fuel to the fire.“Return” means that a teacher’s reproach of a student will become a reproach towards the teachers themselves.In the electronic media era, teachers, compared to students, do not enjoy any advantages.On the contrary, students are increasingly difficult to discipline.Moreover, any educational theory or practical approaches seem unreliable for addressing this problem, and every student seems unpredictable and filled with “uncertainties.” In the print media age, teachers enjoyed an advantageous position for their abilities to acquire the knowledge to which students had limited or no access.However, in the electronic media era, knowledge is “boundless.” Therefore, even though teachers can bend themselves to the task and exert their abilities to the utmost, they can never surpass or achieve the boundless knowledge to which their students are accustomed.

The Attraction of Schools Is Declining

Macroscopically, in the electronic media age, the role of the school as a knowledge and information center has been weakened, and at the microscopic level, the attraction of the school for the younger generation is also declining.As a self-conscious cultural institution, the school has its benefits and “inertia,” and it cannot be unconcerned about its existential crisis.As a matter of fact, schools in the electronic age have always struggled to maintain their credibility with society and students.For example, schools have increased their utilitarianism, which implies that they have attempted to stress their social importance by boosting the economy.Additionally, schools have tried to increase their attraction by promising a good life prospect.Within the school system, the pursuit of higher academic achievement has reached an extreme, producing and intensifying the fierce competition among students, so they have little time to consider the real meaning of their education.Moreover,discipline is emphasized to counteract the damage caused by the declining authority of the school and teachers and other socio-cultural norms.Teachers who are also experiencing their professional existential crisis have to apply a “ridiculous pedagogy” to the students in a “rigid-principle”-dominated school and it leads to the hypocrisy and power-inclination personality; all these are “impersonality”(Manabu, 2003).In other words, teachers who cannot find their role in the current school system have to draw even closer to school’s bureaucratic system to maintain their professional positions through a dispassionate, inhumane application of dominance, strict discipline, and stringent regulations.

As the attraction of schools declines, the younger generation is the direct victim of this crisis.Tothis point, the minor students have no choice or right to select alternative venues in which to learn,even at a time when the school is coming to be the place where children lose joy, friends, and even themselves rather than a place for children to learn and grow up together (Manabu, 2004).Even though the school is a place for many children of the same age to gather together, it is not a good environment when it cannot satisfy its students’ needs, and what is worse, it often does damage to its students.Often students’ so-called “deviance” is considered to be their moral errors, but when viewed from another angle, these deviances are just forms of resistance to their crisis-ridden schools and teachers.For instance, some students write and pass notes in class.They do this for nothing more than to escape and rebel.In a survey conducted by Steinberg (2002), a student explained that writing notes was a way for them to get out of the classroom which was irrelevant to them or very boring.Unfortunately, this kind of resistance only brings harsher punishments and stricter regulations.Therefore, for some students, the school experience turns out to be a hurting experience.

Searching for the Future of Schools

Although schools are still the main choice for education in the current society and it even tends to dominate students’ lives at home-meaning that the school assigns excessive homework to students,and students “assign” it to their parents, it is irrefutable that the anthropological base of schools is declining, and its crisis and probable fate have emerged.Beck (2003) claims that in a society where the boundary between adults and children is collapsing, it is impossible to maintain the man-created spirit of the traditional schools.When the asymmetry between the generations is fading away, it is increasingly difficult to structure schools based on the maturity gap.Therefore, if it is true, do schools have a future? If they do, what is this future?

The challenge of contemporary education is electronic media, and the crisis caused by this media is the unavoidable challenge of education as well.This crisis probably will lead to the destruction of the current school system, but it also may breed a new hope for creating a better educational system.The crisis has always been a part of everyone’s lives: Only by the crisis-actually there are no other ways than the crisis-only through this most serious menace can people gain the real themselves(Bollnow, 1999).Similarly, we may find a new valid foundation and a real existential direction for the school.

Where to Find the School’s Future

Electronic media wears down the gap and the asymmetry between generations whereas it also enlarges the gap between the individual and the collective culture.In modern society, the production of human knowledge increases geometrically.Currently, the volume of knowledge that is produced in one year almost surpasses the amount of knowledge that was produced in a few decades or even over a hundred years in the past.Nowadays, the weekly volume of information that an individual can obtain goes beyond the amount of information that took dozens of years to gather in the past, and evenbeyond the information that took earlier generations a whole lifetime to collect.This transformation is also one of the main reasons that “asymmetry” between the generations is disappearing.In a time when the volume of knowledge was comparatively small, as long as the older generation grasped a certain amount of this knowledge, they could maintain the maturity gap with the younger generation.However, in a society that generates a huge volume of knowledge, even if the older generation grasps a certain amount of this knowledge, the amount will be negligible compared with the total volume of knowledge.In a time when knowledge is sharply increasing, a huge gap occurs between each individual, whether they are adults or minors.Even though what the older generation can teach the younger generation becomes increasingly less, every individual still needs extensive learning.Therefore, if the print media era was a time when adults educated young children, the electronic media era is a time when adults and children learn together.

Humans are social animals and contact with others is an intrinsic human need.Jacquard (2006)defines humans’ fundamental characteristic as the connections with other people.The consciousness of contact with each other is the important unnatural thing we have invented over the past thousands of years.Anthropological research and related field studies have indicated that people’s contact and connections with other humans are the key to human development.Thus, the need for contact defines the basic need of all humanity.However, in the electronic media era, this human need has met a paradox.On the one hand, electronic media has extended the possibilities for contact between people so that they seem closer to each other, although physically far apart.However, on the other hand, electronic media throw people into a world full of strangers, and all we face are people’s pieces(Bauman, 2002).In-depth communications are almost impossible and what is worse, we cannot feel other people by means of electronic media communications.Machines and electronic media increase human capabilities, while it occupies the room of family members, companions and friends.Bohm (2004) claims that in our time, estrangement between people is gradually increasing and people’s communication is steadily fading at an unprecedented speed.In the electronic media era,people often experience peculiar loneliness and alienation, feelings that were rarely felt in the past.Besides, the profound needs of humanity can hardly be satisfied.The superficial consequence is the various psychological diseases and the profound consequence is the personality disorder and social indifference.

Schools as the “Learning Community”

The asymmetry between the individual and human culture, and the failure to satisfy the needs of human communication can be used to predict the future of schools and their new legitimate basis.In the electronic media age, everyone needs to learn because of the asymmetry between the individual and society.Although families and social institutions possess some learning functions, their basic tendency is not to stimulate people to learn.So, if people plan to systematically learn knowledge through such organizations, their learning efficiency is not likely to be very high.Furthermore, the human lifespan is limited, and since there are many things to grasp within these limits, the school, thespecial learning organization, has its validity for existence.

Similarly, the family’s structure and function tend to change under the impact of electronic media.Even with people living in the same house, communication frequency has dramatically decreased.Formerly, the whole family interchanged ideas face to face, but now a “third party” is in the house-television.We watch a television screen instead of the faces of family members.The overwhelming prevalence of the internet has further weakened family communication.Even though the importance of the family has not been undermined by electronic media, the family still fails to satisfy its members’ communication needs in terms of volume and structure.It is even harder for the community to reach this goal because “how far eternity is, how far your neighbor is.”①Anonymous popular saying from a Chinese Website.Some communication occurs in the professional world of adults, but this kind of communication is the by-product of utilitarian work that is usually unavoidable.Therefore, school-the setting for most learning-provides the face-to-face communication that meets people’s communication needs and the internal desire for contact with other humans.Communication is the inner impulse of learning,Manabu (2004) explains that learning is based on interpersonal communication.Literally, “study”can be traced back to the word “imitation” and this implies that “study” is formed based on imitation rising from interpersonal communication.In this regard, we can “peep” some hint by observing the traditional Chinese character “study” (學(xué)).The little cross (looks like an “x”) on the top means the contact with an ancestor’s soul-that is, the contact with academics, art, and culture, and the little cross underneath means the contact among friends (Manabu, 2004).So, if the school can go back to the original meaning of “study,” it could begin to meet the communication needs of people who live in the “forest of machines and cement” and thus obtain a kind of legitimacy for the communication.

For the two above-mentioned reasons, the blueprint of the school should be the “l(fā)earning community.” Tonnies (1999) interprets this community as an idealistic and organic life to distinguish it from an ideological and mechanical society.A learning community is idealistic because this community is the long-lasting and genuine common life.It provides real contact between people and does not exist only in people’s minds and imaginations.This community is “organic” in terms of the common belief including a consensus which directly expresses the essence and reality of all real being-together life, being-together living, and being-together work (Tonnies, 1999).Jaspers also suggests that the third characteristic of a learning community is that the personality is strictly equal within the community.People remind each other, question each other, and create opportunities and conditions for other people’s development (Wang, 2006).If the school acts as a learning community,it is certainly a kind of “being-together” life.Adults and minors gathering together for learning can contact each other in the being-together life, and thus meet the last goal in the educational system which refers to teach every child how to communicate with the others and thus to strengthen their self-construction (Jacquard, 2006).The learning community consists of consensus and common beliefs and exists not only to learn, but also for meeting the need for narrowing the cultural gapbetween minors and adults.Furthermore, the learning community is characterized by equal amounts of personality and common development, and thus it is in accord with the assertion that “asymmetry”is fading away.

Conclusion

The “maturity gap” between the generations is an inevitable fact.It makes education possible and necessary.The physiological and social maturity gap makes it possible for adults to care for and educate the new generation.Meanwhile, education is necessary for humanity to continue due to the reduction in the gap.The maturity gap is exactly an anthropological base of education,and its enlargement especially makes school education indispensable, right along with informal education.Abstractly, the gap is a reflection of the “asymmetry” between educator and educatee in the educational system, which is not only the basis for education but also the mystery that preserves the attraction of education.Therefore, the mission of education is to rebalance the asymmetry systematically but not to remedy it completely.Literacy and the knowledge gap mainly represent the asymmetry in the print media era, according to their characteristics, the school makes systematic,step-by-step plans to improve students’ literacy and help them acquire knowledge to close the gap.Moreover, adults also protect the asymmetry by selecting reading content for children, including selecting suitable materials and controlling inappropriate information in cultural privacy.It not only can prevent inappropriate contents in culture from depraving children’s mind, but also make up good images of adults.

However, “asymmetry” is fading in the electronic media era due to the accessibility of electronic media information.Children can access the adult world at will and adults gradually lessen their control of information.Relevantly, many adults’ negative behaviors are exposed to children.Electronic media also eliminate the asymmetry by directly exposing cultural secrets and taboos to children too early.Moreover, the accessible information is narrowing the knowledge gap or even creating an inverse gap because the new generation is more adaptive to new media.Schools’ legitimacy is also questionable with the decline of “asymmetry.” The school is not the exclusive place for the new generation to learn and grow up in the new era.Teachers are facing an existential crisis because of the weakening of their moral and knowledge advantage.To solve the crisis, schools and teachers struggle to maintain their credibility with society and students.However, these struggles do not increase their attraction.They bring countless harm to students.

A more reasonable way to solve these problems is to create a new justification for schools in the new electronic era and to argue a new existential pattern for schools.First, although electronic media reduces the asymmetry between the educator and the educatee, it enlarges the gap between the individual and the collective culture.Therefore, adults and children should learn together, which creates a necessary demand for schools as effective and specialized learning places.Second, the intrinsic human need for connections with others is stuck in a paradox.Although electronic mediahas extended the possibilities for connecting with people far away, there is a lack of face-to-face communication, while at the same time the frequency of communication with friends and family is decreasing.As for the function of learning, it can be justified in the aspect of satisfying in-depth communication demands.Finally, the school should exist as a “l(fā)earning community” in the future,providing conditions for communication, aiming at learning with others based on the principle of equality.