Over lunch one day, management guru Peter Drucker and computing pioneer Alan Kay got started talking about, of all things, the calligrapher caste in China in the 13th century. Not your typical lunch conversation. But fascinating.

They agreed that the small professional class of calligraphers recording human thought in scrolls had set back the nation—and all of mankind—by doing everything in their power to inhibit the spread of understanding of China's symbols and pictographs. The calligraphers' reason for their obstruction? They wanted to maintain themselves as an elite caste. Weren't today's teachers doing much the same thing? Kay wanted to know.

Weren't they resisting the use of the computer as a tool for learning, to the detriment of all? Hadn't they decided that the goal of education was to teach—rather than to have students learn, whether or not a teacher was involved? Drucker agreed.

When Kay was asked who could take a credible position on behalf of the education establishment, for this Last Word discussion, he replied without hesitation: Neil Postman. Postman, a professor at New York University, is considered the intellectual heir to Marshall McLuhan.

Kay said: "Postman is the smartest guy I know on this issue" of computers in education, often referred to as "distance learning" because computers could remove the need for teachers to be physically present in a classroom. "I always love talking to Neil. I'd fly across the country to talk to him about this."

And so it came to pass that the pair discussed distance learning (by telephone, as it happens) in the vibrant give and take that follows. Neither pretends that the issues are simple. Kay, who is credited with inventing much of what we now think of as a personal computer, does argue that computers have a strong role to play in learning. But Kay discounts most of the broad claims made by advocates of distance learning. Postman, meanwhile, acknowledges the potential power of the computer, even as he insists that learning happens best in group settings, face to face. The discussion is illuminating all the way from the very first sentence, in which Kay offers an unexpected way to frame the conversation.

ALAN KAY: I'll start by asking how you think the book has done as a tool for distance learning. I think the book, and writing in general, is a pretty darn good technology.

NEIL POSTMAN: Well, of course, I would agree. Reading a book is the best example of distance learning I know. A book tackles the problems of both space and time. The teacher and the learner don't have to be in the same place, and they can pursue their separate activities at vastly different times. But I think you mean something more when you say "distance learning," right?

KAY: I think the book makes a good starting point because it was a great invention for distance learning—for many of the very reasons that Socrates didn't like writing. The disembodied nature of the symbols provides a different stimulus to imagination than face-to-face learning does. I think reading strengthens the ability to imagine things and deal abstractly.

But, I ask, is there anything a new technology like the computer could add? And there is. Not a lot of things, but a couple of really important things.

One is in dialoging, Socrates' preferred method of learning. In a good essay, the author invites the reader to argue with him a little bit. But debate usually stops in, say, scientific essays when an author puts a formula in. For instance, if there's an argument about the progression of an epidemic like AIDS, the author might put in an exponential equation. For most people, even literate, scientific people, unless they know something special about diseases and exponentials, they're pretty much at the mercy of the author's claims. On the other hand, it would be great if those mathematical symbols would actually lead into a computer simulation of what's being talked about—if the reader could experiment, much as the author had. The computer can provide an extra dimension, in which people are invited to argue more deeply with the author.

POSTMAN: I have no argument with that. As a matter of fact, when Socrates makes his case against writing, he says that one of its deficiencies is that you can't talk back to the author.

KAY: Especially if the author has died.

POSTMAN: Socrates also says that writing forces us to follow an argument rather than to participate in it, and I think you see that all the time when the professor is giving a lecture. Students are writing their notes, trying to follow the argument, and abandon any hope of participating in it. Your example, Alan, would be a good way of correcting that because the learner could participate in the argument.

But when people talk about "distance learning," they have in mind something that would replace many of the methods we now have, rather than just augment them. I have my doubts.

I think of the longevity of the lecture method in use in most universities. In the 15th century, just before the invention of the machine-made book, a professor had the only manuscript. In the first 50 years after the invention of the printing press with movable type, more than eight million books were printed. You would think the lecture method would have disappeared. Why would we have a professor standing in front of a group of students who could read the same book that the professor had?

The odd thing is that at New York University this very day, probably 95% of the instruction is through the lecture method. One has to ask why, after 500 years, we're still using a method that ought to have been obsolesced by technologic development?

I don't know the answer, except that there is some power in the oral tradition and in the fact of co-presence, which facilitates learning and makes it into a certain kind of event that can't be duplicated by any technology.

So, I'm skeptical when people talk about distance learning as a future process that will replace current methods of teaching and learning.

KAY: Marshall McLuhan's view was there was "a power thing" going on; that's why teachers didn't ever really embrace the book. When I was in school, the last thing any teacher wanted to find out was that I had read lots of books. Those books represented a whole bunch of opinions that diverged from the party line. So, the book was subversive.

I'm not saying that I think teachers are involved in some sort of paranoid plot. But I know that, when I was in school, I never found teachers particularly useful. There were times when I'd find out things in school that I couldn't have found out any other way. But I rarely learned them without going out and hitting the library and getting some books and sitting down and thinking about them and talking about things with my friends. The real benefits of school were the bull sessions outside class, and those rarely happened with teachers. A lot of teachers, especially in elementary school, were positively opposed to the multiple points of view that books represented.

POSTMAN: It's conceivable that teachers would oppose technology because they sense some sort of threat, including to the very jobs they hold. But, also, it could be a certain healthy skepticism about what technology is going to do.

If you look at [Stanford University professor] Larry Cuban's work, he's gone back to look at some of the claims made about new technology. In the beginning, people had tremendous hopes that radio and film and television would forever change what goes on in classrooms. Rarely, if ever, were those hopes realized. I don't think there's anything wrong with teachers having a healthy skepticism about the various claims made about computer technology.

KAY: I think a lot of people don't understand the power of the computer. There's a lot of resonance in the Gutenberg story of how much effort people went through to make the Gutenberg bibles look just like handwritten books. People illuminated them and used fonts that made the books look the same, all the way down to the scribal abbreviations and everything. I would say people in the Middle Ages were doing that because they didn't know what a book was going to be.

I'll admit, though, that I've never gotten anybody to pay my talk fee, even when the talk is to an audience of 5,000 people, where they will only see me on a big video screen. I've offered to send the videotape of the best talk I've ever given, and they won't give me the money. I think there's this sense that if they don't like it, and I'm physically there, they can throw eggs.

POSTMAN: One reason they won't pay you for a videotape of your greatest lecture is that then they couldn't argue with the arguer. They're under an illusion, of course. With 5,000 people, they can't really argue with you.

But, they can interact among themselves. For example, I was talking to some students about distance learning vs. the immense trouble of gathering masses of people in a school, and one of the students said, "Well, this is a great place to meet girls." It made me think that one of the key elements of school is its socializing function, and that's mostly missing in distance-learning situations.

Another reason I'm skeptical about personal computers in classrooms is that school has mostly been about how to learn in a group.

KAY: It's possible that the distance-learning label is a red herring. To me, most of the real learning that happens doesn't happen in the social situation. That's only where you find out about things. Real learning happens when you go off and exercise these new little modules that you're trying to build to comprehend ideas that you haven't been able to deal with before. To me, almost all real learning—of things that aren't pretty much built into the human nervous system—is a kind of distance learning. You're, more or less, off by yourself.

Computers can help because they work as something stronger than a book. For instance, the lectures on physics by [Nobel Prize winner Richard] Feynman have been transcribed from videotape and carefully edited by some of his friends. These three volumes are some of the greatest for learning about physics. You can do quite a bit by looking at the videotapes and then going off with a book and pondering them. Add the computer to the video and the books and you would have something where you could perform the physics experiments, explore the math, and so forth.

Here's an example of another distance-learning model that might be improved by technology: My uncle had a big sailing boat and took amateur cruises around the world eight times. My cousins grew up on that boat in the '40s and '50s. Their schooling through the end of high school was Calvert Correspondence. Over the years, they received materials and corresponded with a person who marked up their essays with comments. They were on this fabulously exciting sailing ship. They went to several hundred countries, learned to speak many languages, and saw many things of the world. One went to Amherst, the other to MIT, without the benefit of regular school through high school. I think you could imagine other correspondence courses that work electronically.

The weakest link is when you're trying to imitate a teacher on the computer, rather than trying to enhance a book or a correspondence course. The computer currently isn't flexible enough. It can only imitate a bad teacher. Will we ever be able to imitate a good teacher? That's an interesting question because nobody knows whether artificial intelligence is a 10-year problem or a 100-year problem.

The state of the art is to take a subject matter that's pretty cut and dried and exhaustively deal with all the different situations that will come up. A computer can then recognize those situations. So, [Xerox chief scientist] John Seely Brown, for instance, came up with a subtraction tutor that could actually be of some help because it could recognize enough of what students were doing. The problem was that the tutor wasn't intelligent, so it was just doing case-based reasoning. The interesting thing is that a lot of algebra teachers are doing the same thing. They don't understand algebra at all, so the best they can do is recognize various error patterns.

I think it's possible to go from where things are now to doing what a mediocre teacher does. It's not clear that it's a great thing to multiply mediocre teaching by the power of the computer. But that's likely what will happen because people have been willing to settle for relatively low standards from teachers.

POSTMAN: Well, for me, the learning situation is at its best when human beings are co-present, and one can see and hear and feel the full context of each human being there. The power of a social group drawing on each other's energy and strength is all part of what's going to happen when I leave to give a lecture in a few minutes, if I'm doing my job well. I think that when you have 20 people together in a room who can see each other and can practically smell each other and they're trying to solve some sort of problem, there is nothing comparable to it.

An interesting aspect of this discussion is that technology could lead to a broad change in the way people see themselves, much as the book did. In Elizabeth Eisenstein's book, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, she ends a chapter by saying that the scribal culture held narcissism in check. The printing press released it. There is little doubt that the printed book created a sense of individuality and self that didn't exist before.

KAY: One of the things that McLuhan pointed out in Gutenberg Galaxy was that the sense of individual self in the Renaissance was somehow connected with the fact that you could take a book by yourself under a tree and think your own thoughts for the first time.

POSTMAN: The question arises, Alan: Will computer technology enhance the idea of individuality? Maybe even make it psychopathic, because it would lead to an idea of learning, and even schooling, as strictly an individual matter?

KAY: That would be possible if the computer weren't connected to the Internet. But, the fascinating thing about the Internet is that it immediately re-created the very epitome of 18th-century letter-writing culture. I have this wonderful book of the complete letters between Madison and Jefferson. It couldn't be more like e-mail in the '70s and '80s, before the Internet went wide to the public.

After it went wide, we found that by far the most popular things on the Internet are what you might call tribalization mechanisms. Chat rooms, forums, "birds of a feather" finding each other. So, today, there are enormous numbers of people doing what you might call "clubbing." I don't call them communities. I call them clubs of people of like interests that have sprung up, and these constitute something that looks an awful lot like McLuhan's "global village," but fragmented. Not a global village, but a return to something much more like tribalization.

POSTMAN: I very much like the idea that you use the word "clubbing," which I prefer to "community." I think we have to pay a lot of attention to the new words that we're using in the computer age. McLuhan speaks, since you mentioned him, Alan, about using a term like "iron horse" for a train. By calling a train an iron horse, we delude ourselves into diminishing the significance of the new technology.

"Electronic town hall meeting" would be a current example. The similarities between an 18th- century face-to-face meeting in New England and some sort of pseudoevent on television or the Internet escape me.

"Electronic republic" is another misnomer. Lawrence Grossman, in The Electronic Republic, claims that when we really get organized with computers, it will be possible for citizens to vote electronically, to hold plebiscites on any issue. So the public could decide whether to join Nafta, send troops to Bosnia, and so on. He says technology will restore participatory democracy as the Athenians had in the 5th century B.C. But he doesn't really spend much time trying to imagine what the differences would be between 5,000 slaveholding Athenian men on a hillside outside of Athens making some sort of decision and 270 million heterogeneous Americans doing plebiscites via technology.

My point is that we need to pay attention to differences. When we talk about distance learning, we have to ask ourselves, What are the differences between what we normally call distance learning and other kinds of learning? If we're careful about noting those differences, then we can make better use of these new technologies. We shouldn't pretend that they're just an enhanced form of what we've always done.