The Fifth Language

Reviewed by Mark Shainblum

Originally published in Quill & Quire, December 1994

Writing Archive Home

Website Home

Anyone who went to high school in the 1970's had a gut-level awareness that all was not right with the world. Our education seemed weirdly out of tune with reality – not in the prosaic way adult and teenage cultures always differ – but in the everyday nuts-and-bolts sense of how things worked. Our teachers often seemed like emissaries from another culture, well-meaning Peace Corps volunteers unable to fluently speak the lingo or figure out the local customs.

The gut instinct gave way to certain dread when I took a one-year teaching diploma at McGill University in 1991-92. My baby-boomer university professors and my post X students in practice teaching no longer seemed like foreigners; they seemed like aliens. Like residents of different parallel universes with no points of convergence.

And there I was, a Generation X cliché, the lunch meat sandwiched between them. Being Spam has never appealed. I decided high school teaching wasn't for me, just as someone in the 1890's might have decided that there was little future in the carriage manufacturing trade.

Robert K. Logan, professor of physics and communications theory at the University of Toronto and the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, may not have put the final nail in the coffin of the traditional teacher/desks/blackboard classroom, but he has certainly purchased the hammer. In his remarkably lucid book The Fifth Language: Learning a Living in the Computer Age, Logan continues the work of Canadian communications pioneer Marshall McLuhan and applies it to the interface of microcomputing and education.

To those not steeped in current communications and educational theory, Logan's basic contentions are staggering. He views the computer as not simply a tool, not simply a medium, but as an entirely new language form, the fifth after verbal language, the written alphabet, mathematics, and science. This language builds upon and incorporates its predecessors, but is as fundamentally different from them as written language is from spoken, as rational science is from pure mathematics.

Logan contends that the educational system has not yet made the ideological leap that our rapid adoption of this new language requires. We are, he claims in his clean, lucid prose, still trying to educate our children for the 1950's. Schools as we know them are the educational paradigm of the factory, still spewing specialists and middle managers and clock-watchers into a culture which demands generalists and renaissance thinkers and flexibility.

Logan doesn't preach evolution, he preaches revolution. The education system, in his view, is simply broken, out of date, out of step not just with the times but the new evolving world culture. Simply plopping a few PC's into the classroom will not solve the problem because PC's aren't simply a tool, they are an utterly new way of seeing the universe. There are as radical a paradigm shift, in their own way, as the introduction of written language or the scientific method.

The Fifth Language is an extremely successful book for several reasons. Logan eschews the convoluted non-linearity of Marshall McLuhan's Toronto School and explains his contentions in remarkably clear and taut prose. He explains the basic principles of McLuhanesque thought better than any third party I have ever read, and his extensions of Toronto School philosophy into the educational and microcomputer domains are, frankly, brilliant.

No one who has stood at the front of a classroom in the last twenty years has any illusions that the current educational system actually functions. Now, perhaps, with Robert Logan's help, we can begin to understand why.