Marching Backward Into the Future

Consider this picture. It depicts one of the earliest railroad trains in the United States, dating from 1831. It also tells an interesting and instructive story that bears surprising relevance to the current world of digital education.

At the front of the train is a steam-powered locomotive—unquestionably one of the great innovations of the industrial era. But look closely at what the engine is pulling. As the image shows, The earliest passenger cars weren’t anything like passenger cars as we know them, they were stagecoaches that had been modified to be pulled on railroad tracks. Why stagecoaches? Because that’s what the first train-builders knew. Their assumptions about passenger transportation quite naturally reflected their experience. They were, to borrow a phrase from the theorist Marshall McLuhan, marching backward into the future.

In the realm of digital education, a lot of energy has been spent to replicate lectures online or to build virtual classrooms in ways that seem to harken back to McLuhan’s quote and in ways that often come at the cost of human interaction and the social insight gained from learning alongside peers. 

At Honor Education we have built a platform to take on this challenge, and through partnerships with higher education and corporate institutions around the world, we are marching forward together into the future.