Strange things are happening every day, as Sister Rosetta Tharpe once sang.

The essays by Vannevar Bush and Douglas Engelbart I wrote about below have been teasing my mind with more connections over the past couple of days. Since I’ve been thinking about Bush I’ve been haunted by a sense of deja vu. I just knew I’d heard the name somewhere before. Then, while reading a tenure file, I saw the name … and realized that I’d heard it from my junior colleague “mentee,” Dr. Tim O’Donnell, speech professor and director of debate at the University of Mary Washington. He’d written his dissertation on Bush and the rhetoric of science.

So I call Tim up, all in a lather about this connection, and the next day Tim brings me a box full of books (including his diss) and articles. One of the books is G. Pascal Zachary’s biography of V. Bush. In the biography I read this:

Among those smitten by the memex in the summer of 1945 was a 20-year-old American radar technician, waiting for his ship home from the Phillipines.
One muggy day, Douglas Engelbart walked into a Red Cross library on the edge of the jungle on Leyte Island and found Bush’s article in the Atlantic. Infected with memex fever, Engelbart returned to the U.S., finished his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and set off “along a vector you had described,” he later wrote Bush. Within a few years, he was harboring his own notions about how to turn intimidating digital computers into intimate amplifiers of the human mind.

Now let’s think about that last phrase for a moment: “intimate amplifiers of the human mind.” I think that’s a pretty fair description of school, as well as of personal computers and their networks. That’s why I say that Bush and Engelbart are not just IT visionaries. They’re extraordinary members of the Secret Society for Real School.

As is Jerome Bruner, a philosopher of education whose The Culture of Education has been a major influence on my own thinking and practice. Of course I need to return to that book now, go to the index, and look to see if either Vannevar Bush or Douglas Engelbart is in there. I’ll make sure I’m sitting down before I look.