Now, however, in the electronic age, data classification yields 
to pattern recognition, the key phrase at IBM. When data move 
instantly, classification is too fragmentary. In order to cope 
with data at electric speed in typical situations of “information 
overload,” men resort to the study of configurations, like the 
sailor in Edgar Allan Poe’s Maelstrom . The drop-out situation in 
our schools at present has only begun to develop. The young 
student today grows up in an electrically configured world. It is 
a world not of wheels but of circuits, not of fragments but of 
integral patterns. The student today lives  mythically and in 
depth. At school, however, he encounters a situation organized 
by means of classified information. The subjects are unrelated. 
They are visually conceived in terms of a blueprint. The student 
can find no possible means of involvement for himself, nor can 
he discover how the educational scene relates to the “mythic” 
world of electronically processed data and experience that he