arrangements, social, political, and economic, had shared a 
one-way pattern. We still think of it as “explosive,” or 
expansive; and though it no longer obtains, we still talk about 
the population explosion and the explosion in learning. In fact, 
it is not the increase of numbers in the world that creates our 
concern with population. Rather, it is the fact that everybody in 
the world has to live in the utmost proximity created by our 
electric involvement in one another’s lives. In education, 
likewise, it is not the increase in numbers of those seeking to 
learn that creates the crisis. Our new concern with education 
follows upon the changeover to an interrelation in knowledge, 
where before the separate subjects of the curriculum had stood 
apart from each other. Departmental sovereignties have melted 
away as rapidly as national sovereignties under conditions of 
electric speed. Obsession with the older patterns of mechanical, 
one-way expansion from centres to margins is no longer