Then, a university professor posted a list of 95 items for debate in his class. Printers in the university town thought it looked good, and that people would be interested, so they printed and sold it. Others took up the text, and transmitted it across Europe. What had started as a not particularly controversial class at a second-rate university turned into the Protestant Reformation. A look through the books from that era, called the age of Incunables or Incunabula, shows that before the development of jargon, readers could turn their hands to any discipline: architecture, painting, fencing, anything.

We’re back in that sort of environment now, where the kids today will learn how to do anything they want to do… and probably very little of what we want to teach them. There’s going to be a long settling-in, as well as a shorter-term crisis. School isn’t going to look the same at the end of the shorter-term crisis as it does now. But it’s going to look radically different even than that, at the end of the longer settling-in.