Argument lost

Today I was at a university.  It didn't at all look like a university. The building that housed the university was a new building on a major highway in a major city, very modern looking.  The university took up only the 8th floor of the building.  All offices had full length windows to the outside and were divided from each other by glass walls.  There were areas where tables existed in front of large white screens/smartboards, but a person could easily see there were no classrooms, no brick and mortar buildings making up a campus, and no library, the heart and center of traditional universities.  The people that worked in the glass offices had almost nothing on their desks, certainly not paper.  Computers were on the desks, but there were no wires as eyesores snaking along the floor to a hole in the wall or across desktops or down the sides of the desks.  The monitors were sleek and curved convexly.  In the first days of computers, this environment would have been called sterile, but today the word is efficient.

Where were the students carrying all their books or sitting around tables in the midst of library stacks of books?  Where were the teachers speaking in front of their students?  Where was the student center, usually a hub of activity?

Of course, you know the answers to those questions.  It's 2016.  Next year is the end of a 10 year war between technology and books.  The war between reading, writing, and arithmetic and the world of coding, algorithms, and applications.  The university I was in today is a perfect example of who has won that war.

Right now, the university is a sign of a growing trend, but my three-year-old granddaughter will call it mainstream and traditional, not cutting-edge at all.  There are so many students preparing for the wrong world that it hurts to look around.  So sad when it could have been otherwise.