The day before Kelly Phillips had started at Social Tech, her mother had left the school, handing over her position as principal to Paul Grey. Sally Aston would remain connected to the school, though, through her best friend, Ellen Smith, the first teacher hired for the school, now vice-principal. Sally would also have influence through her role in the parent organization, Technological Fantasies.
During the summer just before Kelly started at the high school, there was a significant change in that parent organization. It’s president, Ann Kelly moved to New York. Back in June, two conversations had converged into a single proposal. One ongoing conversation was about the problems raised by having Ann living 53 miles away in Princeton with her husband, Mitchell Kirkwood. Also discussed at length was the organization and staffing of the Connected College created by Drake Phillips, Kelly’s legal father. It was young Kelly herself who first suggested having Drake hire Mitch away from Princeton. That seemed impossible at first. Who would want to leave Princeton for some unknown little college in Manhattan?
“Anything you want, Mitch. Professor of Linguistics, Dean of Arts, Vice-President, whatever. Anything that will make you come. Money, of course. Whatever it takes.”
“Well Drake, understand that I am a true believer. Princeton offers me much, but not connectivity. Let me speculate. Suppose you just call me Professor of Linguistics, but let me build my own department, hiring a few more faculty members than usual. Suppose we go to great lengths to make sure that each new faculty member is well connected. Let’s add Social Tech to that. Make all of my faculty members connected to the school as well as to me, each other, and the college. That may mean bringing quite a few people.”
“That does sound good, Mitch, but to be honest, I don’t think it will be possible to find linguists who are directly connected.”
“Oh, you won’t need many for a while anyway. And I didn’t really mean connected to other linguists. Just make sure that they are connected, somehow, even indirectly, but through faculty members, so the links won’t evaporate as students pass through and graduate.”
“That we can do. I wanted a tightly connected faculty anyway. If thorough connectivity is enough to lure you away from Princeton, then come.”
“I will worry about my grad students, but there’s a big department there, someone will take them on.”
So in June, Mitchell Kirkwood had given up his job at Princeton, to take a major role in Drake’s small college. With Mitch came his wife, the lovely Ann Kelly, and their two children, Jimmy and Judy. In the fall, Jimmy and Judy would be in school with Sally’s Kate. Judy in kindergarten, Kate in Grade One, Jimmy in Grade Two. Kelly had been in this same school from kindergarten through Grade Six.
On the one hand, Kelly felt it only natural that her sister should start Grade One in Kelly’s old school. On the other hand it seemed wrong to just assume that a school which had been good for Kelly would be good for Kate. It had been a good school, one of the best, but nothing like Social Tech. Was an elementary school like Social Tech High possible?
Kelly asked her mother. “Mommy, why is Social Tech just a high school?”
“Well, there is a natural break at puberty, Kelly. It seems best to keep the younger kids in a school of their own, away from the older kids, who are all obsessed with sex.”
“Oh. I guess that makes sense. You’ve heard about us older kids, huh. Who would have guessed it? But couldn’t there be an elementary school organized like your school is? Our school, I mean.”
“We’ve talked about it. I don’t think we’d have nearly as many parents in distant places willing to part with younger kids. That would reduce the pool size down to local parts of New York City. Not so good.”
“But not so bad, either, would it be, Mommy?”
“I just don’t think it’s practical, dear, though we have talked about it. The best answer seems to be: Maybe Someday.”
That put an end to the conversation, but Kelly was not quite satisfied. One day she brought it up again.
“Mommy. Your Tech Fantasies software is aimed at adults, isn’t it.”
“Mostly, but it is OK for kids your age to use it.”
“What about younger kids? Like Jimmy, Kate and Judy.”
“It just doesn’t seem very appropriate for them, dear.”
“I was thinking of schools. The city is full of schools. Instead of trying with one school, trying to make an elementary school version of your school, what about something for all the schools? Something parents could use to put their kids in the right schools.”
“Hmm. I don’t think our current software supports that. It probably should. I don’t know why we haven’t thought about it before. I’ll talk to Ann and your father.”
Ann said, “It can’t be that hard to do. Probably harder to persuade parents to do it. We are still having trouble getting people to use our software for anything.”
“But people will do things for their kids that they won’t do for themselves. Drake?”
“Of course. It should just be a matter of fixing the software and advertising that it’s now available.”
Software changes were easy. Getting parents to use the software would be more difficult. Sally approached Sarah Rivers, thinking that a budget for advertising would have to be set up.
“Sharing good experiences does make people more compatible, I think, doesn’t it Sally? That’s why people with only Level Four marriages still stay together and seem happy?”
“Yes, I think so, Sarah. We can see that happening within the school.”
“Right. So kids whose primary and elementary school experiences were better would be more compatible, I think.”
“OK, should be.”
“So we want to say something like: ‘Parents, don’t just send your child to the nearest school. Follow the example of the famous Social Tech High school. Use the available software to send your children to the right school, where they will be with compatible others.’ Use the highly visible success of your school in advertising the new idea.”
“I get it. Sarah, you said, ‘available software’ instead of being more specific. Why was that?”
“Sally, this is getting ridiculous. We can’t just go on telling people to use ‘The System’ and ‘Tech Fantasies’ is not much better. The word ‘fantasies’ turns some people off.”
“What do you suggest?”
“How about something like ‘Social Software System’.”
“A bit generic.”
“Generic might be good, but yes, I guess if we are talking about this specific case, we might say ‘Social Tech High software’ as in ‘send your children to the right school by using the free Social Tech High software, available everywhere.’ Like that, Sally?”
“I guess so. But I am not sure how to make it work.”
Once again the Social Tech High organizing committee met to discuss the subject. Because she had originated the idea, Kelly was invited.
Among the smartest people on the planet, the committee members could not arrive at a solution which might accomplish something by dividing students between schools. It seemed essential to work on compatibility within a school. Had this been a bad idea after all?
It was Kelly who suggested a solution. “Suppose that each school is equivalent. No science schools or history schools. We could still match up kids to schools, couldn’t we? Think of a major chord. C, E, and G. Now try adding various other notes. Add an F-sharp. That sounds terrible. But there are different notes you could add which would work. Adding B makes a nice sound. But there are chords to which an F-sharp could be added, like a G major chord. Think of a school as singing a certain chord. It might also beat to a certain rhythm, as well.”
There was quiet in the room as everyone sat and thought.
“Yes, yes. I see it”, Beth said, after a while. “A school could have a profile which had nothing to do with what it taught. Something more spectrographic – the peaks and valleys in a profile function. If you could listen to any ordinary school right now you would hear white noise. Instead there should be something distinctive. But not just a distinctive subject matter.”
The whole question of listening to profiles would fester in the minds of all of them for some time to come. But for the moment Beth’s spectrographic elaboration of Kelly’s idea dominated the discussion.
“Spectral analysis is much more general than just expressing something in terms of differing frequencies”, Beth explained. “It involve mapping something into a family of related functions. More general yet are optimization methods like the more familiar Principal Components Analysis which we all use in our software. The components are all orthogonal, but they don’t resemble each other. In spectral analysis the components are related. The most useful set is just the one containing the sine and cosine waves of the ordinary Fourier transform.”
“Yes”, Ann agreed. “The best basis is obtained by optimizing the components to the specific data, but if you don’t even look at the data, you can still construct a good basis for an abstract space, and the best will be the Fourier one.”
“I don’t understand the part about not even looking at the data”, Drake said. He was more a computer science person than a programmer.
“Just don’t do any optimization, I mean”, Ann said. Don’t seek the Principal Component, just assume that it is a sine wave with a period equal to the length of your data matrix.”
Beth went on, “That lets you turn a whole matrix of data into a single function. If that function were treated as a sound spectrum, you could indeed listen to it. So if we collected everything we knew about a school into one big data matrix, then turned that into a sound spectrum, we could listen to it. Right now I think they would be white noise, but that doesn’t have to be true.”
“You are right in the abstract, Beth”, Sally said. “But believe me, you have to do something to the matrix, or the result wouldn’t be meaningful. Optimizing row ordering, I think.”
“Oops, yes, of course.”
“I followed approximately none of that”, Kelly said. “It didn’t sound like you were shooting me down, though. You think what I said might work?”
“Yup, good one, Kelly”, Beth announced.
Kelly didn’t understand much of what was said after that, but there did seem to be a plan emerging. It was going to require the cooperation of school officials at many schools, but the name Social Tech High might work wonders. They all wanted their kids to go there. If this would make it more likely, it was worth doing. Even with the schools cooperating, it would be difficult to do. It was only possible to get started. One key issue was getting teachers swapped between schools.
It was just barely possible to get some recommendations ready by September. Most parents and almost all teachers would probably ignore them, but there might be some effect. By the time Kelly went to Social Tech High for the first day, there was enough done for the parents in the organizing committee itself to make their choices. Ann’s children, Jimmy and Judy would go to two different schools. Sally’s little Katie would go to a third.
And, of course, Kelly went to Social Tech High. That exhausting first day was only the beginning of an exhausting week. Thrilling, but taking so much out of her.
Kelly’s regular classes were not what she had expected. Her first class had not been a regular music class but a homeroom class which would meet at the beginning of each week.There were other classes for music. In those, the teacher said little. They played music and discussed it afterwards. That was all. No theory. There were theory questions in the homework, though. Not hard to do.
Math class was not what she expected either. They spent their time discussing what seemed to be a giant structure, mathematics itself, rather than learning how to do things. There were homework problems to be solved those. Pages in the book where hints were found were given. The problems were not hard, though. As with music, all homework problems looked like tests, and were to be handed in the next day.
The best classes in the day were the last ones, the special classes, where various topics were discusses. Life itself was a topic. So was sex, of course. Actually that was the first topic discussed, the very first day. Some of the older girls had done it, some did it a lot. The younger girls had not.
“I am not allowed to give you any advice about this”, the teacher said. “It’s up to you. You can say what you want, ask what you want. I can provide answers to factual questions if you need them, that’s all.”
Kelly had to ask. “How old does a girl have to be before doing it?”
A girl of about fifteen answered “There just isn’t any biological age limit, Kelly. But the government has laws. So if you are under 17, you have to sneak around. I sneak around.”
“Oh.” It had been a hard problem for Sally to deal with when she had run the school, but all she had said to Kelly was, “Don’t until you are ready. You’ll know when that is.”
Unanimously the girls thought the law was stupid. One of the older girls said, “Why wait. It’s fun.”
Another girl said. “I did it once. It hurt. And I didn’t really like the guy anyway. I’ll wait until I am in love.”
Kelly thought that was a good idea, but the first girl, oldest one in the room answered the last, “You want to find love, use the social software. Find love, have sex, enjoy.”
Kelly could not contain her herself, she always said what she thought. In this case she said, “I am twelve. When I was in Grade Six, last year, that seemed really old. I thought a lot about doing it. Now I’m in the youngest grade in the school and don’t seem so old anymore more. Half the girls in this room haven’t had sex yet, and some of those are older than me.”
There was more discussion, but Kelly left with her mind made up. No boyfriend, not yet, no sex, either. That wouldn’t stop her from thinking about it every single night. But she was only in Grade Seven, after all.
Every day the last class was different. Sex was still a topic, but not the only topic. On Thursday it was mentioned at all. The teacher had predicted changes in the class, but no students came or left. By Friday afternoon only the seating arrangement had changed. Two of the girls near the middle of the row had swapped seats. Kelly did not quite know what to make of this class, only that it worked. The discussions were deep, exciting, intense and full of humour.
By the end of Friday afternoon, Kelly was completely exhausted, her mind feeling burned out. The two afternoon classes had been an intellectual thrill, but she could even produce the light of a single watt bulb anymore. Sally understood. “I’ll plan a late dinner, Kelly. How about you go and lie down for a while. Even if you can’t sleep, close your eyes, anyway.”
“Thanks, Mommy. Oh, yeah, close my eyes. Wow, I need to.”
Sally didn’t want to wake her. When the smell of cooking didn’t get her up, Sally and Drake ate without her, keeping food warm for another hours. By the time Kelly stumbled down stairs, after ten o’clock, it was in the fridge.
On the weekend, Kelly got up and practised on her keyboard for a while, then met with Suzy and a few other kids to play some music. This was not her class at school, just a few people they both knew. Suzy was the only real musician in the group. Kelly was glad her friend had come, though she was so far above the level of the rest that it couldn’t have been much fun for her.
After doing this, and bringing her friends home for lunch, Kelly badly needed a little physical exertion, so she got Drake to take her somewhere to do some work. There was some plastering and painting to be done at his college now, which would continuing to grow, becoming a four year college a year from now. He wanted it completely ready ahead of time.
Some colleges have feeder schools designed to prepare their students. Drake’s college was just the opposite, a place for those who had become dependent on a network of close social relationships within a learning environment. Though Connected College would grow and continue to be excellent institution, it would be in effect an upward extension of Social Tech High.
The college students were all ones who had not wanted to go to a regular university. They were only admitted into the college if the software agreed that they should be. That required good academic performance and a level of connection like the school had. For some students backward connections into the high school would be considered sufficient, but this was not enough, for most. Because they all felt a dependence on the compatibility-based environment, most did have some backward connection into the school. Though Drake and the others had chosen a different name and location to make it clear that it was not related to Social Tech High, they were closer than they appeared. The students were not fooled. Nor did they want to be. Almost as one they looked back to their days at the high school as the happiest of their lives.
As agreed, the school did nothing to publicize the existence of the college or present it as an alternative to university until late in the senior year. Only then it was mentioned as an alternative, and just to a few, the ones who said they needed an alternative.
As the universities acquired more and more Social Tech grads they were beginning to exert some pull on students who remained in the school. Sally Aston asked her daughter about this. Kelly said that everyone she had met just assumed they would go to university. No exceptions. Maybe they all would. The stats suggested that. Sally wondered if there would be some pull the other way, the school exerting an influence over the universities. They seemed to want Social Tech students, perhaps they would make some changes to lure them away from the competition.
It would take longer for the effects to reach downward, but the the desire to be or to attract students from Social Tech High would gradually draw in both older and younger students, those at universities and those at elementary schools.