Week...6?: It Goes On

Ages ago, my father and I drove through a good chunk of the northern United States, from Maine to North Dakota, on our way back from Prince Edward Island, where I'd been living for a few years.

One thing about that trip that stuck with me is just how much denser the population is on the East Coast than it is here, even in supposed backwaters like Maine or rural Pennsylvania. We visited a friend of mine who lives in the latter, and her town is within a few hours drive of New York City, smack dab in the Poconos, a vacation spot for the denizens of the megalopolis that want to get away from the hustle for awhile. 

Unlike somebody from Winnipeg taking off to a pristine and lonely lake up in the Shield, however, the Poconos are not really all that pristine, or lonely. There are towns everywhere, and settlements are never more than a short drive away from each other. Even surrounded by the rugged, forested Allegheny Plateau, there is a sense of being packed in, of constant proximity to your fellow humans. Compare that to the isolation you feel at a small cabin in Northern Ontario, or the long stretches of the Trans-Canada that pass through about one town every hour and a half, towns that only exist for gas stations and passing through hurriedly. 

Imagine how absolutely out to sea a life-long New Yorker would feel driving from, say, Sudbury to Winnipeg. You would, driving about the same distance on the Boston-Washington, DC corridor, be travelling through an area that contains about 50 million people, give or take. On the Sudbury-Winnipeg drive, you would encounter a lot of pines, loons, and pulp mills. For somebody used to having any kind of human connection they could hope for (or dread) at easy access, it'd be a shock. 

Think about Manitoba. It's huge! But outside of Winnipeg, it's barely populated. Now you know where "Perimeteritis" comes from: there's just not enough people outside of the city to build up any sort of human capital, and the distance between those few people makes it even harder. 

Rural and Northern Manitoba are thus at a huge disadvantage when it comes to delivering education, as are sparsely-populated areas all over the world. Before the modern era, governments used all sorts of crazy schemes to get education to kids, including Australia's School of the Air, which broadcast lessons to children who lived in the deep Outback over the radio. 

Which, it turns out, is not all the different in principle to distant learning over the Internet (which the School of the Air now employs). Of course, a big advantage of the Internet over radio is that the Internet is much more capable of the two-way communication so vital for learning, not to mention all the multimedia possibilities. 

Education over the Internet is essential to empowering rural communities that suffer from a lack of human capital, and I think that significant investment is necessary in communications infrastructure in order to keep those communities alive. 

What do you think?


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