On Oct. 20 in the year of Our Lord 2025, Canvas went down. Canvas is the learning management system that is used by 50% of the colleges and universities in North America as a hub for course content, assignments, testing and communication. The software only went down for one day, but on that day of reckoning, all students, teachers and administrators asked themselves the very serious question: “Dude, do we have to go to school tomorrow?”
The Canvas platform failed due to a widespread outage at Amazon Web Services, the provider of cloud-based services for many large companies. Yup, you heard that right, It was Bezos’s fault. When I was at San Diego State in the late 90s, Amazon was just a book store. How’s that for friggin’ irony? My son, who is in high school, checks out three to five textbooks at the beginning of every school year. He lugs them home, deposits them into a box in the shed, never to be seen again until he returns them at the end of the semester. Not a single leaflet of a former tree will be turned by that young man this year. He, as many of us, will rely on a laptop and solid Wi-Fi as his only recourse for learning. When did paper and pencil stop being essential school supplies? If my trusty #2 Ticonderoga pencil broke in 1999, classes didn’t stop in Arizona.
In one of my first college courses, I was given a seemingly trivial assignment that I should have seen as the beginning of the end. We were to create an “email” account. None of us had even heard of said “Email”, and less than none of us planned to actually use it. Once we created this magical account with an “address” of our choosing, we were to find another person, literally any other person who had an “Email Address”, and to exchange two emails.
This groundbreaking exchange of interconnection over the interweb was to be printed out on paper and turned in to the professor for full quiz points. The hardest part of the assignment was waiting in line at Kinko’s for the printer, because that’s the only place printers existed in the Dark Ages. I wish I still had access to this dinosaur of communication between my tech-savvy uncle and I, but apparently, the account for “420shotcaller69@aol.com” was closed a long time ago.
If the internet fell for good, would education live on? Would humans remember how to learn and teach as we did in the land before time? Humanity has lost technologies before. The great Roman Empire was built on concrete. After Rome’s fall in 476 AD, the ability to make concrete was lost to the entire world for a thousand years. A millennium?! Will we last that long next time? Are we built like the students who rose up in the aftermath of the ancient Romans?
All this aside, I have faith in human beings. I have faith that no matter what evil may befall our learning management system, we will find a way to salvage the wealth of human knowledge. We will teach the next generation of our arts and sciences, of our histories and religions, of literature and trades and skills long forgotten, just as our forefathers did before us. We will learn to learn again. And on the offhand that our digital, online platform, cloud-based, ones and zeros pedagogy crumbles like the Colosseum, I’m gonna stockpile a few cases of #2 Ticonderogas.
