For fifteen or twenty years, this question is relentlessly answered, whether or not we ask it.
After we learn fractions, the teacher moves on to decimals. After we read O’Connor, we’re handed Faulkner. In music history, Debussy follows Brahms. Chemistry after biology.
It persists in some places after school… the museum hangs Picasso in the next room after Braque.
And in the old days, the newspaper editors spent a lot of time organizing their stories and their pages.
But now… nothing.
Random access. No attention paid to what we need to know now, what follows from where we are, what’s about to be important.
Not at work and not as citizens.
Instead, it’s a random-access blizzard of emails, meetings and alerts. A mob screaming about the emergency of the moment without lining up the context first. Part of our dislocation and ennui come from the lack of a shared curriculum.
Choosing what’s next might be the most important decision we make today.