The fact of the matter is that 20th century education failed. If that is too strong a statement for you, here is one few will deny: In the 20th century education slipped off the road and became stuck in a dismaying ditch. Click the illustration above for a photograph of a virtually identical debacle. A lot is going on, there is plenty of effort, but not much seems to be happening.

A couple of weeks after 9/11 I was startled by what a CNN anchor read from a humanitarian aid report. It said that the first load of supplies to the high mountain regions of Afghanistan were going to be delivered the following week by four thousand donkeys. Trucks were used too, but it took donkeys to reach the high mountains.

This column’s picture of the people trying frantically to use burros to extricate their delivery from a ditch is from my grandfather’s collection, recording the time that as a young man he helped his father operate a lumbering enterprise in the northern Mexico mountains. Their operation took place late in the 19th century when horsepower was still limited to equines. A few years after the picture was taken, one man using a truck could have easily winched the dropped load out of the ditch and carried it to its proper destination.

The internal combustion engine opened a new era of transportation, though the term “horse power” still lingers. I suppose people like Grandpa who, had witnessed firsthand how stubborn problems could become when burros were the best solution, never lost their amazement at how much more power trucks and cars achieved: 50 hp, 100 hp!, 200 hp!! Wow!

In the early 20th century there were sentimentalists, and those with vested economic interests, who clung to the horse and buggy method. But it rode off into the sunset and there was nothing they could do to reign in its disappearance. Forward looking folks embraced the auto-mobility of transportation.

The CNN reporter did a double-take, and so did I, when the words “four thousand donkeys” came out of his mouth. He looked back at the script: “Yes, that’s what it says, four thousand donkeys.” What bothered me was the next sentence saying the delivery consisted of food and medical supplies, “and a few schoolbooks.” I thought to myself: Why should we send a few school books in a load scattered among four thousand donkeys picking their way over the rocks when a few handheld wireless Internet access devices would provide an entire mountain village school system with access to virtually everything known by humankind? And without satellite beaming the Internet, one wired computer on the ground could bring it all to a village school! Happily, the inevitability of the replacement of donkeys by digital delivery is apparent in many spots around the globe, like cyber buses in Malaysia, and the Teachers Without Borders centers on three continents – to name two examples of many.

A donkey is a sure-footed, determined little animal that evolved in the African desert. My Mother, whose father and grandfather had lumbered in Mexico, told me you could catch wild burros in the Franklin Mountains that rise above El Paso in the Texas desert where she grew up. Wild bands of burros still live in parts of the American West, where tame ones are being trained to help protect sheep from coyotes. A favorite form of transportation for gold prospectors, the little equines, and their Spanish name burro, probably took hold in the West during the Gold Rush of 1849. Many of the prospectors came from Mexico, where burros arrived with Columbus and the conquistadors. Donkeys were domesticated in Africa in the glimmer of civilization’s dawn, and assumed major roles facilitating the nomadic life and assisting in early agriculture. Herds of upwards of a thousand donkeys were known to have been kept by Egyptians in the dynastic eras. By four thousand years ago, donkeys were a transportation mainstay for the advance of civilization, dispersing from Mesopotamia across Asia and beyond. The Romans completed the spread of the hearty little animals through Europe.

The delivery of school books on the backs of donkeys to Afghan children in remote mountains, is the dispersing of education by physical transportation. Education has always been dispersed that way. Before humankind learned to write, what was known was transported in the living brains of those who acquired knowledge, and they delivered it orally. Writing made it possible to move knowledge around on tablets, papyrus, and eventually in books. Donkeys had a key role: the knowledge either sat on their backs as teachers rode or was strapped to their backs in written form.

The dominance of the donkey in the American West ended with the coming of the railroad. Automobiles and airplanes have to some extent supplanted the rails, yet the new forms — trains, trucks, and planes — are all essentially higher tech donkeys. Their role is the same in delivering knowledge: physical transportation. What is known by humankind does not weigh anything anymore and no longer needs to ride on the back of a donkey. The little fellows should be put out to pasture where they can lift their heels at coyotes. Delivering knowledge digitally is a radically new and wonderful key to ending the 20th century education debacle.