Neil Postman Archives - Will Richardson

Here’s your Friday moment of EduZen to think about over the weekend. As always, would love your thoughts:

Neil Postman in The End of Education (1995);

What we needed to know about cars–as we need to know about computers, television, and other important technologies–is not how to use them but how they use us. In the case of cars, what we needed to think about in the early twentieth century was not how to drive them but what they would do to our air, our landscape, our social relations, our family life, and our cities. Suppose that in 1946, we had started to address similar questions about television: What would be its effects on our political institutions, our psychic habits, our children, our religious conceptions, our economy? Wouldn’t we be better positioned today to control television’s massive assault on American culture?

I am talking here about making technology itself an object of inquiry, so that Little Eva and Young John in using technologies will not be used or abused by them, so that Little Eva and Young John become more interested in asking questions about the computer than in getting answers from it.

I am not arguing against using computers in school. I am arguing against our sleepwalking attitudes toward it, against allowing it to distract us from more important things, against making a god of it.

What questions should we be asking about our technologies?

George Siemens was nice enough to share a presentation he gave in South Africa yesterday, and while it’s always better to hear the context that any speaker brings to the ideas on the screen, a couple of the points in his slide deck got me thinking. Even though it’s articulating his thoughts around higher ed, I think there is a lot of relevance for K-12 as well.

In the accompanying blog post, George says:

I’m concerned about the narrowness of thought in higher education reform today…If you have one solution to the problem of education, you have missed the true nature of the problem. Many, many stakeholders have a vested interest in what goes on with our universities. Doing a better job of giving learners control and better tools for creating and accessing content is not enough. Most of reform suggestions are at best additive to the current model. None that I’ve seen have the prospect of replacing it.

Same can be said of the reform conversation in public schools; we’re tinkering on the edges, not understanding the true transformative nature of what technology is bringing. I’m reminded of this great Neil Postman quote:

Technological change is not additive; it is ecological, which means, it changes everything and is, therefore, too important to be left entirely in the hands of Bill Gates.

Amen.

But here is the deal, and this is one of the clearest points in George’s presentation: this technology thing and specifically the web is going to change us whether we want it to or not. He writes:

If it changes how information is created…
If it changes how information is shared…
If it changes how information is evaluated…
If it changes how people connect…
If it changes how people communicate…
If it changes what people can do for themselves…

Then it will change education, teaching and learning.

It already is.

So here is our challenge, I think. We can go along kicking or screaming, or we can LEAD. As I said the other day, we are the learning experts (or at least we should be) in our communities. We need to become the learning with technology experts in our communities, the ones who understand deeply and personally the really powerful opportunities we have right now and who also understand the difficulties and hazards that technology presents us as well.

You have a choice. Which will it be?

Technology as the Object of Our Inquiry

It Will Change Education