I was having a converstaion with a colleague yesterday about the excrutiatingly slow pace of change that we see in education. I find it disconcerting to think that despite some new bells and whistles, what we do in the classroom really hasn’t changed all that much in the last 50 (or more) years. Our main curriculum delivery tool is a text book. The focal point is the teacher. There is little real individualized instruction. Students move through they system at the same, chronological rate, and when they enter our classrooms we know them only by the grades they’ve earned from teachers before us.
I mentioned a passage from The Red Pencil where Ted Sizer writes about all the order that schools require and how inane it really is:
There is plenty of noise these days about the necessity of order in schools and a frightening silence about what it takes to help shape orderly minds. The hard, familiar reality is that learning is both idiosyncratic (you and I do not learn everything is quite the same way and pace) and messy. Most serious learning is not nicely sequential; rather, it often spirals, with each of us circling back–if we have the opportunity–again to where we thought we were but, ideally, now better informed and thereby finding ourselves at a deeper place. It is situational, depending on immediate conditions for each of us as individuals and the appropriateness of our surroundings. The order that we seek to find in a school is a means to the end of order in each student’s mind.
I said to my colleague that it seems like we’ve not really evolved that much at all in terms of our thinking about learning, but that I thought that might be changing, primarily due to the effects of the increasing transparency the Web seems to be bringing to many areas of life…journalism and politics, for instance. Two places where traditional ideas are being seriously challenged by our new ability to particpate and by the demand, of some, for a more open accounting of process and methodology. And so, I said, I felt like in time, education would be affected by that as well, in potentially very positive ways. By demanding that we not just be accountable by what we deliver in terms of curriculum, for instance, but that we be accountable for what a student can do with that information. That the Read/Write Web creates many more opportunities for students and teachers to circle back, as Sizer says, to re-examine and reapply knowledge in constructivist, meaningful ways. And that at some point, the ability that the technology gives us to do that will force a reexamination of traditional beliefs about education.
I’m a dreamer, I know.
“You have to read some Marx,” my friend said. “Don’t you know that those in power will let the masses convince themselves that are in control until they become a bit too powerful, at which point they’ll step in and shut it down?” (Or something along those lines.)
“So what are you saying?” I asked. “You think if the Web gets too disruptive to education ‘they’ll’ try to censor it?”
His answer was, for all intents, yes, that if things ever got to the point where the status quo was seriously challenged, there would be serious attempts to limit the technology. That people in charge would start saying that education was going in a direction that wasn’t healthy for our kids, and that we have to take steps to rein it in.
“Yeah,” I said. “But this is different.” (Great comeback, I know.)
“But things were ‘different’ in the 40s and the 60s and the 80s…all these things that were supposed to change education and never did,” he said. “How is this different?”
And that is the question, isn’t it? And that’s what’s been on my brain ever since…how do we articulate how this change, this technology, is different? Because it’s easier? Cheaper? More global? Democratizing? More connecting and collaborative? All of those?
Brain…hurts. But in a good way.
You hurt our brains as well…again…in a good way.
I came to learn something at a very deep level yesterday that touches on a few of your thoughts.
KG Schneider’s “Free Range Librarian” weblog had a little reminder for me yesterday. “Andrew Abbott’s discussion in ‘The System of Professions’ of how railroads saw themselves in the rail business, not the transportation business…”
The “slowness to change” in education is much like the railroads focusing on rail instead of transportion. In education, we are focusing on teaching while our business is learning. Who do we teach? What do we teach? Where do we teach? How do we teach? Why do we teach? When do we teach?
In a “learning business” model, our thinking changes dramatically with the same questions. Who do we learn with? What do we learn? Where do we learn? How do we learn? Why do we learn? When do we learn?
The real value in technology is in changing learning, not teaching. We have to unlearn our obsession with focusing on teaching and relearn about how we (and our students) learn.
John Pederson
http://www.pedersondesigns.com/mt
Good point, John. There’s a similar tale of how the big ice companies (despite having excellent technology for refrigeration) went belly-up when refrigerators began to replace iceboxes thinking they were in the ice-delivery business, not the refrigeration business.
The backlash may have already begun – witness the “mainstream media” attack on the political bloggers who forced the Jordan Eason story into the light. Hugh Hewitt is a good starting point if you’re unfamiliar with the story.
However, the backlash will fail as surely as the saboteur’s shoes failed to stop the Industrial Revolution, as surely as Rome failed to stop the Reformation.
Regarding censorship, a friend pointed out some years ago that the Internet was originally designed to enable communication during and after a global nuclear war. It treats censorship as battle damage and routes around it.
Access, on the other hand, may be a different matter.
Will, I look forward to meeting you at the ODCE conference in Columbus in a few weeks.
Corrie
There’s something perversely appropriate about Corrie’s comment here. If you think people like Hugh Hewitt are part of the solution, you’re sadly deluded. The paranoid, bullying style of right-wing blogs is only a threat to progressive education. In this case, the problem isn’t the medium, it’s the message.