Transparency and Education

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.