Educational Systems and the Needs of Students
Prof. Langdon Winner
While I hope that something that can legitimately be called post-modernity will actually happen, there is little evidence of its appearance yet, other than in the slogans of fashion obsessed intellectuals. Among the key features of modernity were excessive use of natural resources in production, massive burning of fossil fuels, reckless destruction of ecosystems, exploitation of workers to accumulate capital, the creation of very thin varieties of “democracy,” information systems controlled by state and corporation, and the massive application of violence to impose order. All of these features are still strongly present in today’s global society and until they vanish, it is too soon to pop the cork in celebrations of “post” anything.
I welcome the use of electronic technologies in education, just as I welcome good books, musical instruments, sports equipment, and other tools used to encourage a well-rounded, personal individuality. Alas, the dirty little secret about computers and electronic media in the education of youth is that they are often a substitute for the one element long understood to be the key to any good education, namely, the presence of devoted, knowledgeable, inspiring teachers able to recognize who a particular student is and what she/he needs. In my own country, for example, it is now a scandal that many highly skilled young people fresh out of college go into the teaching profession because they expect to love the experience. But studies show that after five years most of them abandon that work to find other employment. They find the schools crowded, chaotic, bureaucratized, regimented, and heavily burdened by regimes of “teach to the test” – conditions that stifle the creativity of both students and teachers. Elaborate education theories and infusions of ever more sophisticated technologies will do nothing to change this situation. The failures arise in the domain of human relationships and lack of support for a vital human presence in activities of teaching and learning.
If institutions become mere “systems” that nobody really cares about, things can deteriorate rapidly. This has happened in the penal system of the US that has effectively abandoned any plan to offer positive kinds of rehabilitation to young law breakers in favor of increasingly high tech, privatized methods of warehousing millions of souls. Will the spread of IT systems signal a development a similar kind – the abandonment of young people to sterile, depersonalized, but seemingly upbeat “learning environments”? Hence, I worry about the lower case “i” in the title. Will iClass become like the iPod, an occasion for personalized consumption and social disconnection? This could be yet another exercise in which the arrival of “shock and awe” electronics signals an underlying fact: We no longer understand the needs of students and, frankly, don’t much care.
