Interesting to see what the IT corporations' strategy is for increasing
their market share of public education in the face of no-nothing
educational conservatism in the current US administration.
Basically they are trying to hitch their wagon to the current bandwagon for
mindlessly uncritical "knowledge" education (basic subjects, prescribed
informational content, no innovation, no critical thinking). They praise
every empty-headed educational policy statement of the last 10 years,
including some rather vapid conundrums that are supposed to represent real
gains in our knowledge about learning processes from cognitive science
research (if that's what's been "learned" it is a terrible indictment of
the approach). Their aim is pretty transparently to put themselves on the
currently winning side, and I just hope that many IT leaders are smart
enough to be cynical about this strategy.
Not much of what they are putting forward goes very far. It's nice that
they think IT can promote more global perspectives (though they phrase it
as understanding global cultural diversity rather than as what most of them
really want, globalized neo-liberal hyper-capitalism), and they even call
for Americans to learn a foreign language (ha-ha, don't hold your breath!).
They only touch very lightly on multimedia literacy, not probably having a
very clear conception themselves of just what it entails. They nod to civic
participation (possible at the local level, but national discussion of
issues does not exist in the US and is certainly not favored by the
government, the corporations, or expert communities). They of course
highlight preparation for the workplace, and they understand very well that
making IT central to the workplace cannot succeed only through marketing
to workplace managers if it does not also succeed in preparing employees
who are ready to use it.
There are a few interesting premises articulated rather softly at the
beginning, the most interesting of which is that there needs to be some
integration between what students are learning in school and what they are
learning outside school. Schools are not teaching most students anything
they don't already know about IT, and the students in most schools could
probably teach the faculty plenty and write a better curriculum themselves.
Making IT a school subject however seems to be more likely to turn students
off to learning it (as it does for science, say), while keeping it as an
advantage of cultural capital for students over teachers and schools will
keep it high on students' out-of-school agendas. But the problem with this
current scenario for the IT corporations is that there is then no control
over how students will perceive IT. They are very likely to form their own
independent views about what is good and bad about IT and its various
forms. This threatens the corporations control over the future of IT. In
particular the presently dominant corporations could lose their lead to
other startups (e.g. Linux and the open-source movement) if the future
public, and employees, decide what we want IT to look like, rather than
what they have decided they are going to sell us. Most IT today is really
pretty poorly designed and unimaginative. In fact it is rather like the old
QWERTY keyboard, designed to keep IT from grounding a revolution in social
practices by hobbling its potential. Our quasi-monopoly form of capitalist
production does not favor innovation or rapid radical change, even in
products (though of course its marketing strategies make us THINK that we
are getting something NEW every few months ... superficially only).
The one idea I would agree with is that we need some serious discussion
about what a 21st century education ought to look like, and in particular
how it ought to look really different from a 20th century education (which,
frankly, didn't look very different at all from a 19th century education so
far as I can tell). 20th c. education has been for the most part boring,
uncritical, and practically useless. And that's for the fraction of
students who actually learned anything and remembered it for more than a
few hours after their tests. Education, and especially its neo-conservative
variety, also seems to be following the QWERTY principle.
What would make the content of 21st c. education exciting to learn?
What would make 21st c. education ground the development of critical
thinking about all matters?
What would make the outcomes of 21st c. education realistically useful for
the lives and desires of most students?
I am not going to add, What would make 21st c. education help create a
better world? because I really don't think it can do that, except very
indirectly by answering the three questions I have posed.
I wonder if we have any hypotheses about what those answers might include?
JAY.
At 07:59 AM 9/21/2003 -0700, you wrote:
>Of potential interest to list members
>
>ROUNDBREAKING NEW REPORT provides educators and policy-makers with a
>vision and
>
>framework for "21st century learning"...
>
>http://www.medialit.org/reading_room/article580.html
Jay Lemke
Professor
University of Michigan
School of Education
610 East University
Ann Arbor, MI 48104
Tel. 734-763-9276
Email. JayLemke@UMich.edu
Website. www.umich.edu/~jaylemke
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