CLAL on Culture Archive
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"The Future of Education and Cultural Transmission," a seminar of CLAL’s Jewish Public Forum held March 18-19, 2002 in New York City, brought together leading thinkers on education, culture, Judaic studies, and online learning. eCLAL is publishing a series of articles based on participants’ contributions to the seminar.
This seminar was part of Exploring the Jewish Futures: A Multidimensional Project On the Future of Religion,Ethnicity and Civic Engagement. For more information about the project, click here.
Dr. Joshua Halberstam has been writing and teaching philosophy to college and general audiences for two decades. He taught at New York University, and is now adjunct professor at Teachers College, Columbia University where he teaches courses in social theory and the philosophy of technology. He has published widely in leading international and national professional journals in the areas of epistemology, legal theory, ethics, social and political philosophy, and the philosophy of religion and is the editor of a popular textbook in ethics, Virtues and Values (Prentice Hall, 1986). His most recent book is Work: Making a Living and Making a Life, an exploration of how we can make contemporary work more meaningful in our lives (Perigee/Putnam, April 2000). He is currently the president of a startup company developing web-based learning courses and assessment tools.
A Celebration Of Uncertainty: The Future of Technological Education
By Joshua Halberstam
It is because modern education is so seldom inspired by a great hope that it so seldom achieves great results. The wish to preserve the past rather than the hope of creating the future dominates the minds of those who control the teaching of the young.
Bertrand Russell
Confusion unnerves
us. It gives us agita. We are so desperate for terra firma that we prefer any
answer to none at all. Too often, the result
is massive waste and, sometimes, utter tragedy.
So commonplace is the lament about
the current lack of direction in education that calling it a cliché is itself a cliché. Thank goodness. Because if, in this rapidly
changing landscape, we assume we know which way to go, we’re likely to march into
educational junkyards and pedagogical dead ends. Before we proceed too far just anywhere
and expend billions of dollars along with vast intellectual and political capital to get
us there, we ought to take a deep breath and consider just how lost we really are. We have
some hard choices before us.
Education is in transition and
technology is the engine of that transformation. The
typical, reflexive response to this sweeping assertion is emphatic annoyance. The
exasperation erupts from two opposing flanks. One is the anti-technology camp that views
techno-promoters as hype-ridden, bloated engineer types who believe way too much in their
own cyber-press accolades. According to these
critics, technology is no more than a wonderful tool, and in some instances not so
wonderful at that. No “revolution in education” awaits us, they insist, no more
than transpired with the introduction of television and AV equipment a generation ago. The same basic goals and methods of education
endure. On the other side of the
anti-technology pincer movement are those who see technologists as capable of doing what
they say they can do and find this proposition utterly frightening. These virtual
creators, we are warned, are demigods inventing new worlds in their own image: worlds that
are affect-less, disembodied, and humanely disengaged.
As a result, the essential educational intimacies of exchanges between
teachers and students are in dire jeopardy. In one view, therefore, the clarions of
educational technology are bluster and noise, while, in the other view, they are the
dangerous rumblings of emerging educational disasters.
One
essential caveat must attend any speculation about the future of educational technology:
in the broader chronological scheme, we’ve only been at this business for twenty
minutes. From the vantage of these earliest embryonic stages, either of these criticisms
may turn out to be right. Alternatively,
however, both may turn out to be wrong, as I think will be the case. If we act
intelligently, technology can indeed transform education for the much better and we are
already beginning to see how this might occur.
Educational technology explodes
traditional, tired categories. The structures
of our educational institutions and the formal arrangements within them are largely the
result of earlier geographic and temporal necessities. But in a world of ubiquitous
information, where individuals can learn anywhere and at any time, the arbitrary ways that
we partition our educational time and space will be increasingly nugatory. We no longer should or will arrange young people
by their calendar year (as adults, do we only hang out with people our exact age?), for
online, students will learn at their own levels irrespective of age. Why should all classes be forty minutes? Now,
students will allocate their time as needed for each subject. Divisions among middle school, high school,
college, and indeed lifelong learning and training will blur. Learning can take place
anywhere and also can come from anywhere--local and global have no specificity in
cyberspace--with all this implies for the contour of educational content. For
example, we already have programs in global studies such that high school students in
Missouri can have real-time conversations with students in Bombay. As important, the category of teacher will widen
to include anyone in the culture who imparts appropriate information; students can access
the knowledge of experts anywhere. But new
technologies will alter the role of the teacher from transmitter of a culture’s
truths to a facilitator who helps students learn on their own (the “guide on the
side” in the field’s parlance).
Advocates herald educational
technology as the best opportunity for wide-scale student-centered, inquiry based
learning. But this broader constructivist agenda -- the motto that champions learning how over learning that, learning by doing -- also leans on
categorical distinctions that are increasingly fluid.
For notice: I ask an eleven-year-old if she’s memorized the state
capitals. She asks me in response why in the world she’d bother inasmuch as she could
so easily download that information to her palm pilot. And if she’s forgotten where
to get this information, she can always turn to Yahoo or some other search engine for
help, and if still stuck, there are always several meta-search engines that will lead her
to her destination. Knowing that begins to look more and more like knowing how to retrieve
information.
Ah,
but is that education? Although educational technology is a young field, it already has
its own inventory of truisms. One such observation distinguishes among data, information
and wisdom. Yes, caution the pedagogical overseers, we have all these new ways of getting
data and information, but this does not education make. True education entails the transmission of wisdom. But this complaint is too vague and too easy to be
of much help. It’s worth noting that many who are most vociferous in voicing this
objection are also those who insist that our children lack in the “basics” of
proper spelling, calculations, historical dates – hardcore facts. In fact, we need to
consider whether mass public education ever successfully imparted such “deeper understanding.” And just whose
wisdom are we supposed to promote? If
technology is not the solution to this particular, well-rehearsed challenge, it’s not
the problem either.
A comprehensive catalogue of changes
that educational technology promises would also include the following: the melding of the
public and private sectors – technology companies and their content share roles as
central educational resources with schools; the increasingly tenuous nature of knowledge
as intellectual property; the necessary reinvention of former repositories of culture such
as museums and libraries. This list would
also include the impact of technology on metaphysics, for example, how the centrality of
the body in establishing identity will be replaced in
cyberspace by identity as defined by one’s thoughts and interests. But
technology’s most immediate educational disruption is that it forces us to reconsider
the very aim of education.
Why educate our children? The question might be straightforward, but the
broad spectrum of answers that have been proffered over the ages reflects just how
complicated this question really is. From Plato and the Republic on down (and before as well), one theory viewed the purpose of education as the
training of rulers. (Even a contemporary figure like John Dewey posits education as
critical to a flourishing democracy since the people will be rulers, albeit of
themselves.) Religious educators, for their
part, saw the chief goal of education to be the establishment of proper religious
sensibilities in their charges. Much educational effort was also undertaken with the aim
of training students for future work. The tie between education and employability is heard
often these days when governments worry about the “competitiveness” of their
future workforce. Other theories of education concentrate on the importance of
transmitting cultural values and accomplishments as a fundamental obligation to one’s
civilization. And still others argue that the true point of education is individual -- to
enrich the lives of its beneficiary. Learning
how to appreciate a Beethoven Sonata, to view a Rodin, to undertake a proof in geometry,
and to understand the causes of the French Revolution -- all improve the quality of
one’s life.
And here is where technology plays a
crucial role. Without doubt, the medium is somewhat the message in this case: how
we learn certainly contributes to what is learned. But only somewhat – in
fact, technology is neutral with regard to the broader educational aims. It does, however,
provide a powerful utility for most pedagogical programs. As never before, it can
individualize learning and target the single learner. At the same time, it can bring
hitherto unavailable global perspectives. It can offer lifelong, just-in-time training in
skills needed in the marketplace and train managers and rules with new precision. In
short, it can be an effective tool for a plurality of educational aims.
But we must decide what those aims
are. In choosing the kind of life we wish to live and the kind of society in which we hope
to live this life, we ipso facto align
ourselves to an educational goal for our children. Advanced technologies provide a
dazzling vehicle to get us where we want to go, but it can’t tell us where that is. Educational technology also makes it
increasingly viable to pursue a variety of answers – a development that enlightened
societies ought to applaud. But more choices
also entail more confusion. Acknowledging this uncertainty is the first step on this
crucial educational journey.
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