Thanks for reading and taking the time to comment.

He was successful at this. I remember finishing “The Last Battle” as a child and crying because I wanted Narnia to be real. Or maybe, more than wanting more volumes, I knew there was something good and true about the story (in other words, beautiful), but I didn’t know how to get there…yet.

Cheers!

The thing I find most frightening in the above discussion is the endorsement of the “lecture to lattice” reorganization of the classroom in the description of the North Carolina school district experiencing “notable success” as a result of its embrace of technology. (The sceptic in me wants a good, hard look at the evidence for this “notable success.” Testimonials from those who have chosen not to be weeded won’t suffice. The uber-sceptic in me says “follow the money on this one” — but these are bones for another day.) The most distressing element of the picture painted is the erroneous assumption lying at its heart which would be sweetly ingenuous if it were not so dangerous: that the teacher “swooping in for consultation” is fully able to:

1. assess the integrity of the information accessed by the students through technology (in terms of both its source, and its accuracy)

2. understand it, and its relationship to the topic at hand, sufficiently to provide students any meaningful context or guidance in its interpretation.

This is in no way meant to be a criticism of teachers — I am one myself. I imagine there may be, at best, a handful of intellectuals on the continent whose vast erudition would make the classroom scenario described above feasible. While many teachers do have advanced degrees, for the most part, a general BA or BSc. plus some teacher training will get you the job — and this is perfectly proper — I’m not arguing for advanced degree requirements or belittling teacher intelligence. However, I hope that no one would argue that a BSc. qualifies one to parse the infinite supply of scientific, quasi-scientific, and utterly non-scientific information available on any subject on the internet. We must remember,as well, (at least at the high school level, from whence I draw my experience) teachers are often expected to teach outside of their area of “expertise.” In the main, they are remarkably successful, considering the circumstances, at what they do, because their focus has been narrowed for them by curriculum requirements — really a list of level-appropriate concepts deemed to be essential subject knowledge by their society — their job is to understand the relationship between these concepts and to facilitate their students’ advance to the next level — a task on a human scale, and one they are equipped to do because their degree has demanded that they be at least reasonably successful mastering these concepts themselves. This narrowing may seem hierarchical, but in fact, it is vital — why?– because you can’t learn everything at once, much less teach everything at once — much less sift through and assign order to the infinite supply of contextless information available through technology. Anyone with any experience setting students free to research on the web will know that (unless you get there before them and lay out a highly structured pathway which starts to look very much like a textbook) the results are dismal (whether or not the students are aware of it), and often, the students frustrated and overwhelmed. All good teachers know this in their hearts.

Why is this “lattice model” so dangerous? Because in the lattice set up — core knowledge is abandoned and replaced with this contextless sea of info bits — suddenly, anything might be true because there is far more “information” available than can possibly be assessed, And, if anything might be true, then nothing is necessarily true — or, more ominously, whatever you wish to be true is true — a condition which seems already to be affecting the technophiles!