Education

Technological Momentum and Education

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

“There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.”  — Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage

Conversations about technology and education, in my experience, eventually invoke certain vague notions of inevitability. There is often talk about getting on the train before it leaves the station and all of that.  Perhaps it is the case that notions of inevitability will surface in most discussions about technology whether or not education is involved — the specter of technological determinism casts a long shadow. I am not a technological determinist. Nevertheless, I do believe technology influences us in significant ways. How do we describe this condition of being influenced, but not determined?

The concept of technological momentum employed by historian Thomas Hughes provides a helpful way of thinking about this question.  In Technology Matters: Questions to Live With, David Nye explains Hughes concept and offers some examples.

Hughes argues that technical systems are not infinitely malleable.  If technologies such as the bicycle or the automobile are not independent forces shaping history, they can still exercise a “soft determinism” once they are in place …

“Technological momentum” is not inherent in any technological system when first deployed. It arises as a consequence of early development and successful entrepreneurship, and it emerges at the culmination of a period of growth. The bicycle had such momentum in Denmark and the Netherlands from 1920 until the 1960s, with the result that a system of paved trails and cycling lanes were embedded in the infrastructure before the automobile achieved momentum. In the United States, the automobile became the center of a socio-technical system more quickly and achieved momentum a generation earlier. Only some systems achieve “technological momentum” …. The concept seems particularly useful for understanding large systems. These have some flexibility when being defined in their initial phases. But as technical specifications are established and widely adopted, and as a system comes to employ a bureaucracy and thousands of workers, it becomes less responsive to outside pressures …

Hughes makes clear when discussing “inertia” that the concept is not only technical but also cultural and institutional. A society may choose to adopt either direct current or alternating current, or to use 110 volts, or 220 volts, or some other voltage, but a generation after these choices have been made it is costly and difficult to undo such a decision. Hundreds of appliance makers, thousands of electricians, and millions of homeowners have made a financial commitment to these technical standards. Furthermore, people become accustomed to particular standards and soon begin to regard them as natural. Once built, an electrical grid is “less shaped by and more the shaper of its environment.” This may sound deterministic, but it is not entirely so, for people decided to build the grid and selected its specifications and components. To later generations, however, such technical systems seem to be deterministic.

Coming back to the more specific topic of technology in education in light of Nye’s observations, I want to suggest that teachers and administrators think carefully about the implementation of technology, particularly in its early stages.  There is no inevitability.  We have choices to make.  Those choices may lead to the adoption of certain technologies and corresponding practices, and later the institutionalization of those technologies and practices may eventually make it very hard to discard them.  This kind of inertia is what retrospectively makes the adoption and implementation of certain technologies appear inevitable.  But at the outset, there were choices to be made.

It is probably the case that in some circumstances the choice is not really a choice at all.  For example, in certain industries one may either have to constantly adopt and adapt or else lose business and fail.  Exercise of choice may also lead to marginalization — witness the Amish.  Choices come with consequences and costs.  I grant that those costs may sometimes amount to coercive pressure.

Perhaps education is one of these industries (calling it such is already to prejudice the matter) in which this sort of coercive pressure exists.  One hopes, however, that better aims and ideals are steering the ship. Teachers and administrators need to be clear about their philosophy of education, and they need to allow their vision for education to drive their choices about the adoption and implementation of new technology. If they are not self-conscious and intentional in this respect, and if they view technology merely as a neutral set of tools at their disposal, they will be disappointed and frustrated.

As media theorists have noted, the ecological metaphor can be a helpful way of thinking about and understanding our technologies. Once a new element is introduced into an ecosystem, we don’t get the same ecosystem plus a new element; we get a new ecosystem. The consequences may be benign, or they could be destructive. Think of the classroom as an ecosystem; the introduction of new technologies reconstitutes the classroom’s media ecosystem. Consequently, the adoption and implementation of new classroom technologies should be guided by clear thinking about how new technologies alter the learning environment and a sober estimation of their compatibility with a school’s philosophy of education.

 

Grading Teachers

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 1 Comment

Two weeks ago, Stanley Fish wrote a column in the NY Times recalling his classical high school education.  Fish expressed his deep gratitude for the education he received explaining that,

although I have degrees from two Ivy league schools and have taught at U.C. Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, Columbia and Duke, Classical High School (in Providence, RI) is the best and most demanding educational institution I have ever been associated with.

That is remarkably high, and seemingly well-deserved, praise.  Fish’s column, which went on to review three recent books advocating a reconsideration of classical education and the humanities, apparently provoked a strong response from readers.  This Monday, Fish began his column by recounting the many responses he received which described an experience along these lines,

“I had a high school (or a college) experience like yours,” the poster typically said, “and I hated it and complained all the time about the homework, the demands and the discipline; but now I am so pleased that I stayed the course and acquired skills that have served me well throughout my entire life.”

I imagine this is not a terribly unusual situation.  We have all had the experience of coming to appreciate something in retrospect which for one reason or another, often immaturity, we were unable to appreciate at the time.  But, Fish goes on to reflect on the implications of this pattern for the near ubiquitous practice of student course surveys.

Now suppose those who wrote in to me had been asked when they were young if they were satisfied with the instruction they were receiving? Were they getting their money’s worth? Would they recommend the renewal of their teachers’ contracts? I suspect the answers would have been “no,” “no” and “no,” and if their answers had been taken seriously and the curriculum they felt oppressed by had been altered accordingly, they would not have had the rich intellectual lives they now happily report, or acquired some of the skills that have stood them in good stead all these years.

This is why Fish suggests that, “Deferred judgment” or “judgment in the fullness of time” seems to be appropriate to the evaluation of teaching.”  And this is also why Fish concludes,

… student evaluations (against which I have inveighed since I first saw them in the ’60s) are all wrong as a way of assessing teaching performance: they measure present satisfaction in relation to a set of expectations that may have little to do with the deep efficacy of learning. Students tend to like everything neatly laid out; they want to know exactly where they are; they don’t welcome the introduction of multiple perspectives, especially when no master perspective reconciles them; they want the answers.

But sometimes (although not always) effective teaching involves the deliberate inducing of confusion, the withholding of clarity, the refusal to provide answers; sometimes a class or an entire semester is spent being taken down various garden paths leading to dead ends that require inquiry to begin all over again, with the same discombobulating result; sometimes your expectations have been systematically disappointed. And sometimes that disappointment, while extremely annoying at the moment, is the sign that you’ve just been the beneficiary of a great course, although you may not realize it for decades.

Needless to say, that kind of teaching is unlikely to receive high marks on a questionnaire that rewards the linear delivery of information and penalizes a pedagogy that probes, discomforts and fails to provide closure.

In the interest of full disclosure, I am a teacher and I have been the subject of course surveys of the sort Fish describes, or better, decries.  For the record, I have done quite well on such surveys, so this is not a rant born of bitterness.  However, I find it hard to argue with the logic of Fish’s argument.  The rest of his column goes on to target a proposed education reform plan being advanced in Texas which relies on the student-as-customer model which is closely connected with the ethos of the student evaluation form.

Education in this country, at the secondary and post-secondary level, is unfortunately in a state of disrepair.  Countless books and articles have been written on the subject and some form revitalization is needed.  This much is true.  It is also true that often the problems stem from teachers and professors who are more interested in career advancement and security than they are in advancing the knowledge of their students.  Something needs to be done about this.  However, we should be careful to avoid a cure that is worse than the disease, and the further mechanization, commercialization,  and bureaucratization of education seems to be just such a deadly cure.

In his excellent piece, “The Computerized Academy,” from the Summer 2005 issue of The New Atlantis, Matthew Crawford offered these apropos reflections,

Ideally, a teacher’s judgment about what is good for you is not colored by what is immediately pleasant for you. But increasingly, what is good for the teacher (professionally) is determined by what is immediately pleasant for the student. The career incentives for professors can be managed to some extent by judicious deans and department chairs, for example, by norming a professor’s teaching evaluations against his or her grade distribution and the demands of the course, so that tough grading and a choice of difficult material, even if penalized by students in their evaluations, will not be allowed to threaten a professor’s tenure prospects. Absent such a contrarian, clear-eyed defense of excellence by those in charge, all the pressures on a professor tend toward dumbing things down: giving fewer assignments (less work for him), grading generously (less whining and pleading from students), and choosing subjects that are not too remote from the students’ experience (a sure path to popularity). Since that prior experience is constituted to a large degree by mass forces, there is a certain uniformity of perspective and taste that begins to assert itself in the curriculum.

Accountability that will not endanger the pursuit of excellence and reward conformity is the goal.  Figuring out the mechanism that will get us there is the task at hand. The indiscriminate expansion of choice and the introduction of market pressures into the classroom does not seem to be the right mechanism for the task.  At the very least, it is fraught with serious and troubling side effects.

The Ends of Learning

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 2 Comments

Yesterday I posted a link to a column by Stanley Fish in which he suggested that a return to something resembling the classical model of education might be just what our educational system needed.  Fish cited three recent books from three very different authors who nonetheless complimented one another in arguing for educational practices invested in the humanities and the  traditions of classical education. Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities by philosopher Martha Nussbaum was one of the three titles briefly reviewed by Fish.  Today, while reviewing some recent issues of the Times Literary Supplement, I stumbled upon an excerpt from Not for Profit in the April 30th issue under the title “Skills for life:  Why cuts in humanities teaching pose a threat to democracy itself.”  Keith Thomas’ essay, “What are universities for?” followed in the same pages the following week.  Predictably, letters to the editor protesting Nussbaum and Thomas’ antiquarian and elitist advocacy of the humanities followed.  Regrettably only subscribers may access either essay online.

Nussbaum and Thomas both write in response to cuts in public funding for departments of humanities, Nussbaum focusing on the American academic scene and Thomas on the British, but both with an eye to the global situation.  More specifically, Nussbaum worries that universities myopically focused on national economic growth will fail to form responsible citizens:

… nations all over the world will soon be producing generations of useful, docile, technically trained machines, rather than complete citizens  who can think for themselves, criticize tradition, and understand the significance of another person’s sufferings and achievements.

As a result,

… democracy is bound to fail, because democracy is built on respect and concern, and these in turn are built on the ability to see other people as human beings, not simply as objects.

Nussbaum goes on to argue particularly for the Socratic method and the arts as the means for fostering the critical thinking and empathy essential to the citizens of a healthy democracy.  Education for economic growth rather than for democratic citizenship threatens both Socratic teaching and the arts.  Moreover, she argues that education for economic growth will be innately hostile to a Socratic education grounded in the arts:

The student’s freedom of mind is dangerous if what is wanted is a group of technically trained obedient  workers to carry out the plans of elites who are aiming at foreign investment and technological development …. but educators for economic growth will do more than ignore the arts.  They will fear them.  For cultivated and developed sympathy is a particularly dangerous enemy of obtuseness, and moral obtuseness is necessary to carry out programmes of economic development that ignore inequality.

As sympathetic as I am to Nussbaum’s position, I found myself underwhelmed by her essay and perhaps even a bit unsettled.  Something did not sit quite right.  I have little reason to question her diagnosis of the present crisis, but it seemed to me that her commendation of the cure was not all that it could have been.  One letter to the editor came close to naming my uneasiness:  “Nussbaum’s passionate defence of the humanities falls flat because, in the end, she is not defending the humanities but rather a method of teaching.”  I believe in the Socratic method and in my own teaching I strive to implement it as much as possible.  However, there was something about Nussbaum’s case for the Socratic method that seemed off; perhaps it was the anti-traditionalist emphasis, or maybe it was the nod toward “global citizenship.”  Or, more likely, it was both together.

The ability to “criticize tradition” or mold individuals who “argue for themselves, rather than simply deferring to tradition” are recurring elements in Nussbaum’s advocacy of the humanities.  There is of course something right and noble about this, yet Nussbaum’s emphasis seems to eclipse the possibility that the humanities are not aimed simply at the cultivation of a skill, but also at the discovery of truth — truth that may in the end be embodied in a tradition.  After all, would it be unreasonable to speak of something like the Socratic tradition?  Isn’t there a sense in which Nussbaum herself is defending a practice now embedded in a particular tradition of thought?  At the very least it seems to me that the practice and the tradition of thought that has built up around it are mutually dependent.  There ought to be good reasons why the Socratic practice is to be commended and these reasons will form a tradition of thought.  Nussbaum, however, betrays something of her unease with tradition when she writes that the

arts, by generating pleasure in connection with acts of understanding, subversion and cultural reflection, produce an endurable and even attractive dialogue with the prejudices of the past, rather than one fraught with fear and defensiveness.

This is in some sense a gesture toward engagement with the past, yet one wonders why it need be so potentially angst ridden.  That the dialogue needs to be rendered “endurable” suggests that Nussbaum may not ordinarily be inclined to join it; or perhaps she simply assumes that this will be the disposition of the modern reader.  After all, given her past scholarship, no one can justly accuse Nussbaum of being disengaged from the western tradition.

Furthermore, awareness of our “global interdependency” and the resultant need for something like a notion of “global citizenship” makes a certain sense.  Yet, combined with the latent hostility toward tradition this finally leaves me thinking that the products of Nussbaum’s liberal education may become detached and cynical citizens of nowhere, enamored of abstractions, experts of criticism, yet without a sense belonging and unable to love the particular and the concrete.

On both counts I was reminded of an essay by Mark T. Mitchell that appeared last fall at the Front Porch Republic titled “Liberal Education, Stewardship, and the Cosmopolitan Temptation.” Mitchell praises many of the same virtues of a liberal education that Nussbaum commends, but at the same time he guards against the formation of people who are “at home anywhere, yet actually, concretely, making a home nowhere.”  Addressing the kind of Socratic, anti-traditionalism that one notes in Nussbuam Mitchell writes,

when we speak of liberal education in terms of stewardship, this implies that there is a specific content to liberal education …. in asserting that there is a specific content at the center of liberal education, I am claiming that the first disposition is not dubiety or suspicion but submission and trust. One must submit to the authority of a master in order to fully appreciate the subject matter at hand. One must enter into the world of the past in order to understand it, and to enter the past is to submit, at least temporarily and provisionally, to its prejudices and demands. Understanding requires, in the first instance, sympathy. Criticism comes later, after sympathetic understanding has been achieved.

Speaking to the notion of “global citizenship” Mitchell has this to say:

… the mind given to abstract universal concepts will readily gravitate toward saving “the world” or “ending hunger” but will find it less natural to consider how to preserve a local community or care for the poor widow around the corner …. In other words, a liberal education should teach students how to be human beings and how to live in some particular place. If a course of education cultivates a hatred for home, it has failed. If it cultivates a dissatisfaction with the local, particular, and the provincial in favor of distant, abstract places where cosmopolitanism drowns out the loveliness and uniqueness of local customs, practices, stories, and songs, then the education has failed. To be well-educated is to be educated to live well in a particular place.

In the end, perhaps it is the utilitarian or pragmatic slant that Nussbaum takes which leaves me less than satisfied.  Not surprisingly John Dewey is among the philosophers of education that she sites approvingly.  For Dewey, as for Nussbaum, the end of education was to produce productive citizens for the democratic order.  But what happens when the democratic order decides that what it wants are consumers for the growth economy?  It is not that I would necessarily advocate art for art’s sake; the humanities and something like a classical education may not quite be ends in themselves.  Yet, do they have no higher end than the cultivation of responsible citizens?

Keith Thomas’ essay at points slips toward a similar utilitarianism, but on the whole tracks closer to the heart of the issue.  He too links the humanities to the health of the democratic order, but while Nussbaum focuses on the skills of critical discernment enhanced by the Socratic method, Thomas seems to have more of the content of the humanities in mind when he writes,

The humanities offer an indispensable antidote to the vices which inevitably afflict a democratic, capitalist society.  They counter the dumbing down of the media by asserting the complexity of things; and they challenge the evasiveness and mendacity of politicians by placing a premium on intellectual honesty.

With Nussbaum he likewise laments the onset of the economic model which overtook the British universities in the 1980’s:

No one talked any longer of the free movement of ideas, or recalled the medieval adage that knowledge was a gift of God which should not be sold.

And again with Nussbaum, he bemoans the managerial regime of assessment and measurement that has afflicted modern education:

Universities ceased to be governed by communities of academics.  Instead there developed a managerial class led by vice-chancellors who saw themselves as thrusting business executives rather than self-effacing ancillaries, and paid themselves accordingly, typically three or four times as much as a professor.

Perhaps most admirably, Thomas affirms the central place of teaching, not just research, to the life of a university:

Only a minority of academics can hope to achieve any real advance in their discipline, but all have the possibility of making an enduring “impact” on the minds of their pupils.  Yet the present system encourages them to spend as little time as possible on teaching …. We need scholars to resist the annihilation of our intellectual inheritance, to expose myths and to remind us that there are other ways of thinking and acting than those with which we are familiar.  Not all such work can be described as “research”  …. A better word for this is “scholarship”, with its emphasis less on new knowledge than on fresh understanding.

Thomas is clearly aware of the changes and adaptations that the university has undergone, sometimes unwillingly, since it first appeared in England over 800 years ago.  Some will see the changes taking place at present as just one more necessary transformation in the ongoing evolution of the university.  Thomas, however, urges caution and self-restraint and above all attention to “what the purpose of a university is.”  In closing, he cites the English scholar and poet of the turn of the last century, A. E. Housman who wrote

A life spent, however victoriously, in securing the necessaries of life is no more than elaborate furnishing and decoration of apartments for the reception of a guest who is never to come.

Thomas simply adds,

We cannot determine the purpose of the universities without first asking, “What is the purpose of life?”

This moves us in the right direction.  Whatever conclusions we reach about the humanities, the university, or the purpose of education they will need to be grounded in something deeper than the health of a particular economic or political order.  They will need to be grounded in some understanding of what it means to be human and what it means to flourish as a human being.  And these are the very sorts of questions which the humanities have been addressing in their own peculiar way for a very long time.