A reader who signs as “New York State Teacher” wonders why classrooms should be compelled to use more technology than they need. Why the push to put every student on a tablet and to buy online curriculum and online tests? Is there a comparison, the teacher wonders, between authentic education and “slow foods,” “organic foods,” “artisanal foods,” and the effort to maintain a classroom where teachers make decisions? Why are corporations pushing mass-produced lessons into public schools, but not into the elite schools attended by the children of the 1%? I recall a prediction by Forbes’ technology editor in the 1980s (sourced in my book “Reign of Error”) that in the future, the children of the poor will get computers and the children of the rich will get teachers.
Part of the problem with this manufactured necessity of technology in school is that we, as teachers, often buy into some of the fundamental lies. In our district, teachers clamor for a smartboard, etc etc etc etc under the pretense that it somehow DEEPENS the learning experience for students….a highly questionable notion when subjected to even modest amounts of rigorous thought. Nonetheless, being an earnest, eager, and enthusiastic lot for the most part, teachers, long accustomed to grabbing for any tool or aid, have also lunged for technology….without the requisite thinking. I would argue that a very firm “NO” from teachers on technology would have quite an impact. NO, I don’t want X, Y, or Z. No I will not teach via algorithm. NO, NO, NO. But, too often technology and its myths have become a norm because they were accepted nicely.
Perhaps what is needed is a counter-narrative coming from teachers that is a “return-to-authentic-roots” kind of thing. A return to the idea that with a teacher, some students, and a book, ignorance can be defeated and exposure to the enlightenment possible. A sort of artisanal classroom kind of thing, to appeal to all the Subaru driving parents who long for “authentic” food, clothes, homes, and experience everywhere else in their lives. Why is a Monsanto tomato bad and a Monsanto classroom for little Dylan good? “Technology in the classroom” is marketing-speak for a corporatized classroom, and we need to be the ones aggressively saying that. The problem is that we have to realize it first. We need to begin to understand that we need to create compelling counter-narratives. Certainly there is nobody else doing it for us! This is easy meat though for counter-narratives! Corporate food=bad. Corporate classroom where kids grow=good?? Come on. Too easy.
The entire thing of “technology in the classroom” is an invented need for an invented problem. The most astounding piece of evidence to this is the fact that, somehow, devoid of any technology save for pen, paper, book, art supplies, instruments, lab material, a library. etc, all of us born before 1990 had no technology to speak of and we (well alot of us, myself probably excluded) actually LEARNED. Shocking. We are evidence that technology in the classroom is a sham. However, that sham is only called out and destroyed if we attack its first principles and ideas.
I am not taking a Luddite position here, or a nostalgic one….but simply saying that learning is probably one of those landscapes of the human condition that does not require so much technological aid to participate in.
I agree. While technology can sometimes enhance the learning experience, much of the transaction is rooted in a very basic exchange of information and shared experience which often require little more than books, notebooks and black oe white boards.
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
Computers are like the Arab proverb. “The Camel’s Nose In The Tent.”
One cold night, as an Arab sat in his tent, a camel gently thrust his nose under the flap and looked in. “Master,” he said, “let me put my nose in your tent. It’s cold and stormy out here.” “By all means,” said the Arab, “and welcome” as he turned over and went to sleep.
A little later the Arab awoke to find that the camel had not only put his nose in the tent but his head and neck also. The camel, who had been turning his head from side to side, said, “I will take but little more room if I place my forelegs within the tent. It is difficult standing out here.” “Yes, you may put your forelegs within,” said the Arab, moving a little to make room, for the tent was small.
Finally, the camel said, “May I not stand wholly inside? I keep the tent open by standing as I do.” “Yes, yes,” said the Arab. “Come wholly inside. Perhaps it will be better for both of us.” So the camel crowded in. The Arab with difficulty in the crowded quarters again went to sleep. When he woke up the next time, he was outside in the cold and the camel had the tent to himself.
We teachers are the ones that may find ourselves out in the cold. The goal of “personalized instruction” is to make living, breathing, salary and pension consuming teachers obsolete. Our only advantage is that computers cannot inspire, empathize, address human emotional issues, wipe tears, visit families in crisis, etc. Computers have had an abysmal track record with the very group they want use in on, poor urban students. How long will it take African American leaders to realize they are being misled? Corporations are only interested in lower the bottom line to increase profits.
i can’t believe i haven’t noticed this trend in teaching, if only as a parent. i realized it years ago in other industries, and have tried to avoid spending money there. fees for using bank tellers while having free atms, automated checkouts at stores, ez pass systems etc. are all aimed at eliminating human jobs that require pay, benefits and the like.
not only are the teachers losing any type if control over curriculum, they are going to become mere distributors of electronic equipment before becoming completely obsolete. with the added benefit of indoctrination by the companies designing the coursework.
how very true! In my poor Buffalo, 5th poorest urban area in the nation, the district is hell-bent, often at the behest of well-intentioned African-American politicians, to maximize technology – millions spent on updated servers, educational packages from the usual suspects, laptops and tablets for all, whiteboards, while they downsize or eliminate art, music programs, PE, reduce aides on buses and in special ed classrooms, increase class sizes. Meanwhile Buffalo teachers are still working under the same contract they were 10 years ago, suburban teachers five miles away are making far more $$. See Cliff Stoll’s prescient book Silicon Snake Oil, written 23 years ago, in which he ( an uber computer geek and brilliant scientist) warns of exactly this future in education!
I was hoping public schools would resist the massive marketing effort and make good decisions. I just think it’s ludicrous to continue to say “plus/and!” when obviously schools have limited budgets and time and a lot of these things are trade-offs.
Before electronic white boards I had boards all around the classroom that allowed as many as 16 students at a time to be working at the board. Now, those white boards around the room are gone. I-pads are mainly a toy and management problem. They do not enhance pedagogy over what was done 50 years ago. Education reform has become the path to raiding tax dollars and it has harmed the schools of all but our wealthiest citizens.
The new ESEA opens even more and broader avenues for corporate raiders to come after money committed to public education with its social impact bonds, personalized learning initiatives and its large commitment to expand school privatization. Some people think its less evil than the predecessor, I think its much worse. It does move some authoritarian control to states but not to teachers and parents.
What you describe and the “Pay for Success” are both potential Trojan horses for school districts to squander money to pay corporations for toys or untried wasteful cheap, corporate solutions that are not solutions at all. A good teacher spending time on task would yield better results. We need to stop feeding the consumerism treadmill.
Humans learn today the same way that they have learned before screens. We construct our knowledge based on our experiences ( past and present) and we do so mostly using language. Screens can offer some opportunities for that but as was said above, they are tools.
Technology can provide efficient access to content but it teacher must manipulate the technology to fit the student, the curriculum. Google can provide factual information on almost any topic, but without design, those facts remain a pile of useless lumber rather than a house. A simulation could be effective at addressing a common scientific misconception. The students could use it to test their prior knowledge, gather data to find a pattern or model a complex scenario. Without a design, however, the students will “play” but fail to develop a robust understanding. Too often the lesson is built around the technology rather than the technology helping to build the lesson.
Large-scale technology products with their all encompassing content, assessment and monitoring give the illusion of building knowledge and personalization. The program, however, cannot deviate from its code. A student must choose everything from a pre-generated list. There is no chance for spontaneous conversation about a meaningful detail that addresses a student’s unique prior knowledge. There is no sharing of examples from a student’s life that can then be discussed to expand beyond the textbook example. Without even trying, meaningful conversations occur in face-to-face classrooms. They must be “allowed” in digital settings.
You-all should be reading this writer. There are informed, critical voices in tech who actually question this stuff. Maybe not enough of them, but they exist.
http://hackeducation.com/2015/12/02/trends-politics/
Blended learning is very much IN at the $29,000/year elite for-profit private school backed by Zuckerberg: http://nytimes.com/2015/12/06/nyregion/in-the-spirit-of-mark-zuckerberg-an-experimental-school-in-brooklyn.html
Although I suppose what’s going on at Altschool could be characterized as artisanal blended learning.
If you have lots of money it’s easy to buy stuff with it.
It’s another question whether it is really useful for education. For that, the people with money need to listen to teachers. What’s the chance of that?
There are some things – basically things about computers and software – that high school students can learn, and maybe some teachers want them to learn, and for which computers are needed. These include learning how to code, learning how to understand genetic data, and learning how to find census data.
But the idea of applying this to language-based subjects? Only if human language is sufficiently simplified and only if humans are sufficiently simple-minded. Maybe that’s the future.
In some subjects like math, students *might* be helped, but only if teaching software is *really* good, and if it can spot a wide variety of mistakes and offer useful lessons in response. I suppose that’s what the slogan “personalized learning” means to people who like it. (Online tutorials I’ve taken to learn programming skills have never done this at all well.)
At the university where I am a librarian, a mathematics professor has shown me data showing that the ALEKS learning modules and placement tests now required for incoming students tend to improve students’ grades in calculus at the university level. (I have no direct experience with the modules.) https://www.aleks.com/highered
Recently, he showed me all the software and visualization bells and whistles accompanying the calculus textbook, and said that these might help weaker students, but that these probably hinder the stronger students from improving their understanding beyond the visualization that is given them.
This is an excellent comment by New York State Teacher. My own thinking lines up with this. I wish my own kids could get such an education. We have been loyal to our local public schools, at times with regret. We can’t afford all of this tech, not when other options are sacrificed to buy it. In Silicon Valley some techies see things along these lines, too…
Absolutely right; technology can’t possibly be used to deepen learning.
How do I know? Because I read it on Diane Ravitch’s blog.
Mac, I believe in the use of technology in the classroom, in the workplace, and at home. I spend 8-10 hours daily on a computer. I don’t believe in replacing teachers with technology. Technology is a tool, not the master of the classroom. Tools are to be used by humans, not the other way around.
Boy, I bet you think you scored a real point with that one, don’t you?
Our profession has already been colonized by Silicon Valley. As NYSTeacher points out, the minds of the teachers themselves have already been filled with the narratives that Silicon Valley wants to be there. Improving education is –who but a crazy Luddite could doubt it? –about integrating technology into education. The old ways, we all know, are bad. The new ways, we all know, will be good. The sooner we can rid the profession of those crusty old sandbaggers who cling to the bad old ways, the sooner revolutionary improvement will arrive. In my CA county, almost all of the county-run professional development for teachers is about technology. It’s quite stunning. Developing as a teacher is now defined as learning technology.
The colonizers faced very little resistance. There wasn’t much in terms of clearly-envisioned ideals of education standing in the way. Ed schools gave us a mishmash of PC claptrap, unscientific pedagogical doctrine, and a good dose of technophilia, but no strong grounding in the venerable lore of our profession. Classical education? Most teachers never received one, and never really learned what one is. The roots of both Eastern and Western education traditions have been shorn off –this is the American way –discarding Old World roots. PC abets it: the roots are racist, sexist, etc. Better forget. So Gates and Co. had a tabula rasa on which to write their new code for education, just as Kraft Foods and Monsanto had a tabula rasa on which to write a new culture of food in immigrant America: TV dinners and Coke and Jello in lieu of borscht and ratatouille. Cuisine was redefined as being about convenience and the appearance of modernity. The old ways were bad and embarrassing. The upper class has rejected that mutant corporate food culture, just as they’re rejecting the mutant high tech education order now. But the poor continue to die from drinking Coke, and they’ll continue to be malnourished by the junk education the canny Silicon Valley culture modernizers are selling them now.
ponderosa,
I think you really hit on something very important that few, if any, folks are thinking about/talking about on our side of things. Namely, that the lack of a classical/liberal arts education is something that has severely weakened our resistance to the “colonization” of schools by the techno-capitalists, but also the reform movement in general.
I would argue that the real challenges that face us as teachers from the reform movement and its branch of techno-capitalists are PHILOSOPHICAL challenges. And the problem with a philosophical problem is that 1) folks need to be able to identify it as such, and 2) it helps to have a grounding in philosophical argument….which is, you know, the core of a liberal arts education in the classical sense. Now, there are many teachers who have this perception and ability, and many that have the liberal arts education….these folks are generally not the folks who entered teaching as a first choice of career. (Personally, I have an undergrad and graduate education in history, and only later, while examining my deep un-employability did I think about teaching. I am a poor example however, as my education was lost on me and I am basically a rambling fool) The earnest, living-their-dream, eager teachers who went through ed-programs, these are the ones who are very susceptible to ed reform lingo and technology in the classroom whathaveyou. In general though, as a broad criticism, we as working teachers have not challenged the broad scope of the reform movement at its roots, philosophically, in a meaningful and effective way. We attack it piecemeal and we attack individual plans and policies, which is necessary for sure, but we struggle with taking its legs out from under it. This does have to do with the point you raised.
Another related issue, and one that we don’t talk about enough, is the incessant and relentless focus on STEM. We forget that by placing a primacy on STEM we are also indoctrinating a generation of individuals who will have no inoculation against people, ideas, and programs that seeks to quiet voices culturally and politically via a culture of corporatist-technology. One can be addled by technology. Our national narrative deeply devalues the liberal arts, relegating it to scripted curriculums that only focus on extracting “data.” The STEM narrative is also another area that so many teachers accept uncritically. Not to be too over-the-top, but Germany in the 1930s had, I think, the highest level of technical graduate degrees of any country. They made really spot-on train systems. My point is that technological/scientific education MUST be balanced in a society by a robust liberal arts/humanities education in order for the technologies and sciences to be used appropriately as tools, without going off the proverbial reservation. The current push for technology in classrooms in no way addresses this.
Now its easy to take these points as the points of a hermit-like Luddite, as I said before. I am not that. As a life-long, deeply-enthusiastic private pilot, I LOVE TECHNOLOGY!!! I love STEM stuff!! I am also deeply interested in how technology evolves and emerges, and how society relates to technology. Criticism of our current techno-capitalist culture in no way makes one “anti-technology.” I HIGHLY recommend that anyone interested in this dialog about technology in the classroom read William Langewiesche’s “The Devil at 35,000 Feet” about a mid-air collision high above Brazil. I know it doesn’t sound like it would relate to teachers and technology, but its actually an article on the paradox of technology and the challenges technology presents to people and societies that have not properly placed said technology in proper context and understanding. Langewiesche is also one of the best non-fiction writers out there, so its great reading regardless. Look up the article, It was in Vanity Fair.
Sorry to babble on.
You said it much better than I did!
Bill Gates has his thumb in everyone’s pie with his huge contributions to Monsanto. He also has his electrodes in everyone’s public schools with “flipping the classroom” or “blended learning.”
So much of the money for the tech comes from grants that specify how that money may be spent. I get it, that my district doesn’t have to pay for it out of the general fund, but did hey ask if we wanted it, if we needed it?
Textbook funding is similar. It’s dedicated to the purchase of textbooks or those horrible online versions that are inadaquate and access expires after a few years.
I guess what I’m saying is that if there is so much cash out there for these tech grants, wouldn’t it be so much better if some of that could be used for better purposes, like smaller class size, dependable heat, toilets that flush.
My school doesn’t have the latter problems, but so many do across the US, especially in the cities. They have barely enough cash to keep them clean, but everyone has a white board.
BRAVO. One of your most insightful and clearly written pieces ever. Thank you.
I attended a great Tday celebration that incuded my 5 grandchildren. All of them spent much of the time together–two complete days–on internet devices. Why would educators think that focusing on such devices in the classroom furthers the kids’ knowledge of how to function in the modern world? They are already internet experts!! They don’t need still more technology in the classroom–they need more actual human interaction they can learn from, from the teachers who have so much to offer them “off line!”
Dorothy Parent,
Tony Schwartz wrote an Op-Ed piece in the 11/29/15 New York Times about the addictive, distracting impact of screen use. In his concluding remarks, he cites an incident much like your Thanksgiving celebration. If we as adults have difficulty dealing with the intrusion of these devices into our lives, what is it doing to our children?
I agree with your observation that children need more time in our shared three-dimensional world of reality and less time viewing images in a screen’s flat-land, whether at home or in school.
“Occasionally, I find myself returning to a haunting image from the last day of my vacation. I was sitting in a restaurant with my family when a man in his early 40s came in and sat down with his daughter, perhaps 4 or 5 years old and adorable.
“Almost immediately, the man turned his attention to his phone. Meanwhile, his daughter was a whirlwind of energy and restlessness, standing up on her seat, walking around the table, waving and making faces to get her father’s attention.
“Except for brief moments, she didn’t succeed and after a while, she glumly gave up. The silence felt deafening.
I love having a computer. It saves both time and space. Our computers were updated this year, now my smart board doesn’t work. It can’t interface with the computer. This also means that my district provided TE with its computer enhancements don’t work properly. Which means I get dinged on my observations for not using them. I was told that the smart board was being replaced by an Apple TV and that this would work better. It was supposed to be installed before school started in August, but it is on back order. I love my document camera and projector because it can enlarge anything we are working on easily. I can write on a plain piece of paper and the students can view it easily. I use it to project worksheets on my smart board so that I can easily model what needs to be done. Since I failed chalk board 101 (not really), the writing is more legible and requires less effort. Then this means of course, that I am using this 4000 dollar machine as a simple white board. That’s certainly cost effective- not!
The conversation could continue on to so many other “reforms” that are being thrust upon teachers… from what we are expected to say in the scripted lessons we are mandated to use to the expectation for me to provide for “soft seating” in my classroom to the administration’s refusal to test students with executive functioning issues due to concerns that they will be identified as challenged in ways that they really are challenged…as if that’s a bad thing for them. It really is ridiculous.