WARNING! This website is no longer actively maintained. It is an archive of 2 years work by Doug Belshaw who now blogs at dougbelshaw.com...
I’ve been doing a lot of reading recently towards the dissertation I’m doing for my MA in Education (University of Durham). I’m looking at how the integration of ICT affects the culture of educational institutions, and why the promises of ICT haven’t become reality yet.
A lot of what I’m reading - a lot more than I would have imagined - predicts the death of the school as we know it as a result of technology. This has been going on, of course, since Ivan Illich’s classic Deschooling Society in the 1970s, but even more modern writers seem to see the future, if not in revolutionary terms, as being an evolution towards a radical different model. For example, Seymour Papert in The Children’s Machine: rethinking school in the age of the computer (London, 1993) states:
The institution of school, with its daily lesson plan, fixed curriculum, standardized tests, and other such paraphernalia, tends constantly to reduce learning to a series of technical acts and the teacher to the role of a technician.
And I think Davis* sums it up best when he says:
Classrooms are not ideal learning environments; they are working compromises in mass education systems.
We have to make do with the system we’ve got. Or do we? The promises of reliable, cheap and ubiquitous technology could render the existing paradigm of what constitutes a school - which is based on a system which has been developed in an ad-hoc way since the compromised 1870 Education Act - obsolete. But what will take it’s place? Well, perhaps at the moment we don’t quite know, but that shouldn’t stop us having the debate. Our focus on the day-to-day activities and our status as teachers in institutions called ’schools’ shouldn’t prevent us from thinking critically about the purpose of education and what we are actually trying to achieve. To quote Papert** again:
The suggestion that there might come a day when schools no longer exist elicits strong responses from many people. There are many obstacles to thinking clearly about a world without schools. Some are highly personal. Most of us spent a larger fraction of our lives going to school than we care to think about… The concept of a world without school is highly dissonant with out experiences of our own lives. Other obstacles are more conceptual. One cannot define such a world negatively, that is by simply removing school and putting nothing in its place. Doing so leaves a thought vacuum thatthe mind has to fill one way or another, often with vague but scary images of children ‘running wild’, ‘drugging themselves’ or ‘making life impossible for their parents’. Thinking seriously about a world without schools cll for elaborated models of the non-school activities in which children would engage.
I’m not saying that schools don’t serve an extremely useful purpose in society - in fact one of the most useful of these is to pass on cultural values and norms. The trouble is that society and culture is changing at such a rapid pace that schools face the danger of becoming increasingly irrelevant and anachronistic in reference to the world that their graduates will experience.
I think I’ll leave the last word with Postman and Weingartner:***
The institution we call ’school’ is what it is because we made it that way. If it is irrelevant, as Marshall McLuhan says; if it shields children from reality, as Norbert Wiener says; if it does not develop intelligence, as Jerome Bruner says; if it is based on fear, as Carl Rogers says; if it punishes creativity and independence, as Edfar Friedenberg says; if, in short, it is not doing what needs to be done, it can be changed; it must be changed.
* N. Davis, et al, ‘Can quality in learning be enhanced through the use of IT?’ (in B. Somekh, G. Whitty & R. Coveney, IT and the politics of institutional change (in B. Somekh & N. Davis, Using Information Technology Effectively in Teaching and Learning; London, 1997), p.21
** Papert (1993) - quoted in C. Abbott, ICT: changing education (London, 2001), p.4
*** Postman & Weingartner (1971) - quoted in C. Abbott, ICT: changing education (London, 2001), p.46
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