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Educating for the 21st Century
Robbie McClintock
Institute for Learning Technologies
Columbia University
An Address to the Conference on
The Internet and Politics
Sponsored by
The Academy for the Third Millenium,
Munich, Germany
February 21, 1997
1: Ladies and gentlemen, it is an honor to discuss the
implications of the Internet for education with you. The previous
speaker described the American effort to wire schools through Net
Day. In response, several of you rightly queried how these
developments in the school infrastructure would affect the
educational content, the curriculum, that students might experience.
I hope my remarks will prove responsive to these questions.
2: At this stage, Net Day sets a minimum goal of wiring together
five classrooms and the library in participating schools. It thus
initiates a local area network in the school, beginning to link
classrooms together. Schools that can, should extend the local area
network to more classrooms, putting as many computers as possible in
each classroom on the network. Schools should in addition arrange for
broadband connectivity between their school-wide LAN and the
Internet. With new Federal Communications Commission regulations
coming into effect in a few months, which will greatly lower the
price of such connections for schools and libraries, many will
connect up.
3: Through the Institute for Learning Technologies, Columbia
University works with a growing number of New York City schools to
help them established strong connectivity to the Internet and a well-developed
infrastructure of internal networking to their classrooms. In
comparison to Net Day, we reach fewer schools -- currently about 20
going up to about 100 by the year 2000. But we implant in the schools
a much more fully developed infrastructure -- basically a broadband
link to the Internet, currently a leased T1 line, and an internal LAN
architecture that links workstations in classrooms at a ratio of five
students per workstation.
4: ILT helps schools develop infrastructure because it is a
necessary first step to doing the really important things,
introducing educational innovations. We are not technologists seeking
to use education to advance technology, but rather educators, seeking
to use technology to improve education. Once an infrastructure is in
place, everyone needs to work creatively on three large tasks --
developing new curricula and content for use with the digital
technologies, providing effective professional development, and
adapting practices of student assessment to the new structures of
education. In my remarks this afternoon, I want to concentrate, not
on the infrastructure issues, but on these three matters that become
so important wherever the infrastructure is in place.
5: Now time is short, forcing us to speak merely about the
Internet. In reality, we should not be talking about it, but talking
with it, looking, exploring, and discussing together things we find
on it and things we can do with it. Since there is not the time to do
that while we are all gathered here together, I have put the text of
my talk on our web server at the following location. Readers of print
versions of this address can use it to explore as they wish the Web
sites I will discuss.
http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/mcclintock/akademie3000/akademie.html
6: My formal remarks will follow a rather simple plan. I will
One Question
7: Through the conference speakers have differed a bit about types
of democracy. We have heard from proponents of direct democracy,
strong democracy, and representative democracy. Nevertheless we are
all united by a basic commitment to democratic practices. To put my
initial question, however, I am going risk a modicum of political
incorrectness and ask you to consider a proposition voiced by an
eminent practitioner of politics who we usually do not identify as a
great democrat. One hundred thirty years ago, Otto von Bismarck
observed that politics is the art of the possible. "Die Politik
ist die Lehre von Möglichen." This aphorism indicates
immediately why the Internet is important for politics. The Internet
changes what is possible. Insofar as it changes possibilities, it
challenges those who engage in politics to further develop their art,
their capacities, their policies, to take these changed possibilities
into account.
8: This conference thus uncovers possibilities created by the
Internet with which our political processes should come to grips,
particularly if we are to develop fully the potentialities of
democratic polities. But my theme is a bit narrower, having to do
with education, and to put the question that I want to ask here, I
need to use a German term that we unfortunately do not have a good
equivalent for in English -- Bildungspolitik. In
English "politics of education" refers more to externals,
whereas I want to discuss the political consequences flowing from
educational practices and cultural policies. For this topic, Bildungspolitik
is the correct word, and I will use it in putting the basic question:
How does the Internet change the possibilities of Bildungspolitik?
Is the Internet changing what is possible in educational practice,
and do emerging educational practices condition political
possibilities in new ways?
Two Contextualizing Observations
9: As a prelude to addressing this question, I want to reflect on
two observations about the Internet. It has been surprising to me,
now near the end of three full days, how little has been said or
shown that concretizes what we mean by the Internet or that describes
what sort of phenomenon it is. In talking as if we all share full,
reflective experience of the Internet, we risk mystifying our
subject. I believe that Robert Cailliau, an engineer key in inventing
the World Wide Web, will soon discuss some of the systems
characteristics of the Web and the Internet that give it such power.
I want to make some observations about it from a different point of
view, that of a cultural historian who has been occupied with the
educational uses of networks, particularly the Web and the Internet,
since early in their development.
10: First, we need to observe that people engage themselves with
the Internet and the Web for a variety of motives. I think three are
of substantial importance, both in general and in the discussions we
are here having -- the commercial, the personal, and the
intellectual. Let us reflect briefly on these three motives, in order
to see why we should expect the intellectual drive to be the
sustaining force for the further development of the Internet.
11: Take first the commercial. The Web is fast becoming a major
locus of commerce, both as a marketplace and as a medium of
entertainment. Major media companies are investing large sums of
capital in developing ways to do business on the Web. Clearly the
commercial dynamism of the Internet is one of the reasons for
attending to it in a conference such as this one. I have no doubt
that the Internet will thrive as a marketplace and numerous companies
will profit handsomely by developing these commercial possibilities.
There is a fear, however, that major media companies may take the
Internet over and reconstruct it to suit their interests. Indeed,
numerous speakers have alerted us to the potential distortion of
cultural and political characteristics that may arise should the
influence of the big media on the ethos of the Web become too great.
The commercial motivations are powerful, but I have my doubts whether
they will really dominate the future of the Internet. History
endlessly provides opportunities for Hegelian ironies to take hold.
12: Commerce rests on the willingness to take risks; to deploy
capital in the search of profit. The promise of profit is not the
same as the attainment of it, and it is entirely possible that the
Internet will be an arena of significant commercial failure, as well
as success. Dominance by big media seems unlikely. That Disney,
Time-Warner, and Bertlesmann invest substantial capital in it does
not guarantee that they will earn a commensurate return or have an
abiding influence over it. To reconstruct the Internet to suit their
interests exclusively, big media companies will have to attack the
status of the Internet as a common carrier and somehow provide their
content with privileged dissemination opportunities. They can win big
audiences by spending heavily to attain higher quality production
values, but they are unlikely to be able to narrow the right of
anyone to put whatever they like up for the world to interact with.
Too many other large companies want, like endless other groups and
individuals, to use the Web to support their content and to use the
content of others. Thus, Boeing, Merck, Exxon, Hewlett Packard, and
many other large corporations have substantial countervailing
interests in an open Internet that serves their research and
managerial needs. Even General Electric and Westinghouse, companies
that combine media holdings with extensive manufacturing and service
components, would be unlikely to align their interests with respect
to the character of the Internet tightly with Disney or other pure
media company. In view of this diversity of corporate interest, as
much as I like to fear the ogre of fat cat capitalism, I think a
restructuring of the Internet to close it off to only a few sources
of content is most unlikely.
13: Another motivation, which itself attracts commerce to the Web,
is the personal. Lots and lots of people are becoming hooked, finding
the Web personally interesting and useful. Personal involvements are
extremely diverse -- some like to advertise themselves through
personal home pages and others see it as a form of self-development,
a tool for seeking out one or another community of common interest.
When one looks at the interaction of the commercial interest and the
personal interest, the former late (relative to now) and the latter,
one of the spontaneous upwellings of activity in our culture, one can
assert an intriguing parallel to the early history of radio. With
radio, the first flourishing of the medium was driven by an
incredible variety of amateur activity. That diversity was then
quickly consolidated by well financed groups into networks that
successfully limited the ability to disseminate programming to a few
licensed broadcasters and provided through advertising the commercial
wherewithal to sustain its economic development.
14: This comparison between the history of radio and that of the
Internet seems persuasive as long as one leaves out of account the
intellectual motivation behind the Internet and the Web. Radio was
not a major medium of intellectual work. It did not change the
practice of medicine, chemistry, astronomy, literary criticism,
classical studies, or any other substantial domain of academic
research. None of the great nineteenth or early twentieth century
innovations in communications, excepting photography for certain
specialized purposes, changed the character of intellectual work or
shifted the boundaries of possible knowledge. Digital technologies,
particularly the Internet, are different. They have had deep
intellectual effects. This difference sets their historical
trajectory radically apart from these earlier innovations. The
Internet, first and foremost, is an intellectual medium. And the
place of intellect in life at the dawn of the 21st century is
sufficiently central to guarantee that the Internet will continue to
develop continuously and indefinitely to realize its potential for
the advancement of learning in our world.
15: What is the basic impetus of this intellectual motivation? We
have heard the suggestion that it is tainted with a rejection of the
world of concrete experience, driven by a neo-Pythagorean aversion to
the body and the world of practical action. To see the Internet as a
flight away from the world of action requires a monumental denial of
major features of our intellectual traditions. Even the Pythagoreans
were famed, not only for their obscure otherworldly religious tenets,
but also as practical designers of effective constitutions and plans,
useful in the Greek creation of new cities as they extended their
commercial and cultural influence Eastward. Plato's great allegory of
the human struggle -- out of the cave of appearance, into the clear
world of abstraction -- culminated in the duty to return into the
cave and to reconstruct it with the aid of rational thought. The
historic power of Western rationalism has arisen, not from its
occasional Manichean rejection of the body, but from its ability to
combine abstract thought and embodied action, creating a world, not
of accident, but of design. There is no better place to appreciate
the power of that tradition than here in this hall in the European
Patent Office where we have been meeting. It displays, in the
wonderful geometric structure holding up the ceiling above us, the
fundamental work of a patent office, bringing thought and action
together, which writ large is the genius of both Western politics and
technology. The intellectual motivation to the Internet pushes this
effort to integrate thought and action in rational praxis a major
step forward.
16: People creating the Internet have made it through their
intellectual enterprise. Even in its earliest origins, the American
military did not design the Internet to manage the command and
control of battlefield operations. Rather they developed it to
support advanced military research. For better and for worse, that
military research was in many ways contiguous with research in
general. Hence, the broadening of the Internet to support academic
work in general was quick natural, and ineluctable. This impetus has
remained a driving force. Even now, as the possibility dawns on the
well informed that the commercial hopes for the Internet as the
market of all markets may not materialize, American universities are
collaborating with the American government to implement Internet 2
and related projects. These projects will most likely initiate the
real high-speed, widely available version of the Internet, not the
many-channeled giant of video-on-demand that the entertainment
providers like to depict as the latest utopian vision of commerce.
From the educational point of view, the Internet of commerce and that
of personal fulfillment are of merely accidental importance compared
to the Internet of research and intellect. In what follows, I will be
discussing the educational significance of the networking system
created in response to these intellectual motives.
17: Second, we need to observe that the Internet is a complex
social construction, coming into being in a present of long duration,
one that began between 1970 and 1980 and one that will continue at
least to 2030, if not a lot longer. Whenever we face the future we
have a tendency to project familiar forms into it, assuming that
change has run its course. I do not think that is the case at all
with the Internet. What we see is a very early version still, in
technical terms, and it is very hard to anticipate the social
significance of further innovation. We can, however, suggest that as
a social construction, the Internet may have a telos
implicit in it, one that is very important for our theme of
democracy. As the network of all networks, the Internet is making
digital contents widely available independent of accidents of time
and place. The Internet's inherent telos might
therefore be stated as follows -- to make all cultural resources
available to any person at any place at any time.
18: Now a culture in which all resources are available to any
person at any place at any time might very well be a culture that can
proudly call itself democratic in a full sense of the word. If we
were to assert a democratic goal for Bildungspolitik, could there be
one much better than making all cultural resources available to any
person at any place at any time? I think it is important to keep this telos
in mind, as we work as educators, for it clearly will not be the
formal purpose guiding all the parties that work actively in the
social construction of the Internet over coming decades. Yet if we
have a clear sense of where the logic of the process is leading, we
can proceed without too much worry about the intentions of different
parties. All sorts of parties put all sorts of resources on the
Internet for all sorts of reasons. The long-term effects of these
activities will be to make everything accessible to anyone at any
place at any time and the long-term task for educators will be to
grasp the opportunities inherent in that condition and to make of
them effective conditions for the thorough reform of education.
19: Having noted the primacy of the intellectual motivation
driving the development of the Internet and the telos
inherent in its long-term social construction, let us reflect now on
the new educational possibilities that it raises. The Internet
challenges us to actualize these through and for our Bildungspolitik.
These possibilities are extensive and we need a method for
uncovering them. Over the past ten years, I have worked with may
different resources on the net and I find my academic training as a
cultural historian sometimes imposing itself on my practical work,
making me look at websites rather as if they were cultural documents.
We can bracket our practical ends in view with respect to them and
reflect on them, interpreting them for the insight they give into the
cultural developments that they may disclose. In the remarks that
follow, I will point you towards a few websites. I ask you to look at
them, not as you normally would as tools or resources for achieving
some end in view. I ask you to look at them as documents that we can
interpret in an effort to understand the possibilities emerging in
the world around us. What do these and similar sites suggest about
important possibilities unfolding for our Bildungspolitik.
Four Developments
20: It is important to note that technology in education is
nothing new. Schools as we know them were invented in the sixteenth
century as educators developed ways to make effective use of printed
texts as supports for the educational process. The technology of
schooling has not changed much from roughly 1500; it has simply
spread from a few institutions for the children of leading elites in
early modern European cities, to a worldwide, universal system of
compulsory schooling. The technology of schools as we know them has
been an extremely successful technology, but one that has significant
limitations and problematic characteristics inherent in it. When
Bismarck called politics the "art of the possible," he
called in effect for a strategic sense with respect to possibilities.
The politician should attend, not simply to any random possibility,
but to those that provide significant alternatives to the structural
weaknesses of the status quo. In doing that, it became the art, die
Lehre, of the possible.
21: In the remarks that follow, I will concentrate on four such
strategic possibilities arising with and through development of the
Internet and related technologies in education. These are matters
that pertain to long-standing systemic difficulties of existing
educational structures. Our method will be to look at representative
resources of the World Wide Web and to interpret their possible
meaning relative to the difficulties of the status quo. We start with
systemic difficulties of our educational environment and contemplate
various examples of what the Internet makes possible and ask whether
these might present opportunities for our Bildungspolitik
that we may want to actively develop. The four areas I will address
are equalizing educational opportunity, improving interaction between
schools and universities, opening classrooms and schools up as
centers of communication, and changing constraints on the politics of
the curriculum. Let us reflect on each of these topics in turn.
Equalizing Education Opportunity
22: Cultural historians need to deal with two problems of
understanding that other social scientists can often ignore –
the need to compare the historic prospects of mature developments
with immature ones, and the need to account for periods of latency in
the dynamics of historic change. Both of these are very pertinent to
grasping the prospects for the Internet in education.
23: Schools as they stand are very mature institutions. Digital
technologies confront us with a long-term, far-reaching
transformation in our culture. Educational technologies as they will
be conditioned by these new technologies are in a very nascent state.
We have to compare the known with the indefinite. As a consequence,
the wise interpreter looks for signs of changes under way, not for
demonstrations of their fully developed actuality. That is the burden
arising on having to compare the historic prospects of the mature
system with those of the immature. To compound the difficulty, with
significant changes, a prolonged period of latency can precede the
emergence of palpable evidence of what is taking place.
24: In everyday physics, such latency phenomena are commonplace,
for instance, whenever a variety of substances undergo a change of
phase, as when ice melts or water boils. As the experimenter adds
heat to cold water, its temperature increases, and its volume expands
minutely but distinctly, increment by increment, until the water
reaches the temperature of 100° centigrade. Then it continues
at fixed temperature to absorb a significant quantity of further heat
before boiling off as steam. With digital technologies in education,
we are not simply adding inputs that will make incremental
improvements in the performance of the existing system. We are adding
inputs that will force a change of phase in that system – in due
course. Unfortunately, we are now in the midst of that period of
latency in which much added input will have at the systemic level no
discernable effect.
25: History has many such latency phenomena and they make the
evaluation of historical change very difficult. As a consequence, we
need to exercise an element of imagination in thinking about possible
transformations. The existing system of education has had chronic,
general difficulties delivering on aspirations to equality of
educational opportunity. This is not simply an American difficulty,
but a general difficulty encountered by a worldwide system of
schooling. The children of the well educated do better on average in
school than do the children of the poorly educated. We cannot here
plumb this phenomenon to its depths. Let us be content to be
suggestive. Let us simply note three reasons why this differential
pertains and contemplate representative sites on the Web that suggest
ways in which the Internet may break existing checks limiting the
equality of educational opportunity.
26: First, the children of the well educated have much better
information about how the system works than do the children of the
poorly educated. Schools have difficulty delivering a good sense of
what the options for higher education might be for their students.
Only relatively well-financed schools, ipso facto schools for the
children of the well-educated, can afford extensive information on
opportunities in higher education and counselors advising students on
how to prepare for the transition. Imagine yourself now a student
entering the seventh grade in the Frederick Douglass Academy, a
public school in central Harlem dedicated to the idea that children
from low-income families can succeed academically. Classrooms there
are connected to the Internet via broadband linkages and the student
there from the seventh grade on has immediate access to all sorts of
sites dedicated to the college-entrance process. Look, for instance,
at the College and University list on Yahoo –
http://www.yahoo.com/Regional/Countries/United_States/Education/Colleges_and_Universities/all.html
It is a fast-growing, comprehensive list of pointers to American
institutions of higher education. There are many more specialized
listings that students will find useful for their individual
purposes, but this one will make the point: full information about
higher education is becoming ubiquitous in wired schools. To what
degree will such resources open full understanding of options within
the educational system to any student at any place at any time? Will
such resources tend to perpetuate inequities in educational
opportunity or diminish them?
27: Second, the children of the well educated have casual access
to higher quality print resources than do the children of the poorly
educated. Insofar as we fulfill the telos of the
Internet, making all cultural resources available to any person at
any place at any time, we overcome this differential. Take, for
instance, the Digital Dante project that
Jennifer Hogan, a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia, has been developing
over the past four years.
http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/projects/dante/index.html
A wide variety of people contribute dynamically to this site –
leading Dante scholars, translators, designers, and teachers. It has
features that will engage people of diverse interests and
sophistictions, from comparing translations and studying bilingual
presentations to playing Dante, assigning contemporary figures,
according to the player’s judgment, relative to the moral
psychology of the poem, to various rungs of hell, purgatory, or
paradise. Hogan is pilot testing the site with a group of eleventh
and twelfth graders in a Harlem school, beginning to test the
hypothesis that a complex, many-leveled resource will prove
intrinsically educational. Mass entertainments are usually pitched at
single levels of sophistication, designed to amuse an audience but to
leave sensibilities and capacities unchanged. Educational works
invite entry at one level and provide internal opportunities for a
student to transform his or her skills and tastes, engaging in
self-development through the work. Will the Internet make sites that
sustain educational engagement in this sense more widely available to
any person at any place at any time than they have up to now been?
28: Third, the children of the well educated have a better chance
of attending schools that use powerful pedagogies purposefully. It is
difficult to tell whether this differential will significantly change
with the use of digital technologies in education. Currently, drill
and practice programs are more heavily used in schools for children
of low economic status. I believe that this tendency results from
historical inertia carrying prior practices into the digital
environment. As schools become well networked, teachers will find it
increasingly easy to share their ideas about teaching and to post
their favorite resources. The effect should be to spread good
practice throughout all parts of the system. A good example can be
found at the website for the Dalton school astronomy course,
developed by Malcolm Thompson, a most gifted teacher in a school for
highly advantaged children.
http://www.nltl.columbia.edu/Groups1/Astro/home.html
Without the Internet, teachers and students in less privileged
settings would have no way to gain access to Thompson’s
pedagogical innovations. With the Internet, the exchange of good
practice becomes more feasible and more routine. Another excellent
example of a teacher sharing an innovative web-based course is the
CyberEnglish course developed at the Murry Bergtraum High School in
downtown New York by Ted Nellen.
http://mbhs.bergtraum.k12.ny.us/cybereng/
Will norms of good practice become more flexible as teachers
everywhere realize that they can present their innovations and
achievements to their peers? Will teaching gain stature as a
profession as it becomes a domain of work that is increasingly open
to the public?
29: Developments such as these suggest that the Web can possibly
have a significant effect promoting the equality of educational
opportunity. To make this assertion, however qualified, is not to
assert that the spread of digital technologies into the culture will
follow egalitarian lines. Those with wealth and power enjoy the
fruits of innovation much earlier than those without. We can predict
that the processes by which technology enters schools will for a time
reinforce existing distinctions. When fully introduced, however, the
sorts of sites we have been considering suggest that the net effect
will possibly be very egalitarian.
30: There are some serious risks that the net effect of the
innovations can possibly exacerbate educational inequalities as well.
Until recently the popular culture and the school culture have been
diverging and the combination of well-networked computers in both
schools and homes may bring those two cultures back into a
self-reinforcing relationship. Where this reconnection of home and
school were to happen, it would greatly strengthen educational
performance. Unfortunately, the children of financially secure
families are much more likely to have access to good computers in
both school and home than are others. If the convergence of the
school culture and the home culture is what makes the significant
educational difference, then the net effect could seriously aggravate
class differences. Some hold that market forces will drive the cost
of home technology to levels at which networked computers will be as
widely distributed as televisions and telephones. Perhaps. But very
possibly, advanced societies will need to make special policy efforts
to ensure that a persistent class differential in home access to
technology does not substantially exacerbate educational differences
over the next few decades. But insofar as the technology reaches both
homes and schools, networked digital media will empower students far
more effectively than current arrangement do, and this added
empowerment will have the greatest relative benefit for those who
currently are least advantaged.
Interactions between Schools and Universities
31: Throughout the modern era, the distance between high intellect
and the education of the ordinary person has grown steadily greater.
This gap causes significant problems for democratic decision-making
with respect to issues that demand great expertise. Consistently, the
frontiers of professional practice, interpretative scholarship, and
research science become more and more esoteric. At the same time, the
Baconian recognition that knowledge is power becomes more and more
imperious and the ordinary person seems reduced to an intellectual
minority. In the face of these developments, one has difficulty
believing in the possibility of disengaging from rule by paternal
experts. It seems so inescapably wise, prudent, and necessary.
32: I do not want to propound a populism that discards high
intellect. The sense of possibility about relations between expertise
and the populace has become so constrained, however, that it is
nearly impossible to consider the opposite -- that we can restructure
access to realms of expertise in ways that enable the populace to
participate effectively in them. Let us contemplate nevertheless the
possibility of a populism that universalizes high intellect. Perhaps
it will turn out to be one of those surprising possibilities that
history sometimes springs on humanity.
33: We take so completely for granted the gap between the highly
cultivated and the ordinary person that we rarely try to explain it
in a substantial way. Instead, we incant one or another circular
explanation -- the gap comes about as a result of "increasing
specialization," which is simply another name for the gap
itself. Dare we ask why specialization has increased? Why do ordinary
people find it so difficult to grasp domains of expertise? To say
that they are not smart enough does not really suffice, for most
experts, who have shown themselves to be smart enough to be experts
in something, are ordinary people with respect to most other domains
of expertise. To say that there is just too much to know to be expert
in everything begins to move towards an answer. It leads to the
simple question, Why is there "too much?"
34: To answer this question, observe through modern history how
the tools requisite for advancing knowledge and the state-of-the-art
in field after field have become more and more elaborate, costly, and
fragile in use. The research library, the archive, the observatory,
the operating room, the well-instrumented laboratory, the diving
bell, the space shuttle -- all these are expensive places where only
a few, highly-trained people can work without disrupting and
degrading the effort. The expertise of the expert lies largely in his
or her having mastered the tools of the domain, tools that will work
only by restricting them to carefully selected and well-trained
practitioners. In short, places of high intellect are profoundly
elitist, not by choice, but by the inherent necessity of their operation.
35: Or is the necessity an historical necessity, one contingent on
long-standing historical conditions? It is with reference to this
question that we should contemplate, again as cultural historians
reflecting on the human meanings of certain developments, various
domains of expertise upon the Internet. Network digital multimedia
changes the terms of access to once restricted provinces. To be sure,
thresholds still exist and the new access is virtual rather than
material, but it can often be substantial, allowing people at a
distance to control a complex apparatus and to receive the results of
work they thus produce with it.
36: Consider, for instance, the Project Perseus site and its
effect on access to classical studies. Modern academic disciplines go
back historically to the way F. A. Wolf defined the Homeric question
in the mid 18th century, and the classics
have remained a point of tension between drives to specialization and
ideas about general education ever since. Classic studies are an
interesting measure of the problem because the range of resources
relevant to the field is limited and thus not too estranged from the
reach of the lay person. The sources are expensive enough, however,
that only some schools could acquire them, and there was the obvious
threshold difficulty of language competence. Thus at the point of
their widest dissemination, classical studies defined at most a
fairly broad elite. The limited number of ancient texts and works of
art has made the field a good candidate for digitization of its
resources and hence tools for classical studies are becoming
available on line. What are the possibilities for engagement as a
result? The Perseus site is worth contemplating in this context.
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/art&arch.html
It provides anyone connected to the Internet very substantial
access to the full range of resources available for study of the
ancient Greeks. Clearly, by itself, such access will not make a
classicist of everyman. But it opens up the issue of how educators
can use such resources effectively in the course of the average
person’s education. What hitherto was a material impossibility
may henceforth become a function of pedagogical preference and choice.
37: Much the same holds for many areas of scientific research. The
great paradox with empirical science has been the way that education
in it has been dogmatic. The empirical groundings of scientific
thinking have been largely beyond the reach of the educational
process. With instrumentation increasingly shifting from analogue to
digital readings, the empirical base of much scientific work becomes
available routinely on-line. Given the ease and accuracy with which
digital systems can reproduce and transmit that data, it all comes
within the telos of the Internet, becoming
accessible to any person at any place at any time. Again, as with
Perseus, the problem then becomes one of finding pedagogies whereby
ordinary persons can fruitfully study what hitherto had been off
bounds and out of reach. And here we encounter a most unusual feature
of the emerging conditions for working with advanced knowledge: tools
have become so powerful and data sets so complicated that simplifying
strategies providing powerful, intuitive means of visualization and
simulation have become necessary to researchers. These tools work so
well that relationships that once required great mathematical
sophistication to grasp are now apparent to immediate visual
observation, not only by researchers, but also by nearly anyone who looks.
38: One can find diverse examples of these developments on the
Internet. I offer two from the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, a
component of Columbia University that is set apart from our main
campus and is supported entirely by external research funds at a
level of over $100 million annually. Education has been outside of
LDEO's mission. Until recently, that is -- to everyone's surprise, it
is becoming a natural extension of pure research efforts there to
extend the visualization tools and the like that they are developing
so that students in elementary and secondary classrooms can work with
massive scientific databases.
http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/EV/EarthViewHome.html
http://ingrid.ldgo.columbia.edu/
Groups that develop the most advanced scientific databases are
increasingly also simultaneously developing powerful means by which
students in schools can work directly with the materials. Time alone
will reveal what effect these developments will have on the
accessibility of expert domains. They are likely much more quickly to
change the patterns of interaction between higher education and
elementary and secondary schools. Historically, the intellectual
apparatus of higher education has been too costly and fragile for use
in schools. As that apparatus becomes digitized, students and
teachers the world around can make routine use of it. The pedagogical
challenge that educators face is to develop educational strategies to
activate these resources effectively in educational experience. One
of the major tools in doing that will be a third area where new
possibilities are developing, the role of classrooms as active
centers of communication.
Opening Classrooms as Communications Centers
39: Traditional classrooms are closed societies. The bell rings,
the door shuts, and the class comes to order. The resources in that
closed society are relatively sparse -- the textbook, a few
supplementary materials and possibly an encyclopedia, and the
teacher's stock of knowledge. It is hard, on-demand, to amplify a
given day's discourse. The school library is limited. Access to it
during class time is inconvenient. These communications constraints
have conditioned the educational possibilities within classrooms for
centuries. Consider whether the Internet may change them.
40: The Internet changes the location of intellectual resources
fundamentally. In physical form, collections have a whereabouts and
users must go to those locations. With fully developed digital
networks, the movement is reversed: users are at one or another place
and collections come to their locations. Formerly, the classroom and
the library were in different places; now the library enters the
classroom and not only the library that happens to be in the school,
but full, aggregate digital library of the World Wide Web. The
challenge is to make full use of it there in each and any classroom.
The task is immense; the change fundamental; and it does not end with
this movement of resources to the student.
41: Consider the Ralph Bunche School, which has students in grades
4 through 6 and is located in West Harlem.
http://ralphbunche.rbs.edu/
Here, under the dedicated leadership of Paul Reese, one of the
pioneers introducing the Internet in schools, students regularly use
the Internet as a communications medium in a number of distinct ways.
First, they publish a monthly newspaper on the Web that presents
events in the school and s significant sampling of student work.
Second, they create stories, artwork, and commentaries for
presentation of the Web. And third they solicit extensive input from
people outside the school, using the Web as a medium for gathering
data from the external world -- for instance input relevant to an
inductive study of probability. Too often students experience their
education as something done to them, something that they must
passively endure. Children who use the Internet to communicate their
work and to solicit participation from others in it will be less
likely to be estranged from their own education in this way. The
opportunity to situate educational work in far-flung communicative
experiences is rapidly growing and potentially it can have a
significant influence on the meaning students attach to their
educational experience.
42: Students at the Ralph Bunche School demonstrate that advanced
communications capacities can help transform the educational
experience even in the elementary grades. Later in the educational
experience, such communications capacities are even more significant.
Desktop video conferencing will soon open the classroom even wider.
Already inexpensive programs such as CUSeeMe are helping students
share common interests and reach out to peers and experts in diverse
locations. Two trends will greatly expand these capacities in the
next ten years. Bandwidth is increasingly rapidly while video and
audio compression technologies are improving substantially. To be
sure, traffic on the Internet is likely to remain susceptible to
congestion, but given the underlying trends, that congestion will
simply be evidence that use of video conferencing is spreading
throughout the system.
Changing the Politics of the Curriculum
43: Finally, consider the character of the political tensions that
accompany decisions about school curricula. For the past 500 years,
the curriculum has consisted of compressed surveys of selected
subjects scaled to fit within usable textbooks. The scale of the
curriculum has not been a function of what is worthwhile in the
culture, but rather what a limited set of books can encompass.
Children could not carry a great encyclopedia around with them in
their backpacks. Consequently, the politics of the curriculum
involved a competition to exclude materials judged pernicious and to
include those deemed essential. This competition is at the heart of
the conflict between multiculturalists and defenders of the cannon.
This competition is rapidly becoming meaningless and unnecessary.
44: In truth, for every literary tradition there is a broad,
living cannon, one far more inclusive and challenging than any of the
pale representations of it in official curricula. And each of these
has an integral worth to it. Is the person who reads Cervantes
instead of Shakespeare significantly disadvantaged? We have the
opportunity to build a curriculum that does not rest on a host of
exclusions. This new curriculum will put a tremendous premium on
inclusion and diversity. Visit some of the major digital library
sites -- I'll point to a few parts of Columbia's digital library, as
I know it best. You can find similar doorways into the aggregate
library of the Web through most research and public libraries. All of
these bring new kinds of collections into schools.
http://www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/libraries/digital/texts/
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/libraries/indiv/ets/offsite.language.html
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/libraries/indiv/ets/offsite.subject.html
An astounding curricular variety is increasingly possible.
Educators will need to decide whether or not to embrace it.
45: What is likely to be the issue troubling the public as it
engages this variety? What are the wellsprings of cultural vitality
and depth? Is it important that everyone within a community should
have mastered a least common denominator identical, or nearly so, for
all? I must say that personally, the least common denominator is of
little use. I find myself able to function at a higher level of
intelligence in interacting with people who have had an education of
some depth and rigor, regardless of whether or not it included a
single set of common cultural resources. I suggest that we at least
entertain the possibility that a curriculum that maximizes quality
and diversity will have human consequences far more preferable than
those that result from a curriculum that achieves commonality at the
cost of quality. In this context, it is worth visiting one school
that we have helped link to the Internet. It is a small Muslim school
associated with the Mosque that Malcolm X founded on 116th
Street between Lenox and St. Nicholas Avenues, the Clara Mohammed School.
http://pindar.ilt.columbia.edu/heap/schools/scm/
This school is deeply distinctive and ambitious in its educational
program, despite the fact that it has few financial resources with
which to work. The school seeks to develop a tri-lingual curriculum,
using English, French, and Arabic. Routine access to the Internet has
made a big difference in its ability to achieve these goals. If it
does so well, will it serve its students better, children of poor
minority families, than if it had a more typical curriculum?
A Concluding Imperative
46: In closing, I want to reflect on one imperative that seems to
me important if we are to bring possibilities for educational
improvement to historical fruition. During the twentieth century in
the United States, and I suspect elsewhere as well, people have been
paying more and more attention to teaching, and the official didactic
program of the school, as the one, significant causal factor
determining the outcome of educational activity. According to the
conventional wisdom, education is what happens when teachers teach
something effectively and students learn it well, absorbing precisely
what has been taught. Continued acceptance of this habit of thought
will lead us to ignore the most significant opportunities of change
presented by the Internet and related technologies.
47: For every teacher in the system there are twenty to thirty
students. We should introduce advanced technologies as investments in
our students. We have the opportunity to use capital to enhance the
capacity of students to do their work, to study, which is a much more
complex activity than simply learning what their teachers teach.
Students learn, but they also criticize, think, probe, scrutinize,
judge, question, hypothesize, and disagree. Students inquire,
observe, theorize, map, reason, assume, examine, inventory, seek,
challenge, dispute, hope, quote, speculate, infer, conjecture,
suppose, list, investigate, notice, recognize, contest, and tinker.
They converse, create, wonder, reflect, travel, doubt, solve,
understand, and write. Students also predict, perceive, inspect,
comment, read, conform, honor, refute, debate, compose, oppose,
discuss, invent, copy, search, picture, measure, compare, record,
estimate, and consult. And finally they analyze, deduce, guess,
memorize, listen, evaluate, formulate, simulate, meditate, admire,
muse, emulate, aspire, waver, synthesize, weigh, contrast, associate,
catalog, compute, assert, and so on through all the verbs that
describe the human capacities for cultural activity. Advanced
technologies are tools to make study, the work of students, more
efficient and effective. They enable students to do all these
activities with greater power and self-direction. Tools of study can
vastly amplify the range of educational possibility.
48: Look at the tools with which school children work. They are
essentially the same as they became in the sixteenth century.
Textbooks, notepads, pens and pencils, book bags, desks, slates and
chalk, various visual aids -- all these were invented centuries ago.
They condition what pedagogies will be successful. They require,
after the elementary matters have been introduced, that the day be
divided into periods devoted to distinct subjects. Across diverse
subjects and ages, groups recite in unison lessons duly learned. Over
and over, innovations in pedagogy have been tried, and over and over
practice has gravitated back to long standing norms, for those norms
accord with what most students can accomplish given their traditional
tools. By providing students with new, powerful information tools, we
change what students can accomplish, and as we change what students
can accomplish, we change what pedagogies can usefully prevail.
49: What are the implications of this potential for investment in
the ability of students to carry out their work? From my experience
with the effect of the Internet in classrooms, it will conduce
towards an intellectually rigorous progressive education accessible
to all. To make this renewal of progressivism work, it is important
to accomplish four things in the classroom:
Where these prevail, all students learn; they learn with depth and
rigor; and they take possession of their learning as their own.
50: By investing in the power of students to conduct study well,
we have the opportunity to renegotiate the ecology of educational
effectiveness. During the first half of the 20th century, progressive
educational ideas were widely tried and they generally failed in
practice. We should, at this point it the discussion, understand why
-- the intellectual resources available to students and teachers in
closed classrooms were insufficient to sustain productive projects
and inquiry. Given the limits that even a highly learned teacher
would bring to the classroom, given the paucity of books and other
materials, twenty-five curious students following an open-ended line
of inquiry will quickly exhaust the teacher's ability to respond with
point and authority. Progressive education could not, and did not,
work in closed classrooms -- the appropriate setting did not exist.
51: By investing in the power of students to work with effect, we
open the classroom and make it an appropriate setting for an
intellectually rigorous progressive education accessible to all.
Technological innovations do not originate the aspirations of
progressive education -- those go back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, to
Goethe, Pestalozzi, and Froebel. They lead through the great
educational thinkers of this century -- Dewey, Montessori, Freire.
Technological innovations do not create ideas, or hopes and
aspirations, but they do change the ecology of feasibility. Consider
how in the sixteenth century, the spread of printing helped turn
medieval heresies, which had a century earlier been easily
suppressed, into major reforms of Christendom. The ideas of the
Reform and the Counter Reform were not new, but owing to print, in
the sixteenth century their feasibility was markedly greater than in
the fourteenth. In the same way, the Internet changes what is
possible in education. The Internet challenges educators to make the
best of those possibilities actual by providing students the most
powerful tools of telecommunications in our culture -- that is the
imperative we face. Let us grasp it.
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