Power and Pedagogy: Transforming Education through Information Technology

Chapter One - A Perspective on the Task

Let's look ahead. In the twenty-second century, how might an historian of education sum up the major changes in pedagogical practice over the sweep of time? Imagine that we commission Elizabeth Ironstone, leading authority on the computer as an agent of change, to study these changes. She reports, not in the multimedia of her time, but in the prose of ours. This might be her executive summary, introducing Toward the Educative Polity.

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Through most of history, education was a loose system of ap- prenticeship and indentured service in households, the main loca- tion of productive activity. Those who wanted their children to be- come learned employed tutors to help them out. A few schools ex- isted within specialized institutions, such as cathedral priories and monasteries, but these were not like the schools that eventually proliferated, for students were not divided into classes or grouped according to age.

Around 1500, a major pedagogical transition began as printing with moveable type made an unprecedented era of educational development possible. But the transition was not a quick and simple change: to bring it off, innovators had to develop a complex of different, yet interrelated, educational strategies, which together eventually made mass schooling for all a practical reality. Key steps in this process involved:

These developments were tightly interrelated. The transition required the integration of complex factors into a functional system: the design of educational space and time; a chosen pattern of educational motivation; pedagogical materials suitable for use in such places with such motivations; methods of instruction suited to the organization of the cultural materials, teachers adept at using such tools and strategies; and arguments demonstrating that the substantial costs of it all were worthwhile -- all were simultaneously essential to the historic transition to mass schooling.

Sixteenth-century educational reformers worked out integration of these six, interrelated matters. For five hundred years, educators perfected, expanded, and developed the basic components of the educational system introduced early in the era of print, in due course creating modern systems of universal, compulsory schooling. As the degree of elaboration and penetration of the system into society changed, the specifics justi- fying the effort evolved to stay synchronized with cultural trans- formations. The main features remained stable, however. The design of the classroom and the organization of the school day, the motivational strategies employed, the scope and sequence of textbooks, the definition of good teaching practice, and the rationales for public support remained very stable. The reason for the underlying stability was rather simple: throughout it all, the character and limitations of printed textbooks remained substan- tially fixed, the keystone of the system.

We who inhabit the electronic ethos of the twenty-second cen- tury must remember that early in the twenty-first, the function of printed materials changed rapidly, becoming restricted to their current role of verifying and guaranteeing standard data sets when the electronic versions possibly could be altered. Before then, physically printed materials had a more central intellectual function. For five hundred years, books were the unmatched resources for making ideas, knowledge, and culture available to students, and so long as this role was unquestioned, educators paid little attention to how the characteristics of books shaped the whole instructional enterprise. But during the last half of the twentieth century, diverse innovations in communication and computation occurred, displacing books from their privileged educational position and creating our current, electronic means of access to cultural achievements.

From our vantage point, we can see how the microcomputer, and all its attendant peripherals, quickly matured into powerful multimedia systems. They thereby created a significant historical dilemma for educators at the end of the twentieth century. How were educators to make use of these new resources? Did the existing educational system comprise permanent, necessary arrangements? Should schools remain forever a system of classrooms for twenty-five children, of similar age and talent, overseen by a single teacher, learning set subjects that had been divided into lessons, competing for grades and recognition? Were these arrangements historically relative accidents, sensible in one communication context, but perhaps vestigial survivals in a new context, with distorted functions? In planning computer-based edu- cational efforts, what should educators take as givens that would remain stable, before and after the introduction of powerful infor- mation technologies?

At first, this question was not clear to educators. Early users of computers in education simply assumed that most features of the given system would remain stable, only getting better through judi- cious use of the new technology -- with a good deal of divergence, we might add, over what "better" might mean. There was an initial wave of enthusiasm, and a strong undertow of skepticism, and lots of ingenious, but encapsulated, efforts to incorporate computers into the educational system. Through such efforts to introduce computers into late-twentieth-century schooling, educators became increasingly aware that the then-existing practice was a complex technical system highly adapted over centuries to making use of books as the prime medium of cultural exchange. Encapsulated innovations repeatedly engendered inflated expectations and produced disappointment and disdain.

Unfortunately, the old system had spawned a huge establish- ment of educational research, which functioned to optimize tech- niques and programs within the given system. Almost all its methods for measuring results were system-specific: they assumed that existing divisions of subject matter were the appropriate domains for testing, that standard grade-levels were fit bases for norming results, and that verbalized information was the prime indicator of learning. The bias of such research helped to protect the existing arrangements from systemic changes.

To organize education to exploit the possibilities of an electronic media for cultural exchange, possibilities far more powerful and flexible than the printed media, educators had to rethink the system as a whole. They needed to take none of it as a given that would necessarily persist, unchanged, from before to after the in- troduction of computers. Further, to assess a new system, relative to the old, they had to develop a whole new type of educational research, one that did not presume, in its standards of testing and measurement, that structural accidents of the old system were educational necessities of timeless applicability. The full, fun- damental re-examination of educational options, and the methods for assessing them, began in the 1990s. It initiated the second historic transition in educational practice.

Looking back from the twenty-second century, the results of this re-examination are clear. Educators began to explore new solu- tions to all aspects of the existing system. They stopped applying computers to the educational strategies that had been developed in the early era of print. Instead, they started to search for edu- cational strategies that seemed sensible in an era of digital informa- tion technologies.

These developments took shape in the decade preceding and following the year 2000. Educators gave up trying to introduce new technologies into the established system and they thought out an alternative system, which ineluctably displaced the old one. They came to call it the Cumulative Curriculum, and one of its pioneers, the educator Frank Moretti, described it this way:

We seek to replace the superficial traveler through the sequential school, who collects knowledge trinkets to memorialize each stop on the cultural itinerary, with the philosophical explorer, whose very search for knowledge is a search for self and community. The word cumulative points to the growing personhood of the child. As the Latin indicates, it is a "heaping up" within. Able to instantly access the totality of his work through time, the child has control of his intellectual history as a series of understandings rather than the usual cryptic external judgments symbolized by [grades]. Accordingly, a child need not see each year as a separate beginning but rather as a continuation of a substantially accumulated educational reality, which is his currency entering a new year. The challenge for the child is to understand his rich past and to plan a series of strategies for moving to the next stage. He chooses his educational future in the context of the world within him that he has already shaped and formed. In this context, adults have to give up the security that comes from pretending to know precisely what it is that children ought to learn, by year, by subject. . . . The child begins with his own rich world, which is the starting point of all inquiries. . . . He understands that the art he will master is that of the tentative hypothesis, the value of which is determined by the degree to which it has to the power to explain. What the student of the cumulative curriculum will perceive as "learned" are formulations whose parenthood is not in doubt. Clear about his ownership and authorship, he will perceive all that he knows as the immediate horizon of his all-too-human vision and will seek to extend it, to glimpse a new world and form new understandings that embrace the old.

Once tried, this effort to help student's take possession of their own learning, to "heap it up from within," succeeded rapidly. Old sequential school systems, which had seemed impervious to change, rapidly adopted the cumulative curriculum. Since its initiation at the turn of the twenty-first century, of course, the new system has evolved steadily, more and more thoroughly displacing the vestiges of the print-based educational system. The results have been liberating and profoundly progressive.

Democracy, which had been, for the most part, a predominantly political development through the twentieth century, has gained a substantial cultural import. The persistent tendency of print-based education to reproduce and accentuate differences of power, privilege, and wealth has been decisively reversed. The digitization of the culture has been thorough and with it participation in its full powers has been decisively broadened and tools that strongly amplify human powers of calculation and control have become accessible to nearly all. The great twentieth-century aspiration, verbalized by John Dewey through Democracy and Education, has become substantively fulfilled, although in an environment of pedagogical practice quite different from any he could then imagine.

Shortly before the year 2000, a long era of international tensions and war, in which national defense had been the prime function of the polity, ended. Peoples of the major nations turned their energies more fully to nurturing their human potentials. The relaxation of tensions coincided with the development of the new media of education. Liberal reformers regained a sense of their efficacy and people became increasingly confident that they could at last solve the long-standing human problems of industrial democracy. As the third millennium began, the idealistic conviction of some, that each person has a stake in the welfare and fulfillment of all, deepened into a general common sense. Material conditions and cultural convictions converged to provide the historical grounds for the worldwide educative polity.

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Our informant from the future depicts an alluring vision, one that we may be tempted to dismiss as too optimistic. But these are times of extraordinary potential and extraordinary change. Educators should not face them blindly, recapitulating past expectations and assumptions. However solid seeming, our educational structures are historical creations subject to thorough transformation through the subsequent dynamics of continuing historical change.

Our informant from the future draws our attention to the need to look at the whole educational system in considering how to introduce information technologies into it. A basic proposition provides the generating principle of this essay: in order to have substantial effect improving education, the digitization of our culture will need to elicit a full systemic innovation in education, one that changes not only the medium of cultural exchange, substituting digital code for print, but the entire educational context for working with that medium.

In the chapters that follow, I advance a case that systemic innovation in education is both desirable and possible. I do so by essaying answers to some large questions:

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Chapter 2