Power and Pedagogy: Transforming Education through Information Technology

Chapter Six - Education and the Civic Agenda

Computer-based schools and the cumulative curriculum will cost money. In order to construct a technology-based educational system, the level and structure of educational expenditures must change. Let us estimate some numbers.

Currently, kindergarten through twelfth grade, spending for instructional materials per pupil amounts to a small fraction of the total. Most goes instead for salaries of teachers and staff. With a heavy infusion of technology, educational costs for salaries, plant, and the like will probably not decline. Assume that technology makes it possible to have fewer teachers, a questionable assumption: the level of the teachers' average salary would likely rise proportionately, keeping labor-related costs even. Hence to implement a technology-based educational system, we should expect total per-pupil costs to increase significantly, with a big rise in spending for instructional materials and equipment. "Other expenditures for instruction," a mix of many things, now amount to a bit over 9 percent of expenditures per pupil, and of these, about 2.5 percent, on average less than $100 per pupil per year, go for instructional supplies such as textbooks, library books, and instructional resources.

Assume that special investments saturate the schools with technology. This saturation will require a computer notepad for each student with wireless network link; a high-function workstation for every four students; a substantial infrastructure of servers, networking, teachers workstations, and special displays; and a significant complement of software and digitized contents. We cannot predict exactly what these will cost as the technology matures. Costs of $2,000 in each of the four categories, amounting to a per-pupil technology investment of $8,000, would probably be high. Costs of $750 in each, a total of $3,000, would probably be low. Accountants will treat this investment as property with a five-year useful life. For parts of the investment, the actual life might be shorter, owing both to intensity of use and rapidity of obsolescence. The upshot is an annual, per-pupil technology cost between $600 and $2,500, most likely, let us guess, around $1,250, which, when added to current expenditures, would increase per pupil costs about one-quarter over current levels. This increase is sufficiently large to require a compelling public justification.

Having to develop powerful justifications for substantial increases in educational expenditures is not a novel challenge. Universal, compulsory school systems evolved as nations found reason to devote increasing percentages of their GNP's to such costly instructional efforts. Over the past five hundred years, educating the person and the public has never become more efficient, providing equivalent or increased output for substantially less input. Rather it has become more important, more valued, with parents and polities deciding that increased educational results are worth increased costs. Great educational activists like Horace Mann and Henry Barnard proceeded by developing a civic consensus to increase the level of educational expenditure and effort. In precisely this way, policy justifications for a computer- based educational system will need to convince the public that the increased costs bring benefits that justify the added expenditures.

To justify increased educational effort we need to arouse passion and commitment; we need a will to believe. Prissy pundits find it easy, retrospectively, to disclose the interplay of self-interest within transforming movements, but prissy pundits rarely work change in their own world. To build the existing educational system, many people had to act counter to their narrowest self- interests. Educational reformers needed both stratagems to rationalize participation along with visions to inspire it. In building a new educational system, we cannot demand purity of purpose, but we must call for greatness of vision, for the changes needed will entail far more than simple readjustments of existing efforts. To institute a new system of education, educators will need to marshal large arguments of broad public purpose. To do that, leaders will need to excite pedagogical passion, to articulate an educational vision, to risk failure for the sake of a novel, untested, yet moving future, for an educative polity.

To change the pedagogical world, educators need both material agency and humane vision, both power and pedagogy. To change the world, people need reasons to take risks, to incur resistance and hazard failure. They need forceful agencies with which to stake success, to grasp the opportunities for action that their vision avails them. New agencies will be at hand with the development of computer-based education. To what degree can we provide ourselves with the historic vision that will enable us to put this power to worthwhile use? What reasons do we have for taking the educational risks inherent in the pursuit of fundamental change? As Poor Richard said, "would you persuade, speak of interest, not of reason." In looking for these reasons, let us speak first to interests, then we can turn second to established civic goals and third to novel aspirations.

In diverse ways increased educational expenditures can bring substantial offsetting benefits. Broadly speaking these benefits are of two kinds. One consists of improvements in well-being that result from educational success. Throughout the population, a better education translates, to some degree, into increased productivity and a greater ability, personal and public, to capitalize on opportunities for bettering the quality of life. The other kind of benefit consists of savings accrued by reducing the mounting costs, public and private, that result from educational failure. Costs of crime, unemployment, even aspects of health may be considered, to some degree, as costs incurred because the educations many receive are insufficient to prepare them to deal with the world they inhabit. Less educational failure would lower the cost of coping with calamities. Let us look at the costs of failure more closely, and then return to the improvements that educational success can bring.

Resist at the outset the parsimonious effort to put the whole burden of social policy on educational reform. Much educational failure is not a failure of education. Many problems in schools are not problems of schools. Hungry children, the tired, the sick, the brutalized, the frightened, the homeless: they will not succeed, on average, in any school. Despairing, disillusioned youths, whether rich or poor, will see no reason to develop their abilities. Without real leadership and without social policies that address the extra- curricular causes of educational failure, large-scale educational reform can be a cruel hoax for the disadvantaged. The schools fail them, first, for reasons that are extrinsic to education and improving the educational efforts, without addressing the extrinsic problems, will benefit the disadvantaged little. In effect, educational reform without strong social policies will improve institutions that work best for the children of the middle and upper classes, while leaving in place a system of causalities that make the schools work poorly for the poor.

Resist likewise, however, the short-sighted effort to put the whole burden of educational reform on social policy. Much educational failure is a failure of education, and many problems in schools are indeed problems of schools. Intensive use of educational technology can make schools more effective for all and more effective especially for those currently floundering in our print-based educational system. If we are serious about social betterment through education, we will not finance educational reform by diverting into education expenditures needed for other social services.

Assuming decent policies in those other social services and effective school reform, however, reducing the failure and insufficiency of education could eventually lead to significant cost savings to society. Jail is expensive. Welfare dependency costs a substantial amount and it withdraws talent and energy from the work place. Long-term joblessness keeps the economy in a state of under-employment and may slacken incentives to innovation. If, over decades, the frequency of failure and under-achievement in the educational system can be diminished significantly, then it would be reasonable to expect these large social costs to be substantially less than they would otherwise be.

Likewise, positive benefits from improved education would arise over the long-term as better performance affects relative national advantage and fundamental economic prospects. In the late 1950s the pursuit of relative national advantage through education resulted in the National Defense Education Act. Now the quest for military preparedness is giving way to the problems of remaining competitive in a global economy. A fully developed computer- based educational system can have three types of significant effect on the over-all competitiveness of the American productive enterprise.

It would be premature, however, to estimate from current experience how the educational transformation would increase production and save on social costs, or to attach precise dollar benefits to them. Large-scale structural changes in education will take ten to twenty years to develop and introduce. Their benefits will accrue over the ensuing decades, becoming fully evident only in the mid-twenty-first century. It is like planting oak trees -- our children and their children will be the beneficiaries. Is it worthwhile to take expensive initiatives, when their outcome will long be uncertain?

Consider the wager. If substantial improvements in education can be wrought, their long-term future benefits will be great. If they cannot be achieved, the long-term future consequences may be serious, driving a wedge of inequality deeper and deeper into society, separating those that the educational system benefits further and further from those that it fails. The opportunity to improve education through investment in digital technology is quite new. Conditions are ripe for reaping a high payoff. Since no society presently spends much for educational technology, added investment in it is unlikely to encounter the law of diminishing returns for a significant time. Hence, spending on educational technology would seem to be the reasonable bet for substantially improving education, but to take the risk out of the calculation, to convert the bet into a certain benefit, would require that we claim more than we can presently justify.

When all is said and done, rational calculations of advantage associated with major innovations are wagers, fraught with unknowns. Retrospectively, the highly successful innovations seem to have been sure things, but prospectively they were not. Entrepreneurial and technological vision consists in acting wisely yet decisively in the face of uncertainty. Why take the risk? In this case, the risk may be worth taking for multiple reasons. Chances are good that indeed the practical consequences of the effort will be highly beneficial. Additionally, the social and human effects of the changes may be both significant and desirable. We turn to the second set of reasons justifying the risks of innovation: intensive use of technology in education may lead toward fulfillment of established civic goals.

Although the agenda of freedom has taken great strides in recent history, that of equality has not. Each year during the 1980s the percentage of Americans living below the poverty level was higher than in any year during the 1970s. Significant portions of the population are addicted, nearly unemployable. Uncounted families cling to survival -- homeless people hawking Street News, begging, and scamming, and groveling through the refuse of the middle class for cans and bottles redeemable for a nickel each. Many, prideful on having made it, blame social failure on the failings of those who suffer the failure, and espouse social policies designed primarily to help those already adept at helping them- selves. In our willingness to bail out bankers who mismanaged the savings of the middle class while we cut back on programs to serve those most in need, we poorly represent the centuries of humanitarian progressivism that has animated our traditions. Pascal put it well: "we do not display greatness by going to one extreme, but in touching both at once, and filling all the intervening space." Freedom without equality does not sum to greatness: the agenda of equality requires renewed civic effort.

Educationally the agenda of equality appear in the prevalence of drugs, dropping-out, and the difficulty of making schools work in areas of chronic urban and rural poverty. These are big problems and they will require complex solutions. Substantial issues of distributive justice complicate these problems, but they do not inhere simply in the unjust allocation of resources. Pedagogically, the problem is one of recognition, a feeling of control over one's own education. Regardless of race, class, gender, religion, or ethnicity, each child should have an equal opportunity to participate in a school that he perceives as an institution that has been designed specifically for him, that serves him, that is his own. If the school appears as a hostile power to the youth, he will see it, not as a resource, but as a threat to be neutralized. School choice may help diminish the prevalence of this situation, but choice between schools may not be as significant as engaging options within schools. Those who feel school now to be alien influences may simply use school choice as a new opportunity to neutralize the threat.

Unfortunately, the current system of schooling is part of the cycle of causality, not a means of breaking it. Interpreters of the education system tend to be people who have done well within it. They experienced schooling as a happy system for self-de- velopment and self-advancement. Interpreters often therefore have difficulty seeing how the experience of the less successful was fundamentally different: for many others, the same system functions as a powerful social sorting mechanism, frustrating their self-development and reinforcing their disempowered status. They experience schooling as a system by which the society at large, even they themselves, legitimate their impoverished prospects. Choosing the "wrong" school will continue to work this way. To counter the causalities of inequality, choice is essential in education, but within schools, not between them. A computer- based system of education may help break the cycles holding the truly disempowered in thrall by creating three forms of significant choice within schools, which they and everyone else, can use to good advantage.

First, the way the current system handles subject-matter is invidious. Size constraints on textbooks require that a very limited selection of ideas and information be packaged together. The materials chosen become, ipso facto, sanctioned by inclusion in the standard texts and tests. The result will harmonize with the experience of some children and be at odds with that of others; some will find more with which they can identify emotionally, and others less. Interest groups realize that what the selection includes and excludes has import, good and bad, for their interests. However, since textbooks have a seriously limited scope, the politics of text development has been a contest to exclude any particulars that may offend some articulate sensibility. Increasingly, such efforts to exclude all possible cultural bias tend simply to render the curriculum pedagogically impotent for all.

In contrast, computer-based curricula can be comprehensive and inclusive. The politics of a computer-based system has the possibility of opening the narrow confines of the standard curricu- lum to genuine multicultural possibilities. With the new system, the politics of curricular development will cease to be exclusionary, be- coming instead a many-sided effort to ensure that what may empower this or that interest finds its place within the spacious system. In a computer-based system, diverse racial and ethnic groups should join to develop multicultural curricula through which high levels of disciplinary mastery can be achieved along numerous paths of interest and inspiration.

Second, reliance on printed sources in the current educational system provides a narrow access-path to the power of knowledge. Those who experience the existing system as disabling do not do well with book learning. To be sure, in theory the system offers them vocational tracks, which put greater stress on learning to make productive use of hand and body. But these tracks have a stigma associated with them because everyone knows that in a print-based culture the only real access to knowledge is through verbal facility: no matter how manually skilled one becomes without high levels of verbal knowledge one will be held mentally second- rate. Insofar as a computer-based system can complement the verbalization of print media with the multi-modal powers of electronic media, multiple access paths for acquiring and manifesting mental excellence will open. This will not do away with distinctions between people with respect to intelligence and intellect, but it can broaden the existing structure of intellectual opportunity.

Third, the way the existing system motivates educational effort through pervasive competition creates a sorting mechanism that deprives disempowered groups of their more able members. Those who succeed in the competitive assent often assimilate to the dominant elites. Imagine an educational system that did a better job at fully developing the potentialities of each person while less effectively grouping and sorting the members of age-cohorts according to their performance on a narrow set of mandarin acquirements. Such a system would be a very different response to the Jeffersonian idea that talents distribute randomly through a population. Rather than co-opting those talents to the service of power and privilege, it would preserve those talents in their random distribution, leavening the whole through a multiplicity of communal excellences. By putting a premium on cooperative learning and by offering a multicultural curriculum with many paths to mastery within it, a computer-based educational system can function in this more genuinely Jeffersonian manner.

Here, we should shift attention from established civic goals to the third set of reasons for incurring educational risks, those concerning novel aspirations. Truly significant change in education may have the potential to redefine the polity itself. If the computer as a system constitutes a fundamental shift in cultural communication, then we should expect concomitantly a significant re-definition of controlling purposes. Values have an historical relativity, without becoming arbitrary and meaningless, without being "relativistic" in the pejorative sense. At any time and place, the given historic context is mandatory, and it entails the importance and validity of some values and the irrelevance and wrongness of others. But across time and place, the given historic contexts change, and with those changes there follow changes in the values that compel allegiance. Politics in a digitized culture may differ in significant ways from the politics in a print culture. As Aristotle observed, "the end of the state is not mere life; it is, rather, a good quality of life." As the contexts change and we come to inhabit a fully digitized culture, we may find ourselves obliged to define "a good quality of life" differently than we did before.

Soon the ethos of "More!" must give way to an ethic of "Enough." As that happens, problems of public purpose will remain, but they will undergo revaluations. In the era of print, those justifying the support of education have contended that schooling is a useful, efficient means for achieving publicly sanctioned ends. For the past few centuries, those publicly sanctioned ends have often been variations on "More!" -- more power, more wealth, more influence, more adherents, more law and order, more consumption, more garbage too. What good did the print-based system serve as it mobilized competitive energies, distributed broadly a level of literate skills through the population, and sorted the young effectively according to the quality of their performance within the system? It served best as a means in the pursuit of "More!" It energized expansion and legitimated the allocation of less to those who fared poorly in the schools. Would the print-based system serve well in support of an ethic of "Enough"? A system that relied on cooperative learning, one that could attract participation in educational self-development, not as a means but as an end itself, one that enhanced a student's quality of life, her bonds with others, her shared experiences of personal meaning, would be an education well adapted to the ethic of "Enough."

A competitive ethos of "More!" can take hold among people when they feel they can safely compete for possession of finite, limited goods. Where the competitors become aware that the competition is fundamentally unsafe and unstable they withdraw from the unbridled continuation of it. In the late twentieth century, the age-long competitions for national advantage, pursued through the pursuit of more population, more armaments, more material output, has become increasingly unsafe and unstable as armaments become too destructive to use, populations too large to feed and nurture, and material output exhausts natural resources and threatens to destabilize world climates and ecologies. A thoroughly cooperative education can lead to a thoroughly cooperative society in which people realize that a good quality of life depends, not on standing higher in the hierarchy of advantages, but on all joining together to realize their common potentials. It leads to an ethos, not of comparative advantage, but of mutual support.

Unlike the various forms of advantage, which are finite and relative, education is not a limited good. More education for one need not mean less for another. This unlimited quality will especially characterize education in a computer-based system, for the dynamics of digitization allow unlimited instances of works and resources without diminishing the originals. In such a situation, education can be a public purpose, one pursued by each and all, without provoking a limiting competition, without one person being pitted against the other. Taken as a means to relative advantage, people have an interest in acquiring learning and withholding it from others. But taken as an end in itself, a controlling definition of "a good quality of life," education gives people an unbound mutual interest -- the educational attainments of others enrich the educa- tional possibilities that I enjoy.

An educative polity will be a polity adapted to a world of finite material resources. An educative polity will be one with infinite spiritual resources, one in which the unlimited potentialities of the human spirit provide the endless frontier. As Heraclitus said long ago, "You could not in your going find the ends of the soul, though you traveled the whole way; so deep is its Logos!"

A computer-based educational system is not the only possible basis for an educative polity, but insofar as it can supplant competitive educational motivations with cooperative ones, and insofar as it can genuinely broaden educational opportunity by opening multiple channels to knowledge, it will facilitate the emergence of one. The computer as a system will make all educative resources available to all people at all times, and it will greatly expand the scope and substance of those materials. In those conditions, education ceases to be mere a means to extrinsic ends and becomes an end itself. With those conditions, power and pedagogy may join to redefine political purpose, making education its central aim, the object of the good life. The stakes are worth the risk.

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