A Strategic Plan for Educational Leadership
January 2000 through December 2004

A Moving Social Vision

Technology is a powerful, yet indeterminate, tool of change. Educators must make their actions with technology serve determinate values; they incur historical responsibilities to be activists with respect to the problems of their times. Technological change is neither a malevolent corrupter nor a beneficent machine that guides itself, able to cure social ills without people choosing to make an effort to do so. In the course of its work in education and technology, the Institute intends to address social and civic problems that merit effort as digital technologies become pervasive in education and culture.

At the turn of the 21st century, the rich enjoy ever-more dynamic wealth while the poor face civic stasis. It is a time of public parsimony. To understand what to do with technology, educators need a diagnosis of this prevailing paucity of purpose. Western societies seem to have backed away from further pursuit of their underlying ideals and aspirations. Post-modernist intellectuals legitimate this abdication with chatter about the irrelevance of grand narratives, as if their endless description of symptoms might somehow serve as a redeeming remedy. It is but another opiate. Educators must ask whether the ideals of equality, autonomous participation, and rational self-governance are intrinsically meaningless and worth no serious common effort? Or have people now withdrawn from pursuing the historical fulfillment of such ideals further for some other reason?

Educators need to diagnosis why a generous civic spirit turns mean and stingy. Public parsimony makes sense, often even to those who still believe and feel deeply committed to the ideals of our liberal traditions, if people believe that they have at their avail no effective means for achieving those ideals. The problem may result from the context, not from the text. The test - the stirring aspiration to achieve enlightenment for all -- may not be wrong and defunct, or unworthy of human hope and effort. Rather people may perceive that the means now available for pursuing these ideals, namely, the techniques of programmatic administration in the context of the democratic nation-state, have reached the limits of their historical effectiveness. The whole complex context of bureaucratic social service and rational public control - schools, hospitals, police, sanitation, public transportation, social services, benefits for this and that, the protection of rights, and on - have all done great good in providing conditions under which life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are meaningful expectations to the majority of people in some societies and to significant minorities in others. But where they have been most effective, the further extension of their effects slows; their costs accelerate; and they approach the limits of their effectiveness - limits that leave the driving ideals far short of fulfillment. As effort approaches its limits, people question the value of additional effort, for its cost will prove high and its results low.

To break through the prevailing public parsimony, educators need to rekindle belief that people have effective means for advancing basic ideals towards historical achievement. With familiar means approaching their limits, this breakthrough requires a transformation in which new principles of action incorporate and transcend the old, working well where the old have ceased to have effect. Educators should adopt new communications technologies, not because these are, in themselves, some sort of good, but because they may offer new means, renewing pursuit of long established, but far-from-finished goals. As people address the limits of action evident in existing programs, a moving social vision will emerge. Public parsimony will give way when people begin to see significant achievements in areas where they have ceased to expect them. The Institute wants to address two such domains.

From social reproduction to educational self-determination. Ideas of educational self-determination motivated the original creation of modern school systems. Each person should have substantial opportunity to cultivate his or her potentials to the full, and as Jefferson perceived, those societies that best delivered such opportunities to their members would thrive, able to draw on the fully developed spectrum of human abilities dispersed through the populace. During the 20th century, the leading nation-states have expended vast resources to implement this rationale. The results, profoundly characteristic of modern life, fall far short of the ideal. The system legitimates a second-class status for those who fail at school. It offers some a measure of educational self-determination, which works to co-opt renewing talent into established elites while in the aggregate it reproduces socio-economic divisions and biases.

Existing schools fail to serve many people well, and very few members of the public believe that additional monies or improved leadership will suddenly enable existing schools to meet effectively the needs of those it now so poorly serves. The Institute believes it is of compelling civic importance to redress poor performance by the schools. Educators using technologies in ways that will transform the system must show that a new system of education can meet the needs of the rural and inner-city poor. The Eiffel Project and the North Hudson Electronic Education Empowerment Project (NHEEEP) have this goal.

Advanced media in education are promising as a positive solution to existing inequalities because they introduce new causal forces in education. New technologies are not merely a good to be distributed, but a force to be shaped and activated. In concept, networked multimedia can make the richest, most powerful resources of our culture available to anyone, anywhere, at any time, and in principle this change should have greatest relative value to those who presently have least access to the fullness of our culture. All children will benefit, but the least advantaged children can benefit the most. The Institute holds that digital learning technologies bear within them potentials for renewing the historical pursuit of progressive social consequences. The Institute will work to activate that promise.

Democracy in a world of global, inter-generational choice. With the rise of industrialism and the spread of advanced techniques in economics, medicine, law, and government, much of life has been stabilized and rendered relatively predictable. That has not, however, banished risk and uncertainty, but rendered them more abstract, more global, and more long-ranged. With these transformations, problems of public choice change significantly. Accountability, which could once be handled well through elections every few years within localities, regions, and nation-states, now becomes, in addition, a global, inter-generational problem, turning often on obtusely abstract relationships, visible -- if visible at all -- only through very sophisticated statistical analyses and projections.

Global development brings challenges of astounding complexity and frightening finality. As people find themselves caught in a present, facing an indeterminate future, having to make uncertain choices, needing to live thereafter with the consequences, measures of educational quality for the person and for the public prove to be prospective, not retrospective. Whether the education acquired turns out to have been excellent or egregious depends on unfolding experience and their ability to cope well with it. Old norms mean little if they prove irrelevant to future hazards. Henry Adams described it well -- "Not a man there knew what his task was to be, or was fitted for it; every one without exception, Northern or Southern, was to learn his business at the cost of the public. . . . Their education was to cost a million lives and ten thousand million dollars, more or less, North and South, before the country could recover its balance and movement." Historical remediation can come at a terrible cost.

In the 21st century, the destabilizing challenges will arise from the complexities of global interrelationships. For the first time in history, humans are becoming aware of how everything affects everything else in health, industry, agriculture, planning, transportation, trade, government, and the nurture of nature, as these cut across all walks and conditions and cultures of the world. The ability to experience these global interrelations arises largely through the capacity of digital communications to manage stupendous complexities of information and ideas. Learning to cope with this complexity is the long-ranged pedagogical challenge that current systems cannot manage.

To craft an education that allows our progeny to prepare prospectively to cope with these complexities without a forced re-education imposed by cataclysmic events, Americans need to extend their collective capacity for comprehension far beyond norms of past sufficiency. Declining standards are not the educational problem; the inability to raise standards -- markedly, rapidly, across the whole spectrum of achievement -- is the truly portentous problem. The Institute has begun to address such issues through the Harlem Environmental Access Project and work with Columbia's Earth Institute, Biosphere II, and the Black Rock Forest Consortium. But these efforts are at most a mere beginning. The Institute seeks to join with other innovative groups, nearby and round the world, to address this pedagogical challenge created by the human need to exercise public choice on a global, inter-generational scale.

Institutions seeking to influence change incur historical responsibility for the consequences of their actions. The Institute intends for its efforts and those of Teachers College and Columbia University to stand the test of time as a national model for an effective information-based society, one that people will experience as both empowering and equitable, renewing the Enlightenment agenda, displacing the current public parsimony with a renewed liberality in the pursuit of the public good.

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