¶29

New information technologies open the system of education to a new spectrum of possibilities as surely as new building technologies did to architecture a hundred-fifty years ago. But building techniques did not by themselves design new skylines. Likewise information and communications technologies do not ipso facto implement a better program of educational activity for all. People, acting in the face of uncertainty, must determine what they can make of these emerging possibilities. Many groups and interests, pursuing many divergent inspirations, are vying for command, and a kaleidoscope of coalitions establish, through a diversity of initiatives, emerging norms of practice. Do we who work in intellectual institutions and knowledge communities – the world's schools, colleges, universities, research labs, libraries, museums, and professional offices – share social power sufficient to make our vision of the potential educational uses of new technologies historically significant? It is one thing to have a sustained agenda with which to shape newly emerging educational practices, and quite another to have the possibility of shaping emergent practice in competition with other social groups.

¶30

Sociologists of knowledge attend closely to the ways in which shared patterns of experience lived by the members of various social groups lead them to develop a common outlook and set of ideas. [Note 29] Each person, of course, dwells in actual life in many different social groupings. A focal grouping, in which all persons reside for significant periods and in which many dwell as the predominant situation of their lives, is the group of people living and working "as educators." Indeed, in these reflections our core point concerns educators – as we experience the new technologies, we perceive them to be empowering a significant departure from our current educational practices, making it feasible to displace the reigning status quo with a student-centered, inquiry-based, progressive pursuit of knowledge and understanding. And as more and more educators have this perception, the progressive movement writ large comes back to life.

¶31

Potentially the class of persons acting primarily "as educators" is large and powerful. Let us entertain, for the sake of argument, if not (yet) as a matter of conviction, that this grouping is a class in something like the basic Marxian sense. "Educators" includes all people whose primary work engages us in the creation, dissemination, and application of knowledge, values, and skills in the conduct of life. Students, teachers, parents, researchers, artists, writers, scientists, clergy, most professionals, publishers, not a few journalists, and on, all live and work substantially as educators. Throughout historical time, educators have spontaneously generated a very attractive set of principles. We affirm human potentiality; we act with ideas and rely for effect on reasoning together with others, helping people carry out the entailments of their intentions, both talking the talk and walking the walk. Educators use doubt and skepticism to unleash effort and to sharpen skill. We nurture aspirations, elicit understanding, and form values. Through the work of educators, the stock of knowledge expands and its use in the conduct of life progressively improves. Educators naturally uphold the progressive principle and we work to bind the current generation to its progeny. With such a natural ideology, educators have long been a large latent class, one that is potentially gaining great power in our extended present by working with the digital information technologies. These technologies are transformative tools for people engaged in the creation, dissemination, and application of knowledge, values, and skills in the conduct of life. In the digital culture of the knowledge society, educators may control the essential means of creation and communication, the key material forces in history that are shaping life in the knowledge society. [Note 30]

¶32

Currently educators, in the most inclusive sense of this group, share an inchoate self-awareness. [Note 31] Educators comprise an outsized, diffuse group. In this condition, we have rather consistently failed to concert our potential social power. During the past century, influential ways of thinking about education discouraged many people from forming a general awareness of themselves "as educators." Conditions of work in higher education differed significantly from those in elementary and secondary education, making commonalities of perception difficult to achieve. In addition, the general dissemination of knowledge was largely the activity of commercial publishers, whose primary interests were driven by calculations of profit and loss, not pedagogy. Early in the twentieth century, educators tried and failed to assert a progressive vision of education and public life. The progressive movement had its primary social sources among educators, as we perceive ourselves. Under early twentieth-century conditions, this group quickly proved unable to exercise effective leadership in American life as a whole. Soon too, progressive educators further lost the ability to shape pedagogical practice. Educational arrangements based on ideas about industrial production, the social sources of which lay outside the community of educators, came to dominate pedagogical practice. [Note 32]

¶33

Let us consider, albeit most schematically, these alternative practices based on thinking about the dynamics of industrial production. Such ideas were mixed with the progressive vision from the start of the American common school movement, for educators then had little intrinsic power and had to appeal to leaders of the commercial classes for the wherewithal to build a public educational system. [Note 33] That system (and others like it round the globe) uses the production principles of industry to implement mass schooling. It treats educational processes as processes of production – X inputs processed by Y causal actions result in Z outputs. With this way of thinking about education, educators were unable to concert their views and interests over the past century. People came to understand education as a means set in motion to achieve extrinsic purposes as efficiently as possible – Americanism, the ability to follow instructions, punctuality and dependable attendance. Representatives of the public greatly elaborated the rational bureaucracies of formal education, defining numerous different specialties, each with separate qualifications, discouraging thereby the concerting of educational ideas and a pedagogical vision. [Note 34] According to these production principles, the dominant groups in society owned the systems of pedagogical production; teachers were the workers, directed by administrators and other specialists; pupils and students, or more generically "learners," were their output.

¶34

By thinking of education as a factory-like process of production, educators suppressed pedagogical self-awareness, particularly among students. [Note 35] Pupils and students are the most numerous, important component of the class of persons acting as educators. Students are continually deciding how to allocate their attention and to deploy their effort. These decisions shape the actualities of education, determining who masters what, when, how, and why. Pupils and students are in fact the prime causal agents in education. Despite the fact that they live and work substantially as educators, perhaps pre-eminently as educators, the production model of education encouraged students to think of themselves not-as-educators, for according to it they were not agents of the pedagogical production process, but its mere output. The production model also habituated everyone to expect educators, taken in the narrow sense of teachers and administrators, to serve as means, as causal agents, implementing the educational production goals that other groups should set. Framed in this way, education became a minor profession consisting of well-defined functionaries whose controlling norms and standards were set, not from within, but by groups external to the profession’s practice. [Note 36]

¶35

Such ideas about education have set the dominant standards for pedagogical toil around the world. Owing to the dominance of principles of production in education during the twentieth century, the ability to set the agenda of educational action possessed by people who work as educators, in the full, inclusive sense, has been weak. Policy and practice in higher education has had little in common with that in elementary and secondary schooling. Powerful informal educators rarely recognize themselves as such. Vast numbers of parents think of education as a somewhat threatening legal requirement whereby the society legitimates passing to their children their own secondary status as members of the poorly schooled and poorly skilled classes. In the face of such conditions, the idea that educators constitute an autonomous profession, let alone a dominant class, seems contrary to evident realities.

¶36

History consists in significant part, however, in the rise of new classes. Although weak in the past, during the fast-moving, yet long-enduring, present, the class of persons acting as educators may be able to make itself dominant, to the great benefit of humanity. That is the gist of the reflections that follow; those are the stakes of educational leadership.

¶37

To start these reflections, inquire who might compete with educators for leadership in the historic future. Continued hegemony by the principles of production in education is possible. Or, some other vision of education, similarly rooted in social origins external to education itself, may in its turn become hegemonic. In the dynamics of social construction, the key orienting ideas in a domain such as education can often derive from the ideas of social groups not directly engaged in the domain. Such displacement happens when one or another group successfully attains hegemony in a culture. The twentieth-century dominance of production principles in education was largely a function of the power attained by ideas reflecting the rationalized organization of production during the industrial revolution. The hegemony of the production model reflected the primacy of the economic sector in generating the ideas controlling secondary activities such as education. Pedagogically, the hegemony of production principles has little lasting power, for it was an historical accident originating from the economic realities of the industrial revolution. Those believing in the inevitable primacy of the economic sphere in shaping the activities of life (and there are many on both the right and the left) are taking up the economic theme now supplanting the rationalization of production – ah! the sovereign consumer. Some wealthy corporations stand to profit if a consumption model of education can take over from the production model. Are principles of managed consumption becoming the new hegemony?

¶38

Highly industrialized societies have effectively developed their techniques for rationalizing production. With production under control, the primary economic challenge becomes managing the dynamics of consumption. Whatever the goods society and its members need, these they can produce, provided they can manage and maintain the requisite consumption demands. This was the message Keynes and the Great Depression delivered together. Many therefore expect the forces of market-driven consumption to become hegemonic in our culture in their turn. [Note 37] Awed by this putative hegemony of consumption in the economic sphere, people adopt a depressing corollary: as surely as a production model of education drove out the progressive ideas of educators in the twentieth century, so a consumption model of education may drive out the progressive vision in the twenty-first.

¶39

Let us subject this expectation to critical scrutiny. Consumerist education treats it as a consumption good, shrewdly shaping demand and delivery to suit prevailing tastes through timely market research. Expectations that consumerist education can displace the progressive vision in our extended present may underestimate the power of educators, as educators, to shape the culture. In historical time, from within the living present, who has sufficient power to do what is inherently moot. Only time can tell. Past hegemonies do not lead necessarily to future ones. The long secularization characterizing modern history has consisted in a massive shift of power from people grounded in religious organizations to those rooted in the economic. Now, old captains of industry cannot necessarily choose their heirs and pass hegemony to the young procurers of consumption. To gain that hegemony, the procurers of consumption must win it by virtue of superior powers of action and control, which are not yet prepossessing. Educators might argue that the global society under construction in our extended present is not proving to be a global consumer society in which the manipulation and satisfaction of wants is the main venture of mankind. We might contend instead that the global society under construction is proving to be a knowledge society in which the foremost endeavors of humanity are developing the human potential to understand life in the world and to nurture its capacities to create meanings, to form ideas, and to achieve values within a sustained, sustainable measure.

¶40

Consumerist principles in education hold that education is a service, like any other service. Individuals should contract for it in whatever form and measure they see fit. The best educators are those who can effectively package and market educational services to the largest possible clientele, simultaneously building the market for educational services and expanding their share of that market. Those who taut education as a consumption good celebrate distance learning. They observe that changes in the mechanisms of delivering educational services enable new organizations to wrest control from traditional providers of education by using a new pedagogy. In order for the procurers of consumption to win their hegemony, they must wrest their control from educators, who, however imperfectly, have a base of social power in established educational institutions. Traditionally the delivery mechanisms of schools, colleges, and universities have required attendance by students and teachers at places of education – at a school or campus. The new technologies may significantly diminish the importance of such places to the delivery of educational services and it may follow then that established expertise in the provision of educational service may shift as well. Starkly put: cultural packagers, who can deliver in homes and the workplace standardized instruction inexpensively and conveniently via digital telecommunications, may drive traditional educational arrangements out of business. [Note 38]

¶41

There are several planes of uncertainty to this prospect, however. For one, the degree is unclear to which "school's out," as the phrase puts it (in at least one of its meanings, at any rate [Note 39]). Participation in activities located in a pedagogical place may continue to have great educational value, an in-place value enhanced by the links and interactions from the place to a greatly wider sphere of meaningful communication. [Note 40] It is interesting that the largest campus built in the 1990's houses the design, development, and management staff of the Microsoft Corporation, no slouch at using networked systems. The possibility of getting rid of central offices has been an hypothesized spin-off from the rapid development of networked information systems. Hypothesized, but little realized: so far central offices have remained highly evident in corporate practice. Certainly, the goal of spinning action out to the periphery has not been the prime objective shaping real investment in real digital networks. Recognition of the precise opposite has driven the impetus for substantial investment in networked information systems: such investment makes loci of activity – offices, schools, and campuses – more effective as places of shared, productive work and interaction. Surely the new technologies promote fuller communication between such centers and the rest of the world than was previously the case, but that fullness of communication does not necessarily do away with the value of the shared centers of activity. Let us not forget: in the biological world, life forms that have the most fully developed central nervous systems also have the most sophisticated networks of distributed sensory and activating nerves ramifying through the entire organism, the preeminent example being humans, who combine outsized brains with very highly developed nervous systems.

¶42

Learning is always an inner activity that defies distance, and surely distance is diminishing as an outward impediment to learning. But whether distance learning, in itself, is a significant new pedagogy is both questionable, and actively in question. Whether or not pedagogical places retain their past role in the delivery of educational services, new groups are jockeying to take over the delivery of those services at every level. Control does not rest securely with people acting and thinking as educators, over against those acting as procurers of consumption. Prospects are moot. Yet educators are in a better position to control our actions than we were in the late nineteenth century, when the progressive movement started. For one, educators are in a strong position to shape the educational agenda, perhaps even to make our leadership hegemonic throughout the emerging digital culture, a global knowledge society. For another, we are not in a weak position vis-ŕ-vis a consumption model of education. [Note 41] Whether educators can lead in the social construction of a new education depends substantially on the quality of our actions. To act on our shared interests decisively, we need an unprecedented confidence in our power and potentiality. Consider here four strong reasons why educators, as educators, should not underestimate our power to shape the pedagogical process.

¶43

First, the consumerist vision of education prepares the ground for its own marginalization. The production model habituated people to think of students, not as educators, but as product, the passive output of the system. The consumer model is greatly broadening the scope of the group aware of its self as participating in efforts to shape education, for students cease to be mere product and become the pedagogical consumer, the key actor who calls the shots. As a larger group begins to think actively about education as consumers, they begin to rehabilitate their capacity to think about education as educators. This enlargement reverses the narrowing tendency in the production model of education. Students who formerly were mere output, now make the determining choices. Within the consumption model, the expectations of students, even though it may be a caricature of what those expectations might be in full potential, increasingly come to control the whole process. Hence, the sovereignty of consumer preferences legitimates the idea that the goals of education derive from within the domain of education itself. Should students feel themselves truly challenged and decide to think about education, not as consumers, but as educators, there is little in the structure of the consumerist vision to prevent them from doing so.

¶44

Second, the nature of the issues that people face confronts them with significant educational challenges that reach far beyond the simple consumerist wants of convenience and immediate gratification. As Goethe observed, seriousness comes on one by surprise. [Note 42] Students often begin with narrow ends in view, only to discover behind them much broader, life-long commitments and concerns. To rationalize the provision of education on consumerist principles, the entrepreneur must hold that the ends in view moving students are stable, predictable, and manageable. The issues people entertain, however, carry in them the tension between self-interest narrowly and broadly construed. The consumerist model assumes that people’s narrow self-interests control their decisions, creating a preference for training in practical skills delivered with maximum ease and convenience. Ease and convenience may be what people want first. But they often go beyond those first wants as seriousness comes on them by surprise. To put it abstractly, the law of diminishing returns increasingly devalues the narrow constructions of self-interest that people make. At the same time, their growing capacity to develop, on behalf of themselves and the world in which they live, a clear calculus of risk, which they apply to large-scale activities of immense complexity, makes their broader constructions of self-interest appear much more fateful, attractive, and compelling in their calculus of aspiration. For instance, as the globe warms, issues of global warming command an increasing share of people’s attention, with an ever-more sober recognition that the specialists must get the science right and the public must act upon it with foresight and clear intent. Environmental seriousness comes on people by surprise, even those in due course whose narrow self-interest pushes them to deny the very existence of environmental problems. In their personal and their collective lives, people feel themselves moved by challenging complexities and stirring opportunities, complexities and opportunities that they sense but do not yet grasp. Those are the uncertain grounds of inquiry and growth. In the face of these, is it unrealistic to expect a great many people to engage in education, not peripherally as consumers, but in great earnest, as educators? [Note 43]

¶45

Third, in education, the procurers of consumption pay attention to only limited parts of the whole effort at the advancement of learning. They reduce a knowledge society to a mere information society. [Note 44] It is too easy to scoff at the research work of universities, taking examples of pretentious trivia and obscure jargon as representative of the whole effort. It is too easy to discount efforts to construct meaning and to nurture values, pointing to the fringe fanaticisms in academe. Educators create and manage the uses of knowledge essential to our culture and economy. Educators provide powerful explanations to important phenomena; we are makers of meaning, interpreters of events, resources from which people form their controlling standards and expectations. Proponents of the consumerist model of education downplay the importance of academic research and participation in cultural inquiry. They rather blandly suggest instead that corporations could do it all in their own laboratories. Taking only its most pragmatic parts, this prescription would lame the American economy, or any other economy where it was adopted. It would create a large added cost for crucial whose conduct of their business requires the continued advance of science, technology, and applied research. It makes little sense for us as educators to abandon our vital role in the advance of knowledge and its application, in nurturing values, and in developing skills of worth to individuals and the society. We might better argue that the essential variable in the determination of how economies perform at the start of the twenty-first century is not how well they manage consumption, but how effectively they generate knowledge, values, and skills and bring these into play within the global community. Indeed, we should hold that the emerging society is not a consumer society, but a knowledge society in which an educational system that does not excel as a means to the advancement of learning, to the work of education in its fullest sense, is singularly wanting.

¶46

Fourth, providers of consumerist culture not only ignore the whole, they are undependable providers of those parts to which they do attend. They are unlikely to take on the full task of disseminating knowledge, values, and skills to all persons within contemporary societies. To be sure, many in journalism and commerce avidly attend to the entertainment industries as potential sources of educational innovation. They may be right in viewing practitioners of edutainment – the merger of education and entertainment in products, at once enlightening and engaging, to be marketed to both home and school – as strategic groups determining emerging pedagogical prospects. Certainly, a great deal of commercial capital currently drives efforts to develop edutainment products, and the makers of these products have powerful channels of distribution available to reach the public. [Note 45]

¶47

Significant limitations to these efforts, as efforts to restructure educational practice, are at work, however. The stuff in trade within edutainment is a set of consumer products to be sold in the educational markets of home and school. Indubitably, schools and teachers and students, engaged in the work of education, constitute a market for the sale of various goods – food, books, clothes, pens and pencils, furniture, fuel oil, rings, air conditioners, jock straps, electronics, software, and so. Education, as such, however, is not inherently a market for consumer products, with success measured in market share and the relative efficiency in making and distributing the goods. As a human phenomenon, education is not a market for products, but a process of growth and transformation, one sustained over many years with success measured throughout the vicissitudes of personal and collective experience. Indeed, many companies may successfully sell consumer goods to educators. But producers of edutainment have yet to show whether they have either an interest in the human process of education, as such, or the capacity to give intentional shape to it as a whole, above and beyond determining what, within its precincts, may sell as a marketed product. Modern educational systems are huge civic undertakings and a serious responsibility that must be met regardless of whether the balance sheet is good or bad. [Note 46]

¶48

Can Disney or Apple or Time-Warner take responsibility for the systemic character of educational experience as it occupies the central activities of over 50 million persons nationally for periods of fifteen to twenty years each? Can they extend that responsibility to the billion or so children and youths who globally are acquiring their education over the coming decades? Can major corporations satisfy their shareholders by tying up the scale of working capital that contemporary educational enterprises require for their decent operation, a scale on which there are many divisions, with each of these representing annual expenditure of another 100 billion dollars? Can they achieve high rates of return in the overall educational enterprise, providing full service to the whole society, to the global community? Would governments permit these companies to bail out of their commitment of such billions, nay trillions, should returns on the investment falter? Surely the activities of edutainment companies, like those of mass communicators throughout the twentieth century, are having significant effects on the cultural context within which educational work takes place. But the likelihood that the producers of edutainment, as such and single-handedly, can be the prime movers in reshaping the processes of education is insignificant.

¶49

Corporate newcomers are not taking on the whole job of education. Perhaps they are simply going after selected, lucrative parts. Successful corporate strategies, such as those of Federal Express and UPS, take a element of a more comprehensive service and build a profitable business by intensely rationalizing delivery of the one chosen element. Corporate entrepreneurs in education are not even, in the end, likely to compete very effectively in this way, going after a few well-chosen, very profitable plums embedded in the system, leaving those working as educators to struggle, underfunded and despised, with the vast remainder of routine chores in education. Education is not like the delivery of letters and packages. Delivery of the mail is a massive, yet simple and stable function; education a supremely complex one, susceptible to historic changes of phase. Entrepreneurs, who want to lop off this or that element of education, as it now appears to function, in order to subject the delivery of it narrowly to intense rationalization, can surely try to do so. They are likely to find to their surprise the whole process is changing in ways that leave their newly rationalized element without a purpose or function. [Note 47] Rather than lending themselves to the piecemeal rationalization of selected parts, the new technologies enable more radical, thorough-going transformations of the whole education enterprise.

¶50

People acting as educators are very likely, across the full span of the extended present, to be dominant actors in using digital technologies to transform educational work across all its dimensions. There are, of course, no guarantees in history. Yet educators can be reasonably confident that we share the social power needed to make our vision of the potential educational uses of new technologies historically significant. All the same, many educators are anxious, withdrawing from the new technologies as if these threaten our tenuous autonomy of action. Let us not hold back. Exerting robust leadership with the new technologies strengthens us as educators, enhancing the effectiveness of our work. It strengthens our capacity to shape the quality of life as a whole. Whoever becomes involved in educational work with information technologies becomes engaged in the social construction of an emergent system. Our agenda, as educators, rather than as consumers, as producers, or something else, is shaping the decisive contributions in the construction of a new system. Whatever the anxieties that come with the effort, the public and non-profit educational sectors serve through the extended present overwhelmingly as the sources of education and intellectual leadership, the world around. These institutions, which are in rapid transformation, are a solid base from which the class of people acting as educators can work to make a better future. What agenda of action does this challenge entail?