The Educators Manifesto

Renewing the Progressive Bond with Posterity through the Social Construction of Digital Learning Communities

Robbie McClintock
Institute for Learning Technologies
Teachers College, Columbia University
1999

This is a pre-publication draft, circulated privately for comment, corrections, and suggestions.
rom2@columbia.edu

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Part 2: An Agenda for Educators

Secion 7: Reconstructing the Educational System

Professional Policy

Policy as a set of procedures controlling action meets with the work of professional thinking by educators to implement measures that will bring new pedagogical potentialities to full fruition. Here are the directing strategies – the designs and schedules, the tests and measures, the curricular organization, professional standards, and resources allocations – with which educators have to put existing educational possibilities into action. Here educators create different procedures for coping with particulars in restructuring education to make full use of new media. How can educators guide educational activity with effective policies that will advance the social construction of a new educational system?

As we suggested above, theory in its professional context uses root conceptions to shape the most general features of an educational system. Policy in its professional context – the codified principles of organized procedure in the field – works in diverse sectors to manage and control how an educational system does in fact operate. Such policies are legion. Let us concentrate here on deep-seated professional policies within existing arrangements and assess their sources in experience. We can then reflect on possible changes in them arising as experience with a digital system of educational work progressively accumulates.

By a deep-seated policy, we mean the basic policy principle or concept, as distinct from one or another conception of it. For instance, elementary and secondary schooling around the world uses a deep-seated policy of age grading, the policy concept of managing the progression of pupils through the system by grouping them according to age. We are interested in basic policy concepts such as age grading, not the particular conceptions of age-grading policy that may distinguish French schooling, for instance, from English or Hungarian.

Education is not technologically virgin. As it has existed through recent centuries, it has a technology, one based on print. It also has a policy structure, which people have built up over several centuries. This policy structure gives rise to the characteristic set of educational institutions and procedures shared across nations and localities. If not determined by print technologies, these policies are highly adapted to the constraints and facilitations that print technologies offered educators. Here we can neither do justice to the complexity of this policy structure, nor unravel all the possible permutations of it in relation to the potential uses of digital technologies in education. [Note 76] We survey, instead, five broad domains of professional policy in the existing system of education. Each shapes major aspects of time-honored procedure. Our survey aims at three objectives: to show how key policies within each correlate with the constraints and facilitations of print technologies; to indicate how the constraints and facilitations of digital technologies may differ from, or prove similar to, those of the print technologies; and to itemize some policy departures that educators should try to substitute for existing policies in order to better use the potentialities of digital communications.

Professional policies that structure educational work the world around serve five foremost functions:

• To organize people in time and space for educational work;
• To motivate effort and to allocate opportunity;
• To structure the resources of the culture, its prized knowledge, values, and skills, for effective apprehension by students;
• To recruit and prepare professional educators for work in the system; and
• To mobilize the resources requisite to support its operation and maintenance.

Historically, the technologies of printing were of extraordinary importance in helping educators form, spread, and use available ideas, ideals, and abilities. Educators adapted their procedures in order to make the use of printing technologies full and effective. Insofar as they did so, retrospectively we say that the technologies determined the procedures. In doing so, we are not arguing a strict determinism, however. [Note 77] Instead, we are saying that innovators in the pedagogical past developed procedures to take advantage of the various means available, a powerful category of which were printed books and related materials. In doing this, they adapted their procedures to make use of these means. They perceived printing to be an enabling resource. They might have adapted their procedures to the technology in other ways, or they might even have chosen to ignore the new means altogether. However, having acted to take the technology into account, having exploited its possibilities in pursuit of their purposes, having done it the way they did it, we say in retrospect that their procedures were determined by or with reference to the technology. [Note 78] Most major features of modern schooling result from professional policies, basic policy concepts, that were determined by print technologies in this sense. The vital step was the invention of the textbook. [Note 79]

Books, and printed books within the larger class, have physical characteristics, a materiality, that conditions their use. Books take up space – a given number of people in a room of a given size can only work at one time effectively with a limited number of books. Books have a heft and size – only a limited amount of content can fit between the covers of a usable book. Books undergo production and distribution processes. When printed books first became available in the West, it was not immediately evident how educators should use them in pedagogical work. The printing of books transformed their availability to educators. In principle, books became available as a ubiquitous resource for educators in the sixteenth century. It took time, however, to convert what was possible in principle into what was actual in substance. Medieval educational practices had been poorly adapted to permit educators to exploit the pedagogical potential of print effectively. Step by step, educators built up the modern policy structure of education to enable them to use printed resources well. Let us reflect on their more significant strategies.

Note at the outset some things that educators could not do with printed books – much policy is hidden among routines that we now forget were once the fruit of conscious intention so natural they have come to seem. Educators could not permit each student to work with whatever book he or she might wish whenever he or she might wish it. Such laissez faire would have the responsive teacher juggling an impossible assortment of texts. Educators could not work with a fully integrated curriculum, with all subjects at all levels represented in texts available at all times. No adult, let alone a child, could tote the requisite tomes. If books were to become the primary communications medium for the work of education, certain pedagogical procedures, which in principle might have had value in a different communications context, would prove infeasible. Others, however, adapted well to print, and print to them in the form of textbooks, books specially designed to present a subject or skill with a measured scope and sequence.

Consider first the use of time and space. Why are the typical classrooms laid out as they are, students in rows sitting side by side facing a teacher? Why are school days divided into periods of equal duration, more or less identical the world around? Both typical classrooms and standard periods are adaptations of space and time suited to the textbook pedagogy, which has become the standard pedagogy in schools everywhere. Out of all the possible configurations the classroom might assume and out of all the possible groupings it might house, why should the classroom be a place for twenty-five, plus or minus students, and a single teacher? Educators laid the classroom out to facilitate the recitation, which they structured around the lesson, the basic unit in a textbook, which students the world around prepare according to their respective subjects and grades. In the classroom they engage in one or another kind of recitation, performing for their teacher, sometimes in sequence, sometimes in parallel or unison, to demonstrate and exercise their mastery of the lesson in the text. The period, unless now doubled as pedagogy breaks away from the text, is 40 to 60 minutes, a duration that represents roughly the collective attention span for the class, yoked to the recitation and the lesson. Outside of the context of recitation, the standard period is a span of time largely without meaning, and it is positively dysfunctional for many forms of pedagogy that students and teachers might practice.

Examine second the strategies of motivation. In the order of things printed, textbooks are a bore. To motivate wandering minds, educators learned to induce competition among students, with the allocation of further educational opportunities – dear to parents, if not to the students themselves – depending on the resultant rankings. To make the competitions fairer, and thus more effectively motivational, educators developed principles of age and ability grouping. What a good student should know was basically a given through the textbook and the associated scope and sequence of the curriculum. Hence the competitions and rankings and sortings were possible according to the comparative performance by students on the recitation, the lesson, the test, the subject, the grade or form, the examination. This whole structure of motivation made sense on the assumption that similar students would be engaged in learning the same thing at the same time, an assumption that followed, from neither nature nor from the play of curiosity, but from the material characteristics of the printed book.

Ponder further the organization of the culture for use in education. The characteristics of printed books may have been surprisingly significant in determining the form and substance of the knowledge, values, and skills that the curriculum presented to students and teachers for their use. Books are material objects with physical characteristics and limits. Usability is not an issue new to computers. It has simply become something almost always minimally achieved with printed text. But look sometime at an early comprehensive text, for instance Johann Alsted’s Encyclopedia (1630), a compendium of knowledge, too big to carry about easily, perhaps seven textbooks bound in one, perhaps a book of reference for library use. [Note 80] Alsted’s compendium was still a unified presentation of knowledge, one that could not quite fit in a single usable book, and already other educators were breaking things apart – creating textbooks devoted to the full presentation of a coherent component of learning on the one hand and alphabetic encyclopedias to organize the universe of discrete topics for easy recall on the other. In the process of making books usable, people not only shaped effective presentations of knowledge, but also the effective presentations began to shape the knowledge presented. Hence, we may now start to ask: is knowledge of the world and experience in it divided into various subjects because the world and experience in it inherently divides into those subjects? Or might it be that most of the familiar subjects and disciplines arose because writers found they could better create books, which were at once usable and coherent, by adopting one or another set of boundaries? Is the boundary between physics and chemistry a real boundary in the nature of matter and energy? Or is it a boundary in intellectual practice deeply embedded in our ways of educating and thinking as a result of choices scholars have been making over many generations in their efforts to present knowledge effectively through usable texts? Let us not venture here firm answers to these questions. Suffice it for now to recognize that it is a large and difficult question to decide to what degree our stock of knowledge has resulted from the medium becoming the message.

Probe now the recruitment and preparation of teachers. Prior to the print-based school, most education took place through apprenticeships, formal and informal, with the young learning by helping adults in the work of the world. As the textbook standardized the learning agenda for children in the school, so it spawned a new profession of the modern teacher. The textbook limited the problem of content, which became finite, relatively fixed, and predetermined. It accentuated the difficulty of didactics. The study of education became a search for the effective methods that would impart a standard selection of knowledge to many different minds. From the sixteenth century through the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth, the principles of textbook design remained relatively constant. What changed in the profession was a consistent increase in the sophistication of didactic method. Able to start with content given by the textbook, teachers needed a sure art of teaching. Comenius put it well is the title of The Great Didactic, Setting forth the whole Art of Teaching all Things to all Men, or A certain Inducement to found such Schools in all the Parishes, Towns, and Villages of every Christian Kingdom, that the entire Youth of both Sexes, none being excepted, shall Quickly, Pleasantly, and Thoroughly Become learned in the Sciences, pure in Morals, trained to Piety, and in this manner instructed in all things necessary for the present and for the future life . . . . He concluded that for the strategy to work, rulers had to recruit a sufficient corps of teachers to staff the schools of every town and village, and for such staff to achieve their purpose, teachers and students alike needed one thing above all others, authoritative, well-designed textbooks. [Note 81]

Observe that Comenius also indicated well, in the title of The Great Didactic, the relationship between the textbook and the civic commitment of resources to support organized educational work. A system of schools that exploited the pedagogical possibilities of print could ensure that all youths would be "instructed in all things necessary for the present and the future life." Comenius gave an earlier version of the progressive bond with posterity, a version not yet secularized. In this version, as in many later ones, the key action was instruction, the essential agencies were the schools and their teachers, and the root idea was that these could impart to each youth an epitome of knowledge, value, and skill that would suffice in the living of life. A deep paternalism pervaded this pedagogy. The textbook, an authoritative, bounded selection of those things deemed most essential, set an agenda in which the fruits of civilization might be dependably imparted to all its members. The textbook served well as a vehicle driven by the aim of disbursing the common denominator of a culture. New media may give civic significance to a more ambitious goal – universal, full participation in the work of culture.

Like printed books and related media, digital technologies have tremendous power and usefulness for the intellectual enterprise of educators. They are fundamental resources in the work of generating, spreading, and employing knowledge, values, and skills in the conduct of life. Educators are finding that digital technologies, like print technologies before them, have constraining and facilitating features for educational work. With new media, many of these are different from the constraining and facilitating features that printed resources had for educators. It is these differences that make the digital technologies potentially transformative innovations in education. In essence, the pedagogical contents of the new technologies are more copious, fluid, responsive – the technological empowerments spreading into practice in our extended present. We are beginning to glimpse in each of the five broad areas of professional policy sustained departures from the norms of print-based practice.

Time and Space: Digital technologies transform the constraints of time and space. Content becomes ubiquitous. Human interaction can take many forms detached from distance and unfettered by time. Spontaneous, ad hoc groupings can cohere on the basis of shared interest and intent, regardless of location. Constraints of content once shaped the school. These fall away and the school can take many forms in many places. Traditionally, "class," "grade," "form," "period" – the terminology for managing space and time in schools – gave rise to the terminology of abstract regimentation in our cultures. Now, thinking about educational time and space leads to conceptions of flexible groupings, across ages and locations, as people interact according to their interests, needs, and curiosities.

Motivation: Where large numbers of people perform identical tasks, externally assigned, competitive rankings driven by extrinsic rewards were the natural motivators of educational effort. As inquiring groups, cohering through interest, learning in the course of shared projects, become commonplace features of educational work, cooperation becomes the prime motivator. Learning – the opportunity to realize the good life in an environment responsive to the play of interest – becomes its own intrinsic reward. On the collective level, the traditional responsibility of the educational system to allocate differentials of privilege and disadvantage becomes one of giving to each and all full opportunities for educational self-development through continuous, honest feedback and criticism.

Culture and Curriculum: Curriculum design shifts from making and justifying exclusions in a narrowly limited representation of the culture to effecting the comprehensive inclusion of all its resources and activating the interconnections between its diverse, innumerable elements. As all students, at any place at any time, enjoy access to all intellectual contents and pedagogical resources of their cultures, difficult pedagogical issues come to the fore. Inquiry and interaction must be made manageable and opportunities for the play of curiosity manifest.

Teaching: The balance between method and content in the preparation of teachers shifts significantly. Didactic methods were the primary concern when the teacher, having to impart straitened specialties secured by set texts, found the key factor limiting successful instruction to be his or her ability to awaken and hold diverse students’ interest. In a digital system of education, the teacher needs a different range of skills – to put generative questions, to guide open-ended inquiry, to diagnose the diverse difficulties that may impede their students’ efforts, to provide them continuous feedback that deepens and sustains their self-directed work. New methods, based on an empathy with the student’s active acquisition of knowledge, value, and skill, rise in importance, as does the teacher’s command of an expansive understanding of the culture. Across the profession, these developments steadily diminish reliance on routines and work to raise both the status and the challenge inherent in the teacher’s calling.

Civic Rationale. Here a major shift in democratic theory and procedure are underway. Up to now the democratic aspiration has sought primarily a measure of equality, legal and socio-economic. People have understood such equality to be necessary pre-conditions for attainment of civic participation, the ultimate goal, and they have considered education of value primarily as a significant means to the enabling ends in view, particularly the socio-economic means of a secure, well-paying job. In a knowledge society, participation becomes involvement in the work of culture and a digital system of education moves beyond the traditional propaedeutic tasks. In a knowledge society, education is not the means, but the end, the substance and reality of full democratic participation. The civic rationale for education becomes far less utilitarian. Education – full participation in the cultural work of the world – becomes a birthright of all. Meaningful access to, and control over, the resources requisite for full participation in the work of culture by each person becomes the defining good of the polity in a knowledge society.

What sorts of policies conduce to these developments?

• Policies that encourage the full development of the comprehensive digital library.
• Policies that bring high-speed wide-area networks to schools, libraries, and homes.
• Policies that encourage schools to shape their curriculum and teachers to design their courses in ways that help students to learn together in autonomous groups on substantial projects, within specific courses and throughout the curriculum.
• Policies that move institutions, which formerly were elitist by the structure of controlling constraints, to re-deploy once-closed assets in ways accessible to anyone who can put them to good cultural use.
• Policies that shift issues of curriculum design away from questions of scope and sequence towards ones of posing problems, initiating projects, sustaining inquiry, diagnosing blockages, facilitating exploration, suggesting possibilities, evaluating ideas, assessing results supporting effort, and on.
• Policies that redirect assessment away from measuring how well students know mandated minima to disclosing their ability to manage inquiry, marshal evidence, apply principles, generate hypotheses, solve problems, and explain their ideas, beliefs, and actions.
• Policies that situate the locus of learning in small, heterogeneous groups interacting with each other and the world at large in work on genuinely difficult concerns.
• Policies that allow schools to redesign the physical spaces of education and to restructure the management of time.
• Policies that make it the responsibility of everyone in education – students, teachers, administrators, and parents – to be simultaneously both teacher and student, to engage in their work of real inquiry.

The list might go on, but let it for now suffice.