One of the most stimulating recent ‘think pieces,’ Houman Harouni’s “What should a School be?‘ has set the cat among the pigeons in the North American education world. Originally published in The American Reader (Vol. 8, 2013), the Harvard researcher’s article essentially challenges educationists to think more broadly and seek fresh insights from outside their intellectual cocoons. While many education observers claim that “the school system is broken,” few actually stop to do what is known as a “deeper dive.” In our post-modern era of globalization and connectivity, fewer still pause to ask whether the purpose of education should be completely subsumed by“dancing with robots.”
Education does matter but that is difficult to discern surveying the public debate over the current state and future of schooling. Harouni, the agent provocateur, captures the current dialectic in magical prose: “Whether test scores do or don’t measure learning; whether schools should be privatized; whether Wikipedia will replace the teacher; whether we will ever escape Algebra; whether we can measure the ways which kids of color ‘fail’ or ‘succeed’ on exams; whether to teach like a ‘champion,’ a ‘guide.’ or a ‘pirate’; whether the arts are a right or a privilege; all these questions owe their importance to the system of schooling that turned them into questions in the first place.”
The entire North American education debate, Houman Harouni contends, “keeps folding back into itself” because it accepts established parameters and is almost entirely based upon “self-referential questions” that perpetuate “a system that has stagnated for seven generations.” The promise of grace and salvation, in his view, is not enough to “justify the existence of the modern educational system.” Leading philosophers of education from John Dewey to today’s ‘pedagodfathers’ , with few exceptions, “do a bang-up job of hiding their complacency behind idealistic cants on the potential of schooling.'” While it endears them to educators, it is offered up to justify “the existence of schools as distinct spaces” amid “the absolute dissolution of communities in urban areas.”
What is the purpose of schooling? Contemporary platitudes are usually served up to answer this question expressing some variation on the theme of ‘preparing students for success in the competitive 21st century global world.’ Such statements are accepted at face value and anyone raising a question about its primacy is invariably ignored or dismissed as a ‘turn-back-the-clocker.’ This state of affairs alone demonstrates why the world needs more education thinkers and fewer technocrats.
Schools are vital civic and social institutions but schooling is never openly discussed unless it’s said to be “in crisis.” Education matters because five hours a day, five days a week, from September to June, children and youth are its captives, up to the age of 16 or 18 years. At their best, public schools can inspire student curiosity and instil civic responsibility; at their worst they become what John Taylor Gatto termed “weapons of mass instruction.” For many education theorists, like Louis Althusser, they essentially serve to “reproduce social relations” and slot young people into jobs suited to their own social class. While schools play a vital societal role, Althusser correctly observed that “hardly anyone lends an ear to its music: it is so silent!”
Since the mid-1970s, Harouni claims that serious discourse about education was abandoned to ‘the educationists.‘ Cultural critics, sociologists, and outside scholars simply “washed their hands of education.” Progressive educators came to dominate the field, free to conduct research in pursuit of resources, and seemingly “not bothered by their seclusion.” Today teachers, faculty of education students, and young researchers learn to show “open disdain for any opinion on education that doesn’t come from inside the field.” Pointed questions are deflected with a wave of the hand and the dismissive statement, “but has she ever taught?” Any economist or “crossover” academic is listened to politely, then safely ignored.
Today’s educationists thrive on their own isolationism. Political or sociological critiques that challenge the prevailing “liberal social order” or “progressive pedagogy” are not welcome inside the modern schoolhouse. This does allow educationists to merely shrug-off the core contradictions of their practice. Student-centred learning and promoting student happiness, we are assured, can coexist with raising standards and expecting more from today’s students. Classes would be so much more creative if only we could rid them of student performance testing. It’s tempting to agree with Harouni that schooling has to be “built up as much as it needs to be torn down brick by brick.”
Progressive education as promoted by John Dewey’s later day disciples has always tended to see mass education as the cure for social inequities and underestimated the impact of the class division of labour. Now progressive education is essentially ignoring what social critics term “the end of labour” and best represented by the slow disappearance of the eight hour work day. Promoters of “21st century learning” see technology as the salvation and many now parrot “the rhetoric of international competition.”
Progressivism has spawned a new 21st century mutation. Today’s children must be schooled to survive and perhaps thrive “dancing with robots.” The future success of North American “middle class children,” Frank Levy and Richard Murnane insist in Dancing with Robots (2013), will be determined by their preparedness for the changing “human labor market.”
Schooling, we are told, must adapt to the changing 21st century workplace. Does this sound familiar? Menial, unskilled job functions will be computerized and labour provided more cheaply in developing countries. Tomorrow’s economy will require three kinds of work: solving unstructured problems, working with new information, and carrying-out non routine tasks. Our educational future now rests upon our collective capacity to “sharply increase” the proportion of North American children with “the foundational skills needed to develop job-relevant knowledge and to learn efficiently over a lifetime.”
Educational futurists appropriating the rhetoric of progressivism and acting at the behest of “big data” and “big technology” are, somehow, preying on our weaknesses. ‘Fresh thinking’ from “Third Way” researchers like Levy and Murnane, based at MIT and Harvard, seems to be trying to fill “the silence” in contemporary educational discourse. Critical perspectives informed by Paul Goodman’s Compulsory Mis-Education and Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968) are simply being ignored or marginalized in the public domain. Where critical, independent thinking perishes, schools do not normally thrive.
Preparing our kids for success is being reduced to “dancing with robots.” And, for those who see a more noble calling for schooling, it is somehow disconcerting. It’s time to ask “is that all?”
Educhatter 
Schooling reveals itself in the quality and skills of recent graduates. I recently hired a graduate with two degrees,one in business, the other in economics. I couldn`t relax for a moment; anything he sent out by letter or e mail representing the company had to be edited,grammatically corrected and his spelling closely monitored. It became a source of anxiety between us and reduced the way he could serve the company. I felt really badly for him.
When foundational skills are ignored all the way through, they continue to haunt the individual in their career path all they way through. Needless to say, I couldn`t handle the anxiety or negativity. To say that voice dictation will overcome complex tests and business memos is nothing short of ridiculous.
Foundational literacy will never go out of fashion, but it is not enough to prepare students with critical capacities and the ability to chart their own futures. American economist James Heckman hit the mark when he observed that “skills beget skills” — the ability to acquire skills at one age depends on skills acquired at earlier ages.
Computerized work has added complexity to our lives and, in the words of Frank Levy and Richard Murnane, ” racheted up the definition of foundational skills.” A student’s basic foundational skills do depend upon what is learned in formal K-12 schooling and, increasingly, on what is learned or not learned at home and online.
Literacy is absolutely critical to leading a productive and meaningful life. It is worrisome that one in three American 8th graders and and less than one in five 8th graders from low-income families are entering high school as proficient readers (Levy and Murnane, 25). The figures are only marginally better in Canada’s provincial systems, except for P.E.I. which lags behind in Canada.
Computers and robots are gaining on us. The scariest film of 2013 was “HER” starring Joaquin Phoenix. In the story he finds himself getting close with Samantha, a Siri-like personal assistant. Phoenix plays Theodore, an introverted man getting over a relationship who decides to install the “world’s first artificially intelligent operating system” into his computer.
Samantha (iPhone’s Siri) not only checks his emails and organizes his life but engages Theodore playfully in banter and late night conversations. As Theodore keeps conversing with Samantha, things get thornier. “What’s it like to be alive in that room right now?” the operating system asks. He eventually professes his love for “her.” It ends badly when Theodore awakens to the hard realities of real life.
The human world of work in Theodore’s technology-driven life is permeated with loneliness and a pall of sadness. Samantha speaks clearly and writes e-mails in perfect English, sweeping hundreds of men off their feet. It’s clear that they have fallen under “Siri’s spell” and have lost their heads.
I can think of no better example to illustrate the potential dangers that lurk in the not-too-distant future. Critical, independent thinking has never been needed more than it is today.
Hilda Neatby was right all along about progressive education. Her book So Little for the Mind was the first to expose its dangers. Then it was amoral and tainted by Deweyesque rhetoric promoted by dogmatic educators…today we call it social justice. No more room for academic freedom when confronted by today’s practitioners’ of the black arts.
“Critical, independent thinking has never been needed more than it is today.” Yes, we need to be clear about what is at stake in the debate about education. A disturbing number of dominant voices (as Harouni mentions) assume “success” (both personal and national) is what is at stake, where the criteria of success are ultimately to be understood in economic terms, as if we are to measure our distance from the Dark Ages solely by the level of our per capita productivity.
We need to get back to the roots of the modern project of which we are a part. The Enlightenment constituted a huge leap forward in thoughtfulness. Arguably the project is now falling flat on its face with the construction of a global system of institutionalised thoughtlessness.
The origins of that thoughtlessness have very, very little to do with schooling. On the contrary, compared with what is going on outside schools, the latter, for all their faults, are often oases of relative thoughtfulness. And this is why one of the big mistakes in the debate about education is to assume that education = schooling. The real education (the training in thoughtlessness) goes on outside school.
An example: Jo-Anne (above) refers to a problem of literacy, joining the chorus calling for schools to go back to basics. But why is literacy on the wane? Is it the fault of the schools? Once upon a time there was a culture of the book, maintained by a public life played out in public spaces that gave a prominent place to arguments presented in lengthy books. That kind of public life – that kind of public discourse – has waned. A decline in literacy in school is not the cause of that, but the consequence. Of course schools need to ensure that future clerks can type out their business correspondence with sufficient fluency. The real problem, however, is not the laxity of teachers, but the decline of that adult public life in which literacy, reflection, depth of feeling, critique and finding your own voice really count for something.
Actually Torn Halves,(an interesting post by the way)you may be unaware that children are no longer taught to read and spell nor do grammar.Their understanding of sentence structure is dismal and they have little knowledge on how to use punctuation.
I was referring to building knowledge from the ground up(scaffolded learning) to retain and continuously acquire new knowledge.
Dr.Reid Lyon who oversaw a half a billion dollar study on “how children learn to read”.a 35 year longitudinal study named the way we teach kids to read(look say) the reading war because professors that train teachers refuse to accept that the research is relevant.
Some kids could live in a closet till they start school and it wouldn`t matter,they`d learn to read any way you taught them.
Another 40-60 % need to be taught.The difficulty is what is called the “reading war” coined by Dr.Lyon to describe the resistance to accepting the research.
Interestingly,the most prevalent problem of the look say method is that students can`t spell.
Comparing the Conversation, so far, on this thread with the BC Ed Tech Symposium (Feb 22 at SFU) is a stark reminder of how Canadian educationists can inhabit different planets and be in different orbits. While we attempt to grapple with the Big Questions posed by Houman Harouni and Dancing with Robots, C21 Canada evangelists like Chris Wejr (Principal, Langley, BC) are presenting slide shows like this:
http://www.slideshare.net/mrwejr/cselp-pecha-kucha
Educational collisions don’t happen when you limit your horizons to promoting Twitter and Facebook as the gateway to “professional growth.” Are today’s “connected” educators consumed by edtech sorcery and visual imagery?
The slideshow is full of images and quotes with little substance.
BUT
The world has changed (look at the 2013 World Press Photo winner).
AND
Hilda Neatby is long gone.
We can’t turn the clock back to 1955 so we have to figure out how to work with the changes.
We have to steer between the scylla of faddism spouted by the zealots, acolytes, and enthusiasts of magical thinking and the charybdis of cynicism spouted by those wishing for a time that, if it ever existed, is long past.
Dear John
“Progressive education is frankly anti-intellectual. There is no attempt to exercise, train and discipline the mind. This is language, now forbidden by the experts, but its meaning is still clear to the literate person….Progressivism is anti-cultural…Finally, progressive education is, or has been, amoral.” Neatby’s clear concise thinking is even more relevant today than it was in her time.
Dear Madeleine,
We can’t engage in sterile debates that solve nothing.
Neatby could not have conceived of the role of tech in schools today, or did not in her book.
The terrain has shifted to the promise and challenge of tech.
The current issue might be, to paraphrase this thread,
“Is dancing with robots a benefit or a detriment to the mind?”
If the latter what do we do?
Dear John Boy
You might also would like to know the following:(And Neatbyquotes Orwell in others ways mainly about doublespeak but I guess he would be outdated as well…:IYHO… May I suggest you read 1984 which she had read..yes it has a lot to with technology… or even Karl Capeck’s RUR (Rossums Universal Robots – 1924) which presages the use of technology in schools/society
“But the curious thing is that the progressive educator, in the name of democracy, has in effect accepted the distinction, originally made by the Greek and Roman aristocracy and so repugnant to us today, that there is an education suitable for the few and an education suitable for the many, an education for free men and an education for slaves.”
Alas all those Romans and Greeks seem to be all gone now.But somehow their ideas seem to live on…but I digress
Yours sincerely
Auntie Madeleine
While we can’t turn back the clock, we can recognize the dangers. An interesting read is the book: Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.
Here’s the link: http://www.amazon.ca/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains-ebook/dp/B003R7L90I/ref=sr_1_fkmr2_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1393282429&sr=8-1-fkmr2&keywords=How+the+internet+changes+the+brain
“The Shallows is a book about the preservation of the human capacity for contemplation and wisdom, in an epoch where both appear increasingly threatened. Nick Carr provides a thought-provoking and intellectually courageous account of how the medium of the Internet is changing the way we think now and how future generations will or will not think. Few works could be more important. –Maryanne Wolf, author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain”
It also gives a historical picture of how book changed our brain (for the better, I might add).
Leading advocates of C21 Canada evangelism like Donna Miller Fry of @fryed all too rarely engage in the public discourse over the purpose of schooling. Ray Ivany’s Now or Never declaration and the announcement of a Nova Scotia Education Review caught her attention and sparked this response:
http://fryed.wordpress.com/2014/02/24/what-is-the-purpose-of-school/
Her zeal and courage are all too rare in Canadian education, not to mention the energy and positive optimism. If schools kill curiosity, administration has a way of flattening out imaginative educators bursting with ideas.
[…] https://educhatter.wordpress.com/2014/02/21/the-future-of-schooling-are-students-being-prepared-to-da… […]
On the way to my office today I heard an interview with Sara Chang ,the child protege violinist who entered Julliard at age 5 and had Isaac Stern as a teacher.How does she prepare for a concert?she plays her scales.How did Isaac Stern prepare her to play Brahm,he had her practice one page for 3 hours till she got it right.
The Olympians,another source of drill to skill example.
What do the great mavens of education espouse?No drill and kill.That is the line parroted back to me because professors at University despise phonics and many don’t believe in teaching arithmetic basics,in spite of the fact that they’re dead wrong.
They are destroying everything a human can become,given the opportunity.
How do we stop these people with power from cashing in on their opinions?
“Dancing with Robots” underestimates the competition. Human cognition isn’t magic, your brain is just a honking big associative processor and computers are catching up fast. In two or three decades, there won’t be much left that a computer can’t do better than humans.
You asked if students are being prepared for this. Do you know what a rhetorical question is? A computer would recognize that I’m channeling an old joke, but wouldn’t understand the humor. Most schools don’t teach rhetoric anymore, that went out with classical literature. When computers get that joke, our kids are in big trouble.
Here’s a suggestion for education – don’t bother teaching skills that are already partly mediated by a computer. The computer is going to get better much faster than we can imagine. Instead of video games, get the kids out playing with real objects.
For example, a doctor assesses your health in three ways – by inspection, by history, and by tests. The tests are already partially or completely computerized, it won’t be long before your toilet provides better, more timely data than a medical lab. Computers will also know more about your history, nutrition and exercise habits than you know yourself. That only leaves the physical examination.
Top-notch math and literacy will be required of course. But after that the future belongs to kids who are playing with mass and energy – gluing and trimming model airplanes, banging on drums, building planting in the garden, dissecting frogs, building a particle accelerator in their garage (yes, actually), and getting their hands dirty in a thousand ways.
What Harouni points out very nicely is the way that an overly narrow education debate conceals and obscures deeper political issues. Some of the comments here about tech, cognition and schooling are good examples of that concealing. The tech is talked about as if it were a neutral phenomenon that merely raises questions about the continuing relevance of certain aspects of human cognition. But the tech is not neutral. It is a scorching hot political potato. The truth is that while we may think we are dancing with robots, we are actually dancing with Wall Street and with the Orwellian forces behind Big Data and the Huxleyan forces behind the new wave of commodity fetishism. The iPhone, for instance, is not just a box of cognitive tricks, nor is it simply a new implement to be added to the toolbox of the mythical tool-using man; rather it is a new fetish – a commodity become object of love that wins unwitting support for a political and economic machine of global proportions – one that remains largely hidden from view.
The debate about tech and cognition is an interesting one, but it shouldn’t obscure the deeply political character of the developments that we are caught up in.
The challenge going forward is not one of learning to dance with robots, but of developing a better understanding of the tension-riven historical projects of which we are a part.
The feature film HER awakened me to the possibility that we could become entranced by human robots. Samantha (aka Siri) had her undeniable charms, but she missed the subtleties and could be foiled by rhetorical questions.
Earlier this week, I had a full conversation with a Bell Aliant she-robot and fooled her with a few rhetorical tricks.She snapped back at me saying “Answer with one word.” (not two). I started laughing when I realized that she was merely acting like most other call centre humans trained to “go by the book.”
What am I getting at? Our capacity for critical, independent thinking may, in the end, be all we have left in the “dance with the robots.” It lends support to the cause of “disruptive education” because we will have to be pretty sharp to find new ways of breakiing up those linear sequential thought patterns.
Paul said:
“Educational collisions don’t happen when you limit your horizons to promoting Twitter and Facebook as the gateway to “professional growth.” Are today’s “connected” educators consumed by edtech sorcery and visual imagery?”
Today,I read a wonderful blog by Peter Atkinson,Director of Education of Ottawa Catholic Schools,a review of Malcolm Gladwell`s latest book.I had read it but it was great to read his synopsis.Then I saw he had an entire book shelf of reviews on his blog and I felt thrilled with technology.
It is an incredible tool with which to share information,as we are now.
It`s drawbacks are obvious(twitter and Facebook) and they are playing havoc with the future generations who are in need of constant gaming, connection and sharing of what they ate for lunch versus the virtues of reading,observing and thinking.”Proust and the Squid”was a wonderful reference.
With this many years under my belt still looking at students I can easily tell who will not have the grades and English proficiency to attend UT next year. The successful students have an inverse relationship with video gaming.
It is the curse of this present generation.
Japanese parents now send kids, especially boys to internet addiction rehabilitation camps.
We have been trying and failing to make the point that the elephant in the room where the debate about digital tech is taking place is the economy. To be able to dance with dance with robots, people will have to have the money to pay for the ticket to the digital disco. Where will they get the money from if those same robots are putting their human counterparts out of work? The most pressing problem will not have to do with the redundancy of human cognition, but with the redundancy of human labour. Hence the gargantuan problem of how to change the global economic system – a system that a hundred and fifty years or so ago was touted as something that would eventually liberate humanity from toil, but now proves itself incapable of providing for the “liberated” (the unemployed and the underemployed and those stuck in deskilled, low-pay jobs).
By coincidence, Robert Skidelsky has just posted a lovely article on the problem of labour in the digital age, coming to the conclusion that the Luddites were not entirely wrong:
http://www.social-europe.eu/2014/02/death-machines/
The question of schooling has always been predicated upon the overclass of society. Emerging from the Enlightenment era, the overclass dictated what will be or not be for an education for the underclass of society. As such, the very structure of the K to 12 education system conducts operations according to the social-income status of students that meets the approval of the overclass and the economic needs of society. As such, literacy, numeracy and knowledge falls on the wayside as technology advances increases and as economic needs change.
Torn states – “But why is literacy on the wane? Is it the fault of the schools? Once upon a time there was a culture of the book, maintained by a public life played out in public spaces that gave a prominent place to arguments presented in lengthy books. That kind of public life – that kind of public discourse – has waned. A decline in literacy in school is not the cause of that, but the consequence. Of course schools need to ensure that future clerks can type out their business correspondence with sufficient fluency. The real problem, however, is not the laxity of teachers, but the decline of that adult public life in which literacy, reflection, depth of feeling, critique and finding your own voice really count for something.”
Torn is speaking on the behalf of the overclass, including the K to 12 education establishment, to keep the narrative of a public life, that was exclusively the domain of the overclass alive and healthy. The K to 12 education structure is rooted in the great philosophies of the Enlightenment era, and by extension to the Caves of Plato. Torn is advocates for a Liberal Education – “Unlike a professional and vocational education that prepares students for their careers, a liberal education prepares students for universal freedom and tolerance. Such an education helps the individual avoid conflicts in life. For example, a liberal education helps students be self-conscious and aware of their actions and motivations. Individuals also become more considerate for other beliefs and cultures. According to James Engel, the author of The Value of a Liberal Arts Education, “A liberal education provides the framework for an educated and thoughtful citizen.”[10]” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_education
Torn, part of the educator class, is actually advocating schooling of two types. One for the overclass and one for the underclass. Or as Aunty Madeleine states in her post – ““But the curious thing is that the progressive educator, in the name of democracy, has in effect accepted the distinction, originally made by the Greek and Roman aristocracy and so repugnant to us today, that there is an education suitable for the few and an education suitable for the many, an education for free men and an education for slaves.”
Alas all those Romans and Greeks seem to be all gone now.But somehow their ideas seem to live on…but I digress ”
Yes they seem to live on, where today despite all the science advances, some parent is being told by the overlords in the education system, their child will always have low skills in the 3 Rs. So much for having access to the gates of public square that Torn speaks of. The advent of the 21st century technology has now put a different set of interruptions crossing the span of society, and causing divisions within the overclass, and no more evident is within the K to 12 establishment and schooling. Below is the latest threat to the classroom, and within 20 years we shall see if the classroom educators will rise to dominance and the educator consultant will fall into the dustbins…….Is 3-D Printing Ready to ‘Beam Up’ to a Classroom Near You? – http://blog.soprislearning.com/is-3-d-printing-ready-to-beam-up-to-a-classroom-near-you
It does not remove the toil because 100% of the productivity benefits go to the 1%.
We need to slash working hours without pay cuts to share work and all would benefit.
It is odd how the debate about education has lost contact with the debate about labour and the economy. For instance, we are vocal in our concern to teach the whole child, then silent on the way the economy insists on a stultifying specialisation that condemns the “whole wo/man” to a withering existence.
As someone once tweeted: We are preparing the children for the world, but where is the world that is prepared for these children?
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