Not My Reality

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I was reading around this morning via the “NCTE Inbox” and found yet another piece that seems to suggest a “teaching and education” revolution that could only happen in a dream: “Coming to Terms With Five New Realities,” by Will Richardson. (In all honesty, I probably sounded like this myself around a dozen years ago.) I thought it might fun to offer counter points to each of what the author call the “new realities” or “big challenges for schools to navigate.” It’s less a description of what’s coming than a prescription for helplessness.  Here’s the list of our apparent reality:

1. “I don’t need my own children to attend a school to learn algebra or French. More than anything, I need them to attend school to learn how to learn. Sooner rather than later, we will need to redefine our value now that teachers and content are no longer scarce.”

Ironically,this is the sort of statement that many might identify as a lack of critical thinking. There’s nothing new in the idea that students go to school to learn; that’s been the central tenet of pedagogy for decades. There may well be a plethora of teachers and content, too, but that doesn’t mean that there’s a plethora of good content and good teachers. Just the opposite. The more information there is, the more students need guidance, not less.

2. “The drive to privatize education by for-profit companies and the growing emphasis on online learning, virtual schools and personalized instruction delivered via technology is threatening to make physical-space, community-run schools irrelevant. Again, while physical-space schools will remain a fundamental part of our society in the near term, the options for self-paced, highly personalized, on-demand curricula are exploding.”

and

3. “While the Common Core assessments are still in development, there is now a clear possibility of a national exam for every student, one that is now also “high stakes” for teachers and schools. Whether or not we choose to challenge that scenario and refocus our work on learning, not testing, remains to be seen.”

Education is supposed to be about empowerment. I don’t think you have to be naïve to say that “standardized testing is inevitable” and “private schools are better at this future thing” is both fatalistic and inaccurate. This sounds suspiciously like a “the public schools are going to hell” so let’s open more charters idea. We need to fund public education fully and shut down the standardized testing industry.

4. “Due to the speed with which the Web and other technologies have evolved and are evolving, current teachers, education professionals and teacher-training programs are ill-equipped to employ sound pedagogues for learning with technology or to prepare students for the technology rich, unpredictable, fast-changing, globally networked world they will inhabit.”

This one is harder to figure out. In what sense is technology “too fast” for teachers? Do we have to allow every new Apple product into the classroom the moment it is released in order to stay relevant? I think relevancy is also defined by a critical perspective– that word again– that will allow us to decide what is and what is not relevant to what we are trying to do rather than to simply embrace the messages of the market. Ironically, while the consumer products advertisers like to paint this picture of a great irrefutable techno-future, corporations are notoriously slower to adopt the latest fads, for obvious reasons: rapid, willy nilly change is expensive and disruptive.

5.”The growing ability of technology to replace both unskilled and, increasingly, skilled labor is disrupting traditional thinking and practice about how best to prepare students for careers and is challenging the view that a college degree is a ticket to a middle-class existence.”

Anyone with even a rudimentary sense of history– or, say, a grandfather who worked in the automobile or printing industry– knows that there is hardly anything new in new technologies replacing labor in certain industries, skilled or unskilled. That’s fundamental to capitalist economics, not an by-product of the internet. We manage that process– to a greater or lesser extent–through our political arrangements; we could certainly do that better. At issues is what we mean by “middle class existence.” Do we mean a life without the sort of back-breaking labor that used to contribute to early aging, disease, and death? Do we mean a life in which the basic terms of political debate are generally comprehensible? If so, that would mean that we need to make an undergraduate education free, just as we made a high school education free.

Posted in: Economics, Professional

The Shoe Yet to Drop

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Most important, the system promotes driven and talented students who might otherwise be denied access to higher education: a kid in Afghanistan, a young mother in Scotland, an ignored pupil in Detroit. From Mr. Thrun’s class (translated into 44 languages) Udacity chose 200 students based purely on performance and, a few weeks ago, forwarded their resumes to companies including Amazon, Bank of America and BMW.

There are glitches, of course, including a high online dropout rate, complaints about speed, questions on accreditation and the predictable whining from old-school alumni who have gotten too cozy in their club chairs.

“Watching the Ivory Tower Topple“

Technological change in a capitalist economy often has a lot of hidden and important costs hidden by the marketing campaigns– formal and otherwise–that go with them. There’s always a downside. We’ve been on a long arc of speed-up and casualization of labor in academia ever since the personal computer replaced the secretary pool. Capital– if you will excuse my personification–always seeks to cut costs and the highest costs are always labor costs.

This new “revolution” in education– the latest in a series, many of which never happened, at least in any authentically revolutionary sense– has a lot of benefits.  It also has some real risks. It’s a boon for any autodidact and or interested armatures.  It may help a certain group of students, starting with those who are already materially privileged, get ahead. A smaller group might be able to use the ‘educational web’ in a savvy way to cut costs.

We need a culture focused on education as a life-long endeavor to fully take advantage of these new courses, but only a culture fully focused on learning as a life-long endeavor will be much interested in these courses.  Only time will tell.  Our real concern, I think, should be with the continued ill-health of the teaching profession at all levels. The Oxford model included “tutors” who were well paid and respected professionals. We need that too.

Posted in: Economics, Professional, Writing

That Sort of World

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In reality, instructors off the tenure track account for more than four-fifths of the faculties of two-year public colleges, more than two-thirds of the faculties at private four-year colleges, and more than half of the faculties at public four-year colleges.

“Accreditation Is Eyed as a Means to Aid Adjuncts,” Peter Schmidt

This ought to be a shocking statistic for anyone who works for a living. Academia used to be the cutting edge of employment standards in many ways; it didn’t always pay well to be a teacher but you did have some job security and benefits.  One problem is that the language is so obtuse; “off the tenure track,” means, by and large, part-time workers who can be fired at will. Imagine we could say this of doctors: “Part time and temporarily employed doctors and nurses now account for more than four-fifths of medical personal in clinics, and more that two-thirds in hospitals…”  Would anyone say that their lack of full-time salaries and job security has no impact on the quality of care?

It has to have an impact on the quality of care, just as it has an impact on the quality of teaching now. Teaching is self-selective.  In most cases, if you are want to be a teacher– even more than a doctor– it’s because you like helping people. That’s not to be sentimental about teaching; there are plenty of ego-maniacs and lots of greed in academia and I doubt there’s any more or less incompetence than in any other field. As the numbers show, though, teachers will pursue their  vocations even knowing that their work won’t be well compensated and even when conditions are bad. As a profession, teaching serves goals larger than the person. That’s what’s satisfying.

I think, then, that the real question is why we seem to have to resort to this argument about the quality of education when we ought to be able to simply talk about the quality of work.  We should be able to say that, in any profession, the majority of people ought to be employed full-time, have some say in their working lives, health care, and the tools they need to do the work they need to do. We believe these things because we want that sort of world. We don’t need to pursue silly, obvious arguments that suggest that people can, if pressed, do almost any sort of work well even when they have no health benefits, or job security, or say in their jobs. That should be our assumption.

 

Posted in: Economics, Professional, Union