Technology Can’t Replace Teaching
The National Education Summit last week had exactly one classroom teacher in attendance, and when she was asked to assess the learning-curve dynamics of this lofty assemblage of mostly governors and CEOs, Joyce Elliott of Robinson High School in Little Rock said they seemed to have trouble staying, as teachers say, “on task.”
“But then it’s difficult to keep people ‘on task,”’ she added, “if they already have their answers ready before you ask the question.”
It was as good a way as any to describe the endless point-scoring and sidetracking that passes as discussion at these big education-policy jamborees.
The summit didn’t turn out so badly; it got an assortment of powerful people in government and business to agree on a few joint projects, and it sent them away with a certain amount of renewed enthusiasm for what tends to be an uphill political trudge.
But unlike education itself, at its best an essentially common-sense endeavor conducted in common-sense language, education reform is an activity that seems unable to proceed except amid astonishing amounts of spoken and written nonsense.
The favored variety of nonsense this year, as many have observed, was the elaborate lip service paid to the importance of letting states and localities determine their own standards, no matter how obvious or elementary, for what students should leave school knowing.
Some of this was just protective rhetoric to pre-empt another ambush of the kind that threw the modest “Goals 2000” program off track by painting it, and by extension all federal standards programs, as nefarious plots to induce ideological conformity.
But the notion that local control is the essence of the American educational tradition has also been an article of faith in education circles for a century - though it’s increasingly hard to recall why.
Watching the education people try to get the CEOs in attendance to accept this local-control dogma with the necessary reverence was one of the summit’s more entertaining cultural spectacles.
Early on the first day, Paul O’Neill of Alcoa Inc. stood to ask “why on earth we can’t insist on universal standards at least for 9-year-olds. Can’t a 9-year-old multiply 9 by 9 and get the same answer in all 50 states?”
Louis Gerstner, the chairman of IBM and host of the meeting, replied quickly from the podium, “This is a political issue, Paul - not a rational issue.”
Since this was accepted with grace and the meeting proceeded on track, you might conclude that the people who are serious about improving education - people like Gerstner himself and governors like the summit co-organizers Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin and Roy Romer of Colorado - have simply figured out how to work around the aversion to federal standards and keep moving forward without getting rattled.
But there are plenty of other possible sources of derailment.
One source of danger is the periodic appearance of blue-sky rhetoric that insists it isn’t enough to have standards, or assessments, or whatever - by golly, the whole system has to be totally reorganized, new buildings, new schedules, a new teacher-training establishment!
Though well meant, this plays havoc with actually getting anything done. Lately it has also come in a high-tech version.
It’s understandable. You can see how visions of the computerized, hooked-up, dialed-in, Web-savvy classroom would provoke a certain amount of rash certainty that plugged-in kids won’t need to be nagged to do their homework - won’t need homework at all! - or that the modem will make issues of access, equity and curriculum go the way of the dinosaur.
The summit’s declared emphasis on standards and technology, its sponsorship by computer and other high-tech companies that see education as a huge potential market and the fabulous educational software it unveiled from time to time during the program, all helped enhance the impression that technology can wipe away education’s problems in a trice.
No question, some of the technology is wonderful. National Geographic had a foreign-language-learning game on display called Zingo Lingo, in which Spanish words float down from the top of the screen across a landscape or a roomful of objects - “lamp,” “table,” “pencil” - and the player has to figure out what they mean and quickly pin them on the proper object before they fall too far.
This sounds stupid, but it is addictive beyond description. Surely it could revolutionize the acquisition of simple vocabulary in the first, boring phase of learning a new language.
But there’s a difference between making a product that lures kids to do the necessary drill work and arguing that with technology you aren’t going to need educational drill work ever again.
George Fisher, CEO of Eastman Kodak and one of those who think the 180-day year and the deskbased classroom “must not be allowed to continue into the 21st century,” complained in one of the technology sessions that “computers nowadays are mostly used for drill and practice. It’s a waste, just automating what we did with pencil and paper.”
Asked later if a certain amount of drill work isn’t essential to learning, he said he hadn’t meant the reference pejoratively - “but if you just do things you already know how to do, you’re not using the technology for anywhere near what it’s good for.”
But education by definition involves teaching kids to do things you already know but they don’t yet. Technology can make this process go faster, but if it isn’t happening, nothing is.
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