"A black board, in every school
house, is as indispensably necessary as a stove or fireplace; and in
large schools several of them might be useful."
"Slates are as necessary as black boards, and even more so. But they
are liable to be broken, it will be said, as to render it expensive to
parents to keep their children supplied with them."
"But are not books necessary at all, when the pupils are furnished
with slates? I may be asked. Not for a large proportion of the children
who attend our summer schools, nor for some of them who attend in the
winter. To such I believe books are not only useless, but on the whole,
worse than useless. As they advance in years, however, they may be
indulged with a book, now and then, as a favor. Such favor will not be
esteemed a light thing; and will come in time, to be sought more
frequently, and with more and more earnestness."
"At first, it will be well for the small portion of each day in which
very young pupils are allowed to have slates, to let them use them much
in the way they please. Some will make one thing, some another. What
they make is of comparatively little consequence, provided they attend,
each to his own business, and do not interfere with that of others."
In 1842
William A. Alcott, a now forgotten member of that legendary American family of letters, wrote a series of articles for the
Connecticut Common School Journal,
asking teachers across America to make use of the newest educational
technology - the black board and the student slate. Well, it wasn't
really new. West Point had been using these for instruction since at
least 1820, but then, as now, schools were slow to adopt new ideas.
But in the 1840s everything in communication was changing. Wood pulp based paper and the rotary printing press had created the
penny newspaper, an entirely new way of spreading news - and
often gossip.
The telegraph had arrived creating the revolutionary concept of
instantaneous communication across great distances. And the world itself
was shrinking as steamboats and railroads rushed humans from place to
place at unheard of speeds.
 |
William Alcott's ideas, handheld - "1:1" slates, the chalkboard, individual seats (allowing children to leave
without disturbing others), kids moving around, good heating, big windows... |
These new technologies spawned new forms of writing. Authors such as
Charles Dickens began
serializing fiction for the masses
- one no longer needed to buy expensive books and sit in that big
leather chair. Writers even created the first blogs - think of
American Notes. Others, people like
Horace Greeley, were redefining journalism.
The world was changing, and certain people, led by Alcott, were desperately trying to drag the schoolhouse into the present.
The Question
Then, as now, there was furious opposition. Alcott admitted that he
was seen as being "against books." He was perceived as disruptive. He
was already forcing schools to buy costly new furnishings (individual
student desks and chairs, to replace tables and benches), and now he was
advocating a radical change in how teaching took place.
Then, as now, the wrong question was being asked. In 1842 the
doubters wondered what these new technologies could do for schools as
they existed. Today, educators and policy makers constantly wonder what
computers, mobile phones, and social networking will do for a curriculum
largely unchanged since 1910.
That was the wrong question then, and it is the wrong question now.
The right question is, what can schools, what can education, contribute
to these new technologies?
Just as in 1842, just as
in Socrates' time when literacy appeared,
the technologies of information and communication have changed
radically this decade - the ways in which humans learn about their world
have changed radically, and schools will either help their students
learn to navigate that new world, or they will become completely
irrelevant.
How you learned doesn't matter at all
If you are a teacher, a parent, an administrator, or the President of
the United States, I do not care how or what you learned in school. Or,
let me put it this way, your experience in school, or in sitting with
your mom studying books in the wee hours of the morning, is completely
irrelevant to any discussion of the education of today's students.
Maybe worse than irrelevant. Maybe dangerous. The belief that "your"
experience is relevant leads to a nightmare loop. Students who behave,
and learn, most like their teachers do the best in classrooms. Teachers
see this reflection as proof of their own competence - "The best
students are just like me."
And thus all who are "different" in any way -
race, class, ability, temperament, preferences - are left out of the
success story.
 |
Choosing everything: A student listens to text while creating
his own seating and desk... (Michael Thornton) |
The majority of our students do "poorly" in school, do not achieve
their potential in school, do not enjoy education. Doing it "the old
way," utilizing the old tools, ensures that they never will.
Mobile phones, computers everywhere, hypertext, social networking, collaborative cognition (from
Wikipedia on up),
Google, text-messaging,
Twitter,
audiobooks,
digital texts,
text-to-speech,
speech recognition,
flexible formatting - these are not "add ons" to the world of
education, they are the world of education. This is how humans in this
century talk, read, communicate, learn. And learning to use these
technologies effectively, efficiently, and intelligently must be at the
heart of our educational strategies. These technologies do something
else - by creating a flexibility and set of choices unprecedented in
human communication - they "enable" a vast part of the population which
earlier media forms disabled.
Back in Socrates' time it was all about the information you could
remember. With this system very, very few could become "educated." In
the ‘Gutenberg era' it was all about how many books you could read and
how fast you could decode alphabetical text; this let a few more reach
that ‘educated' status -
about 35% if you trust all those standardized tests to measure "proficiency."
But now it is all about how you learn to find information, how you
build your professional and personal networks, how you learn, how
to
learn - because learning must be continuous. None of this eliminates
the need for a base of knowledge - the ability to search, to ask
questions, requires a knowledge base, but it dramatically alters both
how that knowledge base is developed, and what you need to do with it.
This paradigm opens up the ranks of the "educated" in ways inconceivable
previously.
Technology is NOT something invented after you were born
Technology is everything humans have created. Books are technology - a
rather complex and expensive one actually, for holding and transmitting
human knowledge. The schoolroom is technology - the desks, chairs,
blackboards, schedule, calendar, paper, pens, and pencils. These are not
"good" or "bad," but at this point, they are simply outdated.
Yes, we still have stone carvers. Yes, we still have calligraphers.
But we no longer teach students to chase the duck, pluck the feather,
and
cut the quill. We no longer
teach Morse Code. We no longer teach the creation of
illuminated manuscripts.
Now we must give up teaching that ink-on-paper is the primary
information source. It is not. We must give up insisting that students
learn "cursive" writing. Instead, they must learn to text on
their mobiles and dictate intelligibly to their computer. We must toss out our
"keyboarding" classes and encourage students to discover their own best
ways to input data. We must abandon much of Socrates' memorization and
switch to engagement with where data is stored. We must abandon the
one-way classroom communication system, be it the lecture or use of the
"clicker," and teach with conversation and
through modeling learning itself. We must lose the idea
that "attention" means students staring at a teacher,
or that "attendance" means being in the room, and understand all the
differing ways humans learn best. We must stop separating subjects
rigidly and adopt the contemporary notion of following knowledge where
it leads us.
And we need to start by understanding that we are preparing students
for the world that is their future, not the world that is our past.
-
Ira Socol
anyway...
