> For five hundred years, educators perfected, expanded, and developed the
> basic components of the educational system introduced early in the era of
> print, in due course creating modern systems of universal, compulsory
> schooling. As the degree of elaboration and penetration of the system into
> society changed, the specifics justifying the effort evolved to stay
> synchronized with cultural transformations. The main features remained
> stable, however. The design of the classroom and the organization of the
> school day, the motivational strategies employed, the scope and sequence of
> textbooks, the definition of good teaching practice, and the rationales for
> public support remained very stable. The reason for the underlying stability
> was rather simple: throughout it all, the character and limitations of
> printed textbooks remained substantially fixed, the keystone of the system.
>
Robbie McClintock: Power and Pedagogy: Transforming Education through
Information Technology<http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/publicAtions/mcclintock.html>
McClintock, in the work quoted above and below, makes a case that
the*textbook is the keystone
* of our current paradigm of schooling. When you remove a keystone from an
arch the arch will decompose. Is the textbook the keystone of our education
system? If we replace textbooks with online course content will the current
system of schooling fall apart? Does McClintock's vision below of a
computer-based educational system seem likely? What do you think?
A computer-based educational system is not the only possible basis for an
> educative polity, but insofar as it can supplant competitive educational
> motivations with cooperative ones, and insofar as it can genuinely broaden
> educational opportunity by opening multiple channels to knowledge, it will
> facilitate the emergence of one. The computer as a system will make all
> educative resources available to all people at all times, and it will
> greatly expand the scope and substance of those materials. In those
> conditions, education ceases to be mere a means to extrinsic ends and
> becomes an end itself. With those conditions, power and pedagogy may join to
> redefine political purpose, making education its central aim, the object of
> the good life.
>
Thanks to Bram Moreinis for bringing McClintock's work to my attention.
Fred Bartels
Dir. of Info. Tech.
Rye Country Day School
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