I completely agree with you that schools are and will continue to be
essential social institutions. I also agree with your caution about
technology not providing educational silver bullets.
However, there was a slightly self-congratulatory tone in your description
of independent schools as utopian communities that I'm not so comfortable
embracing.
My concern can be summed up by a couple of comments made by two school
administrators at a strategic planning session last year.
The first administrator said she was concerned by the shrinking
representation of the middle class in the school. The second administrator
said, somewhat facetiously, that there was no middle-class representation.
No one disagreed.
The past thirty years in the United States have been very good for the
wealthy (our primary clientele) and not so good for everyone else. Our
schools have been showered with gifts from wealthy parents and alums (they
have to spend it somewhere) which have allowed us to create glittering
facility-laden campuses, add wonderful services of all kinds, and enlarge
financial-aid budgets. Our schools are islands of excellence but at what
cost?
The United States leads the world in the percentage of the population that
is incarcerated. Ken Robinson said in the interview I posted yesterday
that California will soon be spending more on its prison system than on
its higher education system.
I believe that for our country to move forward the wealthy will need to
greatly reduce their percentage of the rewards our economic system
produces. If this is right, then it means that for the good of the country
we have to hope independent schools will have fewer resources going
forward. With fewer resources it will be a great challenge to maintain our
high standards. I believe that perhaps the most important way to meet this
challenge will involve being much more creative in our use of information
technology.
The soapbox is now available for the next speaker.
Fred
>I'll challenge the assertion that school has been irrelevant for many
>years. I've been meaning to do this for a couple of days, and now I've got
>the time.
>
>It's not school, but many of the priorities that educators and public
>expectations have imposed on schools for many years that are fading in
>relevance. However, I'd argue that a great deal of what happens in schools
>around socializing young people and helping them develop intellectual
>character and moral purpose continues to be extremely relevant, if not
>utterly essential for the survival of the planet and everything that
>dwells upon it.
>
>I am not talking about just a continuation of classical forms of
>instruction or the maintenance of triumphalist historical and cultural
>narratives.
>
>Technologies come and technologies go (although lately I've felt like the
>new triumphalist narrative on this list is the growing up/grown up digital
>concept, in which everything that anyone has ever done in the past without
>the benefit of cell phones and Twitter--both of which I use--is somehow
>"industrial," intellectually crude and stultifying). I think that we might
>remind ourselves that glorious communications technologies have been used
>for evil purpose (Nazi films, Rwandan radio, Mumbai satphones), and that
>all technologies are no better or worse than the people who use them.
>People evolve more slowly than tubes and chips. Daniel Pink may be calling
>it A WHOLE NEW MIND, but it's not quite that--it's a new way of deploying
>tools. (Let the record show that I was the first on this list to mention
>that book--I LOVE it.)
>
>Human beings are gregarious by nature, and science seems to support the
>idea that fae-to-face interaction and collaboration make for stronger
>experiences, including learning experiences, than virtual ones. This is
>why many of us go home for Thanksgiving even though we could Skype the day
>away, and this is why virtually every human society has some provision for
>educating and acculturating its young in groups, not just within nuclear
>families.
>
>Schools, in particular the independent schools represented by members of
>this list, evolved for their own purposes, and they have an interesting
>history. Groton was not founded to pump out industrial workers, nor were
>Winsor or Greenwich Academy or Westtown or Hockaday or Kinkaid (or Beaver,
>for that matter); the "industrial model" dog won't really hunt when sicced
>on most independent schools. These schools were founded in a particular
>era to help a particular group of students from a particular stratum of
>society gain an understanding of how th world works and how to apply their
>talents to keeping it working and to make it work even better. Along the
>way these schools were inevitably caught up in preserving certain forms,
>and certain privileges, that in time obscured some of their founders'
>purposes and gave birth to the "elite prep school"--snob school--image
>that we have to contend with today.
>
>However, I think a good case can be made that many independent schools,
>old and young, have in the past twenty years or so looked hard at their
>heritage and tried to rediscover or reshape their original moral purposes.
>Look at how hard some schools have worked to make themselves relevant
>around issues like globalization, diversity, environmental sustainability,
>and even social justice. Intentionally and as a collective enterprise,
>some schools have pushed to give their students a deep and broad
>understanding of how the world works and how it doesn't.
>
>Some of this push has been curricular, much and wonderfully aided and
>enhanced by technology. "Depth" and diversity not only mean deeper and
>broader conceptualization, but when done well (do we "do depth"?) they
>also involve multiple points of view, cultural and ethical. Tools like the
>web and the various cool new communication technologies make it much
>easier to find these points of view, and teaching students how to use the
>tools--and to evaluate what they find--is vital to a better future. So is
>teaching students how to work collaboratively, in small groups in the
>hallways and in larger groups in the auditorium and in virtual, global
>groups.
>
>The push has also involved giving students new kinds of experiences. In a
>Depression world, it isn't a terrible thing that some students are still
>doing old-fashioned (c. 1995) "community service." It's an even better
>thing that in many cases activist field work on social and environmental
>problems is part of the learning experience: service learning, which can
>also be powerfully enhanced by technology.
....
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