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Public Education: The Excluded Middle

The Microsoft folks who brought us Channel 9 have spawned on10.  It took me a while to figure out that this is not a quarterback’s in-huddle play call.  Every weekday morning at 10:00 pst (gmt-0800, adjusted as needed for summer time I suppose) there’s a new short video, a kind of MTV-does-technology moment.  It’s light, gushy, enthusiastic and I like it.  I even began listening to KEXP in Media Player though I’ll soon revert to my TV-less detachment from spectator culture, with an occasional burst of Radio L’Olgiata for my kind of spice.  In addition, and the point of this post, on10 is introducing in-house columnist blogs on popular topics.  MD Bill Crounse has begun the Health Blog On 10 with a focus on how “technology can improve healthcare delivery and services around the world.”   Microsoft Research blogger Kevin Schofield has begun the Education Blog On 10.  That focus: Using technology to advance individual learning.  Since On10 blogs limit comments to 1000 bytes, I came over here to comment on Kevin’s theme and now my post is even longer!  Let’s see if I can find out how to ping back over there.

{tags: education learning instruction technology computer-science education schooling Ivan Illich on10 orcmid}

[update: I messed up the tags so I also repaired a word choice that was bothering me.]

Although Kevin Schofield’s inaugural on10 post is about the crisis in computer-science education, that is, the decline in students and the connected fear for our national technological capability, his second post emphasizes that the blog, contrary to the mast head, intends to take a wide-open approach “education.”

I am nervous about the topic of "Education" at its broadest.  I now feel incompetent to even pontificate! 

The “excluded middle” in this post’s subject is about some silliness on a discussion list about philosophical logic.  I don't know why it seems perfect here, perhaps because I am among the great unwashed that are not stakeholders in the institutionalization of “education” but I am expected to have an enlightened interest as a matter of good citizenship and democratic participation.  I think my views on education (and democracy) are decidedly Jeffersonian.  (I also don’t subscribe to the social-logicalism law-of-excluded-middle that has “If you’re not for it, you’re against it” as a principle of social civil discourse.)

In terms of public education, all I see around me (being almost 50 years distant from my own experience and having no school-age children) is divisiveness in school-board elections, scorn for teachers/administrators/parents/pupils, etc., and concern for the cost and the payoff and the role of government at all levels.  So if we go off on the institutionalization of "education" broadly, I worry that we will go down a rat-hole where everyone has an opinion and none of us know what we are talking about.

Then I suppose there is the question of how people learn and develop, what has that be a life-long practice, and how being educated figures in having a satisfying and productive life.  I am keen about that.  I am also keen about technology as an instrument for our own, self-directed education.  (Side note: In Italy, the English “education” is understood as “la istruzione” and not “la educazione” which mostly refers to civil and mannered upbringing.  Since the Italians seem to have our number on this one, I settled on “la erudizione” for my, uh, educational interests.)

Now, even though I am not a stakeholder and maybe not a qualified participant (except there are always these education-focused ballots to deal with), I want to add Ivan Illich to the mix of readings that are being suggested on10.  Illich’s 1970 book, Deschooling Society is intentionally provocative, I'm sure, and I am unwilling to accept his attribution of base motives behind the system of public education as established in the United States and elsewhere.  What I do find interesting is his observation that institutions often end up being the problem they were created to solve, to put a Zen spin on it.  I also find his challenge to the coupling of instruction and certification/qualification as very worthy of discussion. 

I see Illich as a great source of the kinds of outrageous questions that, if we can give up our indignation about some of his postulates, will get us out of the box to apply some critical evaluation to whether and how our institutions are delivering on their promise, and what is it we (that is, all of the stakeholders) are really expecting of them, not in our proclamations but in our deeds and their results.  I also wonder if there is anything that makes the material dated or is it dreadfully prophetic instead.  I don't have the facts, I'm just one of the great middle observers of our public angst.

I am confident of one thing though:  Technology can be a great instrument for “education” at any level and however construed.  It is not the answer.  It’s not an answer at all. 

I see that I have also fallen into the contemporary association of technology with artifacts and mechanisms, rather than with the economist’s view of technology as know-how.  I supposed that’s something to consider (broadly) when we speak of technology for education and especially in “using technology to advance individual learning.”