Inertia. Newton's first law tells us an object will remain unchanged unless acted upon by a greater force.
I had lunch today with a friend who I first saw speak almost 30 years ago at Swarthmore College. Bill is a poet, a PhD, a Vietnam Vet, former Marine, radical, and fellow history teacher. Bill's not hopeful about the future. He's glad he won't have grandkids. He's happy in his own skin and willing to keep fighting the good fight for a better future despite his deep pessimism.
Unlike Bill, though I've a tendency towards misanthropy (except when teaching), I'm basically a hopeful person. This isn't a hopeful blogpost.
When 25 and witnessing the birth of the internet,reading and learning through the writings of Papert, Friere, Kohl, Kohn and Dewey, I really thought we stood at the cusp of a revolution in teaching and learning. It hasn't happened. It hasn't even started to happen.
At 30, I watched as for two weeks the horrors of Columbine dominated news coverage. I thought surely something would be done. It hasn't happened. It hasn't even started to happen.
I'm closer to the end of my career than I am to the start of it. Education isn't changing. And now some morons think it is a good idea for me to have a gun in my classroom!
Why are reactionaries so empowered?
Real change is so very hard and fear is powerful. "From my cold dead hands" as the NRA is wont to say.
Yet....
Are we really going to be lecturing at kids 20 years from now, 50 years from now? Will that still be the primary way teachers teach in secondary school? Will we confiscate their tech, their computerized glasses, their virtual reality thingamabobs and insist they take notes with pen and paper? Will teachers proudly confiscate this tech they way they proudly make kids put their phones away?
If the phones go away because rich conversation and a co-created quest for meaning is the goal, I can't complain. If the phones are banned because bored kids stop paying attention in boring classes, I want to yell and scream.
Will we have armed teachers? Will we still accept thousands of dead kids (within schools and without) as the price of liberty? I know I'm not being fair to my fellow teachers across this county as I conflate the murder of children with traditional schooling. They are not the same. Not close to the same. But these are the things that are on my mind right now and both are seemingly so entrenched that nothing is going to change the status quo.
Schools could be a part of the solution in this atomized society. It isn't going to be technology per ipsum.
In blogpost tribute, digital activist John Perry Barlow (requiescat in pace) talks with author, feminist bell hooks in 1995. hooks was prescient and Barlow was much, much too hopeful.
John Perry Barlow: Much of what is critically ill in the American heart of the moment has to do with the confusion of information for experience, and reducing one’s map of the world to the informational. We are removed from all of the intuitive realities because we’re trying to experience them through this mediating and separating agency of television or the media in general. We’re living in highly desocialized conditions in our hermetically-sealed two-level ranch-style suburban homes.
bell hooks: I’ve been involved with a project called “Digital Diaspora,” and a lot of what people fear about computers is that they will simply intensify this privatization and alienation from body and spirit that you’re talking about. Do you see that?
John Perry Barlow: We’ve already been separated by information to an alarming extent. The difference between information and experience is that when you’re having an experience, you’re in real-time contact with the phenomena around you. You’re able to ask questions with every synapse in your body of the surrounding conditions. What I’m hopeful about is that because cyberspace is an interactive medium in a human sense, we’ll be able to go through this info-desert and be able to have something like tele-experience. We’ll be able to experience one other genuinely, in a truly interactive fashion, at a distance.
Just yesterday I had the experience Barlow describes as I Skyped with my daughter who is in Italy. Yet, we're more separated and more alienated, not less. Not me and my daughter, society. The West. The East vs. the West. And so on and so on.
The overlay of technology upon schools and larger society have only reinforced long existing trends. We need deep, fundamental, societal and ontological changes. Our kids are increasingly stressed, we're killing ourselves with opiates, the body politic is fragmenting, automation threatens, fear rules us and schools continue to chug along, largely as they always have.
Tomorrow, I'll write about why I'm still hopeful. But not tonight. I'm very sad.
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