Chasing the Laser Pointer Dot
Education - Education
Written by Douglas Wilson
Friday, 17 May 2013
If I may, I would like to urge all Christians interested in the
future of education reform to continue their hot pursuit of said reform,
but not to do so like a kitten pursuing a laser pointer dot on the rug.
We live in exciting pedagogical times, and the arrival of many more
options in distance learning via the Internet really is exciting -- and
promising. At the same time, people are still the same as they
always were, and one of the things that people have always done with new
technologies is draw false inferences. Sometimes the next big thing
isn't, as those with vintage 8-track collections might be able to tell
you.
First adapters can be visionaries or idiots, and it is sometimes hard
to tell. I say all this as a preface to some cautionary notes about our
newest boom town in education. And please keep in mind that I am saying
all this, not as a critic, but as a participant. Okay, if you want, you
could make that a participating critic, or a critical participant.
In any case, in the middle of this start-up educational reformation,
there is a lot of nonsense being spouted about the history of education,
and we are unlikely to get the future right if we insist on getting the
past all wrong.
One of the ways to tell the visionaries from the chumps
is to look carefully at how carefully connected to the past it all is.
Southwest Airlines burst onto the scene the way it did because it was
not really competing with the established airlines. Their business
model was to compete with the Greyhound bus -- to go after a clientele
that had never flown before. The explosion of e-readers is turning out
not to be the competitor of the book, but rather of the paperback. And .
. . wait for it . . . distance learning of our modern, souped-up
variety competes, not with genuine schools, but rather with libraries.
Lose you? Think of it this way. We have always had distance learning
-- that's what a letter is, or a book. The original book of Ephesians
was an example of divinely-inspired distance learning. For the Ephesians
themselves, it was geographical distance, and for us in this generation
it is geographical, chronological, linguistic, and cultural distance.
There is a lot of distance between my thoughts and Paul's as we
contemplate together what is meant by all spiritual blessings in the
heavenly places -- and an enormous amount of blessing has crossed that
distance nonetheless. So, in this sense, three cheers for distance
learning. God loves it. But as He loves it, He knows what it is.
Not only have we always had such letters, books, and libraries, we
have always had bookworm nerds who needed to get out of those libraries,
and blink in the sunshine for a bit. They needed to go out to the
sandlot with the other boys (other boys? what's that?) and get clocked
on the forehead with a sweet line drive. Do that boy a world of good.
This is because community -- the blessing of other people -- is not
something that can ever be dragged and dropped.
So let us think like adults, not children. Community means people
nearby, and that means people needing to be organized. And organization
in community is a mark of good discipline, not a mark of capitulation to
Enlightenment categories. I have seen a goodly amount of recent chatter
that equates any kind of age-segregated classroom learning with the
Prussian model of education, where we make all the little children sit
in straight-line rows, so that they can be made to sit still while our
robotic educative arm pours knowledge into their wee heads. And
seriously, the Prussians were pretty bad, while the early American
education johnnies who wanted to be like them were really bad too. But
God's covenant people have had classrooms since the Jews established
their first schools after the Babylonian exile, and Jesus graduated from
Nazareth High. Every synagogue had as one of its officers a
schoolmaster --a chazzan (Luke 4:20)-- and for all these many centuries all of these covenant folks had only a passing knowledge of things Prussian.
The Prussians, being both modernists and Germans, a bad combination,
tried to turn all classrooms into knowledge factories, and that was bad.
But they didn't invent the classroom from scratch, for pity's sake.
They didn't invent kids learning how to stand in a line -- and if they
did, good for them.
If you sign up for one of the online classes that Logos Press is offering this fall (as
indeed, I hope you do), everything hinges on what you are comparing it
to. Is that class a wonderful, interactive textbook, or is it a
two-dimensional classroom? If the former, it is really cool. If the
latter, then it is a great temptation.
One of the central reasons it presents such a temptation is that it
is really convenient -- and one of the great blessings of community is
that it is so inconvenient. Seriously. Your child has to be at
the school by eight in the morning, even though he is not a morning
person, didn't have time for a balanced breakfast, and has to deal with
other kids who are not as sweet to him as his mother is. That is why it
is so good for him. There is a macro-lesson underneath all the other
lessons when it comes to working inside the framework of an established
school. That macro-lesson is that life is not all about you.
Is your car a really fast chariot, or a really slow airplane? When we
make adult evaluations of education delivery platforms, we always must
ask the basic question, "compared to what?" When I have to travel
without my wife, today I can stay far more connected to her than I could
do when traveling thirty years ago, for which I render thanks for the
technology . . . but traveling without her is still for the birds.
Compared to what?
Those who are using technology wisely are those who are using it to
help them eventually connect with other people, in real time, on the
ground. The goal is life together, and that means breathing the
same air in the same room. It may take a while to get there, but that
should always be the goal. In the meantime, I would much rather have my
grandchildren studying in a good online course of study than in a bad
brick and mortar school. This is for the same reason that I would rather
have them go to a good library than to a bad school. Of course again.
Remember, compared to what?
But anybody who might reverse this, walking away from a good school
in order to chase knowledge "in the cloud" has already got his head in
that cloud. He would rather read a book in the great cyber-library of
the sky, especially if the book vigorously denounces Gnosticism, than to
go out and deal with actual people on a daily basis -- which
necessarily elicits from us this thing called love.
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