Here is my latest rant on higher education. After you read it, please share your thoughts and feelings. Just click on “comment” on the lower right and keyboard in your comment.
As a young undergraduate at Stanford, I nearly worshiped my professors. They seemed like gods to me, so brilliant, so erudite, so wise and compassionate, an awesome combination of selfless servants and bold intellectual warriors willing to follow the truth through the jaws of hell if need be.
Now, rather closer to the end of my academic career than I prefer, I cannot say that I have changed my mind. I still love academia. I still worship in the temple of truth.
But how can I explain the failure I cannot deny of the university to live up to its high principles? Somehow, somewhere, there has been an appalling failure of leadership, an abandonment of principle, some dereliction, a loss of moral confidence, a reluctance to confront falsehood boldly.
I still cannot understand how anyone can abandon so noble a cause. To me, the entire fate of humanity rests in the hands of our educational enterprise. After a lifetime of study and scholarship, I am convinced that good, practical, satisfying answers exist to virtually every human problem, from disease to poverty to fear-driven hatred. It’s not that these answers are not known but that they are not used, not celebrated, not shared, not applied.
The fulcrum for extraordinary change is education. If we were to actually exploit fully the true potential of existing technology, everything, -- literally everything -- would change.
Much of the blame for academia's loss of direction, its failure to execute, has to be on the trustees of the university for they have ultimate legal responsibility. Legally, the university is theirs. But their dereliction is not hard to understand; they were not chosen for leadership but for their wealth or connections to wealth. The foxes put the title to the chicken house in the hands of some genial but altered dogs. Generally, they are both clueless and gutless.
Much of the blame has to be on the administrators. But one cannot marvel that they are self-serving; it is nearly bred into them. You expect a mouse to be a mouse and a rat to act like a rat.
I blame most of all the professoriate. This is who has let me and the world’s entire educational enterprise down. They are supposed to be intelligent and wise and to know better. In the classroom, they act like they know it all, so why aren’t they actualizing that comprehensive vision outside the classroom?
Why have they chosen to be more concerned about perks and privilege, power and prestige, than transforming the lives of their students? Were they just after an easy, well paying, part time job with a full time salary and access to coeds?
The thing about the professoriate that most disgusts me is their failure to master technology in service of higher education. I can forgive them their moral cowardice. I know it takes courage to speak up in defense of an unpopular and unpleasant truth. Unfortunately, by the time they get tenure, they lose their passion for defending the unpleasant truth.
But how explain their failure simply to adopt the latest technology? It can be explained only by intellectual sloth, the one unforgivable betrayal of all that should be holy to a teacher.
If you have no love for learning, how do you call yourself a teacher? Rather than charging to the front to help lead the most exciting and promising era in the entire history of education, they have hidden behind the podium and trembled about the possible loss of their position.
Ironically, while these technophobes quake about the demise of the classroom teacher, their fears are entirely misplaced. The information revolution will not eliminate the teacher, merely liberate him to become a better teacher. The only cost to the teacher will be preparation. She must become fit to teach, able to use the wonderful new tools that are transforming our discipline.
The classroom teacher will never disappear. People need high touch as much as they do high tech. They always will. While computers will continue to get better and better at freeing the classroom teacher from the routine elements of instruction, they will never be able to inspire. They will never be able to show a compelling personal interest in someone. They will never be able to care and
to demonstrate that they care.
No computer will ever have a personal story of striving against adversity and rising up the challenges of life. No computer will ever laugh or cry. No computer will ever care about and comfort someone with a skinned knee or a bruised ego. None will ever rejoice at the signs of visible personal growth.
As much good as educational technology can do us, no computer will ever love us. But they can allow us to do a better job of being human. They can relieve an overworked teacher from much of the monotonous and unrewarding routine of her craft.
It is obvious that in order to make the most of the power of educational technology, we must employ it to do everything except the intrinsically human. Humans must be freed to do what they alone can do.
Teachers must abandon their role as the definitive source of information and become facilitators instead. Their new role is not to instruct but to guide discovery.
They need to get over being the expert, the final source of truth and justice. Their expertise has been trumped by the digital invasion of the classroom. Everyone in the classroom now has access to an entire universe of information, a staggering panoply that makes any individual's wealth of knowledge seem modest.
The loss of the power experience by the teacher is balanced by an increase of power in the hands of the student.
But this is only as it should be. The whole purpose of the teacher is not to posture as an authority but to share knowledge and understanding, to empower students.
Teachers need to embrace the new technology and the wonderful new change it is bringing to the world of education. This is without a doubt the greatest era in all of education’s history. As vital as the invention of writing was, as crucial as the development of the printing press, today’s technology is more important, because it takes everything known and makes it everywhere available to all.
The invention of writing led to the development of a priesthood of scribes. The invention of the printing press led to the development of schools serving the wealthy and privileged. The development of educational technology is leading to the complete democratization of education.
All knowledge wants to be free and freely dispersed. Everyone on earth has a God given right to learn. The great and wonderful U.S. Constitution failed to even mention education, because at that time it was simply unthinkable that all humanity would ultimately have a right to an education.
Today’s technology makes that possible. It must be the goal of the university to advance that cause, to put all the education that anyone could ever want into the hands of those willing to study
and learn.
Our students are all the children of the world, everyone who dreams of a better life and is willing to work to achieve it.
It doesn’t take a prophet to see that educational technology is transforming teaching.
American education faces its greatest challenge today. Either our teachers will rise to meet this challenge or abandon the future of education to others. The ivy covered campanile is on the verge of becoming another iteration of a rusted steel mill, a symbol of a bygone and irrelevant age, bypassed by a dynamic flow of energy and information. I don't know. Perhaps the death of the university as it exists today is just a necessary step in the overall progression of learning, a part of the creative destruction that seems a necessary part of advancement.
I do know that education technology in American education is largely a failed enterprise. Almost none of the true potential of technology has been realized.
The problem has been the half-hearted halfway measures thus far employed. The system has tried to adapt to the new technology by grafting it onto a primitive system, one that has changed little in the past 300 years. We have had computers in classrooms for decades but they are hardly utilized.
All organizations, all humans , are resistant to change. Our teachers teach the way they are taught, because that is what they know. We cling to what is safe and familiar.
Teachers use outmoded practices not because they are a great deal dumber than the average college graduate but because the system discourages doing anything different. Like all bureaucracies, the system exists to serve the interests of those who operate the system instead of those it is supposed to serve.
The system is corrupt and monstrously inefficient, wasting most of the endless dollars pumped into it. Billions of dollars are wasted on textbooks. Textbooks should be banned, made as illegal as any life wasting hard drug.
Only total systemic change can succeed. The answer is not more teacher training. The answer is complete system redesign. We need an entirely new educational system, one engineered around
technology
The biggest barrier to educational progress today is the educational system itself, the stakeholders heavily invested in the past, the teachers afraid of change, more worried about their own future than that of their students.
Having worked in this system for years, I have become convinced that it cannot be reformed. It simply needs to be left alone to wither and die. It is totally resistant to change. I remember over a decade ago that it took me two years pushing hard at the largest private university in the state just to get our writing classes moved into the computer lab. Here we had rooms full of computers sitting idle while next door college students were writing essays by hand.
Another example: While my own discipline is English literature, I’ve always been fascinated by math – and probably would have made a career in it had I not been so mistaught – so when on my own time I came up with an entirely new math curriculum that would have transformed the teaching of the subject, it was dead on delivery, because I was treading on someone else’s turf.
The new university
There is good news for modern man. A new kind of institution of higher education is coming into being, one capable of transforming not only the world of higher education, but the world itself. A number of marvelous features make this exquisite and powerful engine of positive change different
from every school that ever went before.
Probably the most significant difference is that this great new temple of learning exists primarily to provide a truly excellent college education to every person on earth willing to study and learn. It will provide a college education equivalent to the best of the Ivy League schools in the golden era of education -- the 1950's -- and it will do this for a price that everyone on earth can afford.
One of the best thing about the new instructional paradigm this school offers is that all learning will be totally individualized. The programs with which students interact will simply build a profile, notice what the student knows and does not know. Based on such things as their vocabulary, grammar, interests, demonstration of general knowledge, etc. the system will design a personalized
course of instruction.
The learning program will provide an easy and transparent way to automatically create a personalized homepage. It will personalize and automatically present homepage features related to the student’s interests and abilities from a huge library of existing homepage modules. It will function as
a tool of lifelong learning. It will not merely archive the student’s academic achievements in an electronic portfolio, it will constitute a lifelong means of support in acquiring new knowledge and skill.
Prior universities prepared students for a future; the new university shares that future with them, helping to create it. The few years spent acquiring a high-quality academic degree represent merely the start of a lifelong relationship.
The new university is not so much a place as a community, a community of practice, a worldwide community of learners and teachers and workers.
To carry out the personalization process, a program will analyze the way students interact with their computer before recommending a modification. For example, the program can track your favorite sites, frequently viewed news and variety sites, and more. The program will base its suggestions on the prior web sites you have visited, the features you use most, your preferred news sources, the articles you read, the books you read, and the applications you run.
Probably the bulk of the assessment will be done informally with the program simply noticing how you use and don’t use the computer. It will notice the vocabulary you use, the words you use and don’t use. It will track the books and articles you read – and don’t read.
It functions as a lifelong intellectual companion, making suggestions about new skills and interests and developments in fields that seem to interest you. It will notice who within the community shares interests with you and bring the two of your together.
Students will no longer be forced to study what they already know. This probably means at least a 20% leap in efficiency, because in today’s – or more accurately, yesterday’s factory model -- huge redundancies are built in. Instruction is aimed at the lowest common denominator and everyone takes the same standard course. The most likely to be bored: the brightest and most
able students.
Using the best of educational technology means that we will no longer hold back the brightest and best students. Some students will earn a BA degree in two years or less. Others might take ten years, or if they never get there, will at least engage in lifelong learning along with their more brilliant fellows.
Second, teaching will become more fun and exciting. All the routine chores of teaching – grading homework, tests, essays – will be automated. Teachers will now be able to focus on teaching, giving personal attention to students who need help and those ready for new opportunities and challenges.
A new sense of collegiality -- largely missing in today’s schools in which teachers rarely confer or collaborate -- will improve instruction and the teacher’s enjoyment of teaching. Technology will increase opportunities for communication and make it easier to share one’s thoughts and work.
Online interaction among teachers offers many of the characteristics research has shown to be associated with high quality professional development: collaboration among colleagues; adequate time for inquiry, reflection, and mentoring; and a focus on improving student learning.
Third, assessment and instruction will combine.
Fourth, learning will become fun, education and entertainment commingle. Making learning fun will mean a higher success rate, because people do what they enjoy doing.
Some of that time would be spent in a new kind of classroom, some would be spent in front of a computer or a television, some would be spent in private study, some would be spent in team or individual problem solving, and some would be spent in conversation with faculty or other students. To make this new model work, education has to come to better agreement about what kinds
and levels of capacities it expects for each level of credential, and it has to become more sophisticated about measuring them.
The new classroom
The new classroom will be a learning center. Its design will facilitate interaction, communication, collaboration, as well as private study. It will have desks, comfortable chairs arranged for small group discussion, round tables where team interaction can take place. Obviously, the entire arsenal of educational technology will be available.
Fifth, learning efficiency accelerates. Traditional instruction is highly wasteful of valuable resources. The old format of one teacher lecturing to a classroom of thirty students is inherently inefficient. That same lecture digitized and podcast could instruct thousands or tens of thousands delivered right when and where they want to hear it and without the student having to drive to
campus, find a parking space, walk to class. Plus the recorded lecture produces better understanding and retention, because the listener can take better notes.
She can easily pause the recording to catch up on notes or reflect, or click back a few minutes to re-listen to something. The student can listen while exercising or walking or driving.
Podcasting revolutionizes the learning of languages. Just ten minutes a day listening to a native speaker as one carries out the routine tasks of everyday life will produce a mastery of a foreign tongue rarely obtained by students who spend two years in a conventional college language course. Language students of the past may have learned the intricacies of the subjunctive voice and the
subtleties of the nominative case, but they never achieved fluency in the language.
I’m now learning Italian while I walk my dog. While I stroll along the woodland path, native speakers let me share a dialogue at a speed I can comprehend and they are happy to pause when I wish and repeat endlessly. They never get tired and are even happy to accompany me into the bathroom
or crawl into bed with me for a few minutes of late night instruction.
Not only does my $80 MP3 player the size of a business card teach me Italian, it is an FM tuner, a voice recorder and stores some 30 hours of audio books. I'm listening to a book on leadership, an account of the Reagan White House years, Proust's "Remembrance," and "War and Peace." And this is just the start.
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