Class War by Megan Erickson

Author:Megan Erickson
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: Verso Books

Teaching machines

Technology offers real possibilities for changing the way we relate to each other for the better—for example, adaptive technology for children with special needs gives us the potential to integrate children with even severe disabilities into general education classrooms. But there’s a disconnect between what we imagine technology can do and what it truly will do, much like the divide between what we imagine education can do and what it actually does. One laptop per child can’t lift communities out of poverty, because the entire global economy is structured to keep the wealthiest people—who have no interest in paying people more or making other concessions to workers, and indeed, are compelled by market competition to keep cutting costs—in power.

Management gurus and their tech-industry followers insist that if we can dream it, we can do it; that instead of “throwing more money at the problem,” we must use our creativity to brainstorm best practices for education and make them scalable. Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen believes that in the future, computer-based instruction will entirely replace the current model, bringing a higher return on investment for the nation’s education system.

Today’s corporate education reformers express frustration with the continuity of traditional schooling methods—though most do not recognize the history to which they are intimately tied, since technological innovation is imagined to be as ahistorical as it is apolitical. In a 2013 Google+ hangout, US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan told Silicon Valley–based social entrepreneur Sal Khan:

We have to continue to accelerate. The fact that we’re still teaching with a nineteenth-century model makes no sense whatsoever, with twenty-five or thirty kids sitting in rows learning the same thing at the same time, same pace. It’s like Neanderthal. It makes no sense. This idea with technology being a great thing to empower moving from seat time to competency—I don’t want to know how long you sat there, I want to know, do you know the materials? Do you know algebra or biology or chemistry or physics? If you know it, you shouldn’t have to sit there.15

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