Educational Ecologies by Dowd John;

Author:Dowd, John;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

The serious attention Kurzweil’s work is receiving is difficult to ignore. So too is the underlying discourses of progress, entrepreneurialism, and inevitability, which empower much of Kurzweil’s vision of homo technologicus and makes the critical vantage point required to assess the relationship between education and technology difficult to maintain.

Within higher education, any critique of the above relationship is often met with scrutiny by those charged with more efficiently streamlining teaching and learning (Archibald and Feldman 2010). This discourse becomes problematic precisely due to the general attitudes and actions it influences, which manifest in ways distinct to specific material sites, objects, and practices. With regard to higher education, these discourses bias the ways we think about and organize our educational and technological environments. A point expanded upon later in this chapter.

Among Kurzweil’s cleverer rhetorical denunciations is his coupling of “Luddite” with another powerfully evocative concept, “fundamentalist” (2005). A heading in his book entitled “The Threat from Fundamentalism” begins with a paragraph on the imminent and especially insidious threat of radical Islamic terrorism (Kurzweil 2005). He argued that although it appears these terrorists are solely after wanton violence, their real agenda is to turn back progress on “such modern ideas as democracy, women’s rights, and education” (414). Interestingly enough, he uses this example as segue into his denunciation of Luddites. By leading with his description of fundamentalist Islamic terrorists and drawing attention to the fact that they too are concerned with halting progress, the rhetorical force is carried over to the Luddite who, like the terrorist, desires only to stop progress. Prior to this point, he uses “fundamentalist” and “Luddites.” However, in the section described above he loses the “and” to refer to this group solely as “fundamentalist Luddites” (Kurzweil 2005, 415).

At first glance this may not appear a serious move, but upon closer inspection extremely powerful images surface as to the dangerousness of anything perceived to be Luddite. By tying the terrorist to the Luddite in regard to the latter’s purported desire to halt progress, Kurzweil further equates the Luddite and the terrorist in regard to the propensity for violence. This rhetorical link is particularly problematic in a post 9/11 world. Through the appropriation of one devil term (Burke 1966, Weaver 1965) “Luddite,” Kurzweil and others brush aside any opposition to unmitigated technological growth, regardless of its consequences. This closes off important dialogue concerning technological development and appropriation, and leaves most citizens out of the decision making process.

In a similar fashion fellow co-founder of Singularity U, Peter Diamandis, aims to leverage technology to address major global problems. His credentials, like Kurzweil’s, are impressive. He received degrees from MIT in molecular genetics and aerospace engineering, and his M.D. from Harvard Medical School. In addition to his formal education Diamandis is a self-described entrepreneur and is best known for being the founder and chairman of the X-Prize Foundation (xprize.org 2015). According to X Prize’s website, the main goal of this educational non-profit is to provide competitive financial incentive to harness the intellectual and

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