Louie Crew, English Dept., Rutgers, Newark, NJ 07102 201-485-4503
Preferred: P. O. Box 30, Newark, NJ 07101
http://newark.rutgers.edu/~lcrew
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sat, 07 Jun 1997 21:38:18
From: Richard Thieme <rthieme@thiemeworks.com>
To: rthieme@thiemeworks.com
Subject: Islands in the Clickstream
Islands in the Clickstream:
No More Pencils, No More Books?
We are all children of our times.
We frame our worlds as they are given to us by our language
and the structures of our education. The frame is invisible until
there is a change so pervasive that we see by contrast what we
once took for granted. It's like the terminator on the moon, the
line between darkness and light where the mountain ranges are
thrown into relief.
I did not experience the education I received growing up in
America in the 1950s and 1960s as a choice. It's what education
was.
In the same way, becoming an "adolescent" was simply a fact
of growing up, a universal stage of development. But adolescence
is really a modern invention. The word was first used in 1904.
The same is true of "childhood" which was really invented by the
Victorians.
In the United States, the expectation that adults will
graduate from high school is a fairly recent development, a
twentieth-century phenomena.
"School" as we know it is a direct result of the printing
press. Collections of benches in a central building on which to
sit and read are a recent development. Learning had universally
been accomplished through apprenticeship. Young people worked
beside adults, learning by doing. Most never left the village in
which they were born.
The fact of textbooks and universal literacy made necessary
a prolonged period of time called "adolescence" that postponed
adulthood. During that time we learned the art of symbol
manipulation. We learned to internalize typographical symbols and
be "reading people." Learning to read transformed who we were and
how we understood our lives as possibilities for action.
The process was at least as important as the content.
We called that process "education."
Today the structures of education are out of joint with the
structures of adulthood. That's why so many businesses are
educating workers. More education takes place today in conference
rooms, meeting rooms in hotels, and via remote telepresence and
onsite computer-assisted learning than in classrooms. The need
for continuous lifelong education is now an unquestioned
assumption.
Apple flooded schools with computers, but didn't provide
teachers who knew what to do with them. My consulting with
schools tells me that money is often budgeted to buy computers,
but seldom budgeted for the years of training needed to re-
program teachers to use them effectively.
I know a fourth grade teacher who was supposed to teach
computers but didn't know how to turn them on. She asked her
class, "Who knows how?" Hands waved in the air. She turned the
task over to the students and hid behind her desk while they
showed each other what to do.
She called it "empowerment."
But she couldn't hide forever. So she asked her three
brightest students secretly to teach her after school how to use
computers. Then she could teach the students how to use
computers.
That teacher's situation as an officer in a command-and-
control hierarchy who does not know as much as the people she
teaches is analogous to a manager asked to supervise younger
workers who understand computer technology and its uses far
better than she does.
Older managers as well as older teachers must learn from
younger adults as well as teach them. The wisdom of experience is
relevant, but relevant in a different way. Command-and-control
behaviors do not make for good coaching.
That teacher, like many managers, learned that she still had
authority, but authority that had to be exercised in a collegial
way. Leadership is exercised in a network by implementing a
vision, not by dominating and controlling. Power is exercised in
a network by participating and contributing.
That teacher knew, at least, how to get out of the way, but
that didn't make her a coach. She needed to learn how to be
present but not controlling, available but not directive. Like
the best computer assisted learning, good coaches provide
information not at the convenience of the curriculum but when
learners are most teachable.
Naturally the fact of computer technology has been
threatening to many schools. Some responded to the challenge by
taking away all the computers and locking them up in a room. They
call it a "computer lab" and let the kids in there an hour a day.
Imagine being a teacher when pencils were invented. You pass
out pencils and watch as the children discover that pencils can
do anything because a pencil is a symbol manipulating machine.
Children can write stories, do math, reflect on history. Afraid
you're no longer needed, you collect the pencils and lock them in
a Pencil Lab, letting the children use them an hour a day. The
rest of the time they write with rocks on slabs of broken
concrete.
In preparation for a speech for a school district in
northern Illinois recently, I was told that the large
corporations in which most of their students worked gave the
district good grades in much of what they were teaching, but not
in preparing young people for cooperative learning and cross-
disciplinary teamwork. When I asked what they meant by
"cooperative learning," I realized that in *my* day it was called
... cheating.
A stand-alone human being who learns and works by themselves --
as I was taught to do -- is a brain in a bottle.
The structures of education, like the structures of work,
are moving through a sea-change. Symptoms include:
+ Rising drop-out rates. Racial minorities, the canaries in
the coal mine of society, die first. The growing irrelevance of
school to life in the real world was experienced first in
ghettos. Now blue-collar workers and middle-aged managers are
feeling the pain so it's a "crisis."
+ A growing "black market" in education. We give lip-service
to traditional structures but barter for "educational goods" on
the job and over the Internet, in the global marketplace.
+ Businesses are becoming centers of education, not because
they want to, but because they must. McDonald's teaches
politeness and civility because the traditional structures of
society no longer do the job. The budget for training in many
businesses exceeds the budgets of local school districts. Some
companies have started their own colleges and graduate studies
because schools do not generate people with the skills and
knowledge they need.
+ Conscientious teachers who can't see the forest for the
trees redouble their efforts. They become exhausted , working
harder and harder, but it's like drinking from a dribble glass.
The gears of the system don't mesh with the real world. Veterans
count the days until retirement. Burn-out abounds.
+ "Work-to-school" programs grow as apprenticeship is re-
engineered for the 21st century.
Is there hope? Of course. The solutions begin with
understanding the depths of the transformation we are
experiencing and asking questions relevant to our real lives. The
process of finding answers together will generate the security we
need to remain effective during revolutionary times.
**********************************************************************
Islands in the Clickstream is a monthly column written by
Richard Thieme exploring social and cultural dimensions
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Islands in the Clickstream (c) Richard Thieme, 1997. All rights reserved.
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