Before the computer could change School, School changed the computer

There is a lot of talk about how technology is disrupting education in ways that allows students to learn in different ways at any pace, any place and any time. Some elements of education reform has a lot of us pondering how technology will impact schools.

While it's true that School (with a capital S) has not changed very much over the years, we must be mindful of the reforms we impart on public education. After all, tradition for the sake of tradition is no better than change for the sake of change.

We owe it to our children to stop and seriously question whether technology and hyper-personalization should drive our education reforms.

I challenge you to watch the video below and ask yourself: Is this the ideology we want dictating our education systems?



Firstly, you'll note that this video is from 1954 -- makes you wonder why we think talking about iPads is revolutionary.

Secondly, you'll notice that the video features B.F Skinner, the grand-daddy of behavioristic psychology. For those who understand that we learn by constructing our own understanding from the inside while interacting with our environment, this should be a serious red flag.

• Those who suggest teachers should be replaced by a technology that can simply grade more efficiently are at best revealing their primitive understanding for what education is all about and at worst are exposing their desire to bust teachers' unions and destroy public education. These people play politics and profit from education at our children's peril.

• The dream of having learners intensely concentrate on using technology quickly becomes a nightmare when it is the technology that is using the learner. When children are mined for data, education becomes something done to them rather than by them. 

• Technology that is used to elicit correct behaviour (rather than encouraging children to construct their own understanding) is sold as a daring departure from the status quo when really it is a tactic taken from the same behaviourist strategies that have been strangling the life out of classrooms for decades.

• Technology used in this way turns children into empty receptacles that simply require filling. This is a perfect way to achieve a Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Paulo Freire writes:

"The teacher talks about reality as if it were motionless, static, compartmentalized, and predictable. Or else he expounds on a topic completely alien to the existential experience of the students. His task is to "fill" the students with the contents which are detached from reality, disconnected from the totality that engendered them and could give them significance. Words are emptied of their concreteness and become a hollow, alienated, and alienating verbosity."

• If technology is used as a way to correct students so as to help them always be certain about their learning, children will only know uncertainty. Alfie Kohn explains:

"When students are simply told the most efficient way of getting the answer, they get in the habit of looking to the adult, or the book, instead of thinking things through. They become less autonomous, more dependent. Stuck in the middle of a problem, they’re less likely to try to figure out what makes sense to do next and more likely to try to remember what they’re supposed to do next – that is, what behavioral response they’ve been taught to produce. Lots of practice can help some students get better at remembering the correct response, but not to get better at – or even accustomed to -- thinking."

• Technology used this way merely perpetuates education as a spectator sport where the student is expected to play nothing more than a passive role.  

• There is a reason why Seymour Papert said, "Before the computer could change School, School changed the computer."

It's tempting to get suckered into talking about technology when the real debate is over how children learn. Some might say there is a war going on in schools between behaviourism and constructivism and the kids are losing; while others have written "One cannot understand the history of education in the United States during the twentieth century unless one realizes that Edward K. Thorndike won and John Dewey lost."