Who Decides?
Sal Khan and Michael Noer recently recorded an 11-minute webisode on the history of education from 1680 to 2050. It angered Audrey Watters, and I think my take on why says a lot about where I stand on education, online or otherwise.
Michael Noer works for Forbes, whose byline is, “Information for the World’s Business Leaders”. I don’t know how many business leaders actually subscribe, but I’ll bet that most of them believe that education’s role is to prepare people to take their place in society. As Khan & Noer point out, Bismarck’s Prussians invented modern public schooling as a way to create the skilled workforce they needed. For the powerful, in Thatcher’s England just as much as Stalin’s Russia, that’s been its purpose ever since.
Throughout the 20th Century, though, people like John Dewey and Michael Young have believed that education ought to be about giving people more power over their lives—which necessarily means the currently-powerful will have less. Real reformers like these have therefore almost always found themselves allied with suffragettes, labor organizers, civil rights movements, and other progressives.
Which brings us to the battle shaping up around online education. After explaining how the Prussian model was imported in the United States, and how the present 12-year model was formulated in the 1890s, Noer and Khan say, “…we’ve basically been stuck there for 120 years.” Watters’ response is, what about Brown vs. Board of Education? What about similar changes that were supposed to level the playing field for children with disabilities, or for women, or the GI Bill that opened higher education to millions of people?
But this isn’t Khan & Noer’s point. The 20th Century may have changed who got an education, but had almost no effect on how that education was delivered. There were attempts (particularly in the 1960s), but most K-12 and university classes today use the same lockstep model that they did in the 1890s. That’s what ed-tech advocates want to change.
But how far are they willing to go? Watters continues:
…to jump from 1892 to 2000…ignores the vocal opposition to that so-called factory model and the construction of alternatives by educators themselves. It ignores the entire progressive education movement. It ignores the work of John Dewey and Maria Montessori. Conveniently… [It] ignores the work done by numerous educators and technologists to think about how computers and networks will reshape how we teach and learn. It overlooks the work of Seymour Papert and all his students. It ignores the decades of research on cognitive tutoring and the notion that a computer should be able to respond on an individualized level to each student—something that Khan’s history of education credits to Khan himself.
Yes it does, and that’s what this fight is really about. I’m sure the Silicon Valley and Wall Street types behind most ed-tech startups welcome the fact that women, people of color, the disabled, and plain ol’ folks can get an education these days—they’re not racists or misogynists or anything like that. However, they clearly aren’t interested in giving up control over who decides what gets taught. Flipping over to Twitter, Watters said:
2012-11-03 13:32: Almost 3K words in this NYT piece on MOOCs, but couldn’t spare a single one to mention Siemens, Downes, Couros, Cormier…
Did you recognize any of those names? They’re the people who actually invented massive open online courses (MOOCs), but you won’t find them mentioned six times in as many weeks in the New York Times. The reason, I think, is that they take the “open” part of “MOOC” seriously: they actually want to let the people who are learning decide what to learn. That makes their experiments a lot less interesting to “the World’s Business Leaders” than the Khan Academy, Coursera, Udacity, and other pseudo-MOOCs that let you watch professors chosen by someone else repeat a fixed lesson as many times as you want, and do the exercises set by the powers that be whenever you want, to earn badges that someone else has made up.
“Gosh, Greg—that sounds a bit campus-radical paranoid.” Yeah, it does, but go and read Larry Cuban’s recent post on power, ideology, and the (mis)use of evidence in national politics and school reform. There is very little evidence that technology of any kind can transform education, but the people who currently have power keep talking as if the matter was settled. Think about that, and about how the current drive to move education online will concentrate power in even fewer hands, and then ask yourself, as Audrey did, “All this revisionist history of education technology. Gee, I wonder why these are the stories being told?”
I don’t wonder at all.
Thanks for writing this, Greg, and for teasing out some of the ideas I didn’t articulate clearly in my initial response to Khan’s video. When I talk about the changing demographics of who has access to public education, I think it’s because for me education isn’t simply a matter of “content delivery” (no matter what that looks like, what technologies are used). Learning is social. We learn from each other and not just from the lessons that are “delivered” by YouTube or by textbooks or by teachers. Khan still subscribes to the very old model of thinking about education that way — filling students’ brains with information rather than fostering agency in learners to build their own knowledge and networks with their peers beside them.
The erasure of progressive education and the erasure of connectivism in these Silicon Valley histories is very telling. And very troubling.
There are some other things going on with the MOOCs. I was for a while concerned that they would greatly centralize teaching, so that there was no diversity; now, there are a number of reasons why centralizing on the ‘greats’ is an advantage – nobody wants 100 different mediocre versions of the Gettysburg Address, we only need one great one – but as I see the MOOCs unfolding, EdX has physical emissaries in Mongolia, like remote teaching fellows. This isn’t a bad model; it is similar to the practices of the elite universities for large classes already.
I should mention that I’m not concerned about anyone trying to regulate ‘what is taught’ – this is only an issue for ‘mandatory’ education in a truancy system, already. Anyone can take underwater basket weaving at most universities; but no employer will pay much for a major composed solely of such classes. Employers will only pay for what they value, no matter what the ‘educators’ decide should be taught. Students can decide what they pay for. I happen to like a broad education myself – so I need a decent paying job, which allows me to pursue education in my off hours.
The real issue with Khan seems to be an embattled community upset that it isn’t getting the credit it thinks is its due; I always have trouble caring about that.
@BenK 1. Should “elite” schools get to set the agenda for everyone else? 2. Nobody “regulated” what was shown on the Big Three US TV networks in my youth, but that doesn’t mean everyone had an equal chance to tell their story. 3. The ad hominem attack you close with is inaccurate (and unnecessary).
@BenK
RE: “The real issue with Khan seems to be an embattled community upset that it isn’t getting the credit it thinks is its due; I always have trouble caring about that.”
No. Many people have issues with Khan Academy because the work is portrayed as something it isn’t.
It’s not about credit; it’s about an honest, candid appraisal of the relative merits and novelty of what people call innovation.
It’s actually possible to disagree with the approach and hype around Khan Academy (and please note, I am not talking about Sal Khan, the person, but the work in the site he started) for reasons that are both rational, and grounded in a clear understanding of pedagogy. To dismiss these concerns as superficial misses the opportunity for a greater discussion that would ultimately benefit all of us working to make teaching and learning more accessible to more people.
Elite schools, in higher education and elsewhere, have a high status attached to them and high resources allocated to their students on a per capita basis. The idea that I put forward is that at those schools, large classes are taught with centralized instruction for a component of the course, with a motivated, individual instructor providing satellite experiences. That this could be extended to the MOOCs is to suggest that what is currently desired in education might be provided more widely; and that it will be compatible with a substantial skilled teaching workforce providing a necessary componant of the instruction tailored to local contexts, despite the centralized nature of a componant of the course. I don’t see this any anyone ‘setting an agenda’ in some dictatorial fashion – the students decide what to attend, teaching fellows decide what to teach and where, and the central instructors decide what to provide by way of online materials. Yes, if all the students decide they won’t learn biostatistics, or if there are no local instructors available in the discipline, or if every single online venue refuses to teach it, then a subject might not be effectively taught. I don’t see this as a realistic restriction on choice.
3. Ad hominem means that I attack the idea by way of the identity of the person making the argument. I did not do that. It appears to be a conflict of communities, which is a well-established mode of action in society. It has all the hallmarks of it. Anger over slights to heroes, standards-bearers, and representatives long past is typical in these conflicts. Claiming that Dewey was ignored has different implications if the claim is that he was ignored out of ignorance (ie. my rival is ignorant!) or out of intent to decieve or malice (‘conveniently’).
Of course, these debates and histories have interesting implications at times. They can change who gets the leadership, which directions and aims are chosen, and who gets to regulate the results (this part seems to worry us both).
Khan is a very interesting topic that has aroused and people were like oozing with interest. Education also plays a vital role in this issue and thus, this will conclude on some of the serious matters in life today.