Is Our Education Only as Good as the Computers We Use?
This summer as I was traveling to Germany to do research, I met a very interesting young woman sitting next to me on the airplane. She was 25 years old, a recent graduate of the prestigious school of journalism at Columbia University in New York City. She was extraordinary in many ways. When she was young her family traveled extensively so she spent some years of her youth in Hong Kong and in other intriguing areas of the world.
Pilar is an American citizen, but she is currently living in Berlin and speaks German fluently. She has an interesting résumé although she finished her journalism graduate studies only four years ago. She spent one of those years living in Estonia, working as a journalist. She worked with the White House Press Corps at a major international trade conference in China. She has covered stories in Russia and has been a working journalist in Germany.
Normally one would say of such a young woman that she has had an extraordinary professional career having been out of school only four years. And yet, as she talked with me, she shared one aspect of the professional pressure she feels. She mentioned that while she was in the U.S. she had visited several of her professors at Columbia.
One of her professors took her into a classroom at Columbia that had been re-designed with new computer equipment and explained that their curriculum now enables students to integrate the latest technology into their studies. Pilar said to me: "I guess I went to Columbia four years too soon. I had limited experience with computers, and these students will be better equipped than I am; they might even put me out of work!" And she's only 25!
Meeting Pilar this summer forced me to think once again about the role of technology in our lives — especially as it impacts our learning patterns and environments and job security. That's what I'd like to think more about. Is our education only as good as the computers we use?
Two recent references have been especially helpful to me in thinking about this. The first is a book by Neil Postman entitled Technology. Postman is head of the Communication Arts Department at New York University. And the September issue of Scientific American is entirely devoted to the challenge of technology.
As we are reflecting together about this, Notre Dame College has been awarded a two-year grant by the National Science Foundation, a tribute to the fine computer planning and development underway here on our own campus.
I'd like to do three things. First we should clarify just what we mean by technology and why Postman defines our culture as a technology. Secondly, we should think together about the learning process and what that means -- whether or not technology is integrated into it. And, thirdly, I'd like to suggest ways we can integrate technology into the learning process while keeping ourselves and the learning environment humane. While using machines we need to search for rainbows. Technology should be our servant; we should not be its slave.
Postman sees our world permeated, regimented, manipulated by technology; for him this has a dark side. He says: "... the uncontrolled growth of technology destroys the vital sources of our humanity. It creates a culture without a moral foundation. It undermines certain mental processes and social relations that make human life worth living." (p.xii)
Well, I left a fascinating and frustrating career as a TV producer a dozen years ago to study telecommunication technologies at Harvard and MIT. I've been monitoring the integration of communication and computer technologies since that time, so I'm obviously invested intellectually in all of this. My husband, who was alive then, took a second job and typed my dissertation, so 1 could do this doctoral work.
However, from the very beginning, I felt a commitment to work to keep the technological world humane. As a college in the tradition of the liberal arts and sciences, it is important to us here that our programs of study are infused with the arts, with history (including the history of science), with an understanding of what makes us human — including our very human desire for relationships and for a God of love.
The technological world did not begin with the computer, of course. Postman notes that the European Middle Ages were a tool-using culture where theology, not technology, provided people with a world view. (p. 26)
However, long before the computer, technology signposts started to appear the ways people perceived reality changed:
the eighth-century use of the stirrup enabled men to fight on horseback, creating a military technology;
the printing press with movable type "attacked the epistemology of the oral tradition;"
Galileo, Francis Bacon and others led us to the possibility of a scientific enterprise;
The steam engine, Adam Smith, utilitarianism... Postman points out that we can see the interplay between technocracy and Old World values in the writings of Mark Twain. As Postman says: "... citizens knew that science and technology did not provide philosophies by which to live, and they clung to the philosophies of their (ancestors)." (p. 47)
The invention of the telephone -- over a century ago -- signifies, for me, the communications revolution; we are now experiencing the impact of the convergence, the integration, of communication and computer technologies. Consider these items:
The Internet - that network of interconnected computer networks ~ grew by
81 % in one year. The Internet currently has more than 32 million users; that's equal to the entire population of the state of California (Wash. Post)
Silicon chips have improved 25,000 times over since their invention only 25 years ago. Every 18 months microprocessors double in speed. Within 25 years, one computer will be as powerful as all those in the Silicon Valley today. (Scientific American, Sept. 1995, p. 62)
Half the people alive today have never made a telephone call. Two out of three business calls still end in "telephone tag." But cellular phones and paging technologies will help developing nations move into the Information Age quickly by leapfrogging over older types of communication systems. (Scientific American, Sept. 1995, p. 70)
Roger Johnson, the noted cooperative education specialist, suggests that computers can give rise to spontaneous collaboration in the classroom. He says: "Technology is a social place."
As Postman has noted, technology permeates our world - especially in the areas of communication, computers and medicine. The editor of Scientific American magazine says: "New technologies ... pose moral dilemmas, economic challenges, personal and social crises." (September, 1995, p. 58) All of us face the pressure, along with my airplane friend, Pilar. Everyone needs to help keep our society humane and graced, as Rahner called it. Where do we start?
Perhaps we should think of communication and computer tools as links, as bonding technologies. Many of these modern tools like the telephone and the computer can promote interaction and networking. Shouldn't such communication links be fostered in a world where there is so much individualism and isolation?
Yet, don't we sometimes need to "pull the plug" and permit ourselves some quiet time? My own use of technologies is balanced by my commitment to contemplation ~ moments of silence when I can move into what an English writer called "The Cloud of Unknowing."
Postman offers some suggestions. He says we should be "loving resistance fighters" in a technological world, and adds we should not confuse the term "information" with the concept of understanding." He urges us to take the great narratives of religion seriously and says we should not believe that science is the only system of thought capable of producing truth. He suggests that institutions like our own should provide students with "a sense of coherence in their studies, a sense of purpose, meaning, and interconnectedness in what they learn." (p. 186)
Postman recommends that our education should focus on the story of "humanity's creativity in trying to conquer loneliness, ignorance, and disorder." And he adds: "... (this) certainly includes the development of various religious systems as a means of giving order and meaning to existence." (p. 187) He puts it another way: "... it is an education that stresses history, the scientific mode of thinking, the disciplined use of language, a wide-ranging knowledge of the arts and religion, and the continuity of human enterprise." (p. 189)
Here’s a story from my recent European trip. I spent four glorious days with German friends in the Tyrolean Alps in Austria. On the last day, as my friend was driving, I noticed that there was sun over some of the mountains and mist and rain over others. And I said: "Usually when you have both rain and sunshine together you get a rainbow."
He laughed and teased: "That's only American 'kitsch,' Fran; we don't have rainbows here"
And all of a sudden, right in front of us, beautifully draped over the Alpine mountains, was the fattest, most vivid rainbow I have ever seen in my life! It was almost as if a voice in Heaven (perhaps a female voice?) had said: "Look, she wants a rainbow; so give her a rainbow!"