WORSHIPPING AT THE TEMPLE OF TECHNOLOGY

This is the text of a memo that I sent to a few UMD faculty after hearing a lecture at UMD by Joe Graba, Dean of the Graduate School of Education at Hamline University, St. Paul, Minnesota.

[Now six years later, I still feel the same way.]

I find it interesting and rather sad that no one ever responded to (or even mentioned) what I wrote here.

SC

DATE:  October 2, 1996

SUBJECT:  Joe Graba's talk on information technology and the future of education
 

I've just returned from Joe Graba's talk.  Good overheads;  good delivery;  lots of interesting ideas.  But fundamentally misguided on several counts.
 

I. Graba may be right about the direction education will go.  He may be right that it is inevitable.  But let's recognize that the pressure comes from an economic system that values profit above people.  As long as we acquiesce in the right of that system to force directions upon us, then the drive for cheaper and cheaper education, even at the expense of learning, will dominate.  My purpose here is to point out some of the drawbacks in this "inevitable" process and the fact that we are letting go control of our lives.
 

II. Graba's view of education is that knowledge is a matter of acquiring "facts":  discrete bits of information:  "Washington was our first president."  "The leg bone's connected to the thigh bone."  "`I' before `e' except after `c' or when sounded like `a' as in neighbor and weigh."  According to this view, the more facts, the more knowledge.  Certainly there are situations where mere facts are important.  Certainly information technology is good at providing facts.  Certainly students will be able to learn facts any time, any where, when they need them, and only what they need.

But are facts all that education involves?  There is another view that knowledge is a matter of cognitive structure:  of understanding how different parts of a situation fit together, trade off against each other, correspond with each other, imply each other.  In Graba's world, such knowledge would not be taught--or would be taught only accidentally.

There is yet another view of knowledge:  that education consists of raising questions and learning how to thrash through to answers.  In Graba's world, again, such knowledge would not occur--or would occur only accidentally.
 In summary, Graba's world offers cheap facts, but little real knowledge or education.  I don't think employers, regardless of what they think they want, will be happy with what such a system produces.
 

III. There are more needs in the world than the need to make money, or more precisely to make profits for corporations.  Our society is falling down around us:  the sense of community dissolving, the sense of meaning to our work vanishing, the gap between rich and poor growing.  Graba's world recognizes none of this, focusing on the technological imperative as if there were no other concerns.  His future, even were it to come to pass, would be swept aside in a revolution.  Or, more pessimistically, it will be propped up by ever-more-massive repression:  more police, more prisons, stricter and more frequent security checks, more monitoring of citizens, more physical and social distance between the wealthy and the poor.  (Do these trends sound familiar?)
 

IV. During his talk Graba read a letter from former President van Buren to President Jackson, a letter pleading for support, in the face of the new technology of trains, of the canal workers and others dependent on the canal trade.  Graba meant to poke fun at people who resisted the march of technology, and many of the audience laughed with him.  But what he's talking about is people whose livelihood was taken from them, whose lives were disrupted and destroyed by the "march of technology".  He's talking about people going bankrupt, committing suicide, seeing their hopes for themselves and their families vanish, having to tear themselves from their friends and community to find other work, seeing set at naught tasks they did well and took meaning from.  He's talking about people who could no longer work at other trades and died sick, homeless, poor.  Graba and his audience laughed at these people.  And yet these are the people he proposes that we now create--in fact, turn ourselves into--in our rush to get in front of the technology juggernaut.
 

V. Graba's image of education is driven by the needs of business, not of human beings seeking to live together;  lost in this subordination is our collective need for creating community.  Just above I referred to how the technological juggernaut destroyed community.  Here I'm just noting that Graba ignores community.  Our need to be social, to get along with one another, to recognize each other as human beings--these have no place in Graba's world.  They exist as best they can, if at all, beyond the dominion of corporate needs.
 

VI. Finally, Graba's image of education holds no place for fostering citizens.  The liberal arts vanish from the educational scene, so that the university--indeed, our educational system entirely--becomes a trade school.  Taking this and the previous two points together, the rush to adopt new technology destroys community, ignores community, and fails to preserve the education that fosters community.
 

VII. In conclusion, Graba's world is not a livable one.  His vision of education will not produce the knowledge we need, except for certain limited tasks.  In their ignorant pursuit of profits, corporations destroy community.  They ignore community where they do not trample it.  And this technological imperative removes at least one of the forces seeking to create community.  There is nothing inevitable about this technology;  the only thing that makes it inevitable is our willingness to let it happen to us without resistance, our willingness to support the concept of profit as the rightful ruler of our individual and social lives.

My father-in-law [now ex-father-in-law] used to say that sometimes people only wake up when their belt buckle hits their spine.  Perhaps that's what will happen here.  But it is easy enough to see the problems in what Graba suggests we create;  let's recognize and act on them now.