In the early '70s, Fred served as the watchdog for preparation standards development for school professionals. He particularly and articulately spoke against performance objectives and programs, machine-based or otherwise, which would produce desired results, or human products. This would be antithetical to education as creating the conditions whereby students discover and develop what they already know, or would naturally acquire in the course of a course, which necessarily allowed new and unapproved lines of inquiry in situ.
That was then, when fears of 1984 and big brother got linked to behaviorism and specifying desired outcomes. Ten years later, computers became personal and the flood was too great to hold back. Fred's feared future folded into an historical past, and now we don't talk much about behaviorism--we have e-learning in all its manifestations, effectively technology-delivered, disembodied content. For better or worse, what is intended is what is desired, albeit concretely and narrowly defined and measured.
The state of the art would seem to indicate that the rationality and sensibleness of good educators have prevailed in spite of. We have almost unlimited horizons with today's tools. We can create places Fred clearly objected to in the historical past, but these are no longer feared. They are just some among an infinite many. We have succumbed in some sense, and found the academic arguments no longer compelling. We have hardware and software and firmware and all kinds of ware at our disposal. We can fashion our learning's desires in ways not seen back then. And we have seen educational and economic interests converge so that practical aims of education (read, "getting a job") no longer play second to arts and humanities. So much for a liberal education.
But have we come so far? Are the tools we use and do the protocols of educational culture signal a kinder, gentler, brave new world? This paper will look at these questions in light of how we know what we know, a cousin to the varieties of learning experiences, and how suitable our technologies are to the tasks of education which have really not changed, only reversed their priority order: To learn practical matters for daily bread and to understand and appreciate the world we live in.
27.02.2005
