- The Need for “Connectedness in Growth”: Experience and Education and the New Technological Culture
I. Is Digital Technology the Realization of Progressive Education?
In this paper, I will endeavour to revisit a central theme of Dewey’s Experience and Education and show its continuing relevance by contextualizing it within a momentous issue in education today. More specifically, I will attempt to proceed along the path of Dewey’s engagement with progressive education by marshalling some of his arguments in discussing what I will call—with a touch of irony—a techno-revolutionary tone recently adopted in education.
It is appropriate to specify in advance what I mean by this expression. Nobody can gainsay that we are facing major developments in technology and in the human ways of producing, organizing, and disseminating knowledge, and that we must draw important educational consequences from this by restructuring, and even revamping, our educational institutions, as Leonard Waks (2013) has argued in his latest book.1 At the same time, though, in contemporary educational discourse both at the scholarly level and—with a potentially more calamitous impact—at the level of documents issued by international institutions,2 there is a tendency to consider digital technology as the predominant (if not the only) answer to the problems and untapped possibilities of education today.
Suggesting that this kind of answer is completely wrong would be foolish. What raises some misgivings, however, is the often uncritically salvific tone in which it is given, as if it were just a matter of more technology or more “digital awareness” in schools. What strikes me in this kind of discourse—when it assumes a sort of millenarian tone of unconditional trust in the benefits of technology—is that the emphasis on digital technology is not accompanied by an adequate reflection on what kind of experiences it promotes and whether and in what sense they are educative.
To put it another way, if a transformation or overhaul of our educational landscape is much needed, in fully exploiting the resources of contemporary technology every change demands, as its very precondition, an increase in our thinking about education and, above all, an effort to be clear about the “collateral learning” (LW 13, 29)3 that digital technology (in the broadest sense) occasions. From this perspective, appealing to [End Page 55] Dewey could be critical. Indeed, on the one hand, as Larry Hickman (1990, 2001)4 has pointed out, Dewey was one of the most sensitive interpreters of the need for a “technological culture” and was completely alien to those forms of “apologetic Luddism” (Hickman 2003, 36)5 characterizing a great deal twentieth-century philosophical reflection on technology. On the other hand, with Experience and Education Dewey provides us with a model of how to engage with some detrimental drifts that even “good” ideas and methods can incur. With that said, I will take his approach as paradigmatic of how we can contain and problematize some of our enthusiasm about the role technology can play in bringing education out of its current predicaments.
As a jumping off point, I take my initial cue from an interesting volume by Marc Prensky, Teaching Digital Natives (2010).6 At the very beginning of the book, he considers together
three strands of current educational discussion: . . . . First, that the students in our classrooms are changing—largely as a result of their outside-of-school experiences with technology—and are no longer satisfied with an education that doesn’t immediately address the real world in which they live. Second, that the “telling and testing” pedagogy . . . has become less and less effective with today’s students. A better pedagogy is needed, and the good news is that it’s available and usable today. Third, that the digital technology now coming, more or less rapidly, into our classrooms—if used properly—can help make our students’ learning real, engaging, and useful for their future.
(2010, xv)
Prensky then drives home the point that
ironically, it is the generation raised on the expectation of interactivity that is finally ripe for the skill-based and “doing-based” teaching methods that past experts have always suggested are...