Let Them Eat Data: How Computers Affect Education, Cultural Diversity, and the Prospects of Ecological Sustainability

6. Why Computers Should Not Replace Teachers

WhyComputersShouldNot ReplaceTeachers Two conferences on the educational uses of computers typify how complex educational, political, and ecological issues are being disregarded in the effort to make the computer as necessary to education as the older tradition of print that it is based upon. The conference, sponsored bythe BenjaminFranklin Institute for Global Education and given technical support by Pacific Bell, Netscape Communications Corporation, and a subsidiary of Marshall Industries , was conducted in October 1997 over the Internet. The reach of the conferencewas truly global. The purpose was to showcase the more than thirty thousand college and university courses offered over the Internet. As John Hibbs, the founder of the institute, put it, the purpose of L.E.A.R.N. Day is to hold a convincing demonstration that "students in Bombay can take courses in Boston." Hibbs further claimed that the Internet conferencewould demonstrate that the technology is not a "fancy telephone for the privileged , but a powerful truck which can deliver the priceless cargo of higher education anywhereon the planet." The cyberspaceshowcasing of courses and degree programs started in Guam and followed the twenty-four-hour cycle of the sun with live interactive conversations between educators and participants in Australia, China, Japan, Canada, the United States, Mexico, Brazil, GreatBritain , France, Germany, Poland, Turkey, Egypt,Russia,and India. All together, twenty-two countries, representing a wide range of cultures and ecological challenges, werelinked together in this effort to market the power of the computer. As one electronic press release 140 6 Computers and Teachers 141 put it, L.E.A.R.N. Day was "a symbol that knowledge can be brilliantly transferred from anyplace to anywhere." Behind the selfcongratulatory rhetoric was another message:The Internet now enables people in the most remote villages in India, China, and other countries to be consumers of Western-style education—and thus to become integrated into the technologically oriented consumer lifestyle. The second conference focused on a more typical approach to integrating computers into the professional education of teachers. Sponsored bythe Northwest RegionalLaboratoryand the Northwest Educational Technology Center, the conference attracted teacher educators from across the country. Using a laptop-controlled slide projector that continually put the printed text on the screen out of syncwith the verbal presentation and thus drew attention to the malfunctioning technology, the keynote speaker, a dean of a college of education in Washington State, framed the challenge facing teacher educators with a story about a six-year-old girl named Emily.Emily will enter the first gradewith abroad familiaritywith television, videos , and computers. Asthe dean emphasized, Emilywillhave already experienced how electronic technologies give her access to entertainment and information beyond her immediate physical environment . The dean then elaborated on how teachers need to be prepared to respond to Emilys attitude toward life in an electronic environment. The goal, as he put it, is to prepare teachers who can create classroom environments where technology is the core of students ' experience and learning is a process of students constructing their own knowledge. After urging the audience to adopt a "fearless attitude" toward preparing teachers to integrate computers into the teaching and learning process, he concluded with the observation that Emily and her friends deserve no less. Aside from the high cost of continually upgrading computers and providing equal access to computers for all students, no other concerns were raised. Nor did 142 Educational Consequences anyone in the audience of 150 teacher educators raise questions about the speaker's assumptions and willingness to use the experience of a six-year-old child to justify the direction of educational reform. The other featured speakers repeated what has become a litany within teacher education circles: the connections between computers and learning; the skills needed in the twenty-first-century workplace ; the need to cultivate ways of thinking appropriate to a world of constant change; the dependence of a "knowledge-based society" on computers; and (borrowed from the business community) how computers "distribute" learning "on demand" and "just in time." Like the promotional literature and other educationally oriented conferences of the last twenty or so years, the conference on Integrating Technology into the Teacher Education Curriculum did not address educational issues that surround the cultural mediating characteristics of computers. Nor wasthere any mention ofthe connections between the commodification process that computers are helping to globalize and the ecological crisis. Indeed, the myth of technologically based progress was as palpable as both the plenary and...