Educational Technology’s Inflated Promises

I recently came across a slender book that aims to redesign liberal education using digital technologies. Titled Open and Integrative: Designing Liberal Education for the New Digital Ecosystem, it certainly tackles an important question: how should liberal arts colleges use new technologies to fulfill their traditional mission? Unfortunately, the book is riddled with the jargon and assumptions of tech boosterism; it’s full of the kind of prose that only makes sense within the echo chambers of technology trade shows.

I don’t mean to berate the authors or undermine the good work that the publisher, the Association of American Colleges and Universities, does, but any honest assessment of the role digital technologies should play in learning needs to be more responsible to the actual powers and limits of these technologies. Such responsibility begins with a language that tries to be understandable. Unfortunately, however, the prose of this argument obscures important questions about the purposes of learning and whether digital technologies can further these ends.

Education for What?

James K.A. Smith over at Comment, has an interesting—and curmudgeonly—essay praising newspapers and asking what the purpose of education is. Read the whole thing, but here is an excerpt:

It’s easy to take for granted one of the remarkable accomplishments of Western democracy: the availability of free, universal, public education. Once the luxury of a privileged elite, now a fundamental education in the arts and sciences is available to all. Despite its problems and deficiencies, a wide-angle view of history can only cause us to marvel at the realization of what was a dream for our forebears. And many go on to postsecondary education as well: over 65 percent of high school seniors in the United States go on to college; and about 65 percent of Canadians have a postsecondary education. In the long arc of history, we in North America are the privileged 1 percent of educated elites.

Given this remarkable cultural accomplishment, permit me one curmudgeonly observation. It’s hard for me to imagine that our forebears dreamed of universal education so that we could spend hours upon hours glued to screens playing Words with Friends or trying to slice digital fruit like a ninja. And yet, as someone who spends countless hours on airplanes, I never cease to be amazed at the number of professional, college-educated adults who, when presented with a three-hour stretch of downtime, proceed to spend that time playing video games. Our countries invest 5 percent of their GDPs in universal education; teachers invite us into the labyrinths of history and the imaginative worlds of literature; parents make sacrifices for us to attend Christian schools and colleges. And we play Angry Birds. We’re not educated for this, surely.

A flight or a train ride or even a doctor’s waiting room is a little gift from a God who delights in the liberal arts—a tiny sabbatical from the drudgery and distraction of our workaday existence in which we can continue our educations and cultivate the intellect. Think of a plane ticket to Vancouver or Los Angeles as the opportunity to finally pick up The Brothers Karamazov or read Shelby Foote’s history of the Civil War or tackle Bavinck’s Dogmatics. Or at least resist the People magazine and catch up on issues of the Walrus, the New York Review of Books, and National Affairs. Don’t waste your education.

I told my students recently, just before graduation: If I ever see you on a plane playing a video game, I will accost you, and I will be disappointed, and I willforthrightly remind you: you weren’t educated for this. The world needs your (continuing) education, and your soul is starving for it. We are remarkably well-educated dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants who could only dream of what we enjoy. Let’s not squander our inheritance.

Partnerships or Mentorship?

I was interested to see Gilbert Meilander’s argument in favour of shifting the balance of university
from a liberal arts to vocational training. While I’ve had my fair share of students that I think would profit more from a rigorous, in-depth vocational program, I’ve also become increasingly concerned about how we define a successful university education: increasingly, more in terms of starting a flourishing career than flourishing as a person, mind and body and soul. True, students do need to be prepared for their career. Yet when universities put students’ job success first, they may well find themselves working hand-in-glove with the businesses that may employ these students. This, I think, is a mistake.

The Liberal Arts: Learning A Generous Language

There may be no more malleable term in higher education today than “liberal arts.” Sometimes it means a broad, “well-rounded” education, and sometimes schools just claim the title to assert their status as an elite institution. But the phrase “liberal arts” isn’t likely to be used in its original sense to mean the Trivium and Quadrivium, and it almost certainly isn’t used to mean an education for generous service.

Education as Pilgrimage

In his lovely book on the liberal arts, Stratford Caldecott describes an element of the Enlightenment’s re-interpretation of knowledge. Part of the via moderna, according to Caldecott, was mathesis, or the spatialization of knowledge. Here’s how Caldecott describes it:

“One of the aims of the European Enlightenment was “mathesis,” or the spatialization of knowledge, mapping the world onto a notional “grid” so that it could more easily be measured and controlled—effectively reducing the world to pure quantity. With this went the attempted substitution of a concept of space for the concept of eternity, and with the attempt to achieve through frenetic activity or movement in space what can only really be attained through contemplation. Aspirations of this sort tend to be implicit in most drives toward greater efficiency, and lie at the root of the sense of ever-increasing stress and shortness of time with which modern man is afflicted” (99).