Education without knowledge

History should keep us a little more cautious about the educational forecasts on technologies applied to education

License Creative Commons

Jon Bustillo

The relentless development of information technology, and especially the devices that we can carry in our pockets, has come to a scenario in which everybody may have access to any type of information just by a simple «click». This information can also be offered in different formats, speeds and depth levels. Anyone with a simple device and sufficient coverage has currently permanent access to any type of information. It seems to be a good idea so far, a resource that can act as an expert who informs us about everything at any time. Those devices are already being applied into schools, in accordance with the idea that its introduction is necessarily going to be very advantageous in all respects.

Let’s say this way, is it not fine to have an expert and friendly twenty-four-hours-teacher who tells you whatever you want to know at any time like Aladdin’s wondeful lamp?  In addition, it would definitely solve the problem of having teachers who are not good communicators and do not master sufficienly the subject they teach. Nevertheless, this also may reminds us other past times when something similar happened  with other new technologies that were also going to solve any education problems. Radio and televisión, for example. Resources that would allow to place ubiquitously good communicators who, through a good script (written by a few experts), could explain almost any issue to anyone. But facts have actually shown us that the optimistic expectations that were made in this regard have not been accomplished.  And the old fashion classroom with teachers and students had to be brought back to regain its place. History should keep us a little more cautious about the educational forecasts on technologies applied to education. Once more, far from solving education problems, they have created new ones, for wich there seems to be no solution at hand so far.

Now I would like to point somethig about teacher training, a topic that, in my opinion, continues to be neglected. It’s not a new issue, nor to be just attributed to the educational emergence of information technologies, but given the promises and forecasts mentioned above, it looks like as though it is not necessary to seriously concern with it. If it is no longer necessary for teachers to be experts in what they teach, why to bother then to remember, understand and relate what is just a click away? The role of teachers, while information is increasingly accessible to everyone, has been changing from that of an expert in a certain area of ​​knowledge, to a kind of sociocultural animator who proposes activities to students who, through their own devices, fly over like surfing on the knowledge. The classic “ocean of knowledge one millimeter deep.”

In the current educational scenario, it seems teachers no longer need to be experts in the subject they must teach to be good teachers, and, therefore, nor may it be required to their teachers. We have now come full circle. In this regard, I recall the words of a former director of the Vitoria-Gasteiz Teacher Training College who, at the beginning of the century, warned about the consequences of implementing curricula based on the acquisition of skills.

“When new graduates trained with the new competency-based plans for the Education degrees come to teach at school, they will be teachers that the University have just kept orphans of knowledge. Thus, the students who’ll pass through their classrooms will have had teachers who no longer value knowledge, and when these new generations reach the faculties, the University will be plenty of students who will not value knowledge (no matter their own or  teachers’s one) and there will be no choice but to continue to reduce the level of demand. The intergenerational loop would thus be completed”.

Moreover, from the current business perspective of the school, where “innovation” becomes a market value promoted by the educational administration itself – often conditioning the financing of the centers -, to be an expert in a proper subject has no interest since no educational center obtains benefits from having outstanding teachers of that kind. On the contrary, schools will be rather concerned about the use of increasingly sophisticated electronic devices in the classroom, the development of productions made by students that are more or less attractive to them, the gamification proposals and an endless number of methodological proposals whose validity is not proven, but just like Aibar (2023) pointed, can be marketed as “innovation” – whether they are or not.

Perhaps it could be argued that the ideal goal would be the integration of expert knowledge with this type of “innovations”. In that case, I believe that the educationals boards should strive to promote expert knowledge, at least to the same extent as the do for the promotion of supposed innovations. Obviously this does not happen and the balance is clearly tilted towards marketable educational practices,  with the invaluable collaboration of the administrations and people responsible for educational management. Rancière (2010) was really a visionary in this issue.

The devaluation of knowledge, assumed as normal from the earliest stages of compulsory education, does seriously hinders access to complex knowledge, pushing higher education institutions towards what Esteban (2019) calls «light diet» university. An adaptation that requires de crutch of the mobile device besides you at any time. Without it, we have fewer and fewer options to understand a world that seems increasingly complex and that we can only understand through what the new oracle tells us in real time. Devices that are controlled by private companies whose business model, as Peirano (2019) and Wu (2020) pointed to, is based on the commercialization of our attention, not on our intellectual development.

No doubt that a society formed through such educational proposals that despise knowledge and reward the implementation of marketable practices and devices in the classroom is the best scenario for the social elevator that education should be to become definitely truncated. Agreeing with Massó (2021), the educational system thus loses one of its main purposes, by gradually abandoning the students who most need knowledge in order to social progress. A society that puts the meaning of learnig and training away of the transmission of knowledge,  it’s directly harming the less economically advantaged ones, who won’t have any further opportunity beyond compulsory school. And it is bound to perpetuate  the currently growing social gap, towards  a kind of socio-educational castes that perpetuate themselves, as shown by Sandel (2020) when describing the tyranny of merit.

___

References:

Aibar, E. (2023). El culto a la innovación. Ned ediciones.

Esteban Bara, F. (2019). La universidad light: Un análisis de nuestra formación universitaria . Paidós.

Massó Aguadé, X. (2021). El fin de la educación. La escuela que dejó de ser. Akal.

Peirano, M. (2019). El enemigo conoce el sistema: Manipulación de ideas, personas e influencias después de la economía de la atención. Debate.

Rancière, J., Estrach, N. (2010). El maestro ignorante: Cinco lecciones sobre la emancipación intelectual  . Laertes.

Sandel, M. J. (2020). La tiranía del mérito: ¿Qué ha sido del bien común?. Debate.

Wu, T. (2020). Comerciantes de atención. Captain Swing.

Source: educational EVIDENCE

Rights: Creative Commons