Education and technology

As I read my classmates comments on Education as Marketplace I wanted to jump in and add to their comments. But blogging doesn’t allow that and I haven’t made time to learn how to use the new tools. Wow! It’s incredible how we criticized the “traditionalist” system. Don’t take me wrong; I have a whole bunch of other criticisms as well. As you see, I could not stop myself and had to blog about it.

Where do we go from here? Now that we know why education has been shaped to form “Lemmings” (http://dmayne.blogspot.com/), which look like robots and follow orders without questioning anything, what can we do? Now that we are starting to get passed the industrialization era, in need of “thinkers, not just workers” [italics added by the author] (http://edtech6931.blogspot.com/), can we reshape the educational system? Christy gave some solutions. She talked about the importance of learning a second language, music and art education, as well as other courses that have been eliminated of school curriculum in order to reduce costs (http://froglady0317.blogspot.com), because of lower educational budgets, or because as Vanessa said, money has been redirected to buy technological tools.

Even more, Vanessa quoted Besser (1993) saying, “without computers we, our children, and our country will fall behind others …” (p. 61). It’s interesting because international studies already puts American students behind many other countries. For example, the International Mathematics and Science Assessments: What Have We Learned? summarizes findings of three international studies conducted in 1960, 1980, and 1988. (http://nces.ed.gov/pubs92/web/92011.asp); and the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (1999) is summarized and compared to the second international exam (1988) in the report Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (http://nces.ed.gov/timss/highlights.asp).

Its somehow interesting that on the homepage for this website, there is a bar graph that compares the average of students’ access to computers at home. American students have on average an 80% access to computers at home, while international students have on average only a 45% access. This, I believe could be considered evidence that having more computers does not imply students will learn more.

Another report that should be examine is Education and the Labor Force which most probably will add to the discussion we had in class last Wednesday night (http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/international/IntlIndicators/index.asp?SectionNumber=5) -- more on this latter.

To conclude, there is no magical solution to the education question. The impact economics have over the government and therefore over education is very strong. At the end it seems a matter of priorities, one that has been described in terms of philosophies and theories of education. Do we want our students to think by themselves and find solutions to the problems they as a group encounter? Or, do we want the students to follow the rule as “lemmings” without questioning what they are given, behaving beautifully, but rarely contributing to social growth?