Breaking into the Curriculum

The Impact of Information Technology on Schooling

John F. Schostak

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000769609
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Information technology is here to stay. Its impact has already been far-reaching: in business, in communications, and in leisure activities it has been responsible for replacing human action by that of machines. As such it raised questions about freedom and the meaning of work and human activity which could no longer be ignored by those working in education. The educational response to information technology must ensure that human activities are enhanced rather than enslaved by computers.

Originally published in 1988 Breaking into the Curriculum provides one such response. A range of curricular structures and teacher roles are examined for their potential for preserving freedom in a future that was already being formed and informed by electronic systems. Drawing on case studies of pupils and teachers from throughout their school career, the authors of this collection sought to provoke discussion on the true ends of education and the kinds of strategies that would best realise those ends. Information technology, it is argued, is already shaping our thinking concerning the schooling of children. As such it can either create an electronically-controlled environment, or it can provide the stimulus for imaginative, playful, and creative thought and the development of 'intelligence' in its broadest sense. The choice is ours: the authors of this collection seek to inform that choice. Today it can be read in its historical context.

1
Introduction

Popular understanding about what is happening, therefore, is an urgent need. But how to achieve it? Information is being applied to the production side of the economy in a particular way, for private, corporate advantage. Yet, it is also applied to the human side. Here it is used to make people accept and believe that current developments are benign, if not beneficial. It is applied to minimizing or deprecating opposition and to denying alternate options that might provide a more humane direction to the emerging information-based economy.

(Schiller, H. T. (1986) Information and the Crisis Economy, New York: Oxford University Press, xiii)

Information technology can be seen either as a threat or as a solution to a vast range of problems. There is hardly a sphere of everyday life it does not touch. Television, telephones, radios, video cameras - these are all commonplaces. Yet they are also transformed by the advent of the computer as a household toy and as a small business or domestic utility. Through the telephone, the humble home computer can be networked into vast international data bases. The unscrupulous, the daring, the modern-day pirates and Robin Hoods can and have hacked their way into the private data banks of businesses and government departments. The individual can break into and peep into the hiding places of the powerful; just as, in turn, the powerful can store and manipulate information affecting the lives of the powerless. The computer is the modern two-edged sword. Will it be used for purposes of control or of liberation? The question is crucial for educationists in an age when crises are an everyday occurrence and information technology is being put forward more and more as a solution to these crises. Information technology is unlike any previous tool. The material it shapes is the most fundamental to all human action: information. With the advent of artificial intelligence, information systems will be created that will have far-reaching implications for human freedom. Thus its impact cannot be studied in isolation from the social context. Educationists, therefore, cannot simply confine their interest to ‘keyboard skills’, programming skills and the like. Information technology and education represent the two sides of the modern processes of handling information: the electronic system and the human. Which side will control the other? Which will be in the service of the other? Education must therefore look beyond the walls of its schools and examine the social context itself and see how and in whose interests information technology is already being used, and promoted. How, for example, is the notion of crisis already shaping our perceptions and uses of information technology? How many educationists contribute to the debate and the processes of adopting these systems?

The new age which information technology is ushering in is complex and its future is wide open. The information which is being generated is so vast that no one human being can ever hope to comprehend anything but a small portion. Gone are the days when a Leonardo da Vinci could claim to know everything and be an expert in everything. The ideal of a ‘rounded education’ is now but an illusion. No school can ever hope to introduce each of its children to every branch of knowledge, or to the whole range of arts practised in the world. To claim that there is a ‘core’ which will prepare the young for this vast range is a nonsense. It can only inhibit the explorations and curiosities which need to be given full range in the new information-technology based world.

We face, therefore, an open future. We would like to control it, tame it, shape it to fit as many of the features of the past as we can. That seems to make us feel safe. So we make our schools pass on to our children that knowledge and that culture of the past. However, we also believe in progress. We know there are always changes. We know we are in competition with other nations. So we also ask our schools and our colleges and universities to prepare our children to be inventive, entrepreneurial, hard-working, patriotic. We want a future which is open to a degree of change but which we can control and which will not frighten us. So change is all right if the essential desired features of society remain the same or are improved and the undesirable features are remedied. But we know, even if we fear to speak it aloud, that the future remains fundamentally open. Anything can happen and if Schiller is correct, it is likely to happen!

Although computer-based information technology in all its forms is a present reality, advances are so rapid that the future is brought slap up against our noses. We can no longer hold the future at a distance. In previous centuries before the Industrial Revolution, technological change was at a much slower pace. The technology of the parents would be much the same for the children throughout their lives. We, however, know that our children’s future will be filled with feats of electronic wizardry which are but dreams at the moment. We face a future which will continually de-skill us. Thus, it may be that as the Industrial Revolution brought about massive social changes so too will the Information Technology Revolution as the nature of employment, and the numbers in employment, continually change. We cannot predict with any certainty what those changes will be.

Human beings are not simply chemical substances for which some predictive laws of behaviour are known with high degrees of precision. Atoms do not choose the directions they take, chemical compounds do not choose the reactions they make. A stone lying on the earth does not think to itself ‘I’ll go for a walk now.’ A fire which burns a house does not through anguish and guilt put itself out or through glee or paranoid delusions burn more furiously to cause more damage. Human futures are essentially unpredictable.

Our futures are open because we can imagine alternative ways of doing things. Our imaginations take us into realms of possibility where the way things are in the present empirical world is just one possibility amongst many for future action. The logic of human action, then, is not the same as the logic for empirical non-human substances. It, in some way, includes the latter logic but is not reducible to it. For human action the logic must be one which takes into account the process of open possibility in relation to the social and practical decisions, action, and technology involved in making the imagined, real. The science of human action, then, is quite distinct from the sciences of non-human physical events. The methodology of the natural sciences cannot uncritically be applied to the study of human action without seriously distorting what it is to be human. That is not to say that the methodology of the natural sciences has nothing to offer to the human sciences but that it is to be framed within the logic of human action, a logic which is fundamentally a logic of possibility, choice, and realization (or actualization).

What then is the range of possibilities which can be realized through information technology? What kind of educational choices must we make in facing our possible futures? Are there any clues which can be gleaned from present educational realities? These are the basic questions of this book. It does not seek to predict but to describe possibilities in relation to current realities. Its data is thus not exclusively empirical but includes the ‘imaginable’, the ‘possible’. It seeks to describe some of the structural variations that can be played upon the structures of current realities. Change, of course, is about variation, a playing with forms, stretching, distorting, subtracting elements, adding elements until the point is reached when a transformation takes place - it breaks, it becomes something different, new. Through imagination we play with our realities. Through action we express our imaginations and hence make or act upon our realities. Imagination breaks into realities.

Through education not only are empirical experiences drawn upon but the experience of imaginative play is drawn out and expressed in a vast range of cultural forms. Education thus transcends the work-play divide of current empirical realities. Schooling as a way of canalizing thoughts, feelings, and actions through prescribed courses and historically determined structures sets limits to the exercise of imagination and self-expression and directs attention and energy less towards the possible than towards the given. Schooling has historically been associated with social control, socialization, and through this reproducing the social order. Education becomes a way of breaking into the structures of schooling.

The underlying theme of this book is that of breaking into the hidden, controlling structures of schooling. Its parallel in computing is that of ‘hacking’ into a system. Hacking is computer slang for the act of using one computer to break into the data banks of another. It is also used to describe the processes of breaking into software which is copyrighted and typically protected in various ways, often by entry codes. As such, hacking is illegal. However, by hacking into systems or programs, the hacker is then able to gain access to hidden information and program structures and can manipulate that information or those program structures. Hacking reveals the hidden. With access to knowledge the hacker then is in a position to act against, or act upon, the hidden structures.

The term ‘the hidden curriculum’ has long been in currency. It refers to the covert aspects of schooling. It is argued that every school has a hidden agenda which may or may not be consciously effected. It is at this hidden level, for example, that boys and girls learn their respective gender roles. It is at this level that children tend to be divided according to their social class and ethnic backgrounds and hence receive different school experiences. Breaking into the curriculum has to do with revealing and challenging these structures in ways which give children access to the knowledge and power to influence their own lives. Breaking into the curriculum does not attempt just to reveal and manipulate the given but to set the given within a range of alternative possibilities, possibilities which individuals and groups can choose to make real through their own efforts. If the current structure results in large numbers of children being turned off education, what alternative structure would turn them on?

Information technology does not necessarily imply that we ask such questions. They were being asked long before its advent. People have always thought about the essential nature of education. However, information technology does present a particular challenge to the teacher because we have already been forewarned of its potential to amplify the powers of information and behavioural control, of surveillance and of indoctrination. If the Orwellian vision seems just a fantasy consider the following news item:

BIG BROTHER is alive and well in the United States. About 2,000 Americans, over the next year or so, will serve prison sentences at home where they will be constantly monitored by electronic‘shackles’.…

The State of Michigan’s Department of Corrections has subjected about 250 people to ‘automated home arrest technology’ as a test and intends to extend its system to up to 2,000 offenders over the next year or so.

To shackle someone in his own home a small radio-transmitter is attached to his ankle. It broadcasts a coded signal continuously. If the prisoner tries to remove or tamper with the tag, or strays from home, it alerts prison headquarters.…

‘The person not uncommonly becomes more domestic’ [Dr Vaughan] said. ‘Alteration of an offender’s life-style may prove to be the most important aspect of electronic monitoring and house arrest.’

(Tom Wilkie, The Independent, 18 February 1987)

The idea was stimulated by a story in a Spiderman comic!

Clearly, the technology is here already. Educationists must respond to it. The response is not simply to teach how to program, how to develop keyboard skills and electronic circuitry. The response must involve an attempt to draw out the human implications of information technology and from this to identify the philosophies, styles of teaching, and educational organization which will best serve to liberate humanity from its own illusions and self-made traps. To this end, this book discusses the range of options for changing the role of the teacher and of the pupil, the school organization, and the curriculum.

2
The impact of the computer on the curriculum

JOHN F. SCHOSTAK

A curriculum, as I use the term, refers to a course of reflection, expression, and action. There are, however, many perspectives, some eccentric or personal, some prescribed in official documents, on how this course should be defined and executed. The perspectives move from a situation where the individual has no control over the course to one where he or she is in full control; from divine revelation to the self-chosen path.

The curriculum as divine revelation

Instruction in wisdom divinely revealed to the priests may be the central curriculum in a particular society, where the thoughts and actions of individuals are shaped in the light of the revelations. For Hannah More (ed. Brimley Johnson 1925: 183), the object of her Sunday schools in the 1790s for the lower classes was to ‘learn such coarse works as may fit them for servants’. Central to her teaching was the Christian dogma of original sin. Children were to come to know of their guilt before God and hence be resigned to the ‘natural order’ of life.

Revelation, one might think, is not particularly relevant to modern times. Even if children by law or by consensus are to be instructed in or acquainted with religious principles (whether Christian or others of the world’s religions) they come into contact with other forms of ‘knowing’ and, most particularly, with ways of criticizing both beliefs and ‘facts’. However, consider the following statements by Michie and Johnston:

Eventually it will be possible to set computers going on the search for solutions not to the winning of games but to the harsher problems that confront society, and the solutions will be found.

Certainly this will take a long time, but equally certainly given human resolve it will happen. We can foresee the day when poverty, hunger, disease and political strife have been tamed through the use of new knowledge, the product of computers acting as our servants, not our slaves.

(Michie and Johnston 1984: 12)

Except for the clear implication that computers will be the servants of people, there are parallels here with religious prophecies of the coming of a messiah, or the coming of God when perfection on Earth will be attained. The predicted power of the computer based upon present knowledge and developments is immense. They write:

Extend these ideas to the year 2010 when the city administration network and the medical network and the news media network and the traffic control network have considerable intelligence built into them so that they are smarter than people for most tasks. They also have their own radio-linked, free-moving effectors. The networks are all communicating quite richly and densely with each other. Imagine then an eventual situation in which computer control networks for entire cities set their own goals, in which nobody can be found any more who understands even the documentation, let alone the systems themselves. Each person sees only one little pathway in the electronic jungle.

(Michie and Johnston 1984: 61)

It is in such circumstances, where computer networks set their own goals, say the rational designing of curricula for people based upon a computer which decides how much they ‘need to know’, that ‘knowledge’ begins to resemble divine revelation. As Michie and Johnston emphasize, ‘any socially responsible design for a system must make sure that its decisions are not only scrutable but refutable. That way the tyranny of machines can be avoided’ (Michie and Johnston 1984: 69). It is just these criteria which the rational curriculum seeks to apply to all forms of received or revealed truth. Is it in such a criterion that one may begin to talk in terms of a curriculum which liberates rather than imprisons the mind?

The rational curriculum

Through the writings of such as Descartes and Locke, the Age of Reason began to challenge divine revelation by subjecting traditional knowledge to critical scrutiny until in the work of Darwin central Christian truths suffered a devastating attack. Scientific rationality has largely displaced religion as the source of knowledge about the world. For the extreme rationalist, there is no necessary place for...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• The contributors
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The impact of the computer on the curriculum
• 3 The magic box of delights
• 4 The computer and the punk
• 5 The impact of the computer on the role of the teacher
• 6 Skilful neglect
• 7 The Jet Set Willy curriculum
• 8 Computers and the social climate of classrooms
• 9 Secondary schooling – the sense of an ending
• 10 The microcomputer and school-based electronic newspapers
• 11 Packaging computer knowledge: The further education classroom
• 12 Programming learners or ‘Algorithm, who could ask for anything more?’
• 13 Intelligence communities
• ENDGAMES
• Name index
• Subject index