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.