A Matter of Means

Friday, American Leadership Forum and Houston A-Plus Challenge hosted a Convocation on Public Education entitled “Preparing Kids for a Future We Can’t Describe.”  The keynote speaker was one David Warlick, an internationally known “futurist” whose most memorable skill seems to be mesmerizing school marms with tales of tech-savvy teenagers. 

Warlick’s familiarity with tools and tricks of technology bridged us educators, who are apparently still baffled by bytes and bloggers, to our kids–who seem now to have magical powers (“invisible tentacles,” Warlick called them) that transcend space, time, and authority to create interactive, collaborative learning and socializing communities beyond our wildest imaginings.

Yet, he insisted, his presentation was not about technology, or about how to use technology in the classroom.  It was about the necessary effects of technological change on our definition of what it means to be a literate and educated person. 

The American education system, Mr. Warlick (and others) informed us, has been locked for two hundred years in a now antiquated methodology designed to teach submission, conformity, and efficiency at performing repetitive tasks.  The ubiquitous rows and columns of desks, the authoritative teacher-led learning methods, and the preponderance of pen-and-paper drills–all, according to Warlick, were suited to a manufacturing economy for which the newest innovations (presumably) were the assembly line and the telephone.  Our system, in short, was supposed to train contented factory workers—not twenty-first century innovators.

The information age, by contrast, will reward synthesis, creativity, critical thinking, flexibility, and effective collaboration: it is a new world in which the ability to listen quietly and repeat in unison is virtually useless.

So goes the story: one that most of the two hundred educators in the room seemed to believe. 

What I intend to argue is that what Warlick calls a new kind of literacy—that is, what he advocates as a fundamental change in educational goals and policy—is not only nothing new: it is merely a simplified and less precise version of a Western Classical liberal arts education.  Thus, if American educators ever did (and I’m not sure they did) train factory drones in the manner he describes, then they did so not because they were stuck in the past—but because they forgot their past.