In the last posting, I wrote about two important aspects of
the American sociological landscape that have had an enormous influence on the
nation’s educational efforts: a strong
work ethic and a belief in balance between equity and liberty. This posting will add a third: the strong
dynamic quality of American society, the rate of change. As Allan Ornstein and Francis P. Hunkins
state, the rate (the speed of change) is more important than the
direction. Let me share how Ornstein and
Hunkins introduce this topic:
Curricula appropriate for various
groups cannot be determined with certainty because groups are changing, ethnic
demands are emerging, information is exploding, philosophical views of the
nature of knowledge are becoming more diverse, views of what it means to learn
are expanding, new frontiers on the nature of the brain are being discovered,
behaviors of students and teachers are being modified, and attitudes and values
are being altered … the particulars of society are shifting.[1]
So, for a potential change agent, this rapidity of change and
the change itself are both good and bad.
It is good to the degree that change
is not so dissimilar from what people expect.
But the bad is multidimensional.
For one thing, a singular change effort is seen as just another disruption,
something to tolerate, not embrace. The
second, more serious consequence is that people in such an environment find it
more difficult to form and keep meaningful value commitments and that includes
values associated with work-related concerns.
When the ground is shifting under one’s
feet, it is difficult to latch on to a steady sense of what is morally good and
morally bad. And this includes making
such determinations concerning education.
In this, the
work of David Purple is important. He
points out the need for moral standards and frameworks. These are important when one speaks about the
social, political, and economic arrangements with which one is engaged. Without them, it is nearly impossible for
people to have a mode of behavior one can consider just as immediate demands
steer people to those options that provide immediate rewards with little to no
concern for long term consequences.[2]
All this
hoopla, when it is directed to education, has built-in tension. Education, by its very nature, is a
conservative institution. As the
critical theorists point out, a primary function for education is “reproduction”
or, as mainstream sociologists describe, “system maintenance.”
That is, in order for a social system
to operate with any viability, it needs to go about insuring that its basic
values and norms, its processes and structures, its very sense of itself, be
passed on and kept within certain parameters.
That social system, in our case the society itself, needs to make sure
that each new generation is sufficiently taught what all that entails for that
given society.
Perhaps that is why in the field of
education, as we have seen in previous postings, most teachers and
administrators tend to choose the more conservative philosophies, approaches,
and psychological views; at the same time, why the rate of change is seen as
threatening and mostly fought against.
Schools are noted for their cultural lag.
And yet in a stroll through any school,
one will see many of the trappings one associates with the changes we are
experiencing, especially when it comes to technological change. The computer has changed many schools, and
determining their full impact will take some more years to determine and that
might be blurred by further change. One
is reminded of the warning of the late futurist Alvin Toffler who proclaimed we
were in for a future shock.
And in no aspect of life is this
change more evident than in the number of choices we have from the very
personal dimensions of life to every consumer option one encounters. We have choices over things we didn’t know we
would have choices. We have “needs”
today about which we didn’t know we would have “needs.”
For example, we are currently
considering a world where labor will no longer be needed; where, between robots
and artificial intelligence, Marx’s warning about labor saving machinery will “be
on steroids” (a saying that had no meaning in my early adult years). How will we handle such a change and then what
will be the role of schools?
This topic of societal change will be
front and center in this blog over the upcoming postings. This one posting serves as an introduction.
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