The Misappropriation of Technology in Education

Paul Hamilton and so many other education experts propose to answer the question of what skills our students will need when they finish school and how technology will help in that regard. They name such skills as “collaboration, communication, creativity, (and) divergent thinking”1.  However, when looking for concrete, measurable examples of these “skills”  that hold reliable and verifiable proof of their understanding, demonstration, and mastery, most of the current literature obfuscates their impracticality by slotting varying degrees of these values into rubrics that can then be abstractly translated into scales of proficiency. This is confusing not only to the teacher but also the student. It is confusing because what are determined as skills are values and ways of working in the real world that add to the learning process and the way that learning is applied but have very little to do with the direct application of what is learned.

Of course, in principle, it is incumbent upon teachers to pass on effective ways of working in the real world by adhering some values to the ways in which we all do our work. However, today’s higher thinking about education and the role that technology plays has confused itself by mixing values with skills to the point that students across many disciplines are echoing the age-old question, “For what do I need to know this?”.

Although it is admirable to teach values that will help students navigate through life after school, it should not be the focus of each classroom by any means; rather such values are taught in every classroom as a byproduct of learning the specialized discipline that differentiated classrooms provide. The focus on values may be a result of a generalist approach to teacher-training and the inability of schools to foster specialized teachers who have mastered actual skills in their chosen field of study.

Another misdirected application of technology in classrooms is proposed by the question, “Should classrooms today be the same as they were when we went to school?”2. The premise set out by Joel Handler in this Google-for-Education sponsored video suggests that everything around has changed over the last one-hundred years except the way education is delivered. This is utterly preposterous as we can simply look in any man-made direction and find three simple truths that refute this conclusion. First, it can be determined that everything around has remained much the same as it was a hundred years ago (i.e. streets, banking, housing, politics, etc.). The environment is now changing, but that is thanks to anthropogenic influences largely due to the industry we continue to rely upon for our convenient, non-adaptive lifestyles that have not changed significantly in one-hundred years. Our basic societal infrastructure from transportation, economics, housing, business and entertainments, all have basically remained the same aside from becoming more urbanized as less and less people are used to meet our need for food. Second, the introduction of technologies into our lives is ubiquitous and has only served to increase both the “quality” and length of our lives. Schools have not protected themselves from the trappings of technology as we have seen in the proliferation of distance and online learning. In effect, virtual classrooms have outnumbered real classrooms since the advent of the internet.  Last, the most dangerous proposition of educational technology is the undeniable business model that has begun to flourish for “education” companies to act as agents for the profit-driven interests of industry to educate and train potential employees. Private interests are pressuring schools to adopt technologies suited to external means. An example of this is how the Chief Education and Technology Officer Albert Hitchcock of Pearson Publishing describes how he ultimately envisions the financial security of the company’s future by allowing “cross-sector partnerships” to focus educational technology on employability: “Unilever designing a degree-level course that would, you know, serve their needs as an employer… …with tight collaboration for companies to help inform the next generation of learning”3.

This last point illustrates the precarious position in which public education now finds itself. The value of public education has deep roots in the development of democratic societies, and as politics continues to suffer the onslaught free enterprise, so too does education suffer the misappropriation of technology. The answer to rectifying this situation lies in the hands of the teachers with specific applicable skills who can hand down practicality alongside such values as divergent thinking, creativity, communication and collaboration. It is the ability to apply such values to real-world tasks that determines the success of students after school and without such examples taught with school, students will remain lost as to the purpose of technology and the purpose of the values that are currently being masked as skills in our education system.

1. Hamilton, Paul. (Nov. 21, 2012). Technology in Education. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXyCECMxhOs
2. TEDx Talks. (Nov. 22, 2015). Technology in Education – From Novelty to Norm | Joel Handler | TEDxHIllsboroughLibrary. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0lNhayjJVE
3. Frangoul, Anmar. (May 30, 2018). How Technology is Changing the Education Sector. Retrieved from https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/30/how-technology-is-changing-in-the-education-sector.html