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continued from Technology Refusal, 3 of 3

CULTURAL CHANGE

In this essay I've painted a rather depressing picture of schools as
grim, self-perpetuating systems of repressive mediocrity for their
employees and their students. I've described how technologies are
variously embraced and resisted in the effort to strengthen this system
and maintain the organizational status quo. I've tried to make clear that
since schools are complex organizations not all their component members
or constituencies have identical interests at all times; that a
technology that is favorable to one faction at a given moment may be
resisted by another which might favor it for different reasons under
different circumstances. Most importantly, I've tried to show that
technologies are neither value-free nor constituted simply by machines or
processes themselves. Rather, they are the uses of machines in support of
highly normative, value-laden institutional and social systems.

I don't believe that decisions to deploy or not deploy a given technology
are made with diabolic or conspiratorial intent. I don't believe that
teachers and administrators consciously plot to consolidate their
hegemony. Rather, I believe that the mental model under which they
operate forecloses some options even before they can be formally
considered, while making others seem natural, neutral, and, most
dangerously, value-free. It is those latter options, those 'easy'
technologies that are adopted and implemented in schools. If one accepts
this framework, there are only two ways to imagine a relationship between
an introduction of technology into schools and a substantive change in
what schools do and how they do it. The first is to believe that some
technologies can function as Trojan Horses; that is, that they can
engender practices which schools find desirable or acceptable but which
nevertheless operationalize new underlying values which in turn bring
about fundamental change in school structure and practice.

The second is to hope that schools will come to re-evaluate the social
purposes they serve, the manner in which they serve them, or the
principles of socially-developed cognition from which they operate. The
impetus for this change may be internal, as teachers and administrators
decide that their self-interest in serving new purposes is greater than
their interest in perpetuating the existing scheme of things. It may be
external, as powerful outside forces adjust the inputs available to and
outputs desired from the schools. It may be institutional, as
restructuring initiatives encourage schools to compete with one another
in a newly-created educational marketplace.

To a certain extent all these processes are underway, albeit slowly,
unevenly, and amidst contestation. On the Trojan Horse front, there are
more and more reports of teachers taking physical and pedagogical control
of computers from the labs and the technologists. They are being placed
in classrooms and used as polymorphic resources, facilitators, and
enablers of complex social learning activities (Newman, 1990, 1992; Kerr,
1991). As computers themselves grow farther from their origins as
military-industrial technologies, educational technologists increasingly
are people whose values are more child-centered than those of their
predecessors. This is reflected in the software they create, the uses
they imagine for technology, and their ideas about exploration and
collaboration (Char & Newman, 1986; Wilson & Tally, 1991; Collins &
Brown, 1986). Nationally, the rhetoric of economic competitiveness used
to justify the National Research and Education Network (and now its
putative successor, the Information Superhighway) has encouraged the
deployment of several national school network testbeds. These prototype
partnerships between public schools, private research organizations, and
the National Science Foundation link geographically dispersed students
and teachers together with one another and with shared databases. The
collaborative, project-based explorations they are designed to support
more closely resemble science as practiced by scientists (or history as
practiced by historians) than they do the usual classroom-based,
decontextualized, and teacher-centered approach to learning. Such project
nearly always result in a significant deauthorization of the teacher as
the source of knowledge, a shift embraced by most teachers who experience
it because it allows them to spend more time facilitating student
learning and less time maintaining their real and symbolic authority. If
students, parents, and teachers are all pleased with the cognitive and
affective changes induced locally by working with these types of f tools
(and it is by no means certain that they will be), it may become
difficult to sustain the older, more repressive features of school
organization of which centrally-administered and imposed technology is
but one example.

The second possibility, that schools will re-evaluate their means and
ends, also seems to have momentum behind it, at least within a somewhat
circumscribed compass. Teachers and administrators are taking steps to
secure the autonomy necessary to re-engineer schools-as-technologies,
though not all are happy with this unforeseen responsibility and some
choose to abdicate it. Nevertheless, for the first time practitioners are
being given the chance to re-design schools based on what they've learned
from their experiences with children. Given that chance, many teachers
and administrators are demonstrating that schools and school technology
can support practices of the kind which reflect values described by
Wendell Berry in another context as care, competence, and frugality in
the uses of the world (Berry, 1970). Others are using the opportunity to
reconstruct the role of the school within its larger community. In
Mendocino, California, for example, an area devastated by declines in the
traditional fishing and timber industries, the local high school has
taken the lead role in developing a community-wide information
infrastructure designed to encourage a fundamental shift in the local
economic base away from natural resource dependency and towards
information work. While initially dependent on NASA's K-12 Internet
program for connectivity, the school district has moved to create
partnerships with local providers to both secure its own
telecommunications needs and be able to resell excess capacity to
community businesses brought online by the school's own adult education
programs. The school is moving towards a project-based approach that
relies on Internet access in every classroom to devise an updated version
of vocational education (many of their students will not go on to four
year colleges) that meets both state requirements and the Mendocino
staffs' wishes for a radically different work environment for them and
their students.

It remains to be seen whether instances like these will multiply and
reinforce one another or whether they will remain isolated
counter-examples, "demonstration projects" whose signaling of modernity
serves mostly to inoculate the larger system against meaningful change.
If schools are in fact able to be more than rhetorically responsive to
either local initiatives or global trends it will be because these
impetuses are themselves manifestations of a more significant and
far-reaching shift: a change in the dominant mechanical metaphor on which
we model our institutions. As we move from machine to information models
we will inevitably require that our institutions reflect the increased
fluidity, immanence, and ubiquity that such models presuppose (See Note
5). As we change our medieval conceptions of information from something
that is stored in a fixed, canonical form in a repository designed
exclusively for that purpose and whose transfer is a formal, specialized
activity that takes place mainly within machines called schools, schools
will change too. They will not, as some naively claim, become redundant
or vestigial simply because their primacy as information-processing
modelers is diminished (Perelman, 1992). Rather, they will continue to
perform the same functions they always have: those relating to the
reproduction of the values and processes of the society in which they're
situated.

What this underlines, I think, is that machines can indeed change the
culture of organizations, even ones as entrenched and recalcitrant as
schools have proven to be. But they do it not, as technologists have
generally imagined, by enabling schools to do the same job only better
(more cheaply, more efficiently, more consistently, more equitably) but
by causing them to change their conception of both what it is they do and
the world in which they do it. This shift is not instigated by the
machines deployed within schools but by those outside of it, those that
shape and organize the social, economic, and informative relationships in
which schools are situated and which they perpetuate. This is not the
same as saying that machines which are widely used outside the classroom
will automatically diffuse osmotically into the classroom and be used
there: history shows that this is clearly not the norm.

What is happening, simply put, is that the wide, wet world is rapidly
changing the ways it organizes its work, its people, and its processes,
reconceptualizing them around the metaphors and practices enabled and
embodied by its new supreme machines, distributed microcomputer networks.
Archaic organizations from the CIA to IBM to the university have
fundamentally rearranged themselves along the lines I've outlined in the
notes to this report. Schools have been out of step with this change, and
it is this misalignment more than anything else that causes us to say
that schools are "failing" when in fact they are doing exactly the jobs
they were set up and refined over generations to perform. It is the world
around them that has changed, so much so that the jobs we asked them to
carry out now seem ridiculous, now make us angry.

The fundamental instinct of durable organizations is to resist change:
that is why they are durable. As schools scurry to serve the new bidding
of the old masters, and as they induct younger workers raised and trained
under the auspices of new models and new practices, we discover--not
surprisingly--that schools too are reorienting themselves along the lines
of the latest dominant machine and, consequently, welcome those machines
inside to assist in their nascent realignment of means and ends.

The norms and procedures of entrenched bureaucratic organizations are
strong and self-reinforcing. They attract people of like minds and repel
or expel those who don't share them. Schools are technologies, machines
with a purpose. They embed their norms and processes in their outputs,
which in the case of schools helps them to further strengthen their
cultural position and resist marginalization. But they can never be
independent of the values of society at large: if those change, as I
believe they are be ginning to, then schools must too. If they do not,
then they will be replaced, relegated to the parts-bin of history.





NOTES

1. This usage of the schools to promote an "outside" agenda once again
invokes their role as a transmission technology even as it fails to take
into account the schools' own values and culture. It shares the
technologists' instrumentalism, albeit to different ends.

2. Although we may apotheosize this habit we didn't invent it. The desire
to apprehend the complexity of the world, to encompass it in a more
immediately accessible form, gives Western culture a long, albeit narrow,
history of mechanical and neo-mechanical metaphor. The shift from one
metaphor to another generally lags technology itself by a generation or
so, and each shift to a new metaphor drastically effects the way cultures
view the natural and human worlds.

Until the fourteenth century there were no such metaphors. Indeed, the
rope of nearly all metaphor, metonymy, and analogy was tied to the
natural or supernatural rather than to the created world, simply because
there were no complex machines as we understand them today. The invention
of the astrolabe, and its close and quick descendant, the clock, provided
the first tangible human creation whose complexity was sufficient to
embody the observed complexity of the natural world. It's at this time
that we start seeing references to the intricate 'workings' of things and
of their proper 'regulation,' usually of the cosmos and nature, although
occasionally of human systems as well. The clock, with its numerous
intricate, precise, and interlocking components, an   felicitous ability
to corporealize the abstraction of temporality, shaped western
perceptions of the world by serving as its chief systemic metaphor for
the next five hundred years.

In the early nineteenth-century, the metaphor of the clock was gradually
replaced by that of the engine, and somewhat more generally, by the
notion of the machine as a phylum unto itself. The figures shift from
those of intricacy and precision to those of 'drive' and 'power,' from
regulation to motivation. In the early twentieth-century, as technology
became more sophisticated, the concepts of motivation and regulation were
to some extent merged in the figure of the self-regulating machine. This
is essentially the dominant metaphor with which we've grown up, the
notion of a 'system' which contains the means of both its own perpetuity
and its own governance, and this metaphor has been applied to everything
from political science, to nature, to the human body, to the human mind.
The enginic 'drive' of the Freudian unconscious, Darwinian evolution, and
the Marxian proletariat give way to 'family systems,' ecosystems, and
political equilibria as the Industrial Revolution lurches to a close.

The edges of a new metaphor for complex systems can be seen emerging,
however, one which is able to embrace the relativity and immanence which
stress mechanical metaphors to the point of fatigue: that of the computer
and its data networks. We see, and will see more, large-scale shifts away
from the concepts of drive and regulation to those of processing and
transmission. The raw material upon which processes act will be regarded
not as objects and forces but as data, which is not a thing but immanence
its elf, an arbitrary arrangement given temporary and virtual form. The
action will be seen as a program, a set of instructions, allowing for
more or fewer degrees of freedom. Interrelationships will be embodied in
paths, arrangements, and pointers rather than linkages (creakingly
mechanical) through which objects transmit force. Important phylogenic
distinctions will be made between hardware (that which is
fixed/infrastructure) and software (that which determines use and
function). This has tremendous consequences for our notions of property,
of originality and authorship, of privacy and relationship. It may,
perhaps, be less limiting than the mechanical metaphors it will largely
displace.

3. It is neither possible nor desirable to ignore the issue of gender
here. It may be coincidence that the classroom, the one place where women
have historically had a dominant institutional place, is repeatedly
characterized by technologists as a place of darkness and chaos,
stubbornly resistant to the enlightening gifts of rationalized
technology. It may be coincidence that educational technologists are as a
group overwhelmingly male but direct their efforts at transformation not
at the powerful (and overwhelmingly male) community of planners and
administrators but at the formally powerless and (overwhelmingly female)
community of practitioners. It may be coincidence that the terms used to
describe the insufficiency of the classroom and to condescend to the
folk-craft of teaching are the same terms used by an androgenized society
to derogate women's values and women's work generally. But that's a lot
of coincidence. Kerr discusses the differences in world-view and values
between the teachers who deal with children and the technologists who
approach the classroom from industrial and, as Noble demonstrates, often
military backgrounds as well (Kerr, 1990; Noble, 1991). He stops short of
characterizing what may perhaps be obvious but nevertheless should be
acknowledged: the casual, pervasive, pathetic misogyny which
characterizes the attitude of dominant culture towards any environment or
activity that is predominantly female. It is perhaps for this reason that
we never see proposals to replace (mostly male ) administrators with
machines. The usage of computers to perform administrative tasks should
pose no more, and probably fewer, value dilemmas and conflicts than their
usage to define and practice teaching.

4. The question of capture processes in education deserves more
exploration than I can give it here. As put forth by Agre, "capture"
describes the restructuring of workplace practices to facilitate the
capture of information by a ubiquitous network technology. It contrasts
with the surveillance model, which relies on visual metaphors, is
surreptitious, and is centrally organized. Capture processes, on the
other hand, don't watch what you do but continuously interact with it.
They are about as far from surreptitious as you can get, since they
involve the active reorganization of activities for the explicit purpose
of gathering information. Rather than being centrally directed they are
(re)enacted by individuals as they perform a socially-embedded set of
tasks. Agre cites as examples Automatic Vehicle Identification for
highway toll collection, and the organization of large restaurant chains
where every action from the greeting of customers to the taking of orders
to the preparation of food is designed around the needs of computerized
information capture (Agre, 1993).

5. In the shift from a mechanical to a digital organization of society we
can expect the following changes in the social construction of
relationship: Information, not authority; networks and pointers, not
linkages; inexpensive ubiquity, not dear scarcity; simultaneous
possession, not mutually-exclusive ownership; instantaneity/timeshifting,
not temporality; community of interests, not community of place;
distributed horizontality not centralized verticality. I don't contend
that we thereby usher in Utopia. These new structures will bring new
strictures. But they will be very, very, different.

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