July 22, 2006: The Classroom of the Future

Things have been quiet here because this past week I had the opportunity to sit in on a workshop being conducted for the benefit of about half a dozen principals from the California public education system. The purpose of the workshop was basically to let them know what was out there on the "bleeding edge" of new technologies, particularly information technologies, as a way of getting them to offer their own visions of the classroom of the future. Listening to their presentations on the final day, I was struck by a distinction that I first raised in discussing the opposition of lexis and praxis: While most technical presentations I attend are heavily noun-based (usually concentrating on features and their attributes), the grammatical foundations of all the presentations the principals gave were heavily (and refreshingly) rooted in verbs. Given my preoccupation with this need to give "equal time" to both nouns and verbs, I was very glad to see that attention reflected in the way in which these representatives of the educational community expressed themselves.

However, following the presentations, the discussion took a twist that was also very interesting. Whenever the conversation turns to any form of change management in an educational system, whether or not it involves new technology, the question that always arises involves what it will take to make the change happen in a setting that is painfully strapped for resources and always seems to be the victim of prevailing political trends. One suggestion that was raised was that we could not count on change management coming from the government; so it would have to come from the commercial sector, which, after all had the most to gain (or lose) from the quality (or lack thereof) of public education. At this point I realized that one of the principals had invoked the language of scientific management on one of his slides, although, to his benefit, he realized that one had to think beyond questions of "productivity" to questions of "customer satisfaction." Nevertheless, it made me think about the cultural context in which we think of the stakeholders in our educational system as "customers."

This then reminded me of a book that I read with great relish at the beginning of this year: Education and the Cult of Efficiency: A Study of the Social Forces that have Shaped the Administration of Public Schools, by Raymond E. Callahan. Never mind that this book was published in 1962; the extent that it was still relevant today was, to say the least, chilling. In a nutshell this book provided an excellent review of the principles of "scientific management," which basically originated from the work of Charles Taylor, and then discussed the ways in which public school systems tried to embrace those principles to the general detriment of the quality of education. Callahan recognized that the overall goal of scientific management is efficiency of production and that this goal is, at the very least, at cross-purposes (if not fundamentally opposed) to goals of education, which, to invoke terminology I raised on June 13, have more to do with effectiveness than efficiency. Then I realized that, for all the lip service that has been paid to getting beyond the narrow view of scientific management in the enterprise, whether it involves "total quality," "knowledge management," or rhetoric about "customer relationships," most enterprises are still locked into that goal of efficiency of production, even if, in the Brave New World of services and globalization, they do not always have a clear idea of what it is they actually produce! Consequently, it may be a vain hope to expect that change in the educational establishment will come from a private sector that may be willing to talk about the value of effectiveness "in theory" but, when it comes to practice, it still locked into thinking about efficiency of production.