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Neil Postman, "Technology as dazzling distraction.: Education Digest, April 1994, Vol. 59, Issue 8

I have no hostility toward new technologies, especially ones like computers, that have captured the imagination of educators. Of course, I am not enthusiastic about them, either. I am indifferent, because, in my view, they have nothing to do with the fundamental problems we have to solve in schooling our young. If I do harbor any hostility toward these machines, it is only because they are distractions. They divert the intelligence and energy of talented people from addressing issues we need most to confront.

Let me begin to make my case with a conversation I had with a Honda Accord automobile salesman. He pointed out that the car had cruise control, for which there was an additional charge. As is my custom in thinking about the value of technology, I asked, "What is the problem to which cruise control is the answer?" The question startled him, but he said, "It is the problem of keeping your foot on the gas." I told him I had driven 35 years and never found that a problem.

He then told me about the electric windows. "What is the problem," I asked, "to which electric windows are the answer?" He was ready for me this time: "You don't have to wind the windows up and down with your arm." I told him this, too, had never been a problem, that, in fact, I rather valued the exercise.

I bought the car anyway, because, as it turns out, you cannot get a Honda Accord without cruise control and electric windows--which brings up my first point: Contrary to conventional wisdom, new technologies do not, by and large, increase people's options but do just the opposite.

For all practical purposes, you cannot go to Europe anymore by boat--a thrilling and civilized way to go. Now you have to take an airplane. You cannot work for a newspaper unless you use a word processor, which eliminates me, since I do all of my composing with a pen and yellow pad and do not wish to change. You cannot buy records anymore; you must use compact discs.

New technologies drive old technologies out of business. There is an imperialistic thrust to technology, a strong tendency to get everyone to conform to the requirements of what is new. Now, this is not always a bad thing, although sometimes it is very bad.

Faustian Bargain

What we too easily call "progress" is always problematic--technology is always a Faustian bargain. It giveth and it taketh away. And we would all be clearer about what we are getting into if there were less cheerleading about the use of computers in the classroom and more sober analysis o what may be its costs intellectually and socially.

A second point my Honda story illuminates is that new technologies may not always solve significant problems or any problem at all. But because they are there, we often invent problems to justify using them. Or sometimes we even pretend we are solving one problem when, in fact, the reason for building and employing a new technology is altogether different.

An expensive example of this is the information superhighway that President Clinton and especially Vice President Gore are so ardently promoting. I have not yet heard a satisfactory answer to the question, "What is the problem to which this $50 billion investment is the solution?" I suspect that an honest answer would be something like this: "There is no social or intellectual problem, but we can stimulate the economy by investing in new technologies." That is not at all a bad answer, but it is not the answer given by the vice president, who claims that it solves the problem of giving more people greater access to more information faster, including providing them with 500 TV channels (or even a thousand).

This leads me to the question of schools and technology. In reading the work of those who are passionate about the educational value of new technologies, I find their enthusiasm almost wholly centered on the fact that they will give students greater access to more information faster, more conveniently, and in more various forms than has ever been possible. That is their answer to the question "What is the problem to which the new technologies are the solution?"

But getting Information to people fast and in various forms was the main technological thrust of the nineteenth century, beginning with the invention of telegraphy and photography in the 1840s. The problem was solved and is no longer something any of us needs to work at, least of all, become worked up about. If anyone argues that technology can give people access to more Information outside the classroom than could possibly be given inside the classroom, I would say that has been the case for almost 100 years. What else is new?

No More Schools?

In other words, the information-giving function of the schools was rendered obsolete a long time ago. For some reason, more than a few technophiles have just noticed this and are, in some cases, driven to favor eliminating our schools altogether. They err in this, I think, for a couple of reasons.

One is that their notion of what schools are for is rather limited. Schools are not now and in fact have never been largely about getting information to children. That has been on the schools' agenda, of course, but has always been way down on the list.

One of the principal functions school is to teach children how behave in groups. The reason for this is that you cannot have a democratic, indeed, civilized, community life unless people have learned how to participate in a disciplined way as part of a group. School has never been about individualized learning. It has always been about how to learn and how to behave as part of a community. And one of the ways this is done is through communication of social values.

Robert Fulghum's All I Ever Really Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten has an elegant summary of the important business of schools, including the following: Share everything, play fair, don't hit people, put things back where you found them, clean up your own mess, wash your hands before you eat, and, of course, flush. But no one has learned all these things, along with an affection for one's country, at kindergarten's end. It takes many years of teaching these values in school before they have been accepted and internalized. Some would say this function of schooling is the most difficult task educators must achieve.

If it is not, then providing the young with narratives that help them find purpose and meaning in learning and life surely is. By a narrative, I mean a story of human history that gives meaning to the past, explains the present, and provides guidance for the future. If there is a single problem that plagues American education at the moment, it is that our children no longer believe, as they once did, in some of the powerful, exhilarating narratives that were the underpinning of the school enterprise.

Moral Light

I refer to such narratives as the story of our origins in which America is brought forth out of revolution, not merely as an experiment in governance but as part of God's own plan--the story of America as a moral light unto the world. Another great narrative tells of America as a melting pot where the teeming masses, from any where, yearning to be free, can find peace and sustenance. Still another tells how hard work is one of the pathways to a fulfilled life. There are many other such narratives on which the whole enterprise of education in this country has rested. If teachers, children, and their parents no longer believe in them, schools become houses of detention rather than attention.

What I am driving at is that the great problems of education are of a social and moral nature and have nothing to do with dazzling new technologies. In fact, the new technologies being so loudly trumpeted are not a solution, but a problem to be solved. The fact is that our children, like the rest of us, now suffer from information glut, not information scarcity.

Everything from telegraphy and photography in the nineteenth century to the silicon chip in the twentieth has amplified the din of information. From millions of sources all over the globe, through every possible channel and medium, information pours in. Behind it, in every imaginable form of storage, is an even greater volume of information to be retrieved. Information has become a form of garbage. It comes indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, disconnected from usefulness. We are swamped by it, have no control over it, and don't know what to do with it. And in the face of all this, some believe it is time to abandon schools.

The role of the school is to help students learn how to ignore and discard information so they can achieve a sense of coherence in their lives. It is to help students cultivate a sense of social responsibility; think critically, historically, and humanely; understand how technology shapes their consciousness; and learn that their own needs sometimes are subordinate to the group's. I could go on for three pages in this vein without reference to how machinery can give students access to information.

Instead, let me summarize In two ways what I mean. First, I'll cite my friend Alan Kay, sometimes called "the father of the personal computer," who likes to remind us that any problems the schools cannot solve without machines, they cannot solve with them. Second, if a nuclear holocaust should occur, if children are starving, If crime terrorizes our cities, marriages are breaking up, mental disorders are increasing, and children are being abused, none of this happens because o f lack of information. It happens because we lack something else. It is the "something else" that is now the business of schools.

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Neil Postman is Professor of Media Ecology and Chair, Department of Culture and Communication, New York University, New York City. Condensed from TECHNOS, 2 (Winter 1993), 24-26.

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