46: Throughout the era of scarce educative resources, the basic problem of practice has been to make these scarce resources stretch as far as possible. The basic strategy has been the strategy of instruction, which requires large numbers of children to learn in unison. This strategy has been in force for centuries. It is the strategy that accounted for the design of schools, the workings of classroom practice, the organization of the day and year, the plan of the curriculum, and the function of textbooks. Under a regime of cultural affluence, the effort to make a few cultural resources stretch as far as possible makes little sense. Other imperatives gain prominence. These are not entirely new imperatives, but their relative importance increases with the change in underlying economics as the information infrastructure shifts from print to digital networks.
47: Inquiry, study, problem solving can become the prime educational activities in a system making full use of digital resources. Educators have often commended these as the best modes of learning, but despite numerous reform efforts, practice always seemed to revert to norms of traditional instruction. The reason is fairly simple--schools and teachers could not mobilize the diversity of cultural resources required in order to sustain the program of substantive open-ended inquiry that would be generated by many millions of children and youths, with the inquiries of each sustained over a period of 10 to 20 years. Under a regime of scarcity, locating the causal agency of education in the power of students to study and inquire would overwhelm available educational resources. Consequently, given the constraints, the causal agency in education has necessarily been located in the teacher. When things go right there is a linear flow of knowledge and skill from the teacher to a class of students, with drill, practice, testing, and recitation reinforcing that flow--it being, alas, all too viscous. Digital resources represent a powerful investment in the power of the student to inquire and to learn. Given effective tools of access, analysis, simulation, and synthesis, students can accomplish many things with these resources that they could not do without them. As a result of empowering students more effectively, what teachers need to do to help students develop knowledge, character, and skill changes as well. These shifts require a difficult change in mind-set about the process of education.
48: By and large, the traditional system assumes the worst of students. One of the great ironies is that infants learn to walk and talk largely through their self-directed effort. Thereafter educators become far more paternalistic, and generally assume that children cannot exercise wise judgment about their own education. The cost of this assumption is a frequent estrangement of students from their education. The benefit is a speeding of the process, or so we think, as what might be learned slowly but autonomously by a zigzag path of trial and error is learned instead by the straight and narrow, as the student is channeled along pre-designed tasks to the formal curricular objective. Long ago Rousseau argued eloquently throughout Emile for a careful cost- benefit trial of this trade-off between educational estrangement and didactic acceleration.[Note 25] There has never been a significant trial at the level of organized practice, largely because the strategy of acceleration has been the only organized practice within which results could be examined. The American progressive education movement tried to minimize educational estrangement by working with students as they set their own pace and direction, but this movement proved fundamentally impracticable under prevailing conditions. As digital resources become the infrastructure for education, it becomes much more feasible to test whether or not paternalistic efforts to accelerate the pace of learning are, in fact, counterproductive and whether both time and value can be gained by ceasing to understand the business of the student as learning what teachers teach and instead recognizing it as doing what their name suggests--studying those things that the student finds significant.[Note 26]
49: In a new educational system, centering initiative and control with the student is a fundamental principle of design and a measure of good practice. The role of teachers remains great: it is the role of fomenting questions, doubts, uncertainties; modeling strategies of inquiry; and criticizing the quality of results. In this context, curriculum design becomes the art of posing problems and facilitating work upon them. To so facilitate autonomous work by students requires great skill and sensibility, and teaching may become a more prized and demanding profession. As educators adapt work to empower the student, they will create settings in which--
The transformation of education taking place is not a function of increased access to information. It is a function of increased participation in intellectual work--in advancing knowledge, applying skill, exercising judgment.
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