22: New information technologies are opening the system to new possibilities as surely as new building technologies did to architecture some hundred years ago. But the technologies do not design new practices for us. People, acting in the face of uncertainty, must determine what they can make of these emerging possibilities. Many groups and interests, pursuing many divergent inspirations, are vying for command, and a kaleidoscope of coalitions establishes, through diverse initiatives, emerging norms of practice. Do people working in intellectual institutions and knowledge industries--the world's schools, colleges, universities, research labs, libraries, museums, and professional offices--share a sustained agenda with which to shape newly emerging educational practices? In the remainder of this essay, we outline a positive response to this question--again, a response that does not aim to persuade others what they should think about the matter, but instead claims that the response is the way we do think about the matter when we reflect upon it, to suggest in a tentative, factual way that educators do indeed share a powerful agenda.
23: Other groups, aside from the knowledge industries, may play a significant part in determining the course of educational innovation. Many in journalism and commerce avidly attend to the entertainment industries as potential sources of educational innovation. They may be right in viewing practitioners of edutainment--the merger of education and entertainment in products, at once enlightening and engaging, to be marketed to both homes and schools--as the key groups that determine emerging pedagogical prospects. Certainly, a great deal of commercial capital currently drives efforts to develop edutainment products, and there are powerful channels of distribution available to reach the public.
24: Significant limitations to these efforts to restructure educational practice through edutainment are at work, however. Edutainment's stuff in trade is a set of products to be sold in the educational markets of home and school. Indubitably, schools and teachers and students, engaged in the work of education, constitute a market for the sale of various goods--food, books, clothes, pens and pencils, furniture, fuel oil, rings, electronics, and software. Education as such, however, is not inherently a market, with success measured in market share and relative efficiency in making and distributing product. Many a fool has emerged from a richly financed education, and many others have earned hard wisdom through a sparse regimen of study. As a human phenomenon, education is not a market for products, but a process of growth and transformation, one sustained over many years with success measured throughout the vicissitudes of personal and collective experience. Indeed, many companies may do well by doing good. But producers of edutainment have yet to show whether they have either an interest in the human process of education or the capacity to give it intentional shape.
25: Can Disney or Apple or Time-Warner take responsibility for the systemic character of educational experience as it occupies the central activities of over 50 million persons nationally for periods of 15 to 20 years each? Can they extend that responsibility to the billion or so children and youths globally who will acquire their education over the coming decades? Surely the activities of such companies, like those of mass communicators throughout the 20th century, will have significant effects on the cultural context within which educational work takes place. But the likelihood is slim that the producers of edutainment, as such and single-handedly, will be the prime reshapers of the processes of education. They, like everyone else involved, are engaged in the social construction of an emergent system in which their agenda, as educators, shapes what they do and do not contribute to the construction.
26: Over coming decades, the prime movers of educational innovation are more likely to be the knowledge industries and intellectual institutions, which are already the prime locus of education. Education is the work of educators, not movie producers, broadcasters, or theme-park operators. Educational institutions--schools, universities, museums, laboratories, libraries--are the major factors in the social construction of a new educational system. Worldwide they control a huge annual cash flow, derived from individual, governmental, philanthropic, and commercial sources, a cash flow more than sufficient to underwrite far-flung innovation. Furthermore, they control and produce intellectual property of extraordinary breadth and depth. The holdings of Hollywood are but a pittance compared to those of the world's universities, laboratories, museums, and libraries, and the changes wrought by the digital technologies are making those very holdings more accessible, productive, and meaningful in the lives of everyone. What might an agenda for innovation be like that draws on the interests and strengths of the knowledge industries and intellectual institutions?
27: To draw together the main components of this agenda, let us survey the distinctions that often characterize intellectual and educational work. When people talk about the fruits of intellectual work at its higher levels, they generally think of forms of knowledge spread across an intellectual spectrum that runs from universal scholarship--pure achievements of disinterested reflection--to the domains of professional practice--applied principles of organized performance. This distinction--for shorthand, let us call it the distinction between the academic and the professional--is the fundamental polarity that defines types of knowledge within institutions of education. In contemplating it, we should remember Pascal's great maxim--"We do not display greatness by going to one extreme, but in touching both at once, and filling all the intervening space."[Note 13] Great research universities include departments of sociology and schools of social work, departments of economics and schools of business, departments of political science and schools of public affairs, departments of biology and physiology and schools of medicine. Across every field, education included, people need both pure scholarship and professional learning. An agenda for reconstructing the educational system will touch both the academic and the professional and occupy all the intervening space.
28: It is not sufficient, however, in characterizing intellectual work to reflect only on forms of knowledge. "Art is long, life short, judgment difficult, opportunity transient. To act is easy, to think is hard; to act according to our thought is burdensome."[Note 14] Intellectual work involves action of the burdensome sort in which thought guides the effort. If, from the perspective of intellectual institutions, a spectrum running from pure to applied, from academic to professional, characterizes knowledge, then a gradient running from theory to policy to practice generally describes the intellectual and educational uses to which people put that knowledge. Sometimes theory guides work and activity; other times policy controls it; and often patterns of practice shape action. Properly speaking, these are ideal types, like the poles of pure academic knowledge and applied professional learning. As ideal types they are intellectual formulations applied to the stuff of experience, not empirical actualities substantially involved in it. Both sets of ideal types span the activities of knowledge and education, and we can use them to form a conceptual matrix that can help raise awareness of the powerful and comprehensive agenda embedded in the social construction shaping a new educational system in our time.
| Academic | Professional | |
|---|---|---|
| Theory | What controlling principle or reflective worldview determines the overall standards and directions of intellectual and educational activity? | How should theories about the organization of knowledge structure the professional practice of education? |
| Policy | What basic tasks must intellectual and educational policy accomplish if people are to fulfill the educational potential inherent in prevailing historical conditions? | What must educators do to put into effect policies guiding educational practice that will advance the social construction of a new educational system to historic completion? |
| Practice | What underlying assumptions and principles can best enable people to shape effective patterns of practice under prevailing conditions? | How should educators organize the daily work of educational activity to enable people to fulfill the best possibilities inherent in their conditions? |
29: In what follows, we will explore answers to these six questions in the context of our extended present. Something along the lines of each answer is what educators understand, by and large, as they entertain each question while engaged with the effort to incorporate the digital technologies into the work of education during our extended present.
Next: [Extending the Enlightenment Vision]
Previous: [Processes of Social Construction]