50: In the realm of professional practice, the fundamental theoretical distinction in thinking about educational work is the distinction between K-12 and higher education. This distinction is so fundamental that educators rarely reflect on it, and asserting it as a significant theoretical distinction may strike many as strange. Yet there is a great gulf between the preparation of professionals for service in K-12 schooling and for teaching and research in higher education. Likewise the norms of practice are significantly different, as are the criteria of success and the internal allocation of resources. As professional domains, elementary and secondary go together and higher education, a.k.a., postsecondary education, is something different.[Note 27]
51: This distinction is a good example of how the material conditions of work can shape the way people think about complicated relationships. Expensive libraries and laboratories are a necessity of work in higher education, and their expense is prohibitive in elementary and secondary schooling. Conditions have perforce differed in the two realms, and ideas about education have reflected these different conditions. Digital technologies, however, are rapidly enabling us to avoid these fundamental constraints. The knowledge resources created to support advanced scholarship and professional practice are becoming ubiquitous. Where a digital infrastructure exists for supporting intellectual work, the marginal costs of using those resources do not increase greatly as more and more people make use of them. Consequently, the infrastructure of higher education is becoming available in schools as both levels develop their digital capacities. In a major historical departure, the material conditions separating elementary and secondary education from higher education are disappearing. This change is already emerging in schools that have robust connections to the Internet. With this change, the basic pedagogical problem is to develop ways of making these new resources pedagogically meaningful in the education of children. Certainly differences between K- 12 and higher education will remain, but educators should rethink what those differences may be in very fundamental ways.
52: Historically, the separation between K-12 and higher education has not always predominated. In medieval practice, secondary education assimilated much more to higher education than it did to elementary. Well into the 19th century, secondary schools usually linked tightly to colleges and universities, and in Europe to this day, admission into the lyc?e or Gymnasium is the main cutoff, with all graduates of those schools virtually guaranteed general access to the university system. In many educational systems, especially those where the university derives from the medieval guilds of students, faculty members in secondary education substantially have the status and qualifications of their peers elsewhere in the university. Usage of the terms "pupil" and "student" still reflects this linkage between secondary and higher education, as "eleventh- grade pupils" would be condescending and "third-grade students" a bit pretentious. Let us infer from these residual characteristics that present theoretical constructs are not timeless and that renewed, expanded connections between higher education and K-12 are well within the realm of historical possibility.
53: Several factors make it plausible that an alteration in the controlling theoretical conception about the knowledge professions is reinvigorating these latent connections between schools and the university. Over the past 200 years or so, the apparatus of science and scholarship has become more and more elaborate and costly, restricting practical mastery to elites and forcing increasing specialization upon their members. Digital information technologies do not necessarily lower the cost of the apparatus, but they change the economics of participation significantly, making the marginal cost of broader participation minimal. To be sure, it is moot whether, given digital access to the tools and data necessary in creating knowledge and in forming professional skill, a larger proportion of people will be able make good use of it or be interested in doing so, but at least this possibility becomes a question! At least in principle, people at all levels of the educational enterprise will share and participate together in one full and complex working environment through the digital infrastructure.
54: This material condition makes feasible the unification of the system in a theoretic whole. Several other long-term secular developments increase incentives for scientists and scholars to try to engage a wider public in their work. Weapons-related science and technology tended to concentrate effort on the attainment, no matter what the costs, of narrow ends--bigger bombs, faster planes, more discriminating radar, and on and on. Public understanding was only tangentially important in the work of national defense. With the end of the Cold War, scientific priorities have been changing in interesting ways. The general technological efficiency of a population becomes highly consequential when material well-being is largely a function of success in global economic competitions. Effective education in technology and science is as important as good research in promoting such technological efficiency. Likewise, as national defense diminishes in priority, public health and a sustainable environment increase in importance as science-related issues. Although both have a critical research dimension to them, they also have very difficult educational problems embedded in them, for in both areas, preventative strategies may prove far more cost-effective than corrective strategies that use heroic interventions in the face of crisis. As a result, high-level scientists and scholars are much more responsive to educational issues, and scientific funds are supporting broader educational incentives.
55: As universities become more sensitive to their educational missions, a theoretical construct can take hold in which scientists and scholars understand that the fundamental purpose being served in the creation of knowledge is the advancement of education at all its levels.[Note 28] This comprehensive commitment to education is not resulting in university faculties enlisting in the traditional work of schools of education, preparing teachers and administrators, but it is generating a wider interest in reshaping the whole body of knowledge for broader and easier access, and in pedagogical strategies in which the processes of study and learning draw people into the work of producing knowledge from early in their educational experience onward.[Note 29] An initial instance of this development is the tremendous academic energy surging into Web site development, with many projects that go way beyond facilitating research in the narrow sense to promoting broad participation in intellectual work.[Note 30] Advancing knowledge becomes a defining good and necessary goal of the human polity, and participation in that enterprise becomes both a feasible endeavor and a basic human right for all its citizens.
56: A pedagogy that draws people into the work of advancing knowledge would be a highly empowering pedagogy and one that indicates how the roles of teachers may adapt to the new information conditions. A curriculum supporting this pedagogy facilitates three main functions: posing problems, providing data, and furnishing tools. The pedagogy itself involves various mentoring activities, helping to make sure that students really grasp the problems and questions, that they comprehend key characteristics of the data that they seek, and that they can use the tools of analysis, simulation, and synthesis purposefully. This is the pedagogy of research, and in a sense the changes envisioned here suggest that the whole educational system will increasingly be apprenticed to the research apparatus.[Note 31] One can imagine an interesting new structure to teaching emerging, with general teachers in the school classroom managing inquiry and a network of consultants with special competencies accessible via desktop videoconference--undergraduates, graduate students, and professors who help field questions that neither students nor teacher in a class can answer through their independent inquiries.[Note 32]
Questions:
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