.......

Ted McCain and Ian Jukes. WINDOWS ON THE FUTURE: Education in the Age of Technology. Foreword by David D. Thornburg. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press, Inc., 2001.

These authors think that educators are rattling slowly along at the speed of a trolley car while others in our society have boarded a rocket to the future.

A SUMMARY ...... A COMMENT

.....

 

A SUMMARY

McCain and Jukes are Canadian educational "futurists." This book lays out the reasons why they think educational systems in Canada and the US are in need of fundamental change. Technology in their view is a necessary but not sufficient ingredient in that change. Essentially, their book calls on educators to overcome attitudes that sustain an outmoded educational system.

They ask educators to recognize the radical change in the way we now live, a change being driven, as they see it, largely by the increase in the power of computational technology since the middle of the twentieth century. They try to shock their readers into an awareness of the unimaginable breadth and speed of change occurring and about to occur.

Their advice to educators is to undergo a paradigmatic change in the way they perceive their world and thus deal with it in a fundamentally new way. The key attribute they recommend is to look over the whole situation and find the developing patterns and trends. They urge educators to "live life as a quarterback" who drops back to pass and watches the whole field as the play pattern develops. (51)

Standing in the pocket like a quarterback, McCain and Jukes identify four inescapable trends in technological development. (1) Global digital networks are creating a worldwide demand to be connected anytime anywhere. And we are only in the beginning stages. (2) Technological fusion is creating hybrids with greater power than individual technologies. They see a future "monomedia" composed of TV, video, publishing, computers, photography, and telecommunications. (3) Emerging strategic alliances are combining corporate services for vast new markets. (4) Personal computers for everyone complete the picture M&J paint of a networked, fused, interconnected future. (53-65)

When they look at the state of education in this emerging future, M&J find it woefully unresponsive and unprepared. They see it rattling slowly along like an old trolley car while the rest of the world is moving at rocket speed. Painful as it will be, educators must envision the characteristics of education in the future and get about the business of transformation.

Education, they say, will not be constrained in place and time the way it traditionally has been. Resources will be at the fingertips of students through technology. Memorization, linear learning, standardized approaches for standard school ages--these industrial-age characteristics of education will disappear. (77-90)

M&J then describe the new skills students will have in the future. Traditionalists will be happy to note that they see reading, writing, and arithmetic surviving as "essential process skills." (91) But problem solving and critical thinking will replace rote learning. Communication skills, technical reading and writing, applied technical reasoning, information literacy--these will become priority skills for students. They will use information technology as a tool not as an end in itself. Empowered by technology, students will learn to value personal skills for self-management and entrepreneurship that were not valued in the old paradigm. They will cease to see learning as a collection of discrete subjects; instead they will approach it as a connected fabric, "a life-long process of keeping abreast of change and of learning to learn." (111)

If students will behave differently in the new paradigm of the future, so will educators. M&J predictably lay out a new role for them as futurists who do trend analysis and act like quarterbacks. They teach problem-solving processes rather than subjects. They are guides not founts of information. They are "arsonists" who deliberately try to set their students on fire with a passion for learning. (117) They present themselves to students as models of the life-long learner.

In the end, say M&J, the need is for "vision"--for the power to "leverage" new technologies into lasting educational change. This does not require a continuous barrage of technological instrumentation (that is unavoidable in any event); it requires educators to embrace the new world and reshape educational processes to fit it.

End of A SUMMARY

Go to A COMMENT

 

A COMMENT

McCain and Jukes spend much of their time in front of educators at professional conferences. They are self-acknowledged cheerleaders for the changes they explain. Every profession needs their type, even though they pound home their message with oversimplified contrasts and strain too hard for catchy metaphors.

To hear them tell it, the educational establishment of North America by and large is standing still, stuck in industrial-age methods like an obsolete steam engine. I guess they feel that a bit of exaggeration will motivate good people to hasten on with the change process. Still, the simplistic picture they draw of the reactionary state of education seems starkly black-and-white in this first year of the new millennium.

By staying at the abstract level of paradigmatic social change, they gloss over concrete issues of educational practice in the emerging technological environment. For example, while they acknowledge up front that the "three Rs" will remain central to all student learning, they do not explore this earth-shattering finding further. (91) In the new technological environment, how will teaching and learning the three Rs differ and what should educators do to effect the change? The level of generality of their book does not allow M&J space to explore such important issues.

Nevertheless, this book is a useful compendium of the main themes and players involved in current educational transformation. M&J are right to link the educational system to the vast societal changes already set loose by new information technologies. Clearly, if education as a system is to serve the society well, it must resonate with it.

And that, I think, is the main lesson worth taking from their book. They are impatient because educators have been slower to change their attitudes than they have been just to add technology to the existing way of teaching. Their perception of the lagging position of educators in the race to the future drives their cheerleading. "Let's get on with it, gang!"--that's their basic exhortation. Doing it is easy, they say. Deciding to do it is the hard part. Right on.

End of A COMMENT

Return to A SUMMARY