Brave New World of Education ...

No Teachers - just Software! What to expect if we let it happen!

by Anne-Kattrin Christ

The red phone on your desk is ringing in the middle of the night. The voice you hear is that of the White House Chief of Staff, alerting you to a crisis in the Eastern European country of Krasnovia. You’re needed at the White House, pronto. “We’ll send a limo”, he says, and hangs up. After an emergency meeting with the President, you’re given a classified intelligence report and access to the country’s foremost diplomats, policy analysts and military leaders. You are to submit a report in time for a presidential address that evening. The president is waiting to act on your recommendation.

You – that is every school child or student in America (and when will it be in Europe?) who, in the year 2010, is attending a school or university and enjoying the new and exciting interactive soft-ware courses designed by Dr. Shank, director of the Institute for learning Sciences at Northwestern University.

Systematic learning is out, high-tech games replicating the thrill of Mission Impossible are in. Students of the future will no longer be forced to learn biological facts from so-called boring textbooks but from a computer game in which they try to prevent a deadly (perhaps genetically engineered?) virus from spreading across the entire globe. Students learn physics - of course only via computer games - by building missiles or by landing on the moon. Each software course is set up as a thriller, and the end is up to the student himself.

During the game, in which the student acts as the thriller’s protagonist, he or she must consult books or educational videos to acquire expert knowledge. If the student does not learn ‘the right things’ and tasks are performed incorrectly, then the missiles he or she has built might blow up in space, or millions of people might die from the epidemic, or the American public might laugh hysterically over the President’s speech on the necessity of military intervention in Krasnovia. If the game ends catastrophically then the student must return to where he/she made a mistake and repeat the process all over again.

According to the architect of the new learning software, this kind of instruction will replace the traditional classroom. Dr. Roger C. Schank expects nothing less than a revolution in learning’ through the product developed by his company ‘Cognitive Arts’, which he founded in 1995. His criticism of conventional teaching methods culminates explicitly in the aim to topple the entire educational system - with the help of technology! “The computer is our Trojan Mouse,” he explained quite frankly. “It allows us to get our foot in the door to do something radical and difficult.”

Developing an appropriate video course can cost up to one million US dollars. Currently, 80 such courses are being developed for Columbia University, and even Harvard Business School will shortly offer pre-courses with material developed by Cognitive Arts. Not only is comparable software being marketed for educational institutions such as schools and universities but also for the Air Force and the Environmental Protection Agency.

European School ‘Reforms’ as Preparation for Doing Good Business with the Brave New World of Education’?

The reasons put forward for this new form of learning seem at first sight to be not only reasonable but also to be based on the ideas developed by John Dewey, the educational reformer at the beginning of the 20th century. Of course, they have been placed in a completely new context here: a method which those who wish to radically change the system always like to use to make their ‘reforms’ appear acceptable. “Learning by doing” is the method children are now finally to be allowed to develop freely and fully at the computer, says Schank. “People don’t learn by being talked at. They learn when they attempt to do something and fail. Learning happens when they try to figure out why.”

To teacher colleagues in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, England and all those who have been confronted with school ‘reforms’ in recent years this all sounds rather familiar. Catch phrases like ‘action-oriented’, ‘self-discovery’, and so many other positive sounding slogans were propagated in schools. Those colleagues will surely remember how we shook our heads, couldn’t believe it, as every teacher knows only too well that all this is fine for the beginning of a lesson when we are warming our students to a new task, building up motivation, but not as a be-all end-all principle of teaching, since teaching involves so much more: explaining, systematically training, practicing and applying new knowledge, guidance from the teacher.

A further argument for the computer games, well-known to the reform-stricken teachers of Europe, is the emphasis on individualized learning speeds, something the student can determine for him/herself. Class-based learning in a semester system is ‘terribly old-fashioned’ finds our promoter of revolutionary learning. Tests, and of course the outcome of the interactive video-thriller, enable the student to determine his own progress and deficits.

‘Self-guided learning’ was the catch word repeatedly used in reform publications. Once we counted the word ‘self-guided’ eleven times in only three pages of a publication produced by the Education Committee of North Rhine Westphalia entitled ‘Future of Schools - Schools of the Future’. Teachers marveled at this repetitiveness and sheer nonsense. Are we now getting the answer to our incredulous questions? Were the ‘reform’ slogans ultimately only a vehicle to prepare us for this brave new computer-guided world of learning? Does this have something to do with the fact that reform ideas - learning key qualifications, the propagation of cross-subject combined learning, etc. etc - seemed to teachers so terribly unrealistic, completely devoid of any scientific basis and knowledge of real teaching practice? Teachers continuously asked themselves what ‘global players’ like Reinhard Mohn (Bertelsmann) and Hilmar Kopper (Deutsche Bank) were doing on the education committee put together by President Johannes Rau?

This new form of teaching will render conventional classrooms and a great number of teachers and professors superfluous. Dr Schank is convinced that such courses will render traditional classes - and many professors – obsolete: “Software is going to replace classes as we know them.” “The idea of one professor for one class is ancient. The new technology is going to give every student access to the best professors in the world.”

Such statements also call to mind all the reform publications that proclaimed throughout the country the idea that the teacher as a teacher should withdraw and become redundant in the classroom - something that from an educational or psychology of learning point of view alarmed teachers everywhere. And each reform publication - in order to make what followed seem more acceptable perhaps - began with an attack on classroom learning as totalitarian, autocratic and obsolete.

Luckily, some of Dr. Schank’s academic colleagues are more critical of this development. “Education depends on relationships between people,” explains David E. Noble, Professor of History at the University of Toronto and a critic of computer learning: “Interactive is not the same as interpersonal.” And Phil Agre, Professor for Communication Studies at the University of Los Angeles sees the danger “that we apply overly simplistic ideas about technology and tear apart the institution before we really know what we are doing.”

However, others do support the revolution in learning with the all-too-well-known argument with which all reform pamphlets begin everywhere: our world is in a process of rapid change and that therefore our old concept of learning - and of school - has become obsolete and that children of all ages will have to continually learn radically new things with the help of the new computer-aided technology.

Ideology instead of Knowledge

But what do students really learn with such interactive computer games? Do they really learn something new? Or is it instead something very old that is being transmitted by means of fancy technology? Besides the very minimum of factual knowledge - which can still be imparted through books and educational films - what is being transmitted? Isn’t it just purely and simply propaganda, one-sided political viewpoints, perspectives and emotional attitudes, only much more perfectly catchy because it activates and appeals more to the senses, making a greater emotional impact than the good-old propaganda medium TV? What is missing are really only Huxley’s Feelies in order to make the influence complete. (Feelies were the 3D cinemas in Brave New World in which viewers, whose hands are strapped to the armrests, are transmitted physical sensations via electrical impulses, underscoring what he or she is seeing in the film). Is the idea to totally manipulate school children and students in order for them to already have the right attitude towards such things as military interventions in Eurasia, or the right affective reactions to so-called ‘rogue states’? What are we to conclude from the fact that, according to the New York Times, Dr. Schank’s team developing the ‘teaching sequence’ on Krasnovia used CNN film material on the war in Bosnia? What other ‘crisis interventions’ will such games prepare the population for? What other opinions, viewpoints, feelings, attitudes, violent reactions, motivations, impulses will be transported by this kind of ‘teaching’?

Total Manipulation

In any case, those ‘instructed’ in such a way will no longer be able to form their own view of the world and its interrelationships. They will not learn facts from the various disciplines, which they can then place in a correct context by making their own judgments and by coming to their own conclusions. Instead, they will be handed an entire world-view with all its related affective reactions and impulses to action. This kind of learning is not self-controlled and does not enable growing adolescents to take a mature look at the world and to shoulder the responsibility that is accorded them in a democracy. On the contrary. It means externally controlled manipulation, the complete appropriation of young persons for goals that are anti-educational and anti-democratic and that serve only a small minority. This is the disturbing road to dictatorship.

We cannot allow this to happen!

All quotations were taken from a New-York-Times article published on 11th August 2000 titled “No Teachers - Just Software”.