This is my attempt to make sense of what “school 2.0″ might mean, using a couple of education reform classics I just finished reading. For what it’s worth, I hate speculating about the future, and am more comfortable building with whatever I’m given to work with, if I can see any use.

I found Neil Postman’s Teaching as A Conserving Activity after reading Artichoke’s comment , quoting Humberto Maturana:

“What is conserved defines identity. But what is conserved also defines what can change. This is interesting. We are so concerned about change, yet what is most important is what is conserved… politics conserve. Even revolutionaries conserve. All systems only exist as long as there is conservation of that which defines them.

Postman, addressing revolutionary change, wasted no time in dealing with Ivan Illich, calling Deschooling Society, a “celebration of impotence” (p. 5), and then later dismissing Illich’s proposals as “the utopian disease of which they consider themselves the cure” (p. 202). Since I’d only read excerpts of Illich, I figured it was time to read his book, and so I have. The quote from him (not from the book) that I included in my previous post made a distinction between political and cultural change, in that the political activist works for change in the existing institutional environment, while the cultural revolutionary seeks a change in values. The final sentence, “The cultural revolutionary risks the future on the educability of man,” was clarified for me by by Tom Hoffman’s statement:

This is not to say plenty of people won’t seek alternatives, for a variety of reasons, some will be willing to go “all in” to raise future leaders of the “creative class,” but I don’t see a big upswell of middle class families looking for alternative modes of schooling. It is too big a risk, given the structure of our economy.

The “risk,” as Tom notes, is rooted in social values about what it means to be successful and happy. The idea of “educability” has to be understood in terms of what-for, since people don’t generally seek out formal learning for it’s own sake. Talking about learning as an end in itself is something that I hear mostly from educators and education critics; in practice most people go to school in order to gain an economic edge, and not simply “to learn.” Not always, but mostly. The middle class won’t participate in Illich’s, or anyone else’s revolution until “disenchantment with and detachment from the central social ritual” inspires a popular reform movement. We’re having a political one right now with the standards movement, in fact, and it isn’t moving in Illich’s direction. The deschooled society he envisions is decidedly antagonistic to middle class consumer-oriented values.

Right now, most of the discussion that I read among teachers on the web assumes that technology will deschool education by subverting institutional norms, and we’ll migrate, somehow, from classrooms to distributed networked learning systems without disturbing the institutional death grip that schools and the economy have on each other. Economic motivations encourage people to see education as a means to acquiring certifications of technical competence. Communications technology can facilitate networking, but the need for technical certifications is still going to ensure the preservation of existing educational structures. Even if the uncoupling of curriculum and certifications happens as an unintended outcome of testing and the standards movement (since testing may make schooling optional) schools in some form will still be needed. Vouchers and small charter (magnet) schools, and new opportunities for adult learning, like these ideas of Ilich’s that Terry mentions may be integral to whatever comes next.

I don’t imagine schools disappearing, but I do see them changing as efforts to make schools more efficient run up against the internal contradictions we find in a system that combines compulsory attendance, homogeneous age grouping, and standardized educational outcomes. Everybody can’t be “at grade-level” (or “average”), since it ignores the normal distribution of individual differences. It’s a formula for disenchantment.

Postman uses the metaphor of the thermostat as a guideline for curricular focus, a useful idea once we accept the idea that schools won’t be going away altogether. He recommends cybernetics, the science of equilibrium, to understand how curriculum might be written as a response to prevailing cultural trends. From this point of view, he says,

…education tries to conserve tradition when the rest of the environment is innovative. Or it is innovative when the rest of the society is tradition-bound. It is a matter of indifference whether the society be volatile or static. The function of education is always to offer the counterargument, the other side of the picture. The thermostatic view of education is, then, not ideology-centered. It is balance-centered (p. 19).

It’s important to note that he attaches a limiting principle to his thesis, which is that schools should not intrude on the activities of institutions such as the family, the church, the medical profession, or other community organizations with specialized functions, since involvement in those activities weakens both school and the social institution it attempts to supplant. Most teachers I know would be happy to relinquish those duties!!

He makes the case for studying media ecology and “habits of mind that our revolutionary information environment mocks and even despises, but without which a person cannot be fully educated.” Addressing the need to teach “the basics” Postman returned to one of his favorite topics, language education, calling it the most “basic.” The subject of semantics teaches how we make meaning, and encourages critical thought. It would apply to any of the traditional curricular topics, and it would assist students and teachers, both, in reflecting on the truth of what they read, write, view, and hear no matter what form of media message they are exposed to.

A good starting point for anyone interested in the subject of semantics, besides Postman himself, is S. I. Hayakawa’s Language in Thought and Action.