Last week, a colleague of mine interviewed for a job as an advisor to social studies teachers within a local school district. People like this provide support, resources and in-service workshops on the topics of social studies. During the interview, he was asked what are the biggest troubles facing the discipline. Now, it would be easy to hit this one out of the park but my friend had to be careful. What troubles the discipline is something about which school officials do not want to hear anything negative.
If you are a regular reader of this blog, first, thanks, second, you have read my takes on technology. However, I do not want this is to be a tired refrain. I have what (I feel) are solid and common sense reasoning for my suspicions of technology. School districts throughout the country search desperately for something that could miraculously raise their test scores, gain special recognition and if they are really lucky, get a mention in U.S. News and World Report during its annual education issue. Yet, it is within their supposed salvation that school districts could be embracing its destruction.
The first of the two major problems facing social studies education is the prevalent use of technology. There is no discrimination or caution on how and what to use with regards to technology. In essence, technology could prove to be as destructive to the learning process as the teacher twenty years ago that just showed movies. What school districts fail to understand is that if technology is to be used, it must be as a tool, not as the means to the end. Often, in workshops, I hear about websites that bring the student into history. There are sites that allow the student to pretend they are settlers setting out to cross the plains. There are sites that allow the student to pretend they are soldiers in the trenches of World War I. Under the auspices of teaching the child more about its respective subject, it does the exact opposite. Remember, all websites and all programs are designed with a business paradigm, not an educational one. The other dangerous part of technology is the professed ease that it allows the student to explore history. The exploration of history is not easy. It has never been easy. It should not be easy. Our constant search to create “fun” and “easy” ways of studying history is destroying the subject and students’ ability to truly understand it.
The second major problem is that with the focus and reliance of technology, we are moving away from the tools traditionally used to better understand the subject. Each discipline requires particular skills to truly understand it. For history, a reading subject, students must be able to critically read a text, understand point of view and understand the information within a historical context. It is this last part that is most undermine by technology. Today, the internet is used as a fact gathering instrument (if it is used academically at all) and it is creating increasingly shallower well of information. To truly understand history includes an ability to work through an in-depth text and to forego, indeed to be suspicious of, snippets of information. Historically, dictators and manipulators have used bits of information, and people’s unwillingness to demand more, to sway people down horrible paths. Technologically, we are doing it to ourselves. History requires the taking in of large amounts of information. If our students lack the intellectual and academic stamina to endure this, it jeopardizes the future of the discipline.
Some might find this an odd thing to get worked up over. However, this is my discipline, my passion and, in some ways, my life. Furthermore, I care deeply about my students. I’m not interested in what is good for them now. I care about what is good for them five, ten, fifteen years down the road. The German philosopher Martin Buber once said that a teacher should not just instruct the child in front of them but the adult they will become. That is what I seek and not so much on what will allow them to pass a six-week period or a semester. Sadly, the opposite is the rule of thumb for education specialists and officials today. They search frantically for what will bring up scores today with little understanding or care for the long term impact of their decisions. This needs to change.
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