Teachers Versus Computers
May 14, 2011
Idaho passed its controversial education reform bills during the past legislative session. A centerpiece of this plan was to give every high school freshman a laptop, and require all students to have a certain amount of online credits be required for graduation. The specter of a purely computer based training system replacing traditional teachers suddenly came into view.
The recent study that compared an old-fashioned lecture with an interactive lesson mediated with technology also touches on the future of education, when specialists are no longer the best teachers- though they never were in the first place. I think that the fact this study was news worthy (it’s not really – everyone already knows old smart people talking for hours is not effective pedagogy) is a sign that people are thinking about the near future when technology will effectively obviate teachers. This is not feasible too soon, but is very much in the scope of how technology is developing. It is very Kurzweilian: with technology, we can take any discrete human action, identify its most effective processes, and replicate it with an advanced enough system.
I measure my conservatism against Kurzweil on many points, since my vague feeling of discomfort at technological advancement is what he proselytizes against. So let me make a preliminary claim about the long term need (in 50-100 years) for human teachers: that teachers encapsulate one of those paradoxes of society: one part minister of institutionalization, one part personal human relationship, and the latter is something in need of cultivation, not replacement.
The human relationship part of teaching is the significant dimension that will be the most difficult to surpass. We speak of ‘Mentors.’ The original Mentor, the close friend of Ulysses, was put in charge of his estate before the war, and was the teacher of his son Telemachus. The idea of being a close friend to your child’s teacher has a utopian dimension to it. As an archetype for teachers, the idea of a mentor as a person with a close personal relationship may very well be a less effective means of training and specialization in the short term but still seems ideal.
Consider that utopian aspect of the scenario where you put a close friend in charge of teaching your children, or live in a community where youth can build authentic personal relationships with a variety of people who can offer guidance to them on matters of knowledge and other issues: of character, ethics, different points of view. Fantasy institutions, Sesame Street, Hogwarts, blur the line between the realm of teacher and realm of family. Radically effective pedagogical methods will no doubt become mediated completely with technology. But by removing teachers, these methods are the pure and direct institutional forces of the state and of the corporation.
The failure of the education system (it’s not really failing, but just to be dramatic) comes when teaching becomes an impersonal training that is divorced from human relationships between teacher and pupil. The present failure of teaching comes precisely at the point where parents do not trust teachers, when the collaboration process breaks down, and there is a rift between home and school life. It is a system, though, worth trying to fix. It will be a much longer time before computers actually care about failure. Those who do not trust teachers today will have no choice but to trust the results of a purely objective and impersonal pedagogical processes tomorrow, and they will have much less recourse than they would in a community they can participate in.
