Today, a disturbing op-ed article. The University of
Houston's College of Engineering presents this series
about the machines that make our civilization run,
and the people whose ingenuity created them.
A history professor's op-ed
piece for the New York Times has a headline
that shouts, Get Out of the Classroom and Onto
TV! That's scary stuff for someone trying to
teach history in the classroom.
Still, I spend evenings working in my office with
the History Channel running in the
background. When I hear something I ought to know,
I divert to watch it. I'm almost embarrassed to say
how much of much of my own web of context has been
spun by TV.
Historians, says the op-ed author, serve as
consultants for all those TV history shows. Why
don't they take control and use them as primary
teaching media! That hits home in many ways.
For one thing, that's what I've been trying to do
in a smaller way with radio. For years I've watched
the public expecting increasingly sophisticated
accounts of history. The people who use public
radio, TV, and the Internet retain far more of what
they hear and see than we might think.
The second way this piece hits home is more
complex. If public media are becoming effective
teachers, what does that mean for us who teach in
classrooms? Should we simply push the
ON-switch for students and let the silver
screen do our work? Or maybe we should close our
classrooms and say "Go home and push your
own ON-switch."
That dilemma marks all teaching today. It's hard to
do our advanced engineering material on TV, since
it rides on a mathematical framework. But fancy new
software does much of that math for
students. They react by shrugging off math
instruction, and I'm left struggling to see exactly
which parts they still need to be taught.
Given the obvious fact that the media can do things
we teachers once did, we seem to face intolerable
choices. But what we actually face is neither so
dire nor so simple. The media demand radical
change. The only thing clear about change is that
whole frameworks must be rebuilt. We have
toinventchange.
The physical classroom may go away, but not the
metaphorical classroom, the student and
teacher in conversation, the famous log with
Mark Hopkins on one end
and a student on the other. That will remain even
if the log appears to've changed utterly.
The problem is so hard because its solution won't
be expressible in familiar terms. Classrooms once
centered on oral information. Then commercial
scriptoria made manuscript books more plentiful in
the 13th century, and the great European
universities grew up around them. When fast presses
provided personal textbooks in the 19th century,
Thomas Carlyle reacted
by saying that the true university is a collection
of books. We in America created a new kind of
technical education, for the people, based on
outside readings.
Computers and TV will no more do away with teachers
than books did. But those teachers still standing
will have redefined themselves. They'll be the ones
who've figured out what to give away to the media
and what absolutely must be retained for the
classroom.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
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