The Weekly Screed (#566)

Literal absurdity in the “virtual classroom”
by David Benjamin

BROOKLYN — When I was a kid at St. Mary’s School, the highest piece of educational technology I had in my desk was a compass — a cool device because, besides empowering me to draw perfect circles, it could be used as a weapon to fend off marauding classmates. However, my Weekly Reader regularly gave me glimpses of a high-tech George Jetson future (around 1990) in which people whisked around elevated cities on moving sidewalks and zoomed hither and yon in jetpacks and hovermobiles. And everything about school, from blackboards to inkwells to the flag in the corner to the teacher herself — was going to disappear. Instead, the future featured teaching machines — with a TV screen and earphones, antennae and hypnotic powers to pump knowledge electronically into a child’s reluctant brain, like STP into a gastank.

OK, it’s been 50 years and we’re still waiting for hovermobiles. But we do have such a thing as educational technology. By the ‘60’s, schools were boring kids with educational TV. Devices from IBM Selectrics and overhead projectors to calculators preceded the emergence of the personal computer as a basic tool for every pupil.

But that’s nothin’! Now, apparently, we’re about to take a veritable quantum leap forward, up to and beyond the Weekly Reader’s teaching-machine fantasy. Led by crack educators like Bill Gates, Stephen Brill, Jeb Bush and Rupert Murdoch, we’re about to experience the emergence of what they’re calling the “virtual classroom.”

This brave new edutopia will consist, as far as I can tell, of cloud-computed pedagogy and testing, accomplished without teachers, books, blackboards or the Pledge of Allegiance. No principals or office ladies, no classrooms, no lockers, no cafeteria, no school nurse, no yellow buses, no recess, no gym uniforms, no spitballs, no detention, no pep rallies, no snow days and no other kids. Nobody at all.

There might be still be teachers, I guess, but they would revert to their 18th-century role, as a sort of status symbol for the stinking rich, along with governesses and footmen.

When I started hearing about this spectacular high-tech coup d’etat in education, I was surprised. The software geeks and semiconductor engineers among whom I circulate — because I’m married to the editor of a high-tech journal — don’t normally betray much interest in transforming society. They don’t actually like society.

My hunch was right. It turns out this isn’t their idea. The virtual classroom movement — unlike the personal computer or the current fad for 3-D TV — is not technology-driven. The secret to the revolution was captured inadvertently by Newt Gingrich on “Meet the Press” when he coined the term “right-wing social engineering.”

The “virtual classroom” is a political wet dream for Republicans.

It’s possible that it all began when some prematurely right-wing third-grader opened his Weekly Reader. He saw an artist’s rendering of that Space Age teaching machine. And he thought — as he stared malignantly at Mrs. Poss — wow, I could get rid of this teacher. But not just Mrs. Poss. I could wipe them all out. And with them, every teacher union in every school district, and every penny of union dues paid by all these teachers — union dues that go overwhelmingly to support Democratic candidates who overwhelming support the American tradition of public education.

This wondrous machine, the kid realized, could erase the 20th century and wipe public schools — like a dirty word on the blackboard — off the face of America! One of the great banes of conservatism would disappear.

Whoever that kid was, he’s now an aged right-winger promoting “education reform.” He’s been pushing like mad for high-stakes standardized testing with rigid pass-fail formulae aimed at closing schools. He wants more and more (non-union) charter schools and he loves vouchers. He demands “accountability” for teachers, but he also supports home schooling, where there is no teacher accountability because there’s no teacher. And he sees ed tech, ultimately the teacherless teaching of the “artificial” — oops! — “virtual school,” as the vehicle (maybe a jetpack) of “reform.”

The people involved in this effort tend not to have much background in education and they don’t appear to notice that the guinea pigs they’re pitching into the cloud are a generation of America’s kids. But never mind. It’s too late to burn down Frankenstein’s lab. This is already an industry. It includes non-profit front groups like Education Reform Now and the Foundation for Excellence in Education. It has an army of financial backers like News Corporation, ABS Capital, Global Silicon Valley Partners and Meridian Strategies. It’s closely linked to the right-wing’s two foremost policy-generating boiler rooms, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the State Policy Network. And it includes dozens of slick for-profit “ed tech” corporations, among them EdisonLearning, Connections Academy, K12 Inc., American Virtual Academy, Apex Learning, the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, etc.

What we have here is a marriage made on Wall Street. On one hand, you have a bunch of (rich, powerful) people with a political goal — to disenfranchise the unions who back their partisan foes. On the other hand, you’ve got some (rich, powerful) guys who aren’t very political, but they want to make even more money than they’ve already got. By teaming up, they assembled the wealth and the will to dismantle one of our nation’s most brilliant and daring ideas, the American common school, and replace it with gadgets bought by (not rich, not powerful) taxpayers.

OK, back to St. Mary’s. When I read about teaching machines in my Weekly Reader, I had a child’s wide-eyed reverence for the magic of machines. I was looking forward to buzzing the St. Mary’s playground in my first hovermobile. But I knew even then that there wasn’t enough machine magic — ever — to replace Mrs. Poss or Mrs. Ducklow or even the dread Sister Mary Ann. Some jobs require actual people.

So, if you have kids in school and you go to a PTA meeting, and there’s this computer whiz, or maybe a hedge fund manager, or even Michelle Rhee — and she’s talking about “reform” that lands your child in a “virtual school,” take my advice.

Reach for your compass!