Freire, the Matrix, and Scalability

There are a few writers in the ed-tech world that I can count on for writing something that just gets my brain in a resonating hum, and David Wiley has done it again::iterating toward openness – Freire, the Matrix, and Scalability

To be honest, I suppose the resonance I found in this post is second hand, since it describes David’s resonance with a presentation recently at AERA in Montreal. The presenter, who goes unnamed but I would sure like to know who it was:

connected Freire’s ideas of oppression and the transparency of systems of control to the Matrix, and then went on to analogize the work we educators are called to do with unplugging people from the Matrix.

Wow – Freire and the Matrix together at last. This sounds like a good combination to me. The heart of Freire’s writing is always the spiritual nature of the individual, which seems to me is also a major theme in the Matrix.

Quoting Freire, he said that we should not fear to be laughed at, ridiculed, called unscientific, or even called anti-scientific, but that we must base all we do in education in love. Love for the student, the learner, the other.

Of course! This seems so self-evident with my experience as a teacher. David goes on to contrast this with his experiences in automated instruction.

As I interact with an intelligent tutoring system, what will be the source of my inspiration? Who will be the teacher I remember forever, with whom I form a transformative bond of trust, who I know cares and worries about me? Where is my connection to an other? Where is the modeling of competent, passionate living? Where is the enculturation into a community of meaningful practice?

Aha!!

I have wondered what the purpose of public schools can be in a media context that can deliver individualized instruction to each student’s computer at home. I believe that schools should be relevant and important public institutions. And I’ve wondered what made them so important. The answer is its the love! Good schools are very caring institutions. Teachers are by and large very caring individuals. When we automate instruction, the best and most important part of teaching is taken away.

I would agree with David when he cautions us against the focus on improving scalability of instruction:

There is a political problem with talking about the scalability of instruction that makes it morally inappropriate. “Scalability” looks at the ability to reach large numbers of learners, and the economics of doing so. This is morally inappropriate because “scaling to a large number of learners” implicitly and purposefully excludes some learners. Generally, we assume that the excluded group is comprised of potential learners without the financial means and other resources available to secure access to educational opportunity. (Or it could be that one group is excluded in order to provide an economic or military advantage to another group.) Regardless of which reading of scalability one may choose, we should never talk about scalability of instruction because the language of scaling is the language of exclusion for the sake of profit. Instead of talking about “reaching large numbers of students” we should talk about “reaching each and every potential learner.”

In the comments to Wiley’s post, Dave Bauer proposes a solution to the focus on scalability of instruction:

The answer is to stop thinking about “providing” education and start thinking about facilitating or encouraging learning. Learning is what people do. Education and all that implies, is about delivery of a commodity. Learning is about internalization and ownership of knowledge.

I would probably say that learning and education are two sides of the same coin; they are the same process but one, learning, is an internal process, while education is what happens in the environment to stimulate learning. Schools, for example, are a social technology for the purpose of education. What he refers to as education I would refer to as instruction. Instruction is a kind of method that can be used for some kinds of education and learning, and it is often used in schools. Am I being overly picky? Probably, but I think the distinction is important.