EDUCATION, TECHNOLOGY, AND THE POSTMODERN WORLD:
TOWARDS A PHILOSOPHICAL FRAMEWORK FOR EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY
James E. Martin
University of Arkansas
During the spring of 1999, an educational technology trends and issues seminar in which I participated considered the ways in which Richard Rorty's philosophy might be used as a philosophical basis for the practice of educational technology. My goal here is to recapitulate some of the issues raised in that semester-long discussing while proposing some solutions of my own. I think that our exploration here should rightly begin with a larger question: does educational technology need a philosophical basis? If we decide tentatively that it does, then we can consider what might function as that basis and what the positive effects of a grounded practice are, while also considering the possible dangers of proceeding without any sort of explicit philosophical base.
There is a wealth of writing on technological topics. Commercial bookstores are not without their selections of books speculating about the future of technology and how it will impact our lives. Among these, there are utopian and dystopian visions. In many of these works, we find a wealth of speculation but a serious lack of rigorous argumentation. At least in my own reading, clarion calls are more common that examinations which empower us with the ability to make wise decisions about technology. In such an environment, a philosophically rigorous demonstration of how we can go about making technological decisions could be of great importance.
Rorty himself has expressed reservations about the view of philosophy as a discourse on a pedestal--one with more ability and authority than other discourses to tell us how to live our lives. In fact, such a view of any discourse stands in contradiction to Rorty's own anti-realist philosophical assumptions. Philosophy cannot stand outside of all cultures and provide (as Hilary Putnam says and Rorty is fond of repeating) a "gods'-eye-view" analysis any more than other discourses can. The best philosophy can hope to do is provide guidance for people who already have a tendency to appreciate the insights that philosophy can offer.
If the hostility with which Rorty's work was received by many in our seminar is an indicator of the same or a greater hostility toward philosophy in educational technology, then convincing educational technologists of the importance of philosophical arguments will be an uphill battle. If this is the case, it would be neither unique nor surprising: educational technology would hardly be the only discipline hostile to theory. Most educational technologists, after all, do not have backgrounds which heavily incorporate philosophical texts. Because of this lack of familiarity, Rorty's works can seem strange and difficult to comprehend even though they are, compared to many if not most canonical philosophical texts, relatively concise and often eloquent. Rorty's views are not outlandish in the context of postmodern philosophy, but without that context (or even the broader context of the philosophical tradition) they can seem so. If Rorty's views are to be of use to educational technologists not familiar with theory, his views will need to be (re)contextualized in a way that makes them more readily available to educational technologists. Such a recontextualization would show how Rorty's assumptions and arguments can specifically be used in making technology decisions for education. If such a recontextualization could take place, I am convinced that Rorty's work could have widespread importance.
Rorty's Philosophy
If educational technologists are willing to rise to the occasion, Rorty's texts can provide a useful basis or grounding for their practice, and I hope to show here, briefly, why this is so. But in order to understand why Rorty's works can provide such a basis, we first need to understand the relevant aspects of his work. So what follows is a very brief, but hopefully not shallow, explication.
Rorty's philosophical perspective is pragmatic and anti representationalist, a term which he glosses in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth as "one which does not view knowledge as a matter of getting reality right, but rather as a matter of acquiring habits of action for coping with reality" (1). Rorty's distrust of the concept of truth which relies on "getting reality right" involves the role of the observer. Consider the following illustration (henceforth, figure 1):
CULTURE C(Observer) views CULTURE A and CULTURE B
In figure 1, the observer is viewing two cultures with values which substantially conflict with each other and is given the task of deciding, without reference to any third culture, which culture embraces "true values" and which culture is in error (with "in error" being defined as rejecting any aspect of "true values"). Rorty maintains, rightly, that this situation puts the observer in an impossible situation. The first impulse would be for the observer to judge culture A and culture B by the observer's own values, but the observer cannot make reference to his or her own values since there is no guarantee that the observer's culture embraces "true values" (such would merely be an unproven and possibly inaccurate assumption). (1) But the way the model is presented leads us to this mistake, since the fact that the observer must belong to some culture or other is not emphasized in the model. Instead, we have an observer seemingly detached from all cultures, yet somehow poised to make ultimate pronouncements about their closeness or distance to something called "true values" which are assumed to exist independent of cultures. Rorty refers to this attempt at detachment as the desire for a "gods'-eye view" of culture. The attempt to take such a view is a step toward error:
[O]ne consequence of anti representationalism is the recognition that no description of how things are from a God's-eye point of view, no skyhook provided by some contemporary or yet-to-be-developed science, is going to free us from the contingency of having been acculturated as we were. (13)
From Rorty's perspective, the idea of values existing outside of cultures is nonsensical. Values do not exist in the same way that rocks and trees do. They are thought up by people in communities for the betterment (or detriment) of people in communities. They are not simply found lying on the ground. From this perspective, our model of ethical observation becomes something closer to figure 2 (below):
Our once detached observer is an observer still, but this time one grounded in his or her own culture. The observer is quite capable of making pronouncements about the ethicality of culture A versus culture B, but the observer is not free to claim that such a judgement makes use of a culturally independent system of "true values." At best, the observer from culture C can say "based on my own cultural assumptions (i.e., what we take to be 'true values'), I find X culture's practices to be abhorrent and unethical"
The Problem of Relativism
At this point, the temptation is to see Rorty's system as merely a restating of cultural relativism in its most extreme form, but to do so would be a mistake. The relativist assumption is that all cultural practices are equal. But this statement implies the same model of the observer outside of culture presented in figure 1. It is only from a gods'-eye view (with reference to some standard outside of all cultures) that we can make such a pronouncement. So, in our scenario, both relativists and those who claim to judge ethical situations with reference to "absolute values" are epistemological bedfellows; they each rely on an untenable model of the role of the observer.
The pragmatist/anti representationalist proposition is that we simply cannot know anything about values outside of cultures (even whether or not they exist). The only standards by which we can judge other cultures (and ourselves) are the standards which we have thought up and agreed upon. There's no way of knowing which culture in our example is closer to some universal ideal culture which only embraces "true values" or even if that statement has any meaning, since there is no way to stand outside of all cultures and make such a pronouncement. But such a judgement is not meant to usher in an age of nihilism. We do, after all, have values, we just don't have values which transcend all cultures (past, present, and future). Nor, maintains Rorty, do we need any such trans-cultural, trans-historical, values. What we need to do (and what all thriving cultures in fact do) is to continually rework our own values in light of new knowledge (including, of course, knowledge of the ways in which other cultures do things).
Such a model has implications for practice. One important upshot of Rorty's perspective is that it forces us to consider our values as cultural values rather than as trans-cultural, absolute, values. It also suggests that we can benefit from taking an introspective look at our own values and an anthropological look at the values of other cultures and weigh both in terms of our own cultures' ideals. Rorty maintains that our criteria for making decisions about our own culture should not be in terms of some trans-cultural standard, but in terms of our vision of our own culture "at it's best" and with an emphasis on what works in getting us closer to those self-appointed ideals with which we define ourselves. So any decision about educational technology (and, in fact, any decision we make) must be grounded in what our culture holds to be valuable.
One of the repeating metaphors which we find in Rorty's work is the model of culture as a conversation. Cultures do not have monolithic values. The values of a culture are always, to a greater or lesser degree, in a state of flux:
We cannot, I think, imagine a moment at which the human race could settle back and say, "Well, now that we've finally arrived at the Truth we can relax." We should relish the thought that the sciences as well as the arts will always provide a spectacle of fierce competition between alternative theories, movements, and schools. The end of human activity is not rest, but rather richer and better human activity. (39)
But certain values are dominant at one time or another. Rorty maintains that it is important for a culture to appraise as many alternative viewpoints as possible. This does not imply that all views are to be given equal value, but it does imply that all views are considered before they are judged. Because of its incorporation of diversity, Rorty's philosophy seems well suited to the postmodern world which, I believe, we inhabit (one in which there are many competing views and values).
In many ways, it is profitable to see Rorty as a postmodern moralist. Ethics is one of his ongoing concerns, a concern which he discusses at length in the essay "Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality" from his volume Truth and Progress. It is in this sense that he directly champions education--a broader sort of education than what generally comes to mind at the utterance of the term (e.g., reading, writing, and mathematical skills). Rorty is concerned with how we educate or create ourselves as moral beings and considers it of tantamount importance that we do so: "Producing generations of nice, tolerant, well-off, secure, other-respecting students of this sort in all parts of the world is just what is needed--indeed, all that is needed--to achieve an Enlightenment utopia" (179). But Rorty's answer to the problem of teaching ethics has little in common with the answers generally provided by moralists (who generally believe, as Rorty does not, in moral absolutes). Rorty doesn't have a hand list of ethical commands for us to memorize. Instead, he focuses on what he refers to as a "sentimental education." And by that phrase he means an education which enlarges our sympathies--one which increases our ability to see other people as belonging to our own "moral community." Rorty maintains that the traditional humanist answer to this dilemma, which amounts to the positing of an essential human nature and, along with it, a list of essential human rights, comes short of the mark since it has historically been very hard to convince people that belonging to the same biological community is equivalent with belonging to the same moral community. To borrow one of his examples, Serbs don't deny that Muslims share a similar biology, but that fact by itself does not convince them that Serbs and Muslims belong to the same moral community and should thus be extended the same rights and privileges: "most people are simply unable to understand why membership in a biological species is supposed to suffice for membership in a moral community" (178). That realization would require a widening of moral sympathy, not merely an acknowledgment of biological fact. Mere biological similarities have never been enough to convince antagonistic groups that the other should be considered as human beings in the same sense that members of their own communities are considered human beings: "For everything turns on who counts as a fellow human being, as a rational agent in the only relevant sense--the sense in which rational agency is synonymous with membership in our moral community" (177). (2)
Some Other Possible Philosophical Bases
Rorty's philosophy is not the only possible basis for educational technology, though it may be the most useful one currently on offer. Numerous philosophies have or could provide a grounding for the work of educational technologists and/or educators generally. A brief survey will emphasize this point. It is important to note that Rorty's philosophy is not necessarily in conflict with these other approaches. In fact, there is very little contradiction and much overlapping between his views and the ones we will survey.
Humanism has long provided a philosophical basis for education. In fact, the humanist movement, especially as articulated by writers such as Sir Thomas Moore, encouraged the spread of education to populations for whom it had been previously excluded (3) Much continental philosophy (e.g., Foucault's works, the Frankfurt School) has been devoted to the death of humanism and has sketched what life will be after its (supposed) demise. But it is relevant to note that, outside of these philosophical circles, humanism still has wide currency. Its very familiarity lends to its popularity. Humanism, in its basic forms, also has the advantage of being a very easy philosophy for most people to understand. As such, it is a philosophical outlook which has grounded a good deal of educational practice, and with good results. And it is probable that it will continue in that function.
Existentialism, which is itself a type of humanism, can also provide a base for the practice of education and the practice of educational technology. Its emphasis on individual choice and becoming are consistent with many educators' visions of the goals of education. Existentialism encourages the individual to make decisions and consider the inevitable consequences of all decision making. On the downside, existentialism has always had difficulty justifying why an individual should be loyal to the larger community. Sartre himself tried to show that existentialism actually is a humanistic philosophy and one in which the larger community (of "all men" to use Sartre's phrase) is as important as the individual. But these efforts leave much to be desired, and existentialism remains a philosophy focused on the decisions and dilemmas of individuals rather than the decisions of groups or societies. Existentialism's emphasis on individual choice has often been understood as a championing of "free will" which overlooks the importance of determinate factors such as socioeconomic status, education, and race. However, such an interpretation lacks textual support. It is closer to the truth to say that existentialism emphasizes choice (perhaps to a fault), but it is untrue to say that it makes no consideration for the economic and social backgrounds of the subjects under consideration (though it may well be true that it doesn't give these considerations enough weight). But some of Sartre's insights fit in well with Rorty's philosophy generally. Consider this passage from "The Ethics of Existentialism":
The existentialist, on the contrary, thinks it very distressing that God does not exist, because all possibility of finding values in a heaven of ideas disappears along with Him; There can no longer be an a priori good since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it .... (W)e are on a plane where there are only men. (260).
One of the key differences between Sartre's position and Rorty's is that Rorty does not focus on existential despair in the process of making decisions. Rorty's philosophy is more optimistic--more focussed on the utility in making decisions than on the angst which goes along with not being able to choose two mutually exclusive good things.
Denis Hlynka and John Belland's collection, Paradigms Regained, maintains that various modes of criticism can provide insight for educational technologists. Co-editor of the volume, John C. Belland's, leading article, "Developing Connoisseurship in Educational Technology," presents connoisseurship as a value for educational technologists. Belland, drawing on Eisner's The Educational Imagination, defines the concept, in part, as an "act of knowledgeable perception" (23). It is also presented as a way of integrating new developments with the ongoing history of educational technology (especially educational films). Such fine-tuned sensibilities and wide-ranging knowledge facilitate "the development and refinement of technology-based instructional systems without subjecting learners to design flaws and other subtle factors which affect both cognition and affect" (27). Editor Denis Hlynka's "Applying Semiotic Theory to Educational Technology" makes a case for the value of the insights of semiotics. In "The Production of Distribution of Knowledge Through Open and Distance Learning," Stephen Fox champions the tradition of education as passing along a humanistic core of beliefs (a role which he sees as one challenged by distance education). Other authors provide other bases, mostly drawn from philosophers or literary theorists. What is important to keep in mind here is that there are many possible bases for the practice of educational technology, though not all potential bases are equally valuable.
Dangers of Baseless Practice
The main danger of proceeding in the practice of educational technology without a basis is a phenomenon I will refer to as technology fetish. To make a fetish of technology (especially of computer technology) is to see it as an absolute requirement rather than one possible option among many. It is often the case that technology is seen as the only solution to life's problems (in a similar way that prisons, as a technology for managing criminal behavior, are often seen as the only choice for addressing criminal behavior). A vivid image of the sort of blinding fascination, which we could describe as a strange loyalty to technology, can be found in Fanz Kafka's modernist classic "In the Penal Colony" in which a character referred to only as "the officer" tries fervently and unsuccessfully to influence the new political regime to continue to use an obviously barbaric but once popular form of capital punishment in spite of the fact that the new government and the population in general are clearly opposed to it. It would be better if our schools had the goal of being educationally advanced rather than being technologically advanced. For there is still much research to be done if we are to establish which contemporary technologies really contribute to student achievement. It is important to remember that the technologies themselves are not the only consideration. The best possible technologies must still be activated by the teacher in the wider context of education.
Without a grounding of some sort, educational technologists run the risk of basing their decisions on the available technology rather than on student, administrative, and community needs. Pacey's contextual model of technology is useful in minimizing this possibility. By considering technology as one option (rather than the only option) and by considering the needs of the students, teachers, administrators, and community before proceeding to solutions, we minimize the risk of allowing technological development to drive practice (even when the technologies themselves have not been shown to fulfill our educational goals).
Another risk which educational technologists might do well to consider is the increasing role that corporations play in education at the high school level. With school funding a continuing issue and a greater willingness to allow corporate sponsorship in return for advertising, technologists may find pressure to incorporate a given technology because it is manufactured by a school sponsor rather than because it is fully in line with the educational goals of the institution. We can consider this issue further by taking up two related questions: shouldn't schools provide the training that their students will likely need in the postmodern workplace? Or should specific training be the prerogative of the companies themselves while education has some other goal?
Technological training is certainly of increasing importance to graduating high school seniors. Even menial tasks are often mediated by technological developments. Students certainly feel the pressure of graduating with degrees which are less valuable in the workplace than they once were. Many schools have taken the initiative of offering skills-based training programs (e.g., internships in hospitals, with architecture firms, etc.) along with the core of traditional topics (i.e., reading, writing, mathematics, science, and history). How much of this sort of skills-based training is desirable ultimately depends upon our vision of what education should be.
In this regard, I think it is best to avoid views at either extreme. The desire for some imaginary past where all education was focused on knowledge for its own sake, with no view to application, is only tenable to those operating from a very selective view of history. Until the advent of modern public education, learning was the prerogative a privileged few. The education that most people received was neither formal nor, primarily, in the school house. It was, rather, informal and focused on the daily tasks and skills necessary to live and work. On the other hand, the idea that the schoolhouse itself should be little more than a factory for the production of highly-skilled workers is one which we, likewise, should not advocate. Even with a large amount of every kind of diversity, it is hard to imagine what a society would be like without any shared knowledge (in fact, the term society, used in that context, would be empty of meaning). Education has a history of providing some of the social glue which bonds citizens and societies together: a bond dependent upon a certain amount of shared experience and shared knowledge (though not necessarily shared values or ideology). There is room in our educational practice both for specific skills-based training and for the imparting of broader-based knowledge of our intellectual, cultural, and historical development. The goal should be neither to turn our schools into certified training classes nor to construct them as institutions devoted only to "higher things" while turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to the employment needs of students and industry. A good balance can be achieved by envisioning our students as citizens (i.e., people with an adequate knowledge of their culture's history and the history of cultures) and workers (i.e., people with adequate skills to survive in the workplace) rather than either exclusively.
Conclusions
Assuming that his work can be recontexualized in such a way as to make it accessible to educational technologists, I believe that Rorty's philosophy can provide an adequate basis for the theory and practice of educational technology. Rorty's works encourage us to take a closer look at our own culture and the cultures of others in order to examine what we value. His philosophy embraces multiplicity without giving in to relativism or nihilism. Instead, the focus is on the ongoing quest for new answers to new and old problems. His philosophy also contains a usefully progressive element, in that it encourages us to imagine what our culture, at its best, could be and to take pragmatic steps toward these imagined ends.ENDNOTES
REFERENCES
Belland, John C. "Developing Connoisseurship in Educational Technology." 23-36 in Hlynka, Denis, and John C. Belland (eds.). Paradigms Regained: The Uses of Illuminative, Semiotic, and Post-Modern Criticism as Modes of Inquiry in Educational Technology. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Educational Technology Publications, 1991.
Fox, Stephen. "The Production and Distribution of Knowledge Through Open and Distance Learning." 217-240 in Hlynka and Belland.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1979.
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. 1970. New York: Vintage, 1991.
Hlynka, Denis. "Applying Semiotic Theory to Educational Technology." 37-50 in Hlynka and Belland.
Hlynka, Denis, and John C. Belland (eds.). Paradigms Regained: The Uses of Illuminative, Semiotic, and Post-Modern Criticism as Modes of Inquiry in Educational Technology. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Educational Technology Publications, 1991.
Kafka, Franz. "In the Penal Colony." The Complete Stories. Ed. Nahum N. Gltzer. Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. New York: Schocken, 1983. 140-167.
Rorty, Richard. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers Volume 1. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991.
Rorty, Richard. Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers Volume 3. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. "The Ethics of Existentialism." The Problems of Philosophy. Eds. William P. Alston and Richard B. Brandt. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1978. 256-264.
1. To take the argument further, there is no way to determine if one's own culture's values are in line with some external, absolute standard either.
2. Though, it is important to note, antagonistic groups often seek out and create arguments based on biology in order to exclude the other as less than human. Rorty's point is that, even if no such evidence could be found or constructed, it would not be enough to convince antagonistic groups to respect one another as human beings. The antagonist in question would merely shift his or her arguments to cultural differences rather than biological ones.
3. Moore, for instance, provided for the education of his daughter--a very uncommon practice in his historical epoch. His Utopia extends education to women, though it still emphasizes their role as primarily domestic.