Bail Thesis 1-1

Understanding What Administrators See as Barriers to the Adoption of Technology for Learning and Intervention Measures to Overcome the Barriers

by David S. Bail

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Chapter 1 -- Introduction

The 1990 Strategic Plan of the Riverside Unified School District, as developed with the community (school board members and community volunteers, parents, teachers, students, managers and staff meeting together as the Strategic Planning Committee), announced a strategy that, "Technology shall be adopted in the instructional and operational programs of the district" and "integrated into the educational program. (The Strategic Plan, 1990-91, pp. 28-31)."

Problem Statement and Purpose

The deviation from the expected performance level is that the Riverside Unified School District of Riverside, California and many school districts in this and other states are not using technology to the extent envisioned by that strategy (Main and Roberts, 1990; Preston, 1990; Abramson, 1995; Heaviside, Farris, Malitz, and Carpenter, 1995; Mandel, Melcher, Yang and McNamee, 1995; Pereira, Harrison, and Johnson, 1995; and Teachers and Technology, 1995).

The research purpose of this study is to address the management problem of discovering what barriers administrators see to the adoption of technology for learning. The management purpose of this study is to discover what intervention measures can be undertaken to overcome the barriers.

Background of the Problem

The Riverside Unified School District (RUSD) is a public kindergarten through twelfth grade (K-12) school district located in Riverside County, California. Ninety-five square miles in size, it serves two-thirds of the City of Riverside as well as the unincorporated communities of Highgrove, Woodcrest, and Mockingbird Canyon. With 34,500 K-12 students, 4,500 adult students (completing high school graduation), 2,685 employees, forty-one schools, 580 acres and 2.6 million square feet of buildings, the district is the largest in Riverside County and the twelfth largest public school district in California (Annual Report, 1994-95).

After performing a scan of environmental threats and opportunities, believing that a performance gap existed, and making an effort to reach out so that the community would feel a higher degree of commitment to and ownership of the schools, RUSD formed a Strategic Planning Committee consisting of parents, community members, students, and staff to "chart the future of Riverside Unified School District as it enters the decade of the nineties and beyond." Completed on October 24, 1990, the Plan contained ten strategies directed at making schools more effective, relevant, and reflective of community desires. These strategies are the lens through which internal strengths and weaknesses are viewed for reinforcement or correction as appropriate.

Changes in RUSD's Resources and Demographics

The problems facing RUSD may not be greatly different from those facing many schools across the United States except that they have been compounded for RUSD and other districts in California by the fiscal choke hold of the property tax-limiting Proposition 13 (passed in 1978) and accelerated by recession and exacerbated by job losses from the end of defense spending in our state. While some of the problems are real and some of the problems are perceptions, they all present obstacles for daily operations, strategic planning, and problem resolution. Earlier in the 80s the annual growth was about 3% to 4%; today the annual growth is about 2%. While the average total revenue per student budgeted by the state of California has increased from $3,945 in 1989-90 to $4,146 in 1993-94 in nominal dollars, in constant inflation-free dollars the funding per student has actually declined by $420 in that period. Since the ranking of per pupil spending for California has sunk to 41st in the nation, a comparison of funding with another large urban and rural state such as New York might be in order:

SCHOOL FUNDING SOURCES (table)

As may be seen, the largest difference in the funding per pupil comes from the difference in local taxes behind each student--$1,415 in California and $4,514 in New York in 1991-92--while state support for that year was $3,542 in California and $3,070 in New York, resulting in per pupil current (as opposed to capital) expenditures of $4,531 in California and $7,416 in New York (Augenblick, Van de Water, and Fulton, 1993). Truly the effect of the local property tax-limiting Proposition 13 can be seen. Between 1990 and 1994, RUSD has reduced its budget by $20 million. Growth in funding per pupil for general education has been approximately flat during that time period, until the recent increase in 1995, but funding has actually declined when inflation is taken into account. While no budget cuts have happened during the last two years, RUSD is now spending $3.2 million more than its income in 1994- 95, and $1.8 million more than its income in 1995-96 (Annual Report, 1991-95, Editions 1-4).

During this time, the student enrollment of the district, expressed as units of Average Daily Attendance (ADA)--equivalent to the number of students enrolled after reduction for unexcused absences (about 3%)--has risen from 31,279 in 1990-91 to 33,289 in 1994-95. Earlier in the 80s the annual growth was about 3% to 4%; today the annual growth is about 2%. At the same time, according to Annual Reports of the district, ethnicity of the student population has changed from 37% minority and 63% white in 1985-86 to 52% minority and 48% white in 1994-95. The reality of 5,260 limited English proficient students (up from 1,719 in 1985-86), make a difference in remediation actions needed, such as the various forms of bilingual education dependent on student English proficiency. Sadly, there is a correlation between ethnic status and poverty; since 1987-88 the percentage of students qualifying for free or reduced lunches has increased from 28% to 42% in 1992-93 (55% at the elementary level, an indicator of the future of the district). RUSD is an average California district in many statistical measures including student test scores comparable to other districts in California having our demographics, although average performance is not sufficient.

The RUSD Strategic Plan and Technology

The concept of introducing technology into instruction in the Riverside Unified School District did not occur in isolation but rather as part of an integrated plan including attention to cultural, ethnic, and learning style diversity calling for the application of varied instructional methods, attention to "programs, practices and procedures" (process engineering), and the application of technology to those problems. The purpose was to address a recognized performance gap:

Strategy #1) The achievement of all students will be raised and the gap that exists among various groups will be closed.

"The gap is defined as differences in performance measures which indicate that Black, Hispanic, and students with Limited English Proficiency (LEP) are performing at a disproportionately lower level than their Anglo and Asian counterparts....Test scores indicate that Black and Hispanic students consistently score significantly below grade level. Other education success (or failure) indicators reflect that the gap in achievement, dropout, and retention rates are higher for Black and Hispanic students than for White and Asian students. The annual dropout rate for high school LEP students is two to three times the rate for Non-LEP students....The number of Black, Hispanic, and LEP students is disproportionately lower in higher level classes...[and] disproportionately higher in lower classes (The Strategic Plan, 1990-91, Strategy #4, pp. 5-9)."

Strategy #2) Staff will provide varied instructional methods to ensure mastery of the core curriculum.

It is believed by the district (Strategy 2) that the reform documents, California state curricular frameworks, and research on effective practice share the "overarching" concepts of critical thinking and conceptual understanding, problem solving based on real-life problems, meaning-centered rather than memorization-oriented learning opportunities, active and hands-on learning and activity-based instruction, and contextualized learning making connections to students' experiences. Change is a process and takes time, professional growth is critical to the process of change, assessment of learning is an important part of planning for varied instructional methods, and diversity in the classroom includes developmental stage, learning style (multiple intelligences), linguistic and cultural backgrounds, intellectual strengths, as well as ethnicity and socio-economic status (The Strategic Plan, 1995-96, Strategy 2, pp. 6-9).

Strategy #3) All programs, procedures, and practices of the district and its staff will be adapted to assure student achievement and prevent student failure.

Student achievement was to be the critical filter through which all district and site decisions were to be made. All students were to have equal opportunities to experience success in a rich and challenging curriculum where high expectations were held for every student even while flexibility for adopting instruction to meet the needs of a diverse population were fostered and supported (The Strategic Plan, 1990-91, Strategy # 3, pp. 20-27).

Strategy #8) Technology will be integrated into the instructional and operational process.

Originally Strategy #7 in the 1990-91 Strategic Plan, the technology strategy was intended to be a servant of learning: "Foster student ability to access, organize, and utilize information which enables them to become responsible functioning adults in an information society....Increase the level of student achievement in all programs through the implementation of technology." Other goals called for providing better access to information to promote "quality decision making," improved integration of operational and instructional technology, and establishment of a technology office to further these ends (pp. 28-31).

RUSD's Technology Plan and Implementation Plan

Two different plans have been developed to implement the strategy of increasing use of technology in instruction and operations. The first was a conceptual plan of how technology would be used; the second is a detailed plan of tasks, timelines, and roles.

1) The Technology Plan

In March 1993 RUSD published a plan to implement the technology strategy titled Toward a Knowledge Network: Technology Transformation for 21st Century Learning. The plan reflected the goals of the Strategic Plan strategy for technology as well as additional goals developed by the Technology Advisory Committee: to acquire and use technology to support its strategic activities and help it achieve its strategic goals; help students and staff become more productive; promote access, interaction and collaboration among students, educators, parents and community, while protecting privacy rights of individuals; and be cost-effective. In addition to developing "technical vision, leadership, and proficiency at all levels of the organization," the district was to "establish and support standards for space, equipment, software and support; apply technology resources equitably; and build internal and public support necessary to fund a comprehensive educational technology program (Appendix 2)."

2) The Implementation Plan

When matters had not progressed due to the economic conditions in California public school finance, in 1994 a new Technology Advisory Committee was impaneled, constituted from previous and new members, with the objective of developing an implementation plan for technology. Titled Technology Plan-Year 2000: 1995-97 Action Plan, "The purpose of this plan is to provide a guide for the integration of technology into instruction, training and site/district operations. It provides for the development of a technological infrastructure that will support this integration of technology to elevate educational outcomes and services in the district. This plan is based on a belief that educating students becomes more complex each day.

To meet the challenge, school boards and administrators need information in timely, accurate, accessible, and usable forms. Teachers need to utilize all means of providing the best educational program for the student. Educators and support staff need to find new and better ways to accomplish their mission, both efficiently and effectively. Most importantly, students need the technological tools and resources to help them learn and achieve in the future (Executive Summary)."

Pilot projects by technology innovating teachers on the Implementation Action Plan Committee are underway while plan elements on staff development activities are continuing to be developed and work on installation of the district-wide network is underway, while efforts surrounding integration into the curriculum have yet to begin, and the funding and search for a Director of Instructional Technology has not yet been begun.

Review of Current RUSD Technology Status

Despite the fact that computer technology has been in schools either operationally or instructionally for thirty years, computers in Riverside Unified are few in number, still often found clustered in labs, usually not networked to each other, other rooms on site, other schools of the district, or to the outside world, despite the 1993 Technology Plan goal that "the classroom computer should be a window to the world" (Toward a Knowledge Network, p. 15). With enrollment of 32,725, the number of instructional computers in RUSD in 1992 was 1,822 or one computer for every 18 students (ibid., p. 11), but by March 1995, despite 2,034 computers available for student use and with continuing funding scarcity and continuing enrollment growth to 34,629, the number of students per computer had declined only to one computer for every 17.2 students.--still far from the national goal of one computer for every five students (Abramson, 1995).

Meanwhile in RUSD, the lack of resources for computer purchases and networking was compounded as the effects of California's five-year school-funding recession saw the departure of the Director of Information and Technology from the district without replacement due to budget reductions. Despite the lack thereby of any coordination between operational and instructional technology, and with few dollars forthcoming for funding technology needs in that period, the classroom teachers on the Educational Technology Advisory Committee envisioned under the technology plan did continue to work in their classrooms on the task of integrating technology into education, and to communicate with each other and keep the fires of interest and information exchange burning, albeit without leadership, coordination, plan or resources, and without the benefit of diffusing their learning to others.

Review of Current National Technology Status

In 1995 a survey sponsored by the American Electronics Association was performed on a random sample of 1200 members from eight educational groups: the American Association of School Librarians; the National School Boards Association-Institute for the Transfer of Technology to Education; the National Rural Education Association; the National Association of Secondary School Principals; and the National Association of Elementary School Principals; another 1800 members sampled from the National Education Association, and the entire membership of the Council of Great City Schools and the Council of Chief State School Officers. In that survey, about 80% believed that distance learning would be more available to students and that access to information by educators would increase, and more than 75% believed that the National Information Infrastructure (NII) or "information superhighway " would lead to "a beneficial revision in the curriculum content, increased computer skills for students, increased student motivation, [and] greater opportunities for students for independent investigation and research, while budget constraints, lack of equipment, and lack of training were seen as the biggest barriers to applying information technologies. (Heaviside, Farris, Malitz, and Carpenter, 1995, Executive Summary)".

There is ample evidence that resource issues have not been confined to RUSD. In testimony prepared by Quality Education Data, Inc., a Denver-based education research firm, for presentation to the U.S. Senate Labor, Health and Human Services and Education Subcommittee on April 4, 1995, California ranked highest in the nation in dollars needed to raise the numbers of students per computer to the national average of 12-to-1, requiring $115,538,703 ("Computers in school," USA Today). However, the target of the national average would keep moving, as by Office of Technology Assessment estimate, due to annual purchases of between 300,000 and 400,000 computers, schools in the United States would have 5.8 million computers or one for every nine students by spring 1995 (Teachers and Technology, 1995). In contrast, a related article on that hearing reported that "many school districts in California have ratios of 30 to 1 or even 60 to 1," and that California, Illinois, Tennessee, Ohio and Pennsylvania have the most school districts suffering from "technology poverty (Thurston, 1995)." The position of California as being in "technological poverty" was also shown in Teachers and Technology where in a graphic map on page 101, California was shown to be one of the four states with the worst ratio of students per computer in the U.S. (California 19.5, Louisiana 19.5, Vermont 19.9, and New Hampshire 22.0).

Progress has been made since the actual average for all public schools in 1983-84 was 125 students per computer in Education Vital Signs 1995 (p. A13). By 1989 it was 25.4 students per computer (Preston, 1990), by 1993 it was one computer for every 19.2 pupils (Abramson, 1995), and by 1994-95 it was one for each eleven students (Education Vital Signs 1995 (p. A13)). In another recent survey (Abramson), a third of those polled also wanted five or more computers per classroom, but that was the case in only 7.4 percent of the schools in the survey; fully 42.9% of classrooms were without any computers, while 30.7% had one and 19% had two to five [emphasis added]. One computer for every five pupils was the median goal for many school principals.

Furthermore those computers which were networked were tied only to school-wide networks (32.4%) or district-wide networks (22.2%), while the greatest numbers of classroom computers in classrooms and administrative offices were stand-alone machines, not networked either by Local Area Network (LAN) or Wide Area Network (WAN) in any way. In that survey, 47.5 percent of the schools had classrooms without phones, making modem use for online services impossible (Abramson, 1995). Approximately two-thirds of America's schools have some sort of access to the Internet, but only about three percent of classrooms have access (Heaviside, Farris, Malitz, and Carpenter, 1995).

While RUSD's goal has been that "the classroom computer should be a window to the world" (Toward a Knowledge Network, 1993), the reality is that most school computers continue to be used at best for applications such as word processing (up to 47%, according to Main and Roberts, 1990), spreadsheets, data bases, or CD ROM drivers ("Looking Ahead", 1995), or at worst for individual drill and practice tutorials (up to 51%, according to Main and Roberts)--seen as "drill and kill" thousand-dollar electronic worksheets or flashcards, as opposed to means for allowing children to create meaning (Papert, 1993). In California in 1989, 19,219 computers were present in 484 school districts responding to a California Department of Education survey; of these, 9,145 (or 47.6%) were in classrooms, 7,362 (or 38.3%) were in labs, 846 were in library/media centers, 1,485 were for administrative uses, and 381 were in teacher preparation areas (Main and Roberts, 1990). Instructional uses of computers in that California survey were 38% for business education, 6% for foreign language, 12% each for language arts and mathematics, 17% for vocational education, 9% for science, 7% for social studies, 6% for visual and performing arts, and 42% for "other".

Although computer technology entered schools as long as thirty years ago, the dream of having vast resources of knowledge readily available to students for learning is less real than the reality of most computers being used for a few hours per day; along with the need for funding for equipment purchases and repairs, greater emphasis needs to be placed on staff development as "on average, districts devote no more than 15% of technology budgets to teacher training. Some states have suggested this figure should be more like 30% ." Additionally it was found that curriculum integration was essential for technology to become truly effective despite the fact that such integration is difficult, time consuming, and resource-intensive (Teachers and Technology, 1995, pp. 1-2).

The degree of teacher computer competency for instructional use in California in 1990 was described as proficient or very proficient by only 37% of those responding, while personal use rated only slightly better in those categories at 40%. That study further reported that the training background for teachers came from in-service 78%, on-the-job training 70%, continuing education 50%, vendors 20%, and as part of their professional college degree preparation only 27%. Administrators were reported as having technology training 65% from in-service, 63% from on-the-job, 25% from continuing education, 18% from vendors, and only 9% as part of a college degree program (Main and Roberts). Such results echo the recent nation-wide finding that technology is not central to the teacher preparation experience in most U.S. colleges of education today, despite the fact that it is believed that technology can be a valuable resource for improving teacher education (Teachers and Technology, p. 2). Lack of adequately trained staff and lack of "teacher awareness regarding ways to integrate" technology such as telecommunications into the curriculum were cited by more than 60% of public schools either having or not having access to any wide area network as a moderate or major barrier, in a survey of a representative sample of 1,380 public elementary and secondary schools in fall 1994. Other factors in that survey ranking as either moderate or major barriers at the 50% or higher response level were: lack of or poor equipment; inadequate hardware upkeep and repair (non-users only); lack of instructional software (again non-users only); too few access points in building; telecommunications equipment not easily accessible; telecommunications links not easily accessible; lack of time in school schedule (users only); lack of technical support or advice; and not enough help for supervising student computer use (Heaviside, Farris, Malitz, and Carpenter, 1995).

In the Office of Technology Assessment study Teachers and Technology, a list of barriers to teaching and technology was presented, as follows: "Lack of teacher time to:

Experiment with new technologies
Share experiences with other teachers
Plan lessons using technology
Attend technology courses or meetings

Access:

Hardware and software are limited
Upgrades, support, and training are continuing costs
Technologies may not be located in or near the classroom
Much of the hardware in schools is old and cannot handle newer applications
Telecommunications requires new or updated wiring or phone lines

Vision or rationale for technology use:

Schools and districts need technology planning and leadership
Teachers need an understanding of curricular uses of technology
Teachers lack models of technology for their professional use
Messages on best uses change as technologies change

Training and support:

Districts spend far less on teacher training than on hardware and software
Training focuses on the mechanics, not on integrating technology into the curriculum
Few schools have a full-time, school-level computer coordinator

Current assessment practices:

Standardized tests may not reflect what students learn with technology
Teachers are held immediately accountable for changes that take time to show results (OTA Report Summary, p. 5)."

Despite such barriers, the use of technology is seen to have value for teaching and student learning. A survey conducted for inclusion in Teachers and Technology found that, for teachers who used technology: more than 70% spent more time with individual students and expected more from them in terms of pursuing and editing their work; more than 60% felt that they were better able to present more complex materials, were better able to tailor instruction to individual student needs, and were more comfortable with students working independently; 52% spent less time lecturing to the entire class; and more than 40% reported being more comfortable with small-group activities and spending less time with the whole class practicing or reviewing material (p. 53).

Cultural and Economic Changes Underlying the Perceived Need for Educational Reform

It is a cliché that we live in a time of change, yet few would deny the truth of that observation. This change around us produces an aura of questioning of our institutions. At its simplest level this need has been seen as the "High Tech-High Touch" observation that "we must learn to balance the material wonders of technology with the spiritual demands of our human nature (Naisbitt, 1982, p. 36)," and "the more high technology around us, the more need for human touch (ibid., p. 51)," or reaching out to Nature and more primitive societies as "Wildering" or the trend of "Fantasy Adventure," so as to "offer the safely familiar with an overlay of heart's desire. For even in the most commonplace of experiences we want to be transported--safely. Out of our lives (Popcorn, 1991, p. 38)." At a more complex and less distinct level this is seen as "free-floating gloom," being that "the paradox of our time is that we are feeling bad about doing well. By objective standards, the last half century of our national life has been hugely successful. We have achieved unprecedented prosperity and personal freedom. We are healthier. work at less exhausting jobs and live longer than ever....Yet we disparage our leaders and despair at our prospects. There's an immense contempt for politicians, corporate executives and other leaders (Samuelson, 1996, p. 24)."

According to Peter Drucker, we face a new economic order in which the key resource is no longer labor, raw material or capital, but rather knowledge. As a result, a social order will arise in which inequality of knowledge will be the major challenge, and a political system where government will not be able to be looked to for solutions of social and economic problems. Once again this is another instance in which we as school leaders are called upon to help society members understand this change and be able to survive in the new society while not forgetting that others are having to make this transition also and might not be understanding it. In a 1994 article titled "The Age of Social Transformation," Drucker writes: "Indeed, if this century proves one thing, it is the futility of politics. Even the most dogmatic believer in historical determinism would have a hard time explaining the social transformations of this century as caused by the headline- making political events, or the headline-making political events as caused by the social transformations. But it is the social transformations, like ocean currents deep below the hurricane-tormented surface of the sea, that have had the lasting, indeed the permanent, effect. They, rather than all the violence of the political surface, have transformed not only the society but also the economy, the community, and the polity we live in. The age of social transformation will not come to an end with the year 2000--it will not even have peaked by then ."

Of course with knowledge as the wealth of society, life-long learning was seen as a necessity and school was seen as "society's center." Since this knowledge is portable, the economy was seen as shifting from a national to a global economy where, "knowledge has become the key resource, for a nation's military strength as well as for its economic strength (Atlantic Monthly, November, 1994, p. 7)."

Such a transition to a global economy with resources based in knowledge stands in sharp contrast to the concept of the nation-state and its pre-eminence through its industrial economy and concomitant military strength, as such a theory was presented in 1987 in Paul Kennedy's Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. Contrasting the two perspectives, what was seen by Kennedy as a decline of the U.S. as a world power because of the supposed decline of the U.S. as an industrial power might more likely be the transformation to Drucker's global knowledge-based economy. In fact war--so central to Kennedy's nation-state strength--might become obsolete. Viewed by Marshall McLuhan, war was "accelerated social change, as an explosion is an accelerated chemical reaction," and as "impracticable as playing hopscotch with bulldozers. Organic interdependence means that disruption of any part of the organism can prove fatal to the whole (Understanding Media, p. 306)."

Interestingly, and perhaps instructively, concerns about societal and economic change, concerns about the future of our national lifestyle, and tasks for the education system are not restricted to current times, as this 1931 quotation reveals: "The educational task that is clearly indicated by the phenomena of technological unemployment is at basis the task of educating for adaptability. The all- important question may be put more specifically in this way: Can organized education fit the human types that have hitherto worked on the routine levels for the kinds of work that demand intelligent adaptation? Unless something akin to an actual stepping-up of the intelligence of the masses is possible, the further development of our industrialized civilization would seem to be very questionable. Even now, it is said, certain large industries have machinery designed which would enable them greatly to increase their production and at the same time permit them to dispense with large segments of their present working forces (Bagley, pp. 124-125)."

But the coming of this current transition from industrial society to a knowledge society is different from the economic dislocations of the Depression in the 1930's. The dislocations of the transition to the information age or the communications age are different from that temporary, though deep, disruption in the industrial order because today's change is toward a communications age and away from an industrial order.

Through various works such as Future Shock (1970), The Third Wave (1980), and Powershift (1990), Alvin Toffler has described the transformation of society from an industrial order to an information age. In fact, his concept of transitions from a nomadic hunter-gatherer society to a town-building First Wave agricultural society, then to a nation-state society of city-building Second Wave industrialization, and finally to a global Third Wave information-based society, has largely provided today's popular vocabulary for describing social transformation through cultural and economic shifts.

Yet Toffler owes some of his inspiration to the work of Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man (1964), made famous for the quotes that "the medium is the message" just as the telescope is the extension of the eye, and of the "global village" where twentieth century man would be catapulted back to the life of the tribe as a hunter-gatherer. The threat of unemployment seen by Bagley in 1931 as a result of automation is seen by McLuhan as being the logical outcome of the extension of electricity. The concepts of McLuhan are presented here at length because they seem so central to the moral purpose (Fullan, 1994, p. 8) of education, which is to prepare learners for a world of change: "Centuries of specialist stress in pedagogy and in the arrangement of data now end with the instantaneous retrieval of information made possible by electricity. Automation is information, and it not only ends jobs in the world of work, it ends subjects in the world of learning. The future of work consists of learning a living in the automation age.... Continued in their present patterns of fragmented unrelation, our school curricula will ensure a citizenry unable to understand the cybernated world in which they live (pp. 300-301).

"It is a principal aspect of the electric age that it establishes a global network that has much of the character of our central nervous system. Our central nervous system is not merely an electrical network, but it constitutes a single unified field of experience....As biologists point out, the brain is the interacting place where all kinds of impressions and experiences can be exchanged and translated, enabling us to react to the world as a whole....Automation is not an extension of the mechanical principles of fragmentation and separation of operations. It is rather the invasion of the mechanical world by the instantaneous character of electricity (p. 302).

"Light is a nonspecialist kind of energy or power that is identical with information and knowledge....Energy and production now tend to fuse with information and learning. Marketing and consumption tend to become one with learning, enlightenment, and the intake of information. This is all part of the electric implosion that now follows or succeeds the centuries of explosion and increasing specialization. The electronic age is literally one of illumination....For this reason, teachers are already the largest employee group in the U.S. economy, and may well become the only group. The very same process of automation that causes a withdrawal of the present workforce from industry causes learning itself to become the principal kind of production and consumption. Hence the folly of alarm about unemployment. Paid learning is already becoming both the dominant employment and source of new wealth in our society. This is the new role for men in society, whereas the older mechanistic idea of 'jobs,' or of fragmented tasks and specialist slots for 'workers,' becomes meaningless under automation (p. 304).

"Every industry has had to 'rethink through' (the awkwardness of this phrase betrays the painfulness of the process), function by function, its place in the economy. But automation forces not only industry and town planners, but government and even education, to come into some relation to social facts (p. 306).

"All that we had previously achieved mechanically by great exertion can now be done electrically without great effort. Hence the specter of joblessness and propertylessness in the electric age. Wealth and work become information factors, and totally new structures are needed to run a business or relate it to social needs or markets....For this reason, markets and education designed to cope with the products of servile toil and mechanical production are no longer adequate. Our education has long ago acquired the fragmentary and piece-meal character of mechanism. It is now under increasing pressure to acquire the depth and interrelation that are indispensable in the all-at-once world of electric organization.

"Paradoxically, automation makes liberal education mandatory....a fate that calls man to the role of artist in society. It has the effect of making most people realize how much they had come to depend on the fragmentalized and repetitive routines of the mechanical era. Thousands of years ago, man the nomadic food- gatherer, had taken up positional, or relatively sedentary, tasks. He began to specialize. The developing of writing and printing were major stages of that process. They were supremely specialist in separating the roles of knowledge from the roles of action...But with electricity and automation, the technology of fragmented processes suddenly fused with the human dialogue and the need for over-all consideration of human unity. Men are suddenly nomadic gatherers of knowledge, nomadic as never before, informed as never before, free from fragmentary specialization as never before--but also involved in the total social process as never before, since with electricity we extend our central nervous system globally, instantly relating to every human experience (pp. 310-311)."

Change in Worldview and the Coming of the Information Age

McLuhan's work was influenced by a predecessor also, as today's global network of interconnected computer and communications networks was foreseen fifty years ago by a French priest and scientist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, as a "globe, clothing itself with a brain (Kreisberg, 1995)," and as nothing less than the next step in evolution (Capra, 1982, p. 304). Anatomical evolution of the human being is generally assumed to have been virtually completed forty or fifty thousand years ago, and since then the human body and brain have remained essentially the same; in contrast, conditions of life have changed and are changing rapidly, necessitating a shift to social evolution (Capra, p. 298).

And that evolution may also be seen in the evolution of thought, as we are about to heal a five hundred year old dichotomy of viewing the human existence as independent from and dominant over the natural world around us (Harmon, 1991; Capra, 1982). Previously, at the time of the Renaissance, in order for scientific discovery to be allowed by the Church to advance, an agreement had to be made to divorce inquiry about what constituted the physical world and how it worked from anything considered to be the domain of religion (Kuhn, 1962). According to reproductive biologist Jack Cohen and mathematician Ian Stewart, Cartesian reductionism, analyzing complex things in terms of simpler things, works well as the scientific method (The Collapse of Chaos, 1994), but ultimately "there is a progression from multiplicity and chaos to oneness and order (Capra, 1982, p. 288)."

Descartes' division between the brain and the mind, between physical matter that could be seen and thought that couldn't, worked well enough to allow scientific inquiry to proceed; however, in today's quantum physics, modern monism and modern scientific reductionism is leading to a "Theory of Everything" where at root matter and information, the brain and thought, are fundamentally merely temporary forms energy has taken (Cohen and Stewart, 1994, p. 182-183). In fact, one physicist writes that, "accepting reductionism allows one to integrate fully religion and science (Tipler, 1994, p. xiv)."

"Technology and the progress of science would signal a corresponding progress in society, until man perfected himself and controlled nature through his knowledge and tools (Wilson, 1995, May, p. 3)." The existing prevalent Cartesian dichotomy has had an effect in that a psychological worldview has evolved in which material advance and progress were seen as the only ends of daily existence while history has been taught as the advance of man's technology more often than the evolution of his thought; now, with material needs well met, we seek something more to give a meaning and organizing philosophy to our existence (Brown, 1985). Recognizing these human questions and helping people understand the nature of this change may serve as rationale and motivation for success in making the change.

This dichotomy was also seen in the workplace, as Scientific Management produced a division between thinkers and doers, by analyzing "work into its simplest elements and the systematic improvement of the worker's performance of each of these elements." However, in The Practice of Management (1954), Drucker felt this outlook to have two blindspots, one engineering and one philosophical. The engineering blindspot involved 'the belief that because we must analyze work into its simplest constituent motions we must also organize it as a series of individual motions, each if possible carried out by an individual worker," thus "confusing a principal of analysis with a principal of action (p. 282)." The second blind spot was "the divorce of planning from doing," creating a "dubious and dangerous philosophical concept of an elite which has a monopoly on esoteric knowledge entitling it to manipulate the unwashed peasantry." While Taylor's insight that planning is different from doing was a valuable discovery and the foundation of modern management, it is not a foregone conclusion that planning and doing should be done by different people: "Planning and doing are separate parts of the same job; they are not separate jobs (p. 284)."

"The two blind spots of traditional scientific management explain why its application always increases the worker's resistance to change. Because he is being taught individual motions rather than given a job, his ability to unlearn is stifled rather than developed. He acquires experience and habit rather than knowledge and understanding. Because the worker is supposed to do rather than to know--let alone to plan--every change represents the challenge of the incomprehensible and therefore threatens his psychological security....Indeed the major problems of managing worker and work under the new technology will be to enable the worker to do a complete and integrated job and to do responsible planning (p. 286)."

So the information age ends the dichotomy in the workplace, another change for which education must prepare its graduates. Drucker also has observations on technology and its role in learning: "Technology, however important and however visible, will not be the most important feature of the transformation in education. Most important will be rethinking the role and function of schooling--its focus, its purpose, its values. The technology will still be significant, but primarily because it should force us to do new things rather than because it will enable us to do old things better....The real challenge ahead is thus not the technology itself. It is what we use it for (Post-capitalist Society, 1993, p. 197)....In the knowledge society, subjects may matter less than the student's' capacity to continue learning and their motivation (p. 201)."

Values come to the forefront as a concern when hunter-gathers are once more in vogue, as corporations and governments downsize, as individuals increasingly work on their own, and as technology allows more people to retrieve and create information on the world-wide electronic network from wherever they might be able to connect: "We are being transformed by technology into a hunting-and-gathering economy. We use silicon weapons to search out ideas and images, and we forage for services that can be sold to earn a living. Some of us find our way down internet trails, scouting for game and stopping to collect low-hanging fruit. Instead of eating what the landowner wants us to keep, or what the capitalist pays us for our time, we eat whatever we can forage for ourselves. But we all have to forage, and we all will not eat well....No one really knows what our society will look like at the end of this technological journey. Maybe it will be a meritocracy, or maybe an IQ-stratified aristocracy. More likely, it will be simply an uninhibited, unstructured, undisciplined anarchy. Un-archy. One thing is certain, however: in the one-to-one future, government will suddenly become not only less helpful, but less relevant. The message of the last election was, Get the hell out of the way! (Peppers and Rogers, 1995, p.107).

Government and responsibility to other people may be seen as a burden to those who have to live outside organizational culture, as more of us may come to do in the future. "Self-reliance and teamwork are not opposing virtues - we must have both.," said President Clinton in his 1996 State of the Union address. Here once more it is another moral purpose of school to try to counter this trend and instead foster a climate of civic duty alongside individual responsibility.

What emerges at this time are questions of how man and technology and man and man can work together, and notions of greater interdependence. One study, "Technology as Support for School Structure and School Restructuring," (Newman, 1992), reports that on a project where students worked in collaborative groups retrieving information from a LAN-networked database: "coordination around a shared database was a new kind of activity that emerged because of the LAN technology....While direct support of collaborative groups is still important, we have become increasingly interested in the decompartmentalizing of the school that can result from this kind of use of a LAN....There had never been a mechanism in this school by which a social organization created by one teacher could be used by other teachers as a resource for managing instruction (pp.312-313)."

But changing to a world of interdependence is not a smooth road. Writing of life in the Dakotas, a sparsely settled area where equitable access to networked communications would seem to be welcomed as reducing the isolation of distance, Norris (1993) observes: "With such services becoming commonplace, others might consider living in a remote area and commuting electronically to their workplaces. But the changes wrought by new information technology are not always welcome here. In one town, when the state library offered a public library access through a computer hook-up to millions of books in regional and national databases, the librarian did not want it. It seemed like an insult to her many years of dedicated service, suggesting that the decent but small collection of books she'd built was no longer good enough. Interlibrary loan is an unwelcome link to a larger world, forcing us to recognize that we're not as self-sufficient as we might imagine ourselves to be (p. 57)."

In answer to this enshrined virtue of rugged individualism at this time of global networking, Fullan (1994) writes: "Isolation and privatism have many causes. Often they can seem a kind of personality weakness revealed in competitiveness, defensiveness about criticism, and a tendency to hog resources. But people are creatures of circumstance, and when isolation is widespread, we have to ask what it is about our schools that creates so much of it. Isolation is a problem because it imposes a ceiling affect on inquiry and learning. Solutions are limited to the experiences of the individual. For complex change you need many people working insightfully on the solution and committing themselves to concentrated action together (p. 34)."

"In short, without collaborative skills and relationships it is not possible to learn and to continue to learn as much as you need in order to be an agent for societal improvement (p. 18)."

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