The Evolution of Education

I started teaching in 1990, and boy have we come a long way. That was the time of written grades and video tapes for movies, what we considered advanced at the time. Thank goodness there is still technology that can preserve the hundreds of videos I amassed through the years as an educator. Now there are DVDs and we computerize all  grades and feedback. 

The question you want to ask is: “Have we downsized humanity?”, that personal touch that made us human and able to feel. Today, schools are very preoccupied with standardized tests, along with teacher and school performance, when ultimately the performance is the students’, and the hope that the parent maintains an integral part of that education. It seems like society today feels a need to compensate for bad parenting in our schooling system. By bad parenting, I mean a parent who isn't involved, and doesn't want to be either. This seems to be more of a “child rearing” problem. You need a license to drive, to fish, or to do just about anything in this world, yet to have a child and be responsible for he or she; that is not monitored. Society then is forced to compensate for that loophole.

Today the classrooms are filled with phones, I pads, and computers. In some cases a professor can be put in a classroom and have no idea what each student is really doing behind that screen. Does he care? I don’t think he or she can afford to. If the “system” dictates it so, and Okays it, then it is so. To frustrate yourself over the rules, or go up against change, will deem you a dinosaur.

When I began teaching, I remember that Apple wanted to infuse their computer system into the world, and they know the best way to do it was through the “children.” So they gave computers to schools and teachers, yet I was resistant. I liked my pencil and paper. Eventually we were all dragged into it. We succumbed to the fact that even the students knew more than us when it comes to new technology. 

I remember in graduate school in 1990 when a professor took the class to his office to see him “talk on the computer” to some person in South Korea; we yawned!  I remember in 1995, when one of my students came up to me with a paper that had pictures printed on them, and I was: “How?” I remember around 1996 the librarian saying, “Marilyn, you have to come upstairs and try the “internet”.”  I was freaked out by the way she just clicked about it, and I was sure I could never learn. What a mistake, I later became a web developer. So what is next in education? We don’t know, but this time I can’t wait to see.