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Current
Articles, Interviews and Commentary
from
Technology and Learning, September
2000
 Expert
Advice: A Conversation with John Merrow
Interviewed by Amy Poftak
John
Merrow, former education correspondent for MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour
and producer and host of The Merrow Report on National Public Radio
and PBS, discusses the promise of technology in education– with
a few caveats.
Q:
Tell me how you went from teaching to journalism.
Actually, I got back to journalism from teaching. I worked for papers
in high school and college, and dropped out of college for a year
to work for a newspaper. So that was in my blood, early on. Then I
was going to teach in the Peace Corps, but I got hurt, so I taught
in New York instead. But there's a connection between the two. In
good teaching, you try to bring people out. Isn't the root of educate–
educare– to lead out? In good journalism you're also trying
to draw out people: what do they believe, why did they do this, what
are they feeling?
Q:
Was it important for you to stay with the topic
of education?
I enjoyed journalism, but I had mostly been a sports reporter. And
I really loved teaching. I loved the sense of discovering stuff and
watching kids discover stuff. So a perfect way to connect those two
was to be a journalist, but about education.
Q:
What do you see as the role of technology in
education?
I think technology– electronic technology, because, after all,
a pencil is technology– the instant, quick, and comprehensive
aspect of it, represents the greatest threat to organized education
ever and at the same time represents the almost indescribable potential
for learning
Q:
Why a threat?
It creates the opportunity for cheating– widespread dishonesty
in an unparalleled way. I'm sure your readers know how easy it is
now for kids or teachers to download something from somewhere else
and say: "This is my work." The other major threat is the values driving
technology: that is, if making education more efficient and cheaper
is driving the use of technology, then we're going to drive people
away from learning. We'll have more machine-scored exams across the
country. We'll narrow the curriculum.
Q:
And the potential?
Let me give you an example. If I was a history teacher and we were
studying the Civil War, I could say to my class of 20 students: OK,
each one of you is responsible for the life of a single soldier in
the Civil War. As a student, you would pick– let's just make
a name up– Jonathan Logan from the Hartford 108th regiment. Your
job would be to become, in effect, the world's foremost expert on
the life and experiences of Jonathan Logan and the 108th in Hartford.
Someone else might pick Theodore Watkins of Georgia's 7th regiment,
and so on. As a teacher, my job is to keep track of you, to orchestrate
the tapestry, to make sure you see the whole Civil War. As you dig
up things on the Web, it's very difficult for you to cheat because
no one else has ever done a life history of Jonathan Logan. You may
discover stuff that Henry Steele Commager didn't know. But you're
going to keep digging and pushing.
Q:
As a journalist would.
You'll be like a journalist, but you'll be going back in time. And
the technology means that you can produce a multimedia report. You
might find photos, surviving descendants of that family– who
knows what? The paradigm of school has to adapt to that. They can't
give you 120 students, because you can't do that with 120 students.
Q:
From the educators you talk with, do you have
a sense if technology is being used in the way you're describing it?
If it is, it's being used in charter schools, homeschooling, private
schools, and on the fringes. An obstacle to using technology this
way is the existing system. If the curriculum is a mile wide and a
foot deep and you want to burrow into one piece of it, it's hard for
you to do that.
Q:
What would the solution be– to get rid
of the survey approach?
Sure. Deeper is more interesting, especially if there's a skilled
teacher helping kids make choices. Also, it is not written in stone
that the school year has to be divided into semesters– those
are bureaucratic artifacts. You could, for example, have a three-week-long
class in some specific issue that you would dig into intensely. Again,
the technology would offer great opportunities for that kind of specialized
study. The technology is more sensitive to the way we learn than the
structure of school is. School, like any bureaucratic organization,
is set up for mass convenience, and technology doesn't respect that.
Technology doesn't know if I'm white, black, or brown, young or old,
disabled or able-bodied. The old "educational" technology was just
that– educational. When Edison developed something, they said
it would revolutionize teaching and learning. They said this about
filmstrips; they said it about television. There were various teacher-proof
curricula that were called educational technology. But the schools
didn't have to adapt to survive. The difference with technology today
is that it isn't educational technology– it's just plain technology,
and it's everywhere.
Q:
And there's a big distinction.
Yes. The
dry-cleaner uses this stuff, the supermarket, the B2B. Schools can't
just say we'll use it to keep track of your grades because it's in
the kids' lives outside of school. So it really is an adapt-or-die
situation, I think. But there's a huge part of society that says we'll
use this technology for control. We'll standardize tests, we'll maximize
output, and so on. And that's absolutely the wrong way. Ideally, the
technology will make learning more, not less, labor-intensive.
Q:
Can you explain that last point?
Technology used properly means teachers will work differently and
work harder, but in a much more satisfying way with fewer people.
One of my daughters teaches middle school in Harlem and sees almost
150 kids
a day. There's no time to use technology, if they had it– and
they don't, because it's a poor school. With 150 kids, the only way
a teacher can use it is to drill and kill. And if you stay with this
mass education stuff, you're just inviting kids to cheat. When a teacher
assigns a paper and asks them to use the Internet for research, she
has no way of knowing if kids do the work themselves or if it's from
someone in Portland, Oregon, or Portland, Maine. She doesn't have
time to know how each kid works or to see the paper develop.
Q:
I'm wondering what will change that.
That's just an open question. It's a great question. I worry that
the movement to save money on education and the obsession with standards
will drive kids underground. The kids who want to learn have to be
subversive, do it on their own. Technology, misused, could make things
dramatically worse. Let me give you an example. New York has a standardized
test that determines if you pass or fail, and it determines the rating
of the school. So it's high stakes for the school and for the kid.
Instead of looking for multiple measures in a school's quality, like
teacher and pupil attendance, they say this is the score. When they
gave it here in New York, and talk about unintended consequences:
the day after the test, half the kids stopped coming to school, even
though school has five weeks to run. Even some of the teachers have
stopped coming and are using their comp time and sick leave, because
the system has said by its actions that this is all that matters:
you don't matter as a teacher, learning doesn't matter. No one planned
on that.
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