How do we learn? What systems, methods, strategies, or techniques enhance cognitive functioning? How do schools maximize resources to enhance individualized learning and achievement? Should schools and education itself have a civic function? To what extent does technology enhance learning or merely simplify otherwise complex processes? These are some of the questions that emerge from a reading of a number of critical texts that to one degree or another focus upon the nexus between schools, learning, knowledge, and technology.
At issue in this essay is an analysis of a number of powerful ideas reflected in the foregoing series of questions that emerge from a reading of works by John Dewey (1998), Seymour Papert (1993), Paul Berliner (1994), and Edward Tufte (2004). This diverse group of thinkers share a common interest in education, its form and function, and its impact upon human intellectual development. There is little doubt that John Dewey (1998) inspired many later educators to consider the societal as well as intellectual purposes of schooling and education. There is also little doubt that Dewey (1998) recognized that there are two paradigms at work in education - one that is traditional and therefore structured, disciplined, ordered, and didactic, and one that is relatively unstructured, free, and student-directed. Beginning with this idea by Dewey (1998) the following analysis will attempt to provide answers to the questions listed above. The central argument to be advanced is that while education clearly has both a cognitive and a civic or societal function, it should not be reduced to a mere process of a technological delivery of content because this would ultimately eliminate what Berliner (1994) characterizes as the art of improvisation or the ability to innovate.
The analysis of the questions posed at the outset of this essay begins with ideas advanced by John Dewey (1998) on how we learn and what sc...