My daily use of technological communication has been shaping me into someone more likely to forget others. The flow of water carves rock, a little bit at a time. And our personhood is carved, too, by the flow of our habits. –Jonathan Safran Foer
The technological mentality that has become the American worldview instructs us to prefer practical questions to questions of meaning – to ask of things not if they are true or false, or good or evil, but how they work. . . . Our glittering age of technologism is also a glittering age of scientism. Scientism is not the same thing as science. Science is a blessing, but scientism is a curse. –Leon Wieseltier
The writers of the Common Core had no intention of killing literature in the classroom. But the convenient fiction that yearly language learning can be precisely measured by various “metrics” is supplanting the importance of literary experience.–Claire Hollander
The anxiety that drives this criticism comes from the fact that a radical curriculum — one that has the potential to affect more than 50 million children and their parents — was introduced with hardly any public discussion. Americans know more about the events in Benghazi than they do about the Common Core. –Hacker & Dreifus
In later April I posted at Anthony Cody's Education Week blog a piece based on a post I did here last fall. Can "Humanism Prevail over Technocracy". I haven't had time to think about it much since then, but this weekend, perhaps because it's graduation season, the theme is a big one. There are two articles in this morning's NYT, which, for reasons similar to those I've argued on this site, are critical of the Common Core Standards: "Who's Minding the Schools" by Adrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus and "No Learning without Feeling." These positions contrast with the more conventional view of the Times editorial board, which is just fine with the corporate refrom agenda.
And then there are two commencement addresses critical of the dehumanizing effects of technology, one entitled "How Not to Be Alone," by Jonathan Safran Foer given at Middlebury, reprinted in the NYT this morning, and Leon Wieseltier's "Perhaps Culture Is Now the Counterculture: A Defense of the Humanities, which he gave at Brandeis and is reprinted in the New Republic. There was also in this morning's NYT a rather dismissive review of Curtis White's The Science Delusion, which is mainly critical about the popular reductionism of everything into neuroscience.
So a theme emerges, and how to talk about it without belaboring the obvious–or seeming like an old fart. So first a few clarifications> As Wieseltier points out above–science is not scientism. And I've written about, technocracy is not the same as technology. Technocracy, like scientism, are forms of disease. One is organizational and the other mental, and they work hand in hand. The question that is at the heart of my concern is to try to understand better the degree to which this disease, as Foer describes it, like water on a rock, is changing us imperceptibly. And to understand to what degree are we changing the way we educate kids that abets the spread of this disease?
As has been true for the last several weeks, no time today to elaborate, but I'll leave you with this quote from Wieseltier:
There are thinkers, reputable ones if you can believe it, who proclaim that the exponential growth in computational ability will soon take us beyond the finitude of our bodies and our minds so that, as one of them puts it, there will no longer be any difference between human and machine. La Mettrie lives in Silicon Valley. This, of course, is not an apotheosis of the human but an abolition of the human; but Google is very excited by it.
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