Abstract
Possibilities for a different form of education have provided rich sources of inspiration for science fiction writers. Isaac Asimov, Orson Scott Card, Neal Stephenson, Octavia Butler, and Vernor Vinge, among others, have all projected their own visions of what education could be. These visions sometimes engage with technologies that are currently opening new horizons in education—sources both of wonder and of anxiety—but they also grapple with concerns about student agency, the shape of schools, and the societal purposes of education. This article is an exploration of schools, learning communities, and ways of knowing on offer in science fiction. It suggests science fiction representations of the future as tools for analyzing and choosing the technologies proposed in education today, posing these questions: Why are we adopting this technology? How might this tool be used in different ways, and to what ends? Does this technological intervention prioritize individual development, or collective growth? Do we believe that intelligence is a matter of nature, or of nurture? How do we support student inquiry and why? Ultimately, is a particular educational technology really what we want, or are we really looking for a shape of social change?
Introduction
Elsewhere in this volume, Larry Cuban discusses virtual school proponents’ predictions of the disappearance of the brick-and-mortar school. The fundamental reason this epochal change has not and will not come to pass, Cuban suggests, is that, [a]dvocates for virtual schooling largely ignore a historical fact. The larger political, social, and economic role that public schools have performed (and continue to do so) has to be taken seriously since multiple goals for tax-supported public schools have been a reality for two centuries in US schools … Moreover, any gap between major changes in society, the economy, and cultures and what schools are doing has been translated time and again into school reforms to eliminate those gaps. (Cuban and Jandrić, 2015)
Neither technologies nor schools can exist wholly independently of the societies in which they arise, their goals, and the roles they make possible. Technologies are adopted or fall out of favor due to their match for existing roles, patterns of behavior, and social structures; they shape and are shaped by social pressures (Carey, 1998; Deibert, 1997; Eisenstein, 1980; Latour, 1987).
Schools, likewise, have shapes specific to the societies that run them: they prepare young people for given occupations and other roles, sort students by class status, keep young people out of the workforce, and inculcate the values of states, religions, and social classes (Cremin, 1964; Greene, 2001). Change either in schools or in technologies happens within and against a web of pressures and connections. As in science and in efforts to create social change, educational and academic change is successful based on its allies and supporting technologies, and may fail due to entrenched interests (Fullan, 2007; Latour, 1987; Rogers, 2003). While Cuban dismisses the possibility of the death of brick-and-mortar schoolhouses, those schools themselves are relatively recent developments, in the United States tied inextricably to the birth of the nation in colonial times and to the continuing mission of the democratic state.
The adoption of new technologies into schools, accordingly, is shaped by teachers’ existing pedagogies, and by societies’ purposes for schools; this, as Cuban also alludes, is a reason why technology is so often “oversold and underused” (2003). Mismatches in expectations mean adoption has been lower than predicted. The Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow study found that computers were most readily adopted by teachers who were willing to let students teach each other, themselves, and even the teacher, making the classroom into a noisier, less teacher-directed space than was traditionally accepted in American schools in recent memory. Inertia and professional expectations have made many teachers uncomfortable with the presence of computers in their classrooms (Sandholtz et al., 1997).
The abilities afforded by different technologies support different kinds of teaching. Seymour Papert’s programming languages for children were developed to support constructionist pedagogy, helping students build detailed mental models of the world around them by engaging in hands-on experimentation (Papert, 1980). Simulations, such as the ones built by Columbia’s Center for New Media and Learning, can support students’ ability to think about complex problems (Bower et al., 2011; Kelsey, 2010). Social media like wikis and blogs have been explored as means to encourage students to collaborate (Wilber, 2010).
Some technologies bring less-beneficial attributes. “Drill and kill” software, such as flashcards and “math blaster” games, have been singled out as over-emphasizing memorization as a teaching tool. Rote memorization alone does not contribute to long-term integration or transfer of concepts (Rice, 2007). And specific elements common across media and technology—such as copy protection—can discourage teachers’ use of visual, audio, and digital material in classes as they do not know whether screenings, photocopying, or sharing software might get them or their students in trouble (Hobbs, 2010).
Cuban's dismissal of school ICT proposals as “science fiction” due to their inability to account for the social surround of schools and technology is somewhat ironic. Science fiction’s explorations of education and technology frequently engage with the social systems and values that schools and technologies support. These explorations can be far more thoughtful and nuanced than popular discourse on technology, which has a tendency to polarize discussion of the impact of technology on society, and particularly on youth.
In this article, I will give a close reading to science fiction stories in which education plays a central role in the narrative. I will highlight the authors’ emphases on societal and pedagogical goals beyond their exploration of possible technologies. This will by no means be an exhaustive review of science fiction that focuses on technology and education. Rather, it is a hermeneutic attempt to surface messages about the social surround of educational technology in a handful of texts by well-known, critically-acclaimed authors.
The stories here go beyond the pedagogical implications of the technologies they describe. They consider the societal and moral purposes of education, as well as student agency and individual growth. How do technologies, social institutions, schools, and individuals interact in these narratives? What positive and negative impacts do authors envision? Viewed without divorcing them from the strong visions of society these authors project, what can we learn about how we, as educational technologists, might work to enact change both in and out of school?
Under consideration here are Isaac Asimov’s short story, Profession (1957[1990]), and the novels Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card (1985[1991]), Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge (2006), and The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer (1995) by Neal Stephenson. I first consider these in the light of an earlier science fiction theme (or “trope”) of “direct-download-to-brain education,” as the other texts are in dialog with this theme. Finally, I also briefly engage with Octavia Butler’s vision of education in her Parable series (1993[2000], 1998[2000]) as it shares social themes with the other stories despite the noticeable absence of technology.
Close readings
Brain–computer interface
One of the most common themes about education in science fiction is a direct brain–computer interface, particularly one which downloads a tremendous amount of information to the brain in a short span of time. The theme is so common that tvtropes.com (a crowdsourced website where writers and pop culture fans identify themes, or “tropes,” which appear across media) identifies some half-dozen distinct tropes that relate to it. Each of these tropes—“Neural Implanting,” “Brain/Computer Interface,” “Brain Uploading”—is cited as appearing in dozens of television shows, comic books, films, and novels (TVTropes, 2014).
There are indications that this idea of speed-learning appears to come from the (now largely discredited) idea of hypnopaedia, or sleep learning. The idea was that messages played to a sleeping person would have the same impact on them as they might on a hypnotized person, potentially influencing their behavior either negatively, by controlling them, or positively, by helping them to break bad habits. This technique was subsequently tried with radio and tape recorders, both in life and in narratives diverse as Peanuts comics, The Patty Duke Show, and Flowers For Algernon, as well as countless science fiction narratives including Star Trek, Brave New World, Red Dwarf, and Robert Heinlein’s novels (TVTropes, 2014; Wikipedia, 2014).
Using computers to learn this way seems like a logical next step in technological evolution from audio tapes. Direct-download-to-brain appears most vividly in the film The Matrix, in which the hero is programmed with superhuman martial arts prowess and other skills (Wachowski and Wachowski, 1999). Here, the neural connection both helps—it makes Neo the hero who will rescue humanity—while it also harms—it is how a malign, artificially intelligent machine keeps human minds in thrall, believing they are living normal lives, while their bodies are drained to power the alien system.
Asimov’s story, Profession (1957[1990]), plays out potential consequences of this technology. The story depicts a society where two downloads to the brain, one for basic reading skills at eight and one for professional skills at 18, form the entirety of most students’ education. Profession begins as a Kafkaesque vision of education-as-social-trap. We meet the protagonist, 19-year-old George Platen, in a “House For The Feeble-Minded,” where he has been placed after a scan of his brain pattern has indicated that he is not suited for any work at all—not shoveling manure, not pipe-fitting, and definitely not his preferred field, computer programming. George studied programming books independently before the professional download to determine programming was something he was interested in doing for the rest of his life. This is his downfall. Like the rest of society, his examiner at the professional download frowns on his extracurricular reading, telling George his brain pattern “can’t be affected by thinking special thoughts” (Asimov, 1957[1990]: 176).
At the House, George is put through outmoded courses which involve studying books: “read(ing) and reread(ing) a passage, then star(ing) at a mathematical relationship and not understand[ing] it at once” (Asimov, 1957[1990]: 182). He schemes to escape and ends up at an “Olympics” where his peers compete to win positions in the fields at which they excel, to be placed on distant planets where they will have rewarding work.
After a fight, George is apprehended by the police, who are supposed to jail anyone who has no registered profession. In one final attempt to argue that he is smart enough to do the rewarding work accorded his peers, George makes a plea to powerful people from another planet: that he can provide them with a higher quality of education than professional brain downloads. He argues that taped learning makes people passive, unable to absorb other knowledge, and unable to make sense of real-world problems. Instead, he says, learners should do as he has and read books and study scientific instruments directly.
As a result of his outburst (spoilers ahead), it is revealed to George that the House For The Feeble-Minded is actually The Institute of Higher Studies and, in fact, it is populated by social researchers, considered to be even more bright than “hard” scientists. Only one in 100,000 people, like George, have brain patterns indicating that they are fit for this work, capable of generating original, creative thought. But society is unable to identify by testing who is a “creative genius;” those who have promising brain patterns are not promised or told anything, and the Institute waits until they prove themselves. His mentor tells George, “It won’t do to say to a man, ‘You can create. Do so.’ It is much safer to wait for a man to say, ‘I can create, and I will do so whether you wish it or not’” (Asimov, 1957[1990]: 207). While brain downloads may be seductively easy, Asimov does not see them as supporting creativity or the advancement of knowledge.
Ender’s Game: the Battle Room and tablets
In Profession, what appeared to be a dystopia for one man turns out to be a stepping stone on the way to utopia: the self-directed education George sought all along. The training course in Ender’s Game (Card, 1985[1991]), by contrast, is uniformly dystopian. Schools and military academies subject Ender Wiggin to constant surveillance; physical abuse from peers, to which teachers turn a blind eye; psychological alienation, manipulation, and isolation; and overwork to the point of exhaustion.
Ender’s education is technology-rich in spite of this bleak situation. Most reading and writing happens on a tablet-like, net-connected “desk.” Digital games are believed to increase students’ strategic skill, so students are allowed a large amount of free play time. The most important part of Ender’s training is in the Battle Room: a huge anti-gravity chamber in which students play a game like laser tag around planet-like obstacles.
The overwhelming force shaping this education, though, is not the technology but the social surround. We are told Earth faces an invasion from the “buggers,” insect-like aliens who appear to communicate through telepathy, making it impossible to negotiate with them. Ender and his classmates are inducted into a military academy by the age of six; by their mid-teens, it is expected they will be soldiers and officers prepared to save humanity. They will be cultivated for superior reflexes and the maximization of their youthful recklessness—a prized quality, as the military leadership does not want its soldiers to question their mission. Ender has been recruited specifically because he has been identified, out of all children on Earth, as the most likely to be the perfect intellectual and psychological match for commanding Earth troops to wipe out bugger civilization.
Adults are largely absent from Ender’s daily education. While a few classroom teachers are mentioned in passing, most educational scenes involve only his peers. This is central to Ender’s personalized education plan, which has been crafted by military leaders. They work to isolate him from his peers to toughen him up.
The adults we see most often are manipulative and harsh. They watch as bullies try to do Ender permanent physical harm. Ender decides that the only way to make the bullies stop harassing him is to hurt them so badly that they won’t bother him again. He kills two of them. Teachers do nothing about it. Other manipulation from teachers includes putting students through multiple, exhausting battles in a single day, causing them breakdowns and hallucinations.
Ender and his classmates decide that “the adults are the enemy, not the other armies [of students].” An older student tells Ender: the teachers … get us to fight each other, to hate each other. The game is everything. Win win win. It amounts to nothing. We kill ourselves, go crazy trying to beat each other, and all the time the old bastards are watching us, studying us, discovering our weak points, deciding whether we’re good enough or not. Well, good enough for what? I was six years old when they brought me here. What the hell did I know? They decided I was right for the program, but nobody ever asked me if the program was right for me. (Card, 1985[1991]: 108)
Technology offers a rare opportunity for agency in this regime. Ender enjoys self-directed study time where he goes over videos of real battles on his tablet and plays experimentally with physical strategies in the Battle Room. Back home on Earth, independent study, not school, is how Ender’s siblings learn: “Peter loved to learn … but the teachers hadn’t taught him anything, ever. He did his learning through his desk at home, tapping into libraries and databases, studying and thinking and, above all, talking to [his sister] Valentine” (Card, 1985[1991]: 124). Peter and Valentine are so successful at their independent writing that, as pre-teens, they become major intellectual leaders on the equivalent of the Web, influencing global and intergalactic policy.
Peer learning is central in Ender’s Game. Students teach each other strategic maneuvers and invent new situations for each other to defeat. Platoon leaders, never much older than their troops, issue orders and battle plans. At one point, Ender’s platoon leader orders him, as punishment, not to do the trigonometry homework a teacher assigned him. There is almost never any adult comment on the effectiveness of students’ strategies; they are proven in practice, under attack from peer counter-strategies.
Play is depicted as an enjoyable way of learning. The students enjoy the Battle Room even as it grinds them down, say they “can’t give up the game” because they love it. Men miss it when they move on in their careers; it was “what they lived for” (Card, 1985[1991]: 45, 108). However, the system of formal education the children go through is brutal overwork, in the model of military training. Enjoying the sporting element of the games is a means of escaping the gravity of the situation (spoilers ahead): at the book’s climax, the military commanders tell Ender and his peers that while they thought they were gaming, they have actually been remotely controlling battles in the war against the buggers. The commanders had allowed them to keep believing they were just playing games: “Of course we tricked you into it. That’s the whole point,” said Graff. “It had to be a trick or you couldn’t have done it … Any decent person who knows what warfare is can never go into battle with a whole heart. But you didn’t know. We made sure you didn’t know. You were reckless and brilliant and young … You had to be a weapon, Ender … functioning perfectly but not knowing what you were aimed at”. (Card, 1985[1991]: 298)
The works: Rainbows End
In Rainbows End, Vernor Vinge (2006) throws every technology but the kitchen sink into the mix. A form of direct-download-to-brain, Just In Time Training (JITT), makes up a critical plot point. Medical advances can reverse much of the aging process, from Alzheimer’s to certain forms of osteoporosis. Global crowdsourced prediction pools make an appearance. Students and adults communicate with each other using a network which taps directly into the brain, augmented by circuits built into clothing. With these latter two technologies, anyone can create and share a virtual reality which they can project on the environment around them, even deploying robots which give participants a physical sense of handling real objects. Amid all this, the outlandish centerpiece is a technology that appears to be a jab at Google Books: a tree-chipper-like shredder augmented with millions of cameras, into which books are thrown and ostensibly scanned to be added to global databases that anyone can access—for a price.
The anti-aging technology and the global neural network contribute to a central premise of the book: that anyone, at any age, can compete in global advances in knowledge and creation. This puts young-looking old people into schools alongside energetic young people who constantly have the wisdom of generations at their fingertips.
Yet, it does not necessarily level the playing field. Former college professors find themselves needing to learn how to use wearable and neural technology. Some find their former strengths have not survived the medical treatment: a poet laureate finds he no longer has a way with words. Others find that their old training as engineers or managers simply does not help them in the logic of the new technological landscape. Vinge’s characters discuss inequality between learners; they also note inequalities in the school system, as some schools are in partnerships with universities and corporations while others are not.
Students engage in peer-led, project-based learning both in and out of class, driven by international competition and awareness that their experience will soon lead to adult work in a globalized world. They are invited to work for corporations, or “affiliances” of students and adults, while they are still in school. Affiliances may be seeking to buy student inventions outright, or just identify skilled entry-level workers. Students strategically join affiliances that will give them particular skill sets, prove their abilities, help them find others whose skill sets may be complementary to their own, or simply satisfy a teacher’s requirements. They study topics like “building maintenance protocols” and “time-lag synchronization” in the context of complex, compelling, real-world projects such as building an elevated railway that spans the globe or conducting two international orchestras to play the same piece in sync despite network lag. Networks make this possible.
Despite the leveling of expertise, the classroom and teacher are surprisingly prominent players in Rainbow's End, particularly a vocational-ed teacher, Mrs Chumlig. Her job is to coach students to excel in their projects, and help them grow emotionally and developmentally. Unbeknownst to her student, Juan, Mrs Chumlig is revealed at one point to participate in one of his affiliances: she plays a giant dinosaur in a cretaceous-themed virtual reality park where he has been designing characters. In this role, she delivers a professional critique of his design: The creature shifted game parameters, bringing up critic-layer details. This was a heavy player, maybe even a game cracker! … “[T]he skin texture is from a Fantasists Guild example library. The color scheme is a cliché. The plaid kilt would be cute if it weren’t in all the Epiphany Now ads.” … This was the same crap (Juan) had to put up with at school. “I borrow from the best.” The saurian’s chuckle was a buzzing roar … “That might work with your teachers. They have to eat whatever garbage you feed them—at least until you graduate and can be dumped on the street. This design is so-so. There have been some adoptions [by other players], mainly because it has good mechanics. But if we’re talking real quality, it just don’t measure up”. (Vinge, 2006: 47)
The Diamond Age: or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer
The Diamond Age (Stephenson, 1995) pays close attention to the purposes and effects of a single educational technology, the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer. Stephenson explores not only the workings of the Primer, but also the developmental and pedagogical goals its creators intend for it to support, the society in which it unfolds, and the lives of the children who have grown up with it.
The Primer is a so-advanced-as-to-be-indistinguishable-from-magic book designed to educate a single child. It is built on nanotechnology and an advanced artificial intelligence that constantly generates developmentally-appropriate learning opportunities. It responds to spoken questions and reads to children when they are too young to read. As they get older, it serves as a telescope, microscope, and martial arts instructor, among infinite other roles shaped by the child’s needs. Its developer, John Hackworth, describes the Primer to the man who has commissioned it: “it sees and hears everything in its vicinity … At the moment, it’s looking for a small female. As soon as a little girl picks it up and opens the front cover for the first time, it will imprint that child’s face and voice into its memory … ” “Bonding with her. Yes, I see.” “And thenceforth it will see all events and persons in relation to that girl, using her as a datum from which to chart a psychological terrain, as it were. Maintenance of that terrain is one of the book’s primary processes. Whenever the child uses the book, then, it will perform a sort of dynamic mapping from the database onto her particular terrain.” “You mean the database of folklore.” “Folklore consists of certain universal ideas that have been mapped onto local cultures. For example, many cultures have a Trickster figure, so the Trickster may be deemed a universal … The database is full of [these universals]. It’s a catalogue of the collective unconscious”. (Stephenson 1995: 94)
The Diamond Age almost plays out like an A to B test of the Primer: it follows the development of three groups of girls who have received a Primer, and explores the outcomes of deployment in each of their circumstances. One copy finds its way into the hands of Nell, a girl from a poor community who runs away from home and is adopted into a more affluent community. One copy each is given to two of her friends in that community, Fiona and Elizabeth. Other copies go to a quarter of a million Chinese girls in orphanages, who each get their own copy.
The beginning of The Diamond Age sees the Primer under development, in the territory of New Atlantis, a neo-Victorian enclave in Shanghai, and the Middle Kingdom, a Confucian enclave separate from the more disorganized Chinese Coastal Republic. It is the enforced borders and intentionally-created cultures of the Confucian and Victorian communities which shape the Primer.
The Primer is developed at the behest of Alexander Chung-Sik Finkle-McGraw, a ranking lord in Victorian society. He commissions Hackworth to build the book for his granddaughter, Elizabeth, whose parents he sees as too narrow-minded and entrenched in Victorian society. His overture to Hackworth: “in order to raise a generation of children who can reach their full potential, we must find a way to make their lives interesting. And the question I have for you, Mr Hackworth, is this: Do you think that our schools accomplish that?…” “My daughter is too young to attend school—but I should fear that the latter situation prevails.” “I assure you that it does, Mr Hackworth. My three children were raised in those schools, and I know them well. I am determined that Elizabeth should be raised differently”. (Stephenson 1995: 20)
While both men agree that neo-Victorian discipline has been useful in their lives, they feel the Victorian ethos lacks something which spurs individual Victorians to innovate further. So what they seek is not a thorough overhaul of the schools, but rather an additive: why not give [Elizabeth] a gift that would supply the ingredient missing in those schools? … But what is that ingredient? I don’t exactly know, Finkle-McGraw had said, but as a starting-point, I would like you to go home and ponder the meaning of the word subversive. (Stephenson, 1995: 72)
As the plot unfolds, Nell proves to have the most challenging life out of all the girls in the book. We see her emerge from it victorious: after suffering abuse at home, from which she runs away and lives on the streets, she finds her way into the Victorian enclave. The combination of needing to defend herself and judge which adults to trust, being resourceful, comparing multiple ways of life, and getting schooling both from the Primer and in a traditional Victorian school proves to be a recipe for producing a leader.
While the Primer is initially intended as an additive to school, for the Chinese orphans it becomes a complete educational solution, serving hundreds of thousands. The orphans have been rescued through the work of Dr X, a stereotypically inscrutable character from the Middle Kingdom. Driven by a Confucian sense of virtue, Dr X has saved baby girls abandoned by their parents en masse, as drought has hit China and parents have resorted to the historical practice of female infanticide.
Of all these stories, The Diamond Age is the most explicit about the relationship between education and culture. This is not a connection to which technology is essential. A brief exploration of Butler’s Parable stories demonstrates this.
No-tech: Octavia Butler's Parable series
Octavia Butler’s Parable series (1993[2000], 1998[2000]) presents an alternate vision of future education in which technology is absent. Yet, the books’ discussion of education and society shares many concerns with texts discussed above.
The Parable series is a dystopian vision of the near-future United States: a nation of crumbling infrastructure and mutual suspicion where drug-fuelled violence destroys communities and patriarchal fundamentalists inflict their version of order on all around them. In this setting, Lauren Olamina begins the utopian religion of Earthseed, whose “truths” are gathered from a range of knowledge traditions—“patterns of history, in science, philosophy, religion, or literature. I didn’t make any of them up” (Butler, 1998[2000]: 127).
The central tenet of Earthseed is that “God is change.” Ongoing inquiry into change in nature and in human meaning is woven into the Acorn community’s daily life as well as its religious practice. Congregation members are encouraged to discuss and ask questions after sermons. Earthseed’s weekly Gatherings are described as “problem-solving sessions, they’re times of planning, healing, learning, creating, times of focusing, and reshaping ourselves … and anyone can speak” (Butler, 1998[2000]: 66).
Technology is missing due to infrastructure and the cost of accessing the network. Acorn is resource-poor; it does not avoid technology deliberately. “To do a good job,” Olamina muses about students in her community, “they need to be able to find out what information we have available here and what they’re going to have to go to the nets for” (Butler, 1998[2000]: 148). Acorn’s community hoards what books they can find, particularly those on agriculture and other practical topics. When nothing else is available, Olamina teaches her fellow refugees to write by shaping letters in the dirt. “Anyone who joined the group, child or adult, had to begin at once to learn these basics [to read and write] and to acquire a trade. Anyone who had a trade was always in the process of teaching it to someone else” (Butler, 1998[2000]: 24).
Despite deprivation, Acorn’s youth engage in exemplary educational practices: project-based education to support systems thinking; reciprocal teaching between students; attention to metacognition; and integration of disparate subjects like math and art into real-world problems. We see children talking enthusiastically about their history research, writing their own plays, and reading to each other: All of our kids work on projects as part of their education. Each kid does at least one group project and one individual project per year. Most kids find the two unrelated projects influencing one another in unexpected ways. This helps the kids begin to learn how the world works, how all sorts of things interact and influence one another. The kids begin to teach themselves and one another. They begin to learn how to learn. With their mentors’ help, they each choose some aspect of history, science, math, art, or whatever and learn it well enough to teach it. Then they do just that. They teach it. (Butler, 1998[2000]: 148)
Analysis
Predictions of the educational future have a spotty success rate. Cuban notes that his own hovers around 50% after many years of both experience and forecasting (Cuban and Jandrić, 2015). The stories assembled here themselves represent an eclectic collection of projections that reflect the eras and societies in which they were written: a post-WWII United States (Asimov, 1957[1990]), the late Cold War (Card, 1985[1991]), post-Rodney-King-verdict Los Angeles (Butler, 1993[2000], 1998[2000]), dawn of the Internet era (Stephenson, 1995), and after a couple of dot-com booms (Vinge, 2006).
Given this, we are better off not using these texts as predictions, nor taking them literally as a playbook. Rather, perhaps, we might use questions they raise about the relationships between society and schools as a toolkit for interrogating the possibilities, not just in educational technology, but also in the potential trajectories of society which might shape education and technology. Some useful questions raised by these texts follow.
Why are we adopting this technology?
In our own schools, we see some technological choices made for pedagogical reasons. More often, sadly, choices are made for reasons of convenience, fads, or starry-eyed excitement over novelty. Brain–computer interface narratives speak directly to choices made for convenience’s sake.
A flippant summary on the TVTropes page, “Brain/Computer Interface,” sums up the technology’s key assumption: Since convenience is highest priority and The Singularity [the hypothetical moment when computers achieve intelligence greater than humans’] is looming, it’s natural to assume that the next big thing is embedding cables into your skull and synching your brain with a computer. (TVTropes, 2014)
Vinge and Asimov reject this reasoning. Vinge is explicit that knowledge cannot be separated from individual development and the learning process. This is why he portrays JITT as dangerous: Learning a language, or a career specialty, changes a person. Cram in such skills willy-nilly and you distort the underlying personality … The rejection process was a kind of internal war between new viewpoints and old, manifesting as seizures and altered mental states. (Vinge, 2006: 180) Tapes are actually bad. They teach too much; they’re too painless. A man who learns that way doesn’t know how to learn any other way. He’s frozen into whatever position he’s been taped. Now if a person weren’t given tapes but were forced to learn by hand, so to speak, from the start; why, then he’d get the habit of learning, and continue to learn … Once he has the habit well developed he can be given just a small amount of tape-knowledge, perhaps, to fill in gaps or fix details. Then he can make further progress on his own … From books. By studying the instruments themselves. By thinking. (Asimov, 1957[1990]: 202)
How might this tool be used in different ways, and to what ends?
These texts play out different possible outcomes for some technologies they share in common. Given popular discussions of online anonymity in our time, it is interesting to consider how anonymity plays out in Ender's Game and Rainbow's End. Virtual worlds and networks give both students and teachers the opportunity to let the quality of their ideas stand for themselves, outside of face-to-face social roles.
Peter and Valentine become world leaders through the essays they write online. It is never revealed to the world how old they are: “All that anyone would see were their words, their ideas. Every citizen started equal, on the nets” (Card, 1985[1991]: 133). In Rainbow's End, students are also legitimate (and not even peripheral!) participants in adult efforts such as biological research or the creation of theme parks (Lave and Wenger, 1991). But Mrs Chumlig, also, makes use of a context in which her identity escapes the usual power dynamic of teacher and student: because she speaks as an awesome dinosaur and an instance of a character he created, Juan has a personally meaningful motive to listen.
Two of the technologies here—networks and databases—are already ubiquitous in our lives. They are not the stars of these narratives, but they play key roles. The Primer is built on a massive database, not unlike the ones used by anyone today who does a Google search, shops on Amazon, or even visits a single web address. A database also underlies the Rainbows End book-shredding project. It is the use of databases, and the social goals of that use, that distinguishes it in each setting.
The database in the Primer is not a mass of data disconnected from human meaning; its underlying mathematical algorithm is not Stephenson’s focus. Rather, its distinguishing feature is its cultural content. While Vinge’s book-shredding project also feeds into a database which will enable people in remote locales to access previously inaccessible cultural material, the database is posed as problematic because it will serve to enrich one man and his company. The characters fighting the shredding are concerned that library books will go from being available as a common good to being walled off for private profit.
The value of these technologies comes from the method of their use, not qualities inherent to their code or wires; it comes from their deployment in society. Both authors see the value of massive databases as public goods. But the questions to ask of their deployment are: Who benefits the most? Is it possible those in control may be able to hoard the good intended for the public?
Do we believe that intelligence is a matter of nature, or of nurture?
Assumptions about the innate capabilities of learners are central to all of these stories of future education, and the technologies in them. Card’s assumption is that intelligence is genetically determined. Ender’s intelligence is judged before he is born: his older brother and sister had previously been singled out as the brightest children alive, but were not judged to have the right emotional makeup for the job. Their parents were thus permitted to have a third child—otherwise not allowed in this future, crowded Earth, where parents are limited to two. Adults turn a blind eye to the independent learning activities of Ender, Peter, and Valentine because they have been identified as geniuses. The implicit assumption is that they should be allowed to cultivate their abilities.
A certain amount of biological essentialism also remains unquestioned in Profession. By the end of the story, there has been no disruption to the assumption that a mind can be measured in childhood. George has challenged it, but that challenge is only accepted as proof that he is eligible to transcend the dystopian educational system. Still, George’s argument to wealthy patrons that he can teach better than tapes suggests a potential revolution in his society: the rediscovery that mental growth might be available to more than just the brightest.
Stephenson, by contrast, quite explicitly downplays the innateness of intelligence, beginning with the book’s epigraph from Confucius: “By nature, men are nearly alike; by practice, they get to be wide apart.” Nell’s guardian, the constable, expands on this: Nell … the difference between stupid and intelligent people—and this is true whether or not they are well-educated—is that intelligent people can handle subtlety. They are not baffled by ambiguous or even contradictory situations—in fact, they expect them and are apt to become suspicious when things seem overly straightforward. In your Primer you have a resource that will make you highly educated, but it will never make you intelligent. That comes from life. Your life up to this point has given you all the experience you need to be intelligent, but you have to think about those experiences. If you don’t think about them, you’ll be psychologically unwell. (Stephenson, 1995: 256)
The Primer’s great strength is supporting human development. But the message of Nell being the most successful of Primer-educated children is that having contrasting cases in one’s life and education, and engaging in reflection, are the most important factors in the development of a person’s critical faculties and in their ability to achieve.
It is fortunate that technologies we work with today do not seem to assume some children are born genetically superior. But the assumptions they do make about the value and makeup of intelligence—whether it consists of memorized facts, or of reflected-upon experiences; whether it is the criterion on which learners’ roles in society should inevitably be fixed—are ones we should attend to in choosing technologies. Memorization, in particular, is the goal of many flashcard-like apps. But does it support the kind of knowledge we want learners to develop?
Does this technological intervention prioritize individual development, or collective growth?
Themes of individual development and collaborative work run throughout all of these narratives. Together, the stories present a variety of visions of how individual achievement contributes to society.
In Ender's Game, peer-driven education, with an emphasis on competition and minimal intervention from adults, achieves “natural selection” of leaders. Adults work to isolate Ender from his peers by making him a teacher’s pet; Graff says, “He can have friends. It’s parents he can’t have” (Card, 1985[1991]: 38). The explicit idea is that he will best be able to take lethal initiative if he does not ever expect guidance or protection.
The youth-led society cultivated by this hands-off approach is intended to propagate military tactics, dreamed up by the young and flexible-minded among themselves. The centrality of battle technologies in education, the development of quick strategy and reflexes, is critical to developing unthinking warriors. All of this supports the goal of survival of the species through conquest. The moral calculus Card employs has already been criticized by others; discussing it here would be a digression (Kessel, 2004; Radford, 1987). However, it is worth noting the author’s social Darwinist assumptions and how they inform the way young people are educated and use technology in this universe.
By contrast, Vinge and Butler are explicit that collaborative education, using real-world, project-based tasks where students work alongside adults, is crucial to the survival of the human race. Vinge sees it as sustaining the technology-saturated, largely peaceful, egalitarian world he envisions: Back in the 1980s and 1990s, the rulers of modern states realized that success did not come from having the largest armies or the most favorable tariffs or the most national resources—or even the most advanced industries. In the modern world, success came from having the largest possible educated population and providing those hundreds of millions of creative people with credible freedom. (Vinge, 2006: 17) Civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals. It is a means of combining the intelligence of many to achieve ongoing group adaptation. Civilization, like intelligence, may serve well, serve adequately, or fail to serve its adaptive function. (Butler, 1993[2000]: 101)
Victorian adults in The Diamond Age have a somewhat more individualistic view when it comes to giving particular children advantages. But they are still explicit that educational technology plays a role in supporting the health of the broader society. Confucian adults are even more emphatic about education’s relationship to society. Judge Fang cites Confucian precepts as he explains his decision to award Nell the Primer her brother stole from Hackworth: “If the item of stolen property was anything other than a book, it would have been confiscated. But a book is different—it is not just a material possession but the pathway to an enlightened mind, and thence to a well-ordered society, as the master stated many times.” “The fate of one little girl is nothing,” he says. “But other things being equal, it is better for society that the girl is educated than that she remain ignorant”. (Stephenson, 1995: 148)
While both Victorian and Confucian adults see education as supporting society, the Victorian adults suggest a contradictory goal for the Primer. One of their aims for the Primer is a radical break from a central purpose of education throughout history: they actually want it to subvert the maintenance of an existing social structure. They want their girls to break out of the stultifying preparation for pat roles in Victorian society. The result, illustrated in the book’s climax, is scientific, social, artistic, and military revolution. Nell, implicitly because she has led an “interesting” life and reflected on it with the support of the Primer, emerges as a leader.
What are our own assumptions about individuals and society? Are we choosing, building, and deploying technologies to support the schools (and thus the society) that we already have? Or the ones we want to see?
How do we support student inquiry and why?
There is one striking similarity between all of these narratives: in every one of them, children explore and learn independently, whether or not adults encourage their explorations. This may well be a reflection of my selection bias in gathering these particular works of literature; I am a graduate of a college that emphasized independent inquiry, and a proponent of self-directed learning. However, it is worth further inquiry as to whether natural inquisitiveness is a theme in more works of science fiction. This exploration contributes directly to their participation in adult society, earlier in their lives than we would expect within the confines of our current education system.
George’s independent explorations beyond his download mark him as having the flexibility and critical faculties to become a scholar. Peter, Valentine, Ender, and his classmates teach themselves the skills that make them interplanetary leaders. Students in Vinge’s stories pursue interesting leads on consulting projects that can help them prove and improve their skills and land them jobs. Millions of children pursue individualized education without adult intervention in The Diamond Age, becoming nurses, actresses, and military leaders. And the Earthseed youth pursue the topics that intrigue them as well as those which will keep their community alive. There are additional nuances to be gleaned from this narrative.
Vinge, Stephenson, and Card see potential not just in technology, but specifically in open access to technology, for the purposes of self-guided learning. Interestingly, Asimov sees the same potential in access to a less-technological learning tool: books. In fact, aside from Ender's Game, all of these future narratives still hold books in high regard: they are to be saved and protected, still vital to learning in their narrative shape and their ability to support reflection. The Primer and Vinge’s networks are always on, almost always accessible to learners; Vinge speaks of learners with limited access as disadvantaged. In the successes of Ender, Peter, and Valentine, we see the possibility for gifted students to challenge themselves beyond adults’ expectations, thereby surpassing the abilities of adults themselves.
Real-world problems and project-based learning are also depicted as central. So is play. Take Ender’s “desk” tablet. It has a security system of deliberately poor construction to encourage students to improve their hacking skills. He sees hacking it as “another game that the teachers set up for us … one I’m good at” (Card, 1985 [1991]: 52). Nell’s Primer teaches through playful fairytales, but in doing so it imparts lessons about the technological substrate of the world in which she lives: she learns about computer code and Turing machines through a story in which her character is chained in a dungeon, deciphering the meaning of the binary chains which both hold her and control the robot baron ruling the castle. Asimov also emphasizes the importance of authentic, concrete exploration when he insists that learners get hands-on practice with scientific equipment in order to do science. The technologies themselves are intrinsically motivating, as they engage students with authentic tasks.
Likewise, the participation of youth in adult “communities of practice” here must not be overlooked (Wenger, 2000). Each story sees students preparing for work alongside adults on authentic tasks. Work is ill-structured, just as it would be on the job; there is no easy solution to the tasks students must accomplish, no rote way of answering pre-determined questions. Adults in these worlds mostly value students’ efforts; learners’ motivation comes from the recognition of communities like Earthseed or Vinge’s “affiliances,” not only from the fun and engaging nature of the work itself.
In light of this, it is worth paying attention to the role of teachers, as distinct from adult participants in jobs in authentic communities of practice. “Teachers” in the role we recognize today are often absent, sometimes even obstacles to learning. Nell’s only formal classroom teacher we see for more than a few paragraphs is Miss Stricken, a strict spinster in a Victorian school for girls. Her job is to lecture on the meaning of things the students have already learned through interactive simulations. She smacks Nell with a ruler for minor infractions like twirling her hair and biting her nails. This discipline makes an otherwise “wonderful schoolday” unbearable for Nell. When this conflict comes to a head, the school headmistress explains Miss Stricken’s role as a sad and unpleasant necessity: to “make educated Westerners pull together … [against] a hard world that will come and hurt us if we are not careful” (Stephenson, 1995: 292). Miss Stricken’s classroom rules are there to enforce Victorian societal norms—the ones the Primer has been set up to disrupt. Shortly thereafter, we see Fiona and Elizabeth leave school.
In Ender's Game, teachers have no concern with students’ agency, needs, or desires. This is a world in which the goals of children and adults are hopelessly at odds with each other: adults require the unquestioning participation of children in their militarized society. In his introduction, Card states that he feels this is a reflection of reality: Ender's Game asserts the personhood of children … Children are a perpetual, self-renewing underclass, helpless to escape from the decisions of adults until they become adults themselves. And Ender's Game, seen in that context, might even be a sort of revolutionary tract. (Card, 1985 [1991]: xx)
These authors have faith in children’s innate drive to learn and to become participants in adult worlds. Do the technologies we set up share that faith? Do they support the level of inquiry students can engage in out of class by exploring Wikipedia, participating in learn-to-code activities online, or following tutorials on YouTube? And how are we preparing teachers to adapt to a world in which their factual expertise is overshadowed by publicly available knowledge?
Simply to build a Primer, or a Battle Room, or a download-to-brain technology will not achieve the exciting futures these books portray. To build the schools we want to see, we must be clear about the social impact we wish to have. We need to plan for social changes as well as technological interventions, including being explicit with teachers about the changes these technologies may make to the roles they are comfortable with. We need to articulate our pedagogical goals, talk about how they relate to our visions for future societies, and work towards those societies as well.
What we should ask is not the forecasting question, “Will we see the end of brick and mortar schools?” which Cuban rightly dismisses (Cuban and Jandrić, 2015). Rather, we must ask, “Is that what we want? Why would we want it, or not? How would it interact with students’ individual development? With existing trends in society? With our desires and plans for democracy?” Once we have answered those questions, we are in a position to ask what technologies need to be in place to support the schools we want to see.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
Acknowledgements
The author dedicates this article to the memory of Frank Moretti, our beloved professor who passed away in 2013. Frank kept a copy of The Diamond Age on his office bookshelf, among classical Greek philosophers and critiques of empire. He said at one point that the Primer was an inspiration for the work his team was doing at Columbia University’s Center for New Media Teaching and Learning. It is my hope that educational technologists will carry on in his spirit of exploration and reflection.