Stuck in a System

Reading philosophy is always a challenge for me, but I am trying to persevere through Jacques Ellul’s Technological System. Although written in 1980, close to the rise of the personal desktop computer, Ellul is remarkably prescient of how computer technology will exert a degree of unprecedented control over our lives. I’m only a quarter of the way through (because it is slow reading), and although the author is still setting the stage, I’m finding it a very sobering read – especially as I think about education.

For better and for worse, the rise of nationalized education means that school for both teachers and pupils is, for the most part, embedded in a vast gargantuan system. It has grown progressively unwieldly with size as has the corresponding political system that could bring changes. This is in sharp contrast to the one-room schoolhouse, a small group of students with perhaps only a single teacher. There is no government-mandated syllabus nor are students grouped together in classes by age. The older ones help the younger ones.

Standards and accountability no longer allow for such freedom and variety. Not that it is inherently bad to have standards, and accountability is generally a good thing; but good intentions of “maintaining high standards” has typically devolved into the lowest common denominator as technology increasingly participates in assessment. Not everything that counts can be counted. As much as we’d like to think we have autonomy as teachers, that control is slowly being taken away to be subject to the technological system.

As teachers it is crucial for us to frame education as a relationship between persons; I think this is what teaching and learning is all about. It cannot be easily reduced into its constituent parts. We must resist the application of Taylorian scientific management to our “industry” (a telling example of how the terminology has permeated into our field). This has become increasingly difficult because the advancement of technologies results in an increasing enslavement to those technologies. It consumes and subsumes everything. I’m not advocating a Luddite response; I personally benefit from technology – but it is important to step back and see how it enforces a wider system that attempts to enforce compliance to a flat, rigid, errorless, efficient, program. If we lose awareness, we have only ourselves to blame when we all become pawns serving the system.

I have no solution to this conundrum. Sometimes I wonder if it is too late. There are systems within systems within systems; their smooth running enhanced by technology. I think Ellul would say that this puts humanity in an increasingly un-natural situation to which adaptation also brings a concomitant increase in stress. It is no wonder that teachers/professors and students seem increasingly harried. Speed is one measure of efficiency, and our lives are whizzing by. Technology may have brought us some “leisure” time, but we increasingly need to fill it with more technology. A vicious cycle perhaps. Only in a system does this happen.