Doctrina futura

For my class on educational webtools, we were given links to several videos about education and technology. Watching them was in a way a difficult task. As I mentioned before, learning about technology and teaching makes me realize I have all these luddite prejudices when it comes to education.

I know there's a personal element. I bristle at calls to bring the internet in the classroom because I often lament afternoons, nights, days lost surfing and searching the web with very little to show for it. And I also recall my most memorable learning experiences: discussing a short story with our desks pulled around in a circle with my favorite English teacher, dissecting a fish and getting to stay late so that we could try to remove the brain, barefoot nature walks identifying trees by their bark in environmental science, pulling up a chair in my Greek professor's office with nothing but a text and a large dictionary between us, studying for a psychology final with a good friend sitting half buried in our notes. When I hear criticism of education, calling it useless because it doesn't involve modern media, I feel all the beautiful moments that make me want to be a teacher and a life-long learner are being belittled.

But even when I try to be more objective, I find connections between advocates for technology in the classroom and the manifestos of Futurists and the like. The Futurists were an Italian (and Russian, I believe) art movement. They took "out with the old, in with the new" to its extreme. Nothing old was worth saving, only the fastest and newest technologies were worthwhile.

I actually think their art is very interesting. Here's Boccioni's Dynamism of a Soccer Player currently located at the MoMA in NYC.

And at the Albright-Knox Museum in Buffalo you can see this example, Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash.

While I like their art, philosophically they supported the violence that came with technological advancement. The movement ended when the jingoistic among them were killed during World War I.

Note well. I am in no way saying that people who promote digital learning are violent or pro-war. I think people consistently cite technology as a way to bring people together for cooperation and I support them in their efforts, 100%.

But when I watch these videos, like Did you know? with its almost ominous background music, many of them describe the rise and economic development of India and China, shortly before or after discussing the uncertain job market of today's students. When you combine that with a call for the fastest, newest, best technologies, doesn't it sound like a competition? My question is, is it a healthy competition?

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One video stood out to me:
Educational Change Challenge by educator and blogger Darren Cannell.

When he discusses technology and learning, he talks about it in terms of "understanding student culture." I like this anthropological approach. To effectively communicate with our students, we have to be able to use their cultural tools. We have to do what anthropologists call "participant observation." With the spirit of Terrence's sentiment

Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto
I'm a human: I reckon nothing of humanity is strange to me

you learn the culture by doing it.

It's like being able to speak a second language. The more I learn about current practices of remixing and sampling of art and media, like the millions of montages on youtube created by kids just like our students, the better I can explain Roman poetry and art.

No, really.

Romans often took older works, sometimes Roman sometimes Greek, and took their conventions, language style, and even direct quotes for use in their own poetry. Classical scholars refer to it as "intertext." And Roman sculpture recombined elements of native Italic, Classical Greek, and Hellenistic Greek sculpture, and mixed and matched all the different elements for different effects. 19th and 20th century scholars took this to mean that Romans weren't as clever or creative as the Greeks because they couldn't come up with their own ideas. Sometimes I think this idea still holds in standard social studies curricula. But today we're realizing that the Romans saw this as the peak of artistry: to take something beautiful that has stood the test of time, like Homeric epic or Polykleitos' sculpture, master their technique, and then strive to make it even better.

I think this stuff is fascinating, and if I learn about contemporary examples of remakes and remixes that my students are listening to, or watching, or probably making for themselves, I'm going to be better equipped to demonstrate the relevance of Latin and Roman cultural studies to my students.