Hi Maha,

Thanks for this interesting piece on Papert, Friere and Palmer. These ideas have been around for a long time and, as useful as they are, had minimal impact. You said:

“.. the ways that a lot of educational technology provides more prescriptive learning experiences rather than ones that promote discovery and creativity.”

I think that there are a couple of factors affecting this.

The first is that, in the US at least, educational technologists wear a technologist’s hat most of the time and need not have much, if any, teaching experience. These will typically refer to their own experience as students when they are trying to understand what teaching and learning is about: that teaching is active and learning is passive.

The second factor is that many teachers are heavily invested in a central and controlling role in the classroom. They decide what is to be done, how, when, and why. This approach promotes values of obedience, respect for authority, and a view of knowledge as a static thing that can be mastered with great difficulty. Mastery of it can be confirmed with a multiple choice test.

While learning centered approaches probably better support discovery and creativity, these are not the values that education systems seek to promote. The question is political, not technical. Papert experimented with techniques and he had some success. Some teachers will discover these and use them in ways that do not challenge the authoritarian culture of the education system. Friere challenged this culture directly, and was made a pariah. This is what has happened to everyone who challenged authoritarianism in the schools: A S Neil, John Holt, John Gatto, Celestin Freinet, Ivan Illich…. all were marginalized and silenced. You can see the same thing happening with contemporary proponents of these ideas such as Stephen Krashen, Susan Ohanian and Alfie Kohn among others.

Ed Tech is great, but it must be subject to, not in charge of education. And a new dialog needs to open up regarding the real goals of education. While authorities speak of creativity and discovery, they avoid promoting these things at every juncture. The reason for this is political and until people realize that this is so, I doubt that much else will be possible.