Information and communication technologies in schools: a ...

Through this millennial old legacy, the school appears to be the social organization
most resistant to change. In fact, it mostly strives to keep its basic structures
and functions unchanged, including its information circuits, channels, and
routes. Below, we examine typical approaches to channelling information, which,
in turn, were determined by the traditional concept of so-called compulsory
mass education. To make things clearer, however, we must trace the latter’s origins
back to three or four centuries ago.
There was no serious lack of quality as long as education remained a heavily
guarded treasure or luxury, accessible only to a chosen few. Formal schooling
was reserved exclusively for the high priesthood and aristocratic families, and
denied to anyone outside the cloisters and castle walls.
School as an invention of industrial era
The classical school, as we know it today, was invented at the dawn of industrial,
mass-production-of-everything era. General education was claimed as the property
of the people at the verge of the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe. Just and
democratic at its inception, this path led in time to quite a different state of affairs.
Historians and theoreticians usually say the school was first modeled after a printing-house
– as Comenius announced in his 1657 book, A Living Printery, or An
Art of How Swiftly, Yet Informatively and Lightly to Stamp the Wisdom Not On Paper,
But Upon the Minds. It was not just a coincidence that schools were associated with
the most advanced information technology of the time – the printing press with
movable characters. The minds of pre-schoolers were considered a plain tablet or
a blank sheet of paper upon which teachers could write anything they, or some
higher authority, would think appropriate. In a short while, the thinking about
what was appropriate to teach children was taken away from teachers and concentrated
in the hands of those in political and economic power.
No less significant technologically and educationally was Gutenberg’s concept
of setting up a line of type by using separate letters cast in a uniform pattern
in a mould: the origin of the standardized, replaceable part of ever increasingly
automated machinery. It was only logical to apply the same principles to
schooling, and since the mid-19th century, this approach has prevailed in most
Western countries. A system was established where children and young people
could learn different subjects from different teachers who, in their turn, could
rely safely on a standard, ready-made curriculum and procedures designed by
other specialists.
Schools in Transition
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