When Did We Give Up On Human Beings? Another example of how computers are making us stupid

Our genius educrats have somehow gotten the idea into their heads that computers are going to help them to educate children. In fact, a few of them want to replace teachers with machines (check out Larry Cuban's books). But in reality, computers do little to make us smarter and a whole lot to make us more stupid.

I have many examples of this, but today's lesson in how computers are sucking our brains out involves trying to make a reservation at a hotel. 

I have a conference I am supposed to attend in the coming weeks and I am not sure whether a reservation for me has already been made by our conference person, who I can't reach on the weekend. So, this morning, I call the hotel to ask if I already have a reservation in my name so that, if not, I can go ahead and make one.

Now this is a simple logical procedure. Admittedly, I have written three logic textbooks, so I have an understandable advantage in being able to think about how this should go:

If I do not have an existing reservation, then I would like to make one. And if I do have an existing reservation, then have a nice day. It's not that complicated. In fact we can put it in simple logical notation:

~P > Q.P > ~Q

But this is overcomplicating things because ALL I NEED TO KNOW IS WHETHER I ALREADY HAVE A RESERVATION AND IF NOT I NEED A ROOM.

So I call the hotel, and a person answers. Ha ha, just joking. Of course it is not even conceivable that that could happen and, instead of a person answering, I get an answering system with five options, none of which exactly fits my situation. But I remain confident that if I can outwit the phone system and talk to a real person he or she can simply look my name up an see if it is already on the system and, if not make a reservation for me.

Finally I get to a point where I can press '0' to talk to an operator. I press the button, and an actual human being answers. I tell her what I need. See if you can find any reservation on the system and if there is not one there, then sign me up.

And here is where things begin to gets Kafkaesque.

I have to go through a battery of questions, none of which is relevant. "Can you provide me your confirmation number sir?" 

"If I had a confirmation number," I say, "then I would know that I had a reservation. But I don't know that I have a reservation, therefore I don't know of any confirmation number" (thinking that a simple modus tollens form of reasoning might have some force with this person). But no.

"Okay sir, so when will be your arrival date?" I give her a date. She asks me to confirm it. "The departure date sir?" I give her the date. She asks me to confirm it again. "And what's the purpose of the stay sir?" I tell her. I remind her that I am not sure I am not already in the system, and if so, all these questions are irrelevant and could she please just search my name to see if it is not already there.

"Okay, sir, so how many rooms and adults?" 

"Uh, one," I say, despondently. She confirms.

"Can I have your name, sir?" I tell her, now with some hope that we might be getting the crux of the issue--THAT I MAY ALREADY HAVE A RESERVATION. She asks how it is spelled. 

"Okay, sir, are you a Hilton Honors member?" Now we're back to square one. I ask again about whether I am already on the system so we don't have to go through all this. But it is as if I never said anything and I am confronted with another question.

It dawns on me that this operator is not only not hearing me, but is not aware of my actual existence. She does not recognize me as a fellow human. She is not cognizant of my being-in-the-world. She is, in fact, not aware of any other important concepts that the German philosopher Martin Heidegger attempted to capture in terms with way too many hyphens. She does not acknowledge me other than as a voice on the other end of the line which is feeding her information that must be converted into data that must be typed onto the keyboard and transmitted to some central system somewhere that is controlling this evil hotel.

The computer she is punching information into has, Borg-like, taken over her soul. She is not operating the computer; the computer is operating her. 

I quickly try to think, what can I say that will help me escape from this surreal vortex? "If ~P, then Q and if P, then ~Q," I say, thinking this may be language the Master Computer behind all this will understand. But no. Even logic does not fit into the algorithm. The voice on the other end simply asks the next question in the sequence.

Finally, realizing that this call could go on for days without a resolution of the thing that needs to be resolved, I say, "Ma'am, I think it might be easier if I just try to see if I can contact the person that normally handles my convention arrangements."

"Okay sir. Is there anything else I can do for you?" I consider suggesting that she take the red pill and escape the Matrix, but then think better of it.

I eventually just conclude that it is unlikely I am already registered at the hotel, take a chance and manage, on another inordinately long call, to simply schedule a reservation.

Now I realize that a lot of people will read this and think that this is no big deal. This is just the way it is. And maybe I am just getting old and curmudgeonly (a reality which I long ago embraced), but are we really that far gone? When did we give up on simple things like judgment?

This is not an insignificant question. When did we give up on human beings?

I'm sure some people would laugh now at the section in Plato's dialogue Phaedrus about Socrates' warnings about the invention of the technology of writing: that, rather than increasing knowledge and wisdom, it would do precisely the opposite. But I'm totally on board with this idea. And if writing only threatened to do this, more sophisticated modern computer technologies have closed the deal.

I'm sure the people on the other end of calls like these are nice people just doing their jobs. But the process in the context of which they were no more important than some random circuit in the computer they were wired into apparently excluded them from making simple judgments that would have cut through all the technological nonsense.

Human beings don't need an algorithm to operate, and even when they need to do something that requires a procedure, they can abandon the procedure at any point at will. A computer does not have an algorithm that allows it to escape the algorithm, but humans do. 

The people who think that we can replace teachers with computers by sitting whole classrooms of children down at Chromebooks to be taught (yes, this is actually happening in public schools, and on a large scale)--that, in other words, teachers can be replaced by computers--need to find another line of work.

The only thing such an education will be able to produce is a bunch of socially-challenged button pushers who can follow a script, but can't make simple judgments about basic things.

The public school policymakers who blather on about "critical thinking skills" and think that somehow computers are going to help in this process need to employ a little critical thinking themselves, and I'm not confident they know how to do that.

Is the magic in fairy tales and fantasy books a problem for Christians?

Someone wrote me recently about being admonished by a friend for recommending that her friend’s daughter read the fantasy books of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. The books contained magic and witchcraft and her friend felt that this would only encourage an interest in such things.

I told her about a man who came up to me at our exhibit booth at a conference and asked me if I knew of any good educational computer programs that taught certain subjects. He clearly thought that education technology was a good thing. Near the end of our discussion, he looked down and saw that we carried The Hobbit. “Oh,” he said, “I would never use that book with Christian students.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because it has magic in it,” he said.

“But you approve of technology?”

“Of course.”

“Well, books like The Hobbit have what I call ‘fairy tale magic’ in them, which is just using some process, the exact nature of which is a mystery to you, to manipulate nature. What’s the difference between magic in this sense and technology?”

Fairy tale magic is the fanciful kind of thing that happens in many fairy tales. When the pumpkin and the rats in Cinderella are turned into a coach and horse, and six lizards into footmen; when the prince kisses Sleeping Beauty and she awakens from her deathly sleep; when Jack plants his magic beans and they grow into a giant bean plant that reaches the clouds; when Rumpelstiltskin spins straw into gold.

It is this kind of “magic” that Chesterton declares—in his great essay, “The Ethics of Elfland”—if imbibed as a child, helps to inoculate us against the scientific materialism of our age because it helps us to see that what lies behind the world is not a “law” (as the scientific materialist would say), but a Will.

Arthur C. Clarke once famously said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” What he meant was that advanced technology does the very same thing that fairy tale magic does: manipulate nature using a process which you do not understand.

The man I was talking to said something about the fact that even though technology may be a mystery to us, it is not a mystery to scientists who have a natural explanation for it. I responded that that does not change the fact for those of us who are not scientists who use technology: It’s still magic to us.

And besides, even scientific explanations are not explanations, but descriptions―descriptions which themselves appeal to an order which even to scientists is still a mystery. Using an incantation to open a door in a fairy tale is no more magical than using copper to conduct electricity in the real world. And to say that copper conducts electricity because its outer electrons are not localized just begs more questions, since we have only explained one mysterious procedure in terms of another (Why do materials whose electrons are not localized conduct electricity?)

In other words, not only is any advanced technological process magic for us, but ultimately it is magic even to the people to whom we appeal to explain their magic. In the final analysis, it’s even magic to them.

So one way of responding to this objection to fantasy literature is to ask the person if they have a microwave oven in their home or a cell phone in their pocket. If there is a problem with fairy tale magic, then there is a problem with technology. But there is no problem with technology, therefore there is no problem with fairy tale magic (the logical rule of Modus Tollens).

In addition, the kind of “magic” you find in fairy tales―and in fantasy literature like that of Lewis and Tolkien―is not the kind of magic that is prohibited in Scripture. What is prohibited in Scripture is necromancy in particular and fortune-telling in general. It is the consort with specifically demonic forces that is prohibited, as when, at the behest of King Saul, the Witch of Endor calls forth the spirit of Samuel from the dead in the First Book of Samuel.

Again, if you interpret demonic forces too broadly (the occultic), you indict technology. Any definitional net with holes small enough to capture fortune-telling and demonology and large enough to let technology through will also be large enough to allow fairy tale magic through.

Tolkien’s wizard Gandalf does not have dealings with evil spirits, nor does Lewis’ Aslan.

The holes in the net are going to have to be so small as to capture fortune-telling and necromancy, but large enough to let through Joseph’s interpretation of dreams and Daniel’s prophecies. All of which is to say that the problem is not the manipulation of natural things, but the demonic itself. And there is nothing demonic about fairy tale magic of the kind that you find in Lewis and Tolkien. They are simply not calling upon evil spirits to do what they are doing.

And, in fact, it is clear that necromancy is portrayed as evil in The Lord of the Rings, as evidenced by the references to the evil character Sauron as “The Necromancer.” Tolkien certainly seems to recognize this distinction.

The problem is that the people who make this kind of argument want to go way beyond what the Scriptures prohibit. There is a distinction between the use of the word “magic” (in any sense) that is broad enough to encompass fairy tales and fantasy on the one hand, and witchcraft proper on the other.

People who protest Lewis and Tolkien need to have these distinctions pointed out to them.

What to get with that #educationtechnology grant your school just received

My new post at Exordium, the blog of the Classical Latin School Association:

Q: Our school is a classical school. We just received a few thousand dollars of grant money for technology. What can we do with it while trying to remain classical?

A: Buy a Promethean Board.

Q: But what about iPads?

A: Don't do it.

Q: Why? I mean, if a Promethean Board is good, then why are iPads bad? ...

Read more here.

New reading technology that will amaze you

I've never paid too much attention to IKEA before, but this new reading technology is simply astounding:

The Siren Song of Education Technology

The following article appears in the current issue of The Classical Teacher magazine:

In the world of education, there are many temptations that would lure us to our destruction, and none greater than the siren song of education technology. The computer is, of course, only one form of education technology, and education technology is anything but new.

Those of us educated in the 60s and 70s will remember the mimeograph machine, which spat out pages of blue type the teacher then handed to her students. Some of us still remember holding the fresh sheets of paper to our noses for the unique and pleasant smell of the ink. And some of us can still hear the distinctive sound of the film projector, rattling as it threw up on the screen some poorly animated attempt to inculcate a bit of knowledge or impart some important principle.

As Neil Postman has pointed out, even writing is a technology. In his book Technopoly, he recounts Plato’s story of Thamus, King of Egypt, who was said to have once entertained the god Theuth, the inventor of many things. Theuth exhibited his many inventions to Thamus, but his proudest invention was that of writing, which, Theuth claimed, would improve both wisdom and memory.

But Thamus responds to Theuth, saying:

You, who are the father of writing, have out of fondness for your offspring  attributed to it quite the opposite of its real function. Those who acquire it will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful; they will rely on writing to bring things to their remembrance by external signs instead of by their own internal resources. What you have discovered is a receipt for recollection, not for memory. And as for wisdom, your pupils will have the reputation for it without the reality: They will receive a quantity of information without proper instruction, and in consequence be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant. And because they are filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom they will be a burden to society.

In this older, oral culture, wisdom was upheld and informed by unaided memory. It is not recorded what Thamus (who spoke for and against each of Theuth’s other inventions) may have said in its favor. There is obviously much to say in favor of writing, but we cannot but admit that Thamus was wise in seeing the costs of the new technology.

Every technology has both its benefits and its characteristic costs, and before we can make intelligent decisions about computers in the classroom, we need to know both.

We all know what the benefits of education technology are ... or do we? In practical fact, education technology has become a fad with many schools. Some want it only because it is the newest thing―the educational equivalent of a fashion accessory.

One of the problems in the discussion of education technology is not just that we do not know the reasons why educational technology might not be a good idea—we have a hard time even saying why we want it in the first place.

 But what are the proposed educational benefits of education of technology? Larry Cuban, author of Oversold and Underused: Computers in the Classroom, delineates three distinct goals for education technology: The first is to "make schools more efficient and productive than they currently are"; the second is to "transform teaching and learning into an engaging and active process connected to real life"; and the third is to "prepare the current generation of young people for the future workplace."

It is easy to see how administrators could use computers for more efficient record-keeping, how teachers could use them to more easily keep track of grades, and how students could conduct research more efficiently. Many schools already do this.

But it is more problematic than most people think for schools to use technology to prepare students for the future workforce. For one thing, because of bureaucratic red tape, elementary and secondary schools are themselves seldom outfitted or even familiar with the most recent technology. In addition, schools have shown themselves to be poor prophets when it comes to predicting what will be needed in the economy of the future. The students of my generation who were taught Fortran and Pascal can tell you how that came in handy when they graduated and discovered that those computer languages were already on their way out. Seymour Pepert once called the computer the "Proteus of machines": He can foretell the future, but will change  his shape to avoid having to.

Every technology has both its benefits and its characteristic costs.

And as for "transforming teaching and learning," how would computers do this? In fact, the goal of education technology in the classroom is about as hostile to traditional education as it is possible to be. Cuban, a progressive educator himself, laments that technology has not changed the teacher's role in the classroom. Cuban is one of many promoters of technology who want to move teachers out of their traditional role of imparting knowledge, understanding, and wisdom to being mere "coaches."

Both Cuban and Postman understand that the computer has an agenda and that it is not friendly to the traditional conception of the classroom. Cuban is disappointed that it has not weakened the role of the teacher and Postman is concerned that it will.

"What we need to consider about the computer has nothing to do with its efficiency as a teaching tool," says Postman. "We need to know in what ways it is altering our conception of learning, and how in conjunction with television, it undermines the old idea of school." Postman is writing these words in 1993, and so perhaps he would now have more concern with technologies like the Internet.

Classical educators needn't be conflicted about the use of computers as tools that can enable more efficient administration, and they can have a limited comfort level with a limited use in preparing students for the workplace, but they should be positively alarmed by any technology that presumes to replace them.

Schools need to think through what education technology can and cannot do for them, and in the process of determining what it can do for them, they need to realistically assess what it can do to them. In this regard, classical educators especially should be concerned with a technology that aspires to disarm them from doing the very thing their students need them to do: make sense of their world.

One of the most important things we should expect education to do is to order our experience. The world has an inherent structure―not just the natural world, but the larger reality within which we live, think, decide, and feel. There is a natural reality we can apprehend through mathematics and the sciences, and there is also an ontological reality which we apprehend through literature and philosophy.

St. Thomas Aquinas defined the wise man as that man who "orders things rightly." It is in showing students how to do this that we make them wise. Ordering reality is an essential part of education, and that job has been helped by the advent of the computer, but it has also been made more difficult. Modern culture does not suffer from a lack of information; it suffers instead from the inability to make sense of too much information.

The very relation between information and human purpose, says Postman, has been severed:  "[I]nformation appears indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, in enormous volume and at high speeds, and disconnected from theory, meaning, or purpose."

These words were written in 1992, before the rise of the Internet, and the mention of only one word is required to show that Postman's prophecy has been completely fulfilled: Google.

Digital technology holds out to us the promise of power over information, but at the same time threatens to give information power over us.

The computer can help us order reality, but more often it does the opposite―and it is more likely to do the opposite if the teacher is sidelined by a machine. The computer has done a lot to open the floodgates of random information, and very little in the way of ordering and integrating it. When a school simply hands out iPads to its students, it has made it more likely that students will be buried further under the modern avalanche of disordered information, and less likely that they will be able to make sense of a complicated world.

The computer can help us order reality, but more often it does the opposite.

But it is not only the vertical order of truth that the unchecked use of the computer can separate our students from, but the horizontal ordering of time. In his book Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now, Douglas Rushkoff argues that the new technology has brought about what he calls "presentism." The digital age not only doesn't help, but actually militates against many of our stated educational goals, which include teaching a knowledge of the past and how to prepare for the future. It is a "diminishment of anything that isn't happening right now―and the onslaught of everything that supposedly is":

It's why the world's leading search engine is evolving into a live, customized, and predictive flow of data branded "Google Now," why email is giving way to texting, and why blogs are being superseded by Twitter feeds. It's why kids in school can no longer follow linear arguments; why narrative structure collapsed into reality TV; and why we can't engage in meaningful dialogue about last month's books and music, much less long-term global issues.

When we respond to the siren song of education technology, there are some things we should demand, and among these are that it not cut us off from the past―or the future.

There are two functions of technology in our schools. The first is as a means to teach other things, and the second is as a thing to be taught. The two things we should be most concerned to teach are wisdom and virtue. But the best means to teach these are not computers. The computer can help in a limited role, but it will not do the job for us.

The best education "technology" is the liberal arts: the set of language and math skills that allow us to learn everything else. If we spent half as much time talking about these technologies as we now talk about computers, our students would be a lot better off.

The Pope's Twitter Feed

When I heard that the Pope was going to start tweeting, I was skeptical. But now that I found out he is tweeting in Latin, I'm all for it.

Here is Pope Francis' Twitter Feed: https://twitter.com/Pontifex_ln

Kalb Speaks: How to escape the Matrix

Technology, says James Kalb, "leaves out what concerns us most." And yet technology and the education that now exalts it is what we're all supposed to focus on in our educational institutions.

In order to combat this tendency, says Kalb, we must restoring "an understanding of the world that has a place for intelligence and meaning." We must "accept that the world is ordered by reason and meaning":

Academic study itself is less a matter of pure critical thinking oriented toward radically autonomous decision than the transmission of a tradition of inquiry and understanding directed on the one hand toward the good, beautiful, and true, and on the other toward leadership and wisdom. Education is always education into a community based on an understanding of man and the world, so it should always have a religious component and emphasize substantive cultural content. For that reason, liberal education should see itself as fundamentally religious, and emphasize something very much like study of the classics. A religious setting makes it possible to make sense of all else, while classical studies provide the discipline of close attention to extremely high-quality texts that present the viewpoint of free and active men capable of handling whatever comes their way. It is hard to imagine a better school for leadership and wisdom, or for the search for truth.

Read the rest here.

The Book of the Future

As a follow on to my somewhat controversial post in which I said that the demise of the print edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica meant the end of Western civilization as we know it, I am posting a different vision of the future, after electronic devices have taken over our lives.

More evidence that public schools are hopeless

This story is being filed in the "Why education reform never works" file.

According to the News & Observer, North Carolina school districts are "using their Race to the Top funds to advance structural reform by… purchasing iPads." Durham, N.C., says the report, is spending $3.5 million in Race to the Top funds to “put Apple iPads in the hands of students and teachers at two low-performing schools.” “Our kids are telling us, ‘This is how we learn. This is what we want,’” says Durham Public Schools Superintendent Eric Becoats.

Yeah. I bet. They probably want lunch time extended to three hours, but don't tell Superintendent Becoats. Says Frederick Hess at Education Next:

Ah-ha, yes, this is the change we’ve been waiting for. Look, I own an iPad. I like the iPad. But I’ll tell you, when I’ve been to schools that feature one-to-one computing, personal computers, and iPads, they seem to get mostly used in one of two ways. Neither impresses me. The first involves students working on graphics, clip art, powerpoints, or adding sound and visual effects to video shorts. The second is students Googling their way to Wikipedia for material to cut-and-paste into powerpoints or word files.

This was all brought home to me again, just the other week, when I had a chance to spend a couple days visiting acclaimed “technology-infused” high schools. Yet, most of what I saw the technology being used for was either content-lite or amounted to students using Google-cum-Wikipedia as a latter day World Book Encyclopedia. Making powerpoints and video shorts is nice, but it’s only us “digital tourists” who think it reflects impressive learning.

I'm sure I will be attacked once again as an enemy of public education, but with friends like those in the Durham, North Carolina school district, public schools don't need enemies like me.

Consumers, you have nothing to lose but your chains

Over at the increasingly excellent agrarian blog, Front Porch Republic, an excerpt from the upcoming The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry, co-edited by Mark Mitchell. This is an excerpt of the excerpt:

After utility, people are for freedom. That is, without the ability to provide for our own needs and the needs of those closest to us, we are less than fully human. [Wendell] Berry clearly recognizes that certain tools magnify human freedom while others diminish it. It is interesting, again, to note [Ivan] Illich’s essential characterization of industrialization as a form of imprisonment:

People need not only to obtain things, they need above all the freedom to make things among which they can live, to give shape to them according to their own tastes, and to put them to use in caring for and about others. Prisoners in rich countries often have access to more things and services than members of their families, but they have no say in how things are to be made and cannot decide what to do with them. Their punishment consists in being deprived of what I shall call “conviviality.” They are degraded to the status of mere consumers.

Berry advances this argument. Consumers are no better than well-treated prisoners, and the American economy of industrial tools is designed entirely around the project of reducing autonomous tool users into pathetic, imprisoned consumers. The essential characteristic of their imprisonment is a loss of what we have been calling, according to
Illich’s categories, conviviality.

The industrial age has given us many tools, says Berry, “but little satisfaction, little sense of the sufficiency of anything.” This is because the primary product of industrial tools is dissatisfaction and discontent. Perversely, this is by design, for only in dissatisfaction can the user be imprisoned in the status of consumer, always ready to snap up the next thing, helpless to do for himself.

Read the rest here.

More live sightings of the dead language

When you're looking for a name for your new advanced technological innovation, who you gonna call?

Rod Dreher's blog call attention to the next big thing: a "roadable, light sport aircraft": in other words, a airplane that can also drive on the road. The company that is launching this effort (yes, pun intended) is called "Terrafugia, Inc."

Any guesses as to what it means?

The title incorporates two Latin words: terra, meaning earth or land, and fugere, which means to fly (in the sense of fleeing). The new craft is a land fleer, I guess.

I have to point these things out for the sake of the folks who are always telling me that Latin is a dead language.