Knee Jerking

Another rant... Weblogg-ed has a series of posts that talk about how schools are locking down access to 'net based resources. This is something that seems to be the norm in schools rather than the exception. It seems that education has got to be the slowest institution to accept change. We are just now starting to break away from the idea that school rooms are "squares with chairs" despite the best efforts of many other stake holders and power brokers to maintain the status quo. Technology has the ability to quickly update classrooms, but it requires the generation that is teaching and administering the schools that children are now attending to learn something new. Maybe this is the reason why computers, and other technologies have been so strongly resisted in education. Teachers are afraid of losing power in the classroom, they know that they likely have little support for trying something new out and they have parents that are oversensitive and overprotective. Admin wants to make sure the parents are happy to keep students attending their school. These two factors do not make it easy for new elements to get into schools because the system seems to be set up to take the safest route. This is unfortunately something that is unlikely to change for a very long time. As much as it seems that training institutions push to create techno-aware teachers, the mass of teachers in the field who will not or cannot make use of technology will hold the new teachers back. There is no easy solution, but whatever solution is found, it will have to be system wide and include support for not only the school staff but the parents as well.