Is There Social Justice Or just Apathy?

I have come to realize, perhaps a bit late, but still in time to make a difference, that teaching, reinforcing, and providing technology to students is more than an enrichment to their learning. Because of the costs involved, and the ever changing nature of both the hardware and the software, not to mention the complexities of both keeping students safe, and protecting the servers from corruption, schools face a massive expense that will never be satiated. Even in schools that have the money, personnel, and resources to provide technology to all their staff and students, there is no guarantee that they will be able to sustain this from year to year, or even between bonds and levies. So how can they meet the needs of our culture and society? How will they prepare students to be fluent in technology? If they already have some level of technology, who has access to it? And, if they determine that they simply cannot afford to keep pace with technology, does this decision then doom the students to very limited opportunities in the future? I can see now, that this issue becomes a fight for what is right for students. Just as trying to teach all children to read without having access to books is an issue worth fighting for.

Long ago in my early life as a teacher (before NCLB, when a BFA was enough to be a teacher) I spoke with a consultant about the condition of our school facility. She pointed out many many failings; broken lighting in the restrooms, dirty, peeling paint, stained ceilings, and minimal if any working technology. The thing she said that has stayed with me for these past 20 years was her conviction that students will NOT take school seriously until the grown-ups treat the school as a serious place, worthy of care and attention. She said a kid walks down the hall and into a bathroom at this school and all around them they see decay, and apathy. Then that same student goes to the mall, and what do they see? Things are clean, well cared for, and there is a computer on every counter in every store. Then she asked us if we thought our students were going to take school seriously, if it looked the way it did? The answer was a resounding NO! By not providing a professional environment for students to learn in, we are saying it is not important, or at the very least, that it is not as important as the mall. Therefore, schools must find ways to provide a reasonable, and useful amount of technology for all students, or they must admit that they are merely training a generation of unskilled laborers to flood the marketplace. Sure, the students will have to pass the standardized tests, and sure, they will be qualified to graduate. But if they do not know how to use a computer, how will they be qualified to work in a job, or attend a college, trade school, or other higher education establishment, with little or no computer literacy? It will fall to these entities to then spend their own funds to train our students. Some will, but most will not. At that point, only the students who's schools had the resources will be able to succeed. This is a social injustice as profound as the segregated schools of our past. In the article "Social Justice - Choice or Necessity?" by Colleen Swain and David Edyburn, they state,

"Our students will most likely obtain jobs we cannot even imagine. In 1992, the U.S. Department of

Labor’s SCANS report noted that at least 80% of all jobs in the next two decades would require workers

to be technologically fluent. This means if workers are not well prepared in using

technology to succeed in the workplace, they will be forced to take low-paying jobs with limited potential for advancement." They go on to point out,

"At many universities, admission standards for incoming freshman continue to rise. Even if an incoming freshman is highly gifted, if he or she is not extremely familiar with using technology in the learning environment, that student is at a decided disadvantage the second he or she steps onto the university or college campus.

The battle lines are already drawn. I can see why schools struggle to afford technology, and the resources to support it. But I see much more clearly, the cost of not doing EVERYTHING in our power to provide technology for every student. I have fought this fight for theatre technology in many schools in Vancouver. I have pointed out to school board members, facilities administrators, architects, and teachers (with grant money to spend) that we should be ashamed of ourselves for teaching students in this decade/century/millennium on equipment that has been out of date since the early 80s. How can we say we can't afford to upgrade? We got our money's worth out of that old piece of "gear", but it's time for a change. If we do not upgrade, we will soon become known for our policy of cranking out very poorly prepared students. Then I ask two pointed questions: Is this really the BEST we can do? and secondly, are we really SO, SO, POOR, that we cannot afford to prepare our students for the actual, real world, that we are going to send them into in just a few short months or years? If these questions do not, at the very least, embarrass them into action, it often results in starting to turn the great "bureaucratic ocean freighter" to consider it for the following budget session. I can wait, but our kids shouldn't have to.

While I may have been able to procure technology used for theatrical productions, I am still working out how I might obtain the technology used in most, if not all companies, universities, and even to access information from public libraries. The fight for this technology needs to happen because students need to be capable of not just understanding how a computer works, but how to use it, when to use it, why one needs to use it, and what other technologies are related, supportive, or parallel to it. And that is just to have the basic, bare bones abilities for the next half of the decade. There are resources available to help schools, but the problem still seems to be solved using outside bandaids, rather than seeing this as a duty and responsibility of the schools themselves. As I see it now, this is a facet of education that has the potential to create a rift in our culture, ironically at a time when we are pushing for best practices to be used in all classrooms, and when our duty as educators requires us to LEAVE NO CHILD BEHIND.

My goal for the future is thus: to fight for and obtain as much technology as I can, and to use that technology to prepare students for as rich and exciting a life as I have had. Others may disagree with me, but in my eyes, they are just itchin' for a fight. So meet me out on the "Flanders Field" of this war, the war for our students' future. But before you do, a word of caution; I may have brought my laser guns.