The subsummation of 21st century education into an advanced capitalist framework reaches its Zenith in Jose Ferreira’s recent polemic on The Hollywoodization of Education. Ferreira is CEO of Knewton, a self-described ‘adaptive learning company’. It’s actually a euphemism for edutainment in education rather than any serious attempt at marketing the pedagogical understanding of how children learn and what kinds of knowledge and skills they need to acquire in the 21st century.
His opening observation adulating the large amounts of money that Harvard Business School Professor’s make set the tone for his comments. Yet, he purposefully ignores the average monthly teacher salaries, and the terms and conditions of teachers in countries like India, Nepal, Bangladesh to name a few of the developing countries with outdated, and under resourced educational systems (and poor internet/online infrastructures). He also neglects other more developed countries like New Zealand, Australia and Ireland where teachers seldom earn up to $50,000-60,000 annually.
Ferreira offers no coherent argument in affording celebrity status to online teachers and his views and opinions tend to reflect other well-meaning (but misguided) Digital entrepreneurs who preach with an evangelical zeal that the all children (including the 70 million who do not get an education) will be better off if they are schooled via an online medium or through a digitalized curriculum. Ferreira’s claims, like so many other well intentioned, non-educationalists that the internet and other digital tools will bring about ‘star quality teachers’ whose salaries will equal that of movie stars and other notable (and unknowable) celebrities. Quite a claim to make given the lack of evidence over the last 20 years of online learning and educational technologies in our schools and universities
His polemic is a bit of a ramble because he uses the language of education without really understanding what it means. For example he says that a ‘teachers effect on learning outcomes will be much more difficult to measure than that of materials’. It’s a confusing and unreliable claim to make given the multiple variables in measuring teacher effectiveness per se. On the other hand his claim that ‘teachers do much more than textbooks do’ is correct. Teaching and learning is by its very nature a social communicative process, and requires human, 3 dimensional, interpersonal interaction, NOT of the virtual reality kind.
He bases his claim on the very shaky, popularized notion that online and digitalized learning will create a kind of neo-classical, digitalized Mr. Chips (computerized of course!) He argues that “with online courses comes a new yardstick: popularity. Acting ability is only one part of being a movie a movie star: charisma, luck, and project selection matter too. Similarly, teaching ability will only be one part of being a superstar online teacher…showmanship, clarity, mass appeal, production values, etc. will all matter too”
Popularity is a highly questionable quality in the teaching profession today-some of the best teachers we ever learn from may not be popular because they do their job-those that are popular often are not the best teachers.
His claim that the “Hollywoodization” of teaching will facilitate the distribution of “star teachers” and that they will receive salaries of “ millions of dollars” is a fantasy born out of the Hollywood movie tradition about a mis-guided educational experience-we know some them: ‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, ‘To Sir With Love’ ‘Dead Poets Society, Black Board Jungle, to name a few. His ideas may attract the “Bad Teacher” type AKA Cameron Diaz, but in the day-to-day life of teaching and learning, the good to great teachers will continue to be motivated out of their own passion for learning and for making a difference in the lives of the children and young people they teach. They will develop in them a critical awareness of the false promises and sophistry of the profiteer entrepreneurs of the 21st century who seek to exploit education for their own gains.