Technology and education in Western history

     Participants in this course will reflect on how technological changes, primarily changes in communications technologies, entail the reconstruction of established educational purposes and practices.  Such reflections are timely:

• globally people expend vast effort through mature educational institutions affecting nearly everyone;
• for several generations extraordinary changes in transportation and communication have been transforming how people construct and communicate their knowledge, skills, and values; and
• very fundamental growth trends, well-established for a succession of six to ten generations will markedly level off during the span of the next two or three.

     Consider a simple schema representing the global demographics of education in recent and prospective history. . . .

     Let us contemplate our current situation in our study of technology and education in Western history, keeping it in mind, but let us turn away from the flux of present circumstances, to consider in some detail how people, dwelling in a world quite different from our own, first encountered these questions that are ours and theirs as well.  While the issues in A&HH4078 are very current, participants in the course will attend to them by distancing themselves from the present, turning to ancient Greek history, for it provides a case study in how changes in educationally significant communication made established educational practices dubious, and how educators struggled towards new new purposes, practices, and expectations, many of which are still active in our world. 

     Historical inquiry becomes useful as we project ourselves into what is distant and different in order to see what is close and all-too familiar with more penetration and perspective.  Through Technology and education in Western history we will seek to illuminate present concerns by reading and discussing Homer, the pre-Socratics, Greek dramatists, historians, sophists, rhetoricians, and philosophers with close attention to the technologies of communication with which they worked.  The effort should elicit an interpretative understanding of how Plato, his peers, and his predecessors advanced key ideas, each construed as "an action taken by a man in view of a definite situation and for a definite purpose."^[1]

     To help develop our understanding, we will concentrate each week in class on selected discussion readings, a mix of present-day interpretative scholarship and key ancient texts in translation.  The discussion readings are accessible online through the navigation bar to the right.  Participants in A&HH4078 should expect to use online discussion tools to supplement classroom deliberations and those seeking evaluation credit should produce a reflective essay about the historical challenges people contend with in seeking to become well educated persons as communications innovations may be making the established practices available to them obsolete and alternative pedagogies practicable.  A&HH4078 carries no prerequisites and is open to anyone willing to engage in the work of reflective inquiry and who, like Cervantes, prefers the road to the inn.

1. ↑ José Ortega y Gasset, "Prologue to a History of Philosophy" (1942) in Ortega, Concord and Liberty, Helene Weyl, trans., (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1963), p. 99.