False dichotomies

I believe that life is too complex for simple dichotomies or polarities to reflect the realities of our existence. Such crudities may help shape our personal belief-systems and they may even help us identify who we are or what we are in the maelstrom of life, but they rarely, if ever, reflect accurately the many shades of grey that tend to be the reality in most of life’s circumstances. Why then do people in so many walks of life insist on setting up superficial antagonisms, dividing camps between whichever of the two dubious factions they feel they want to belong to and some imagined opposition? Whenever I see this, I start by wondering: whose interests do such stark polarities serve? It happens in education at least as much as in other walks of life, and I have never been convinced that such simplistic antagonisms do anything to help either our understanding of the needs of learners or our capacity to decide educational policy and practice. And this is true at any level in the education arena, from the micro level in the direct relationships between teachers and learners, to the regional, national, or indeed, global levels of policy making and systemic planning. In the particular sphere of education ICT, what then to make of such crude polarities as: digital immigrant .v. digital native Prensky, of course, was not the first to come up with this simplistic opposition – Don Tapscott’s book “Growing Up Digital” may not have used these precise words but he did set up the same dichotomy between the ‘old technology generations’ and the ‘new technology generation(s)’. There is a basic truth in the terms – it is undeniable that the present generation of young people have grown up within a quite different set of technological parameters than their parents and every generation before them. If we take from this is that the learning needs of young people today are different – indeed, dramatically different - and if we can use that knowledge to work out how best to meet their learning needs, that is fine. But we also need to understand a few other basic truths: one is that within the category ‘digital native’ there are just as many shades of difference as within any other previous generation – the ‘native’ can never be an undifferentiated category; another is that ‘digital native’ is not a badge of honour - it is a crudely simplistic categorisation of a massive swathe of the world’s population. Pride in being a digital native is a bit like being proud of being 14 years old or 49 years old! believer .v. non-believer Incredibly, I saw this used recently in the inane context of ‘belief’ in the power of Web 2.0. The gallant few who are fighting the good fight for social networks, Web 2.0, social software, etc, see themselves as ‘believers’ in a cause – everyone else is a non-believer. Even George Bush only goes as far as: “if you’re not for us, you’re agin us”. The Web 2.0 believers take it further: “if you’re for anything other than Web 2.0, then you’re agin us.” It’s nice, of course, to feel part of a movement, to see yourself as one of the ‘few against the many’. Good luck to anyone who takes this view but I wonder if they realise just how much damage they do to their own ‘cause’ by such simplistic categorisation. reactive .v. proactive This is one that anyone can use, of course, especially if you are more than willing to give way to your own prejudices and to eschew the need for careful thought and the weighing of evidence. Few people are willing to admit they are a bad driver, and equally few are willing to see themselves cast as reactive rather than proactive. Is not everything we do in part reactive and in part proactive necessarily? We react to circumstances and we determine both our response to those circumstances and the strategy we need to adopt to deal with the situation we find ourselves in. In every sphere of education, as in every aspect of life, we need to be able to plan ahead, to innovate, to make real progress – but we do all these things in reaction to the conditions we meet. To do otherwise is to pretend we live in a social and historical vacuum. A critical aspect of wisdom, as anyone in Lebanon at the moment could tell us, is about knowing the harm that the bunker mentality can do. When we fight for a cause, we cannot afford to see the real complex multifarious people at the sharp end of that fight for what they actually are, so we tell ourselves that they all belong to some broad, vague category that we are content to throw our weapons at. This is just as true when those weapons are ‘mere’ words. Those throwing such weapons need to draw back and assess their own motives in using them. Dialogue, negotiation, common ground, diversity, communication, cooperation – all easy to talk about but hard to achieve in the real world because they require compromise, maturity and a personal willingness not just to recognise differences but also to celebrate them in our words and deeds.

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© John Connell
The views expressed in this weblog are entirely my own and are not intended to reflect the views of any other individuals or organizations. All sources will be fully acknowledged.