XplanaZine

Okay, today I’m going to take a personal skeleton out of the closet. You see, I grew up in a particular fundamentalist Christian branch that did not approve of having instrumental music in the church building. This belief was based on the notion that we should only do things in church that the early Christians did, and there is no evidence that the earliest Christians used musical instruments in their church worship.

Now, before you stop listening, I want to assure you that this podcast is not about religion. I only bring up this personal background for the purposes of illustration.

As you can imagine, younger generations, especially those born after Elvis, weren’t always happy about this “no instruments” restriction. In fact, for many it was more than enough reason to either find another church to attend or to stop going altogether.

Over time, however, the general population of this Christian denomination realized that what had started as a deeply held belief was really nothing more than a unifying and distinctive tradition. How people sang or what they chose to accompany their singing with had nothing to do with core spiritual convictions. A religious life was about a genuine change in perspective and a daily walk on a different path. Singing or yodeling, with or without an instrument, just didn’t matter.

I guess when it comes down to it, I’ve never strayed too far from my evangelical roots. I still tend to evangelize and preach about things that are important to me. And — another confession here — I often think that people who don’t do things my way are a danger to themselves and the rest of society. That’s particularly true if we’re talking about education.

I’ll go a step further with that last one. I am probably on record in more than one place lamenting the “lost” educators out there who won’t embrace new technologies and use them for the betterment of the world. I’m afraid there have been times when, in my excitement, I have allowed technology to become theology, to be like instrumental music was for the people I went to church with in my youth.

Well, let me set the record straight once and for all. I don’t actually believe that technology can or will save us. It certainly won’t revolutionize education as we would like for it to, and it won’t make a difference ultimately in the battle against ignorance, hunger, and war. The only thing that can alter those earthly realities is our minds.

You see, there is always some technology of change that promises to revolutionize the world. There have been “technologies” of the philosophical kind (think Socrates), institutional technologies, classroom instruction technologies, and now Web technologies. They have all promised or threatened to fix the problem. And, ultimately, they have all failed.

They have failed because no technology can fix the problem of learning or really address our need to accrue wisdom. Those are matters of the mind and of the heart.

Now, don’t get me wrong. None of this means that I’m going to give up on preaching to the world about the benefits of technology in education. I simply mean this as a reminder to all of us that the only way we’ll change the system is by changing people’s minds. We need to change their minds about what matters and about why education is really important.

Once their minds are changed about those things, how they go about making a difference doesn’t matter so much. They can use technology or not.

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