Seeking the Middle Way - pt.1
I had an interesting conversation with a former student yesterday. After spending his Freshman year here, he went off to an exclusive ivy-league prep school in New Jersey where, his parents decided, he’d become better prepared to face the world following HS graduation than he would be here in the hinterlands of Southeast Asia.
“Do you use wireless laptops?” I asked.
“We-lll,” he finally said. “Most students have them in their dorms. But there’s a cable plug-in.”
“Mmm,” I thought. “We’d never go back to wired laptops here, now that we’re untethered.”
“How about SmartBoards?” I asked, and once again, I was unprepared for his answer.
“No,” he said. “We still use chalkboards.”
“You mean WhiteBoards?” I countered.
“NO!” he insisted. “We still use green CHALKboards. There are almost no computers in our classrooms.
Needless to say, I was almost speechless. We’re now so heavily invested in technology that even whiteboards are an endangered species here, and we haven’t seen a CHALKboard since we moved to this campus in 1990.
But then I paused to consider, and the reality of the world at large was once again brought home to me. If even in America, there are expensive private schools still using chalkboards and eschewing the “wired” world, what exactly are the percentages of students around the world for whom Web ANYTHING is a reality, much less web2.0?
I haven’t made time yet to search this out, but my own experience tells me that classrooms in MOST schools in China, India, Indonesia and the “have-not” Southeast Asian countries (Myanmar, Vietnam, Laos), and even the “haves” (Thailand and Malaysia, with the possible exception of Singapore) will look more like this one than the wireless laptop, Smartboard-equipped, media-rich environments that we now take for granted in our classrooms. Together, these eight countries account for nearly half the world’s population. The students going to these institutions today will become the next generation’s “Renewable Energy” labor supply.
The point?
Buddhism suggests “the Middle Way” as the path to overcoming “dukkha” (”unsatisfactoryness”) Perhaps a little “Middle Way Thinking” is in order as we strive to ensure that we are preparing our students for the world of tomorrow. Perhaps the expensive prep school still relying on 19th century technology to shape the thinking of students today is onto something. Perhaps their graduates will be better equipped to relate to the “huddled masses” exiting the unwired schools still dominating the landscape of schools around the world than the pampered, gadget-rich graduates of our ultra-wired schools. Perhaps we should all take a step back and “seek the Middle Way” as we prepare to embrace yet another round of “best-yet” educational technologies and practices.
Oh-ohmmm. Manee Padme Ohm…
I, too, have thought about the world “without”. Here is my take on it.