What education must not automate
The seminar, the question and the slow conversation against the logic of the platform
This event is part of a demonstration of what Lera offers for running knowledge events. Its content is written with care and draws on real sources, but the conference has not taken place, and apart from the convener its participants are fictional.
In the Phaedrus, Socrates retells the myth of Theuth: writing gives people the appearance of wisdom, not wisdom itself, and the written word, when questioned, gives no answer. Two thousand four hundred years later we have text that does answer: instantly, fluently, and without being answerable for anything. Education technology companies promise every pupil a private tutor who never tires.
Eleni Papadaki has no quarrel with tools. Her concern is what is lost when education is reduced to "delivering content and measuring outcomes". Gert Biesta has shown that a culture of measurement asks what is effective and forgets to ask what is good. In his account, education has three purposes: qualification, socialisation and subjectification, that is, learning to stand in the world in one's own voice. Automation serves the first purpose well, but it wears down the third.
Her case is the Greek public university. In the years after the debt crisis these universities faced deep budget cuts, merged departments and overcrowded classes. Today automation is offered as a cheap remedy for that very shortage: a machine assistant in place of the lecturer who was never hired. But a shortage created by budgets is not made good by technology; it is only hidden.
Papadaki names three things that must not be automated. First, the question a student does not yet know how to ask, which takes shape only in conversation with someone who knows them. Second, disagreement with a person who answers for their view; arguing with a machine is not practice in debate but practice in solitude. Third, slow reading in common, where meaning is built among several readers. Paulo Freire criticised the "banking" model of education, which deposits knowledge into the pupil's mind. The automated tutor may be the most perfect form of that model.
This is not nostalgia. Digital infrastructure can serve conversation: shared annotation, drafts whose versions are kept, a text read side by side in several languages. The condition is that the human relationship stays at the centre, and that it remains clear who said what and who answers for which words.
Questions for discussion
- If a machine tutor is cheaper, on what argument should society pay for a human teacher?
- Can educational technology be built to strengthen asking rather than answering?
- In a multilingual classroom, what infrastructure does slow conversation need?
References
Plato. 1995. Phaedrus. Translated by Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff. Indianapolis: Hackett.
Biesta, Gert J. J. 2010. Good Education in an Age of Measurement: Ethics, Politics, Democracy. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.
Freire, Paulo. 1970. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Translated by Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: Herder and Herder.