3 Difficult-To-Swallow Truths About The History Of Education And The Future Of Technology 2

3. There’s A Fundamental Flaw In The Way We Think About Education
Despite the fact that we believe we have made progress, our current system looks an awful lot like the totalitarian one Plato proposed. Why shouldn’t it? It worked well for centuries. The problem is that today, our digital technologies have connected and networked us in such a way that the separatist agenda that marked Plato’s description of education is no longer maintainable.
Digital media has created a counter-intuitive reversal. You can no longer tell young folks that the faraway people with whom they play Minecraft are morally and ethically objectionable; they know that, on some level, all players think alike. They share the epistemological attributes that define Generation Blockhead.
The world is not bigger, but smaller. Now we all interact with others, in faraway places, regularly—not only with our neighbors, but also with people and locations that we may never physically encounter.
So, why is education currently under debate? Why do some people claim that it is failing? Why do others insist that it is not? Because there’s a fundamental flaw in the foundation that Plato inadvertently laid for all future education systems. And the technologies of the 21^st Century have opened that deficiency up to extreme vulnerability. Plato never imagined a world in which obstacles posed by distance and time could be overcome by technology. He never imagined, in an ancient world fragmented into separate kingdoms and city-states, that there would come a time at which the globe would approach total unity and inclusivity.
Plato’s view of education seemed to require haves and have-nots, geo-political conflict, and colonial expansion. He saw education as the process that established a cultural identity which is fortified by defining each society in opposition to others. We’ve built our whole educational structure upon his foundation, but now we are discovering that the foundation is rapidly crumbling, and the structures that stand atop it are collapsing.
What’s worse, we fail to fix things because we don’t want to talk about fundamentals and foundations. We get caught up in the shadows. We mistake the content for the purpose. We don’t ask what kind of society we want to create. We don’t ask what people need to know to participate in a global society. Instead, we ask: what skills do they need?
But we can’t patch education’s bugs with a technological fix. Instead we need to fundamentally rethink how we want to contextualize literacy and numeracy. We need to ask what kind of emotional, intellectual, social, and ethical knowledge citizens need in a global society.

What’s confusing is that Plato’s Republic was not prescriptive. He didn’t want the system he described. Instead, he was trying to show readers the essential political, educational, and ethical qualities of a society that valued unregulated growth and expansion.

forbes.