1, 2, 3 on my mark... pretend

I am struggling with a piece of scribbling for a book (web2 and education, groan!) but came across some writing of one of my favourite thinkers in this hype-ridden space: Michael Wesch. He enjoys mixed reviews. The academy can be downright bitchy at times, particularly when it sees a relatively junior academic draw serious attention to himself due to some pretty clever and interesting YouTube contributions as well as some excellent presentations that have been posted online. I'm a fan as you may have gathered. Michael was contributing to a recent debate run by Britannica called Brave New Classroom 2. He was writing about students just playing a game to get by and noted a piece by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner written over 40 years ago. In a piece entitled "Pursuing Relevance: where is the problem?" they wrote about a project assignment around ancient cultures (Greek and Roman). A small portion of their commentary runs like this:

The most depressing aspect of this piece of pretentious trivia is that to most people nothing seems wrong with it. Indeed, it may even be thought of as reflecting a “progressive” idea or two. (After all, aren’t students asked to work in small groups and do ‘projects’?) Clearly, defenders of ‘high standards’ would have no cause for complaint here. The same is true for makers of standardized texts, ‘transmitters of our cultural heritage’, and lovers of ‘basic education’ everywhere. Perhaps even most of the students for whom this ‘unit of work’ is intended would approve of it. But if they do, we can be sure their approval rests largely on a carefully cultivated schizophrenia that is necessary, in present circumstances, to their academic survival. (Mencken once wrote that the main thing children learn in school is how to lie.) The children know that none of these questions has anything to do with them, and the game that is being played does not require that the questions do. The game is called ‘Let’s Pretend’, and if its name was chiselled into the front of every school building in America, we would at least have an honest announcement of what takes place there. The game is based upon a series of pretences which include: ‘let’s pretend that you are not who you are and that this sort of work makes a difference to your lives; let’s pretend that what bores you is important, and that the more you are bored, the more important it is; let’s pretend that there are certain things everyone must know, and that both the questions and answers about them have been fixed for all time; let’s pretend that your intellectual competence can be judged on the basis of how well you can play Let’s Pretend.

Which simply says that the issues that KPS-style work is seeking to address ain't new!