\pm\luke [FINAL VERSION 10/28]

By Douglas Kellner

I was pleased to see that in their paper "Adolescence Lost/Childhood Regained: On Early Intervention and the Emergence of the Techno-Subject," Allan and Carmen Luke deployed a critical post-structuralist Hegelian framework to articulate transformations in the situation of youth and the need to reconstruct education and promote new literacies appropriate to the new material conditions, transformations, and subjectivities emerging in the contemporary era. While some educational applications of poststructuralism, feminism, and postmodern theories reject Hegelian and other modern discourses out of hand as excessively totalizing or reductive, the Lukesí convincingly argue that broad-ranging and robust new theories are needed to grasp the changing social and psychological conditions of life in a globalized, high-tech and digitized world. They also convincingly argue that dramatic transformations of education are necessary to create subjects and practices appropriate to a new global society, digitized culture, and world of new identities, social relations, and cultural forms.

I would agree that something like a quasi-Hegelian and Marxian theory of society and history is necessary to describe and map the new historical stages, developments, and breaks, while certain forms of postmodern theory derived from Lyotard, Baudrillard, and others reject the very theoretical resources needed to analyze the "postmodern condition" that postmodern theorists evoke. For a too radical postmodern theory fetishizes breaks and differences (i.e. Baudrillard) whereas more dialectical theories can present continuities and discontinuities, theorizing ruptures and novel conditions as well as connections with the past.

Of course, some versions of the Hegelian philosophy of history are excessively totalizing, idealist, reductive, teleological and ideological, and the Lukes avoid these pitfalls by mediating Hegelian/modern conceptions with poststructuralist epistemologies and analyses of emergent postmodern conditions that put in question previous pedagogies and educational philosophies. They also suggestively deploy poststructuralist ideas to democratize and reconstruct education, combining modern and postmodern perspectives, theory and practice.

My remarks will address three dimensions of what I take to be the Lukesí contributions in their recent article to philosophy of education today: 1) Articulating the novel life conditions, subjectivities, and identities of youth; 2) cultivating new multiple literacies to respond to new technologies and the challenges of globalization; and 3) on the basis of these analyses to propose a radical restructuring and democratization of education.

The Lukes argue that current educational systems, curricula, and pedagogies were designed for the production of a laboring subject who has become an "endangered species" in the current economic, social, and cultural system. Modern education was constructed to develop a compliant work force who would gain skills of print literacy and discipline that would enable them to function in modern corporations and a corporate economy based on rational accounting, commercial organization, and discursive communicative practices, supported by manual labor and service jobs. The life trajectory for a laboring modern subject was assumed to be stable and mappable, progressing through K-12 schooling, to Universities and perhaps onto professional schools or higher degrees, to well-paying jobs that would themselves offer life-time employment, a stable career, and solid identities.

All of this, the Lukes suggest, has changed in a global economy marked by constant restructuring, flux and rapid change, and new material conditions and subjectivities. Students coming into schools have been shaped by years of computer and video games, television, a variety of music technologies and forms, and new spheres of multimedia and interactive cyberculture. Moreover, the steady jobs that were waiting for well-disciplined and performing students of the previous generation are disappearing, while new jobs are appearing in the high-tech sector, itself subject to chaotic booms, busts, and restructuring. And as the September 11 terrorist attacks on the U.S. and their chaotic aftermath have demonstrated, life in a high-tech and global society is much more complicated, fragile, and subject to dramatic disruptions and transformations than was previously perceived.

There is thus a fundamental misfit between youth life-experience and schooling, the expectations of an older generation concerning labor and new work conditions, and the previous print-based and organizational economy and culture in contrast to the new digital and multimedia based culture and hybridized global economy. Postmodern theorists have amassed cultural capital theorizing such breaks and ruptures, but have had few positive recommendations on how to restructure institutions like schooling (although there are stacks of books, generally of little worth, on how to succeed in the new economy). The Lukesí analysis is distinguished by an attempt to draw the consequences for restructuring education and democratizing society from reflection on new life conditions, experiences, and subjectivities in the light of the connection between the re-formation of labor and new social constructions of subjectivity.

Schooling in the modern era has been largely organized around the transmission of print literacies and segregated academic knowledges based on a modern division of disciplines into such things as social science, literature, or physical education. Schooling authorities have been in a moral panic, the Lukes suggest, by declining literacy test scores and have recommended correctives such as early intervention to help produce stronger print literacy skills at younger ages. The Lukes argue, however, that such projects are misguided because they fail to take account of the new technologies, subjectivities, and demands for the new economy and culture that requires multiple literacies, more flexible subjects, and new skills. The solution, they suggest, is to cultivate in the sphere of education new literacies that will respond to new technologies and cultural conditions and empower students to participate in the new high-tech culture and economy.

In this context, the Lukes argue that early print literacy intervention strategies fail to adequately prepare students with the literacies they need to navigate and negotiate the new economy and culture, and may perpetuate obsolete forms of schooling and culture. I would add here that the increasing emphasis on testing and quantitative scoring that is the basis of the Bush administration and conservative educational philosophy in the U.S. is also woefully flawed and already obsolete as it is rolled out, as are the SAT and most tests that measure student capabilities. These tests are educational technologies with genealogies in an earlier era marked by different social and economic imperatives, cognitive skills necessary for the economy and culture, and different subjectivities. The tests are thus now seriously outdated and in need of change to respond to the challenge of new technologies and a new era of globalization.

However, the new technologies and new literacies require a careful rethinking of education and literacy in response to its new challenges that will involve an era of Deweyan experimental education, trial and error, and research and discovery. In many parts of the world, there are the equivalent of early intervention print projects in the realm of computers, in which computers are put in childrenís hands at an ever earlier age in the hopes of developing multiple computer literacies. There is a raging debate, however, concerning the proper age to expose children to computers and cultivate computer literacy, just as there have been and still are debates over the proper time to begin cultivating print literacy in children.

In the Hegelian concept of Geist, the subject develops through mediations of culture and society in specific historical ways, but encounters contradictions and blockages which are overcome by sublation or Aufhebung, i.e. overcoming obsolete or oppressive conditions that are transcended. In the Lukesí version of the Hegelian dialectic, the new technologies
and conditions of postmodern life are producing new experiences and subjectivities that come into conflict with schooling, itself based on earlier historical subjectivities and congealed institutions, discourses, and practices, modeled on the industrial factory system (i.e. time-parceled segments, staying immobile at a specific site to perform labor, submitting to the discipline of bosses). The optimistic Hegelian scenario is that this conflict can be overcome through an Aufhebung that sublates (i.e. negates, preserves, takes to higher stage) the positivities in the conflict and negates the obsolete aspects. Put more concretely: when there are contradictions between, say, a print-based curriculum and new subjectivities mediated by multimedia, then resolving the contradiction requires going to a higher level; e.g. restructuring schooling to preserve, for instance, the importance of print-based culture and literacy, but also bringing in new literacies and pedagogies to respond to, mediate, and develop in pedagogically progressive ways new technologies that make possible new forms of education and culture.

An Hegelian critique would thus perceive some forms of life, such as schooling, as obsolete, as too-print based in the
conception of literacy, and as exhibiting moral panic in the face of new literacies and experiences. In Hegelian terms, schooling is seen as out of phase with the most advanced aspects of the culture and society, and must be transformed to harmonize with the new economy, technology and culture. In the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan made the argument that there was a misfit between education and children's subjectivities largely because of TV and pop culture-based experience of kids perceptions and subjectivities in terms of mosaics, patterns, oral culture, and images. In Hegelian (world-historical) terms, however, I don't think you could justify a restructuring of education on the basis of childrenís immersion in television and media culture. McLuhanís critique overburdens the allegedly transformative effects of television and popular culture on ë60s youth. Moreover, the McLuhan vision arguably exaggerates the role of oral and tribal culture in the construction of new subjectivities, in addition to deploying problematic distinctions between hot and cool media and making a host of hyperbolic claims.

However, I do believe that by substituting computers and new multimedia technology for television and the media of McLuhanís day, one can argue that there are now significant transformations of the economy and culture that lend more credence to sweeping McLuhanesque proclamations concerning the obsolescence of modern education institutions. For one thing, the economic and cultural global restructuring going on in the world today is done on the basis of the most advanced sector of the new economy and culture (i.e. information and multimedia technology) penetrating ever more realms of life from entertainment to labor to schooling. Thus, the reconstruction of education on the grounds that socio-economic, cultural, and the material conditions of everyday life and labor are changing is a reasonable response to the great transformations now underway.

Thus, following the calls of some neo-McLuhanites and the digerati, we need to transform education to bring us into the next millennium, to meet the demands of new economy, and to make education relevant to the contemporary world. There are, however, several caveats necessary in pursuing this argument. First, one needs to take seriously the Hegelian notion of Aufhebung, or sublation, in relation to print literacy since the ability to read and write linguistic texts and communication is arguably more important than ever in the new multimedia environment which is still significantly text-based (i.e. e-mail, chat rooms, list-serves, even much of the world wide web consists of text-based archives). To be sure, new multimedia and computer literacies are necessary but they need to be articulated with print literacy, in which multiple literacies enable students and citizens to negotiate word, image, graphics, video, and multimedia digitized culture.

Moreover, one needs to reconstruct education not to fulfill the agenda of capital and the high-tech industries, but to radically democratize education in order to advance Deweyan conceptions of the development of individuality, the promotion of citizenship and community, and the strengthening of democractic participation in all modes of life. Thus, one needs to accompany demands for new literacies and a restructuring of education with a program of the democratization of education, as I suggest in my concluding remarks.

In calling for the reconstruction of education to promote new literacies as a response to new technologies and globalization, one encounters the problem of the "digital divide." It has been well-documented that some communities, or individuals in privileged groups, are exposed to more advanced technologies and given access to more high-tech skills and cultural capital than those in less privileged communities. One way to overcome the divide, and thus a whole new set of inequalities that mirror or supplement modern divides of class, gender, race, and education, is to restructure education so that all students have access to new technologies and new literacies, so that education is democratized, and the very learning process and relation between student and teacher is rethought.

The Lukes suggestively note that the Hegelian Master/Slave dialectic characterizes relations between students and teachers today in which teachers force their curricula and agendas onto students in a situation in which there may be a mismatch between generational cultural and social experiences and even subjectivities. Educators, students, and citizens must recognize this generational divide and work to overcome conflicts and make differences more productive. That is, many students may be more technologically skilled than teachers and can themselves be important pedagogical resources. I know that much of what Iíve learned about how to use computers Iíve learned from students, and continue to draw upon them both in and out of class to help me navigate the new high-tech culture and to devise productive pedagogies and practices for the contemporary era (for examples, see my websites for recent technology and education and cultural studies seminars at UCLA, accessible from my home page at http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/kellner.html).

In general, democratizing education can be enhanced by more interactive and participatory forms of education such as list-serves, the collective building of websites, on-line discussion, and collaborative computer-based research projects. But the restructuring of education also requires cultivating literacy concerning limitations of Internet-based knowledge and the need for library inquiry and accessing books as important pedagogical resources. For learning and teaching, books and print-based materials and multimedia web-based materials should be seen as supplementary and not as oppositional, in which one is uncritically favored over the other, as some traditionalists privilege print literacy and book culture, while some of our contemporaries excessively celebrate the Internet and cyberculture.

In addition, a Hegelian-Deweyan philosophy of education would envisage merging class-based Socratic discussion with computer research and projects that would combine oral, written, and multimedia cultural forms in the process of education without privileging one or the other. Some educators still insist that face-to-face dialogue in the classroom is the alpha and omega of good education and while there are times that classroom dialogue is extremely productive, it is a mistake, I believe, to fetishize face-to-face conversation, books and print media, or new multimedia. Rather the challenge is to draw upon in an experimental and supplemental way all of these dimensions of the educational process to restructure and democratize eduation.

Finally, I would suggest that since concrete reconstructions of education will take place in specific local and national contexts, the mix between classroom pedagogy, books and reading print-material, and multimedia and Internet-based education will vary according to locale, age, and the needs and interests of students and teachers. The idea behind multiliteracies is that diverse and multimodal forms of culture blend in lived experience to form new subjectivities. The problem with educational institutions is that they become fixed in monomodal instruction with homogenized lesson plans, curricula, and pedagogy. New media enable teachers and students to break with these models and to engage in Deweyan experimental education. New pedagogies could help create subjects better able to negotiate the complexities of emergent forms of everyday life, labor, and culture, as we evolve in the new millennium. Whereas modern mass education tended to see life in a linear fashion based on print models and developed pedagogies which broke experience into discrete moments and behavioral bits, new pedagogies could produce skills that enable individuals to better navigate the multiple realms and challenges of contemporary life. Deweyan education focused on problem-solving, goal-seeking projects, and the courage to be experimental, and it is this sort of education and spirit that will help produce new pedagogies for a new millennium. It is the virtue of the Lukesí article to raise these issues and I look forward to future discussion.