What if each school in the United States now has all the Tablet PCs and other electronic devices various decision makers will allocate to schools?
I’ve been reading Robert Cowley’s edited book What If? (2001), a collection of essays by eminent historians. Each imagines in one of his specialties how life might have been different, if certain historic decisions had been plausibly different. These imaginings can define true turning points in history.
Historians call these imaginings “counterfactuals.” They show that small accidents or split-second decisions are as likely to have major repercussions as large ones.
For example, consider the sudden fog on the East River that allowed George Washington and his badly beaten army to escape to Manhattan after the Battle of Long Island in the summer of 1776. Without that fog, David McCullough points out, Washington might have been trapped on Brooklyn Heights and forced to surrender. Would the United States have happened? (p. xiv)
George Will points out that the value of these What If? exercises rests in keener appreciation of the huge differences that choice and fortuities (bold added) make in the destiny of nations. (p. xv)
Now, imagine you are an eminent historian in the year 2020 writing about the use of computers during the first decade of the 21st century in United States schools. That means you are writing about schooling and other education of today’s students.
You take nothing for granted and limit your speculation to facts and plausabilities. You know these facts, listed in no particular order of importance (these are facts in 2005):
1. the United States manufactures no personal computers or components.
2. five Asian manufacturers produce most of the computers in the world.
3. these manufacturers allocate some newest products to countries other than the United States, because the U.S. market relies on lowest price, not newest technologies.
4. major United States software publishers out source some software development to Asia and India.
5. small and medium independent U.S. software vendors have extreme difficulty entering the education market with excellent products, because educators require “support” for no extra fee after purchasing or leasing their products.
6. an increasing number of Asian countries require school students to use state-of-the-art personal computers for studies.
7. parents in Taiwan buy a Tablet PC and software for each of their children to use in school.
8. a relatively few United States schools slowly deploy state-of-the-art computers for selected students to use selectively for studies.
9. Asian businesses and agencies have sought unsuccessfully to collaborate with any local education agency in the United States to deploy Tablet PCs in U.S. schools as they have in Taiwan, Singapore, and other Asian countries.
10. The United States spends more money on education than any country in history, and the amount continues to increase annually.
11. U.S. educators remain immune from successful challenges of professional malpractice because of educational decisions they make and actions they take.
Given these facts of 2005, what plausible different decision might an educator have made in 2005 about the use of technologies in a local school? How might that decision have affected students for whom that educator was responsible?
What facts and counterfactuals will you write about U.S. education in the first decade of the 21st century? What judgments will you make about the creative initiative of U.S. educators compared with educators in other countries? How do U.S. school alumni stack up against European, Middle Eastern, Asian, and Indian school alumni?
Where will you be located as you write the recent history of United States education?
How might you use your What If? (counterfactual) perspective to formulate a case statement in 2005 for increasing student achievement and reducing costs per learning unit promptly with and without advanced technology? (In fact, a case statement is a form of a counterfactual statement. A case statement argues for someone to change a decision.)
Hmm. This reads like master’s and doctoral written exam questions I wrote in another life for others to answer. So, I expect you, too, have addressed these kinds of questions before…