“The Prom Will Not Be Webcast”
Eighteen years ago, a far-sighted teacher in Los Angeles presciently warned that distance learning would never be an adequate substitute for human interaction between teachers and students.
Alan Warhaftig retired as a teacher in 2017. Education Week gave him permission to repost this article,and he in turn gave me permission to post it.
Educators may be pillars of the community, but their discourse is as mercurial as Paris fashion. Desperate to find a magic bullet to cure education’s woes, many are willing to embrace new curricula and unproven pedagogies, believing that anything different must necessarily be good. Educators’ current fascination with technology is a vivid example.
There was a time, not long ago, when advocates of educational technology gushed about the prospect of schoolchildren exchanging e-mails with world-class experts on everything. The idea was exciting, even if these world-class experts were hard-pressed to find time to reply to e-mails from each other, let alone from tens of millions of American schoolchildren. Eventually, that rosy vision receded into the distance.
Today, proponents of technology deride traditional schools as limited by a calendar determined by the requirements of agriculture and a delivery system CONTINUE READING: “The Prom Will Not Be Webcast” | Diane Ravitch's blog
