Abstract:

At the turn of the last century the United States was ablaze with the promise of progressive hope. Dewey and other educators looked toward a time when all students, no matter their national heritage, would have access to free education and more importantly, to an opportunity to carve for themselves paths for success. This meant understanding their newly adopted culture and learning to participate in the processes and promises of a democratic society. Schools began to follow these ideals and classrooms evolved into centers for interactive learning that respected the learner and encouraged a respect for what we now call “prior knowledge”. This effort lasted but a short time, as politicians found that this kind of education empowered future workers who challenged authority and threatened a firmly entrenched status quo. As a result, the progressive era died, taking with it the dreams and hopes of many educators who knew both intuitively and factually that such an educational opportunity yielded more successful and independent thinkers, creating opportunities for all students, irrespective of their backgrounds, to become fully engaged citizens.

Dewey and others held dear a commitment to civic engagement which requires those in the population to establish a sense of community and to build coalitions, to promote the welfare of everyone, and to create social change when necessary. There is no better way to enhance civic effort than to provide quality educational experiences for all citizens. Unfortunately access to higher education in the United States and throughout many parts of the world has remained inaccessible to the vast majority of people. Historically, the knowledge contained within our universities has been closely guarded and often only available for an elite group of citizens deemed talented enough to partake in the knowledge. As a result, the majority of the world’s citizens are limited in their capacity to become fully engaged citizens and contributors to their respective communities and societies.

The advent of the Internet and the technological innovations that come with it (streaming video, document posting, electronic libraries, government and private sector informational websites, etc.) now provides a mechanism for the sharing of knowledge that was previously contained exclusively in the libraries of universities around the world. This presentation will focus on the educational and social implications of technological innovations that bring knowledge closer to all people of the world. Special attention will be paid to innovations that use the internet as a platform for sharing scholarship such as MIT’s Open Courseware which makes more than 1890 MIT courses available to anyone with Internet access at no charge, guided by the philosophy that “knowledge is a public good and when shared, benefits us all”.

Keywords:

progressive education, technology, public good.