A Position at the Switchboard

jacob shatzer

If you’ve waxed poetic lately about the challenges of teaching with technology, you wouldn’t be the first:

Mr. Edison says

That the radio will supplant the teacher.

Already one may learn languages by means of Victrola records.

The moving picture will visualize

What the radio fails to get across.

Teachers will be relegated to the backwoods.

With fire-horses,

And long-haired women;

Or, perhaps shown in museums.

Education will become a matter 

Of pressing the button.

Perhaps I can get a position at the switchboard.[1]

I love how that final phrase encapsulates some of my more pessimistic moments thinking about the future of education, or the “new normal,” or whatever the case may be. Perhaps I can get a position at the switchboard!

Anxiety about technological disruption is of course not new, and certainly not new to education. Right now, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, I feel it in different ways. On the one hand, it’s clear to me that so many students want and need something more than digital devices can give them. At Union, students have returned en masse (with higher than our normally high retention rates), excited to be together again, learning. But at the same time, difficulties mount in education around the country, and technology is always close at hand as a potential solution. There are also some great new ideas emerging about how to leverage technology in innovative, student-centered ways. Vacillating between feeling more needed and less needed can be dizzying.

I found this poem in a book about the ends of teaching and learning. In it, Neil Postman argues that questions surrounding education fall into at least two categories: engineering problems and metaphysical problems.[2] Engineering problems are about how to accomplish education, but the metaphysical problems are about what Postman calls the “gods” education serves, of the narratives that give the overall, all-encompassing, life-sustaining and life-draining framework in which the education makes sense. Typically technical in nature, the engineering problems tend to make a lot of noise lately. How will I provide material and guidance to my quarantined students? Will I record class sessions, and if so, how? (I briefly considered purchasing a GoPro and getting student volunteers to run the thing but ultimately settled on a small voice recorder with a lapel mic so that I could maintain my peripatetic aisle-wandering without needing to give a thought to camera angles during class.) One of the dangers is that technology certainly has a role in these “engineering” questions, but as Postman highlights, technology is also one of the “gods” that schooling can be tempted to serve!

But the way we avoid a world in which we’re all just applying for positions at the switchboard is to make sure that we distinguish between engineering questions and metaphysical questions, and recognize that sometimes we might have to give engineering answers (remote learning, for instance) that we might not have wanted to give previously. But with careful thought and disciplined leadership, we can make sure we don’t give engineering answers to metaphysical problems, and we can do our best to make sure we don’t forget that both questions exist, even as we’re consumed with thinking about education in the midst of a pandemic. When the engineering problems are the loudest, we must find ways to order them properly within the bigger questions, the “metaphysical” ones, in Postman’s parlance.

This book reminds me that education is something handed down, a gift. It doesn’t exist only in a technological economy, or in the world of tuition and fees, but ultimately in personal relationships between students and teachers, students and students, and teachers and teachers.

I’m reminded of this not primarily by what Postman writes in the book, but because of how I came across this volume. I’ve heard of Postman and appreciated his other work, but I didn’t know of this book until I was looting the office shelves of my retired colleague and mentor. This friend has gifted me with so much through the years, guiding me through graduate school and early teaching jobs, playing an important role in my return to my alma mater, introducing me to Indian food, housing my family for a time, leaving countless books for me in my office. This volume contains evidence from his own journey: tucked in I discovered the book’s 1997 Waterstone’s receipt, from Louisville, where he first taught full time. I couldn’t help but be reminded of his journey as a teacher, the places he’s been, the lives he’s impacted. It’s people like him who give me hope that my calling can continue to draw me into meaningful work—confronting both engineering and metaphysical problems in education, yes—something beyond a position at the switchboard.

[1] Quoted in Neil Postman, The End of Education : Redefining the Value of School (New York: Vintage, 1996), 49-50; quoting Larry Cuban, Teachers and Machines (New York: Teachers College Press, 1986), 5; quoting Virginia Church, “Antiquated” (1925).

[2] Postman, End of Education, 6.

Jacob Shatzer is assistant provost, associate dean, and associate professor of theological studies at Union University in Jackson, Tennessee.