It has also been posted on Jiemian; for reposting, please contact Jiemian~
When it was published, the title was changed somewhat clickbaity, becoming “It Is Hard for a Screen Alone to Change the Fate of Education; Bullet Chat May Be Able To.” In fact, that sentence is not quite accurate. What I meant was that there may be many ways to change the fate of education, and this screen may not be the right direction. But since we’re dealing with mass media, I’m willing to accept a bit of clickbait in the title; the content itself was not changed much.
When it was published, I deleted a middle section, “The Technological History of Distance Education.” In fact, the piece flows a bit more smoothly without it, but I’m still including the original text here. The theme of this section can be further explored in research on the history of science and technology.
A Live-Stream Class or an Elite Class?
Recently, the Cold Point Weekly of China Youth Daily published “This Screen May Change Destiny,” which sparked widespread reposting and commentary. The report noted that over the past three years, 72,000 students from more than 200 schools in impoverished areas followed the teaching of Chengdu No. 7 High School in its entirety through online live streaming, and in the end 88 of them were admitted to Tsinghua and Peking University.
For those students who were admitted to Tsinghua and Peking University, their fate was indeed changed. But the authors and reposts of this article seem to have wanted to express some higher expectation—that new technology can promote educational equality. The article mentions that “as early as 2002, Sichuan Province had already taken distance education as an important measure to promote fairness,” and more than ten years later, it seems that at last there is a result worth showing off.
But to what extent this achievement can actually be credited to the use of distance education is highly questionable. In fact, the article also writes about the countless efforts made by local schools, teachers, and students to support live-streamed teaching, such as: “After No. 7 High finishes an exam, the teachers work through the night to grade and analyze hundreds of test papers, and the next day they discuss the results. Many local teachers say this would take a week to complete and is simply unimaginable, but now they have to keep up, and the whole school has become more tightly organized.” “At Luquan No. 1 High School, most of the children in the live-stream class sleep only four or five hours a day over the course of three years.” … And perhaps these efforts should be credited more to the local education system’s emphasis and supervision. Even without video live streaming, if the education systems in impoverished areas could maintain such strict standards, if every school became so “tightened up,” would college entrance exam scores not improve?
From the report, it seems that no control group was set up for comparison, and we do not even know whether the schools and students chosen for the live-stream class were already among the better ones to begin with.
This is a very crucial issue. We know that gathering the most outstanding students and the best teachers together to form an “elite class” is an ancient and effective teaching method. Elite classes can undoubtedly significantly improve the成绩 of elite students, but the problem is that, out of concern for educational fairness, this form is not encouraged, and has even become taboo. But if the organizational form of these “live-stream classes” is in the first place a kind of “elite class,” then higher results from such classes may not prove the significance of distance education; on the contrary, they may intensify our worries about educational fairness.
In addition, trumpeting admission to Tsinghua and Peking University as the achievement of education is itself rather questionable. First, this is a matter for a tiny number of top students and cannot reflect the general level of education; second, the number of admission slots at Tsinghua and Peking University will not expand as distance education is promoted. Distance education may allow some impoverished areas to gain an advantage over other impoverished areas, but it may not increase the number of places available to all impoverished areas by much. We can see that, after receiving the same classroom content, the more than 200 schools in impoverished areas together could only match one top high school in a big city in the number of students admitted to Tsinghua and Peking University. Even if distance education were extended to all impoverished areas, it still would not change the huge gulf between impoverished and developed regions.
The Technological History of Distance Education
Let us calm down after this “good news” and think again about the issue of distance education. We quickly notice that “this screen” is nothing new. Its defining feature is merely to broadcast the image of one classroom in another classroom; the relevant technical means could have been achieved long ago as soon as television existed, and did not require any of the new technologies of the internet age at all. In many respects, even the postal age form of “correspondence education” could do the job—for example, something that one science-topper in a live-stream class liked to talk about with delight: “Many subjects send over a dozen test papers at once … which is of great benefit for college entrance exam prep.” The question is, the system for obtaining excellent test papers could already have done this hundreds of years ago. Why is it still such a rare thing today?
The concept of “distance education” resurfaced in a wave of enthusiasm with the rise of internet MOOCs, but it really is nothing new. So over the past decades, even over the past century, haven’t there already been many practices in the field of “distance education”? If having excellent schools “send over test papers” is indeed so good, shouldn’t it already have become a commonplace norm long ago?
Seen this way, the fact that we are still full of anticipation for the future of distance education today is itself not very encouraging—because if distance education truly could significantly promote educational equality, then it should have already shown its value in the television age or even earlier, rather than only now leaving us feeling novel. Therefore, rather than looking optimistically toward the future, we would do better to turn back and look at the technological history of distance education.
Written text may have been the first “distance education” technology. It changed the condition in which knowledge could be passed on only through direct face-to-face teaching from master to apprentice, and made it possible for knowledge to spread across the barriers of time and space. Printing further strengthened the power of text, and mass-printed textbooks made text the center of teaching, laying the foundation for the basic model of modern education.
Judging from the results, the use of these educational technologies did indeed all promote equality. For example, the spread of writing broke the monopoly over knowledge held by priestly strata such as shamans and druids in oral cultures, while printing further broke aristocratic privilege, giving every common person the chance to educate themselves into success.
But if we delve into the historical details, we will discover that the process was not always smooth. Writing dismantled primitive shamanism, but at the same time it promoted the establishment of more rigid centralized dynastic rule; printing made knowledge cheaper, but it also reinforced the dogmatism of rote learning. The printing of the Bible promoted the rise of fundamentalism, and printed manuals such as The Malleus Maleficarum pushed forward the brutal witch hunts—the notorious witch hunts, though launched in the Middle Ages, only truly became widespread across the world with the help of printing.
A new technology, while promising a beautiful future, also often brings unprecedented crises to the world. Simply embracing new technology does not necessarily usher in progress; on the contrary, new technology may also cause old ailments to recur, allowing certain long-standing maladies to swell once again.
Two Paths for Online Education
The contemporary American philosopher of technology Andrew Feenberg personally participated in online education practices as early as the 1980s. He pointed out that online education has two contradictory paths: “factory” and “city.”
This is because internet technology itself contains two forces: one is “automation,” the other “interconnection.” Different emphases on these two forces in educational practice will form two completely different educational modes.
First, through automation, the internet can greatly strengthen one major feature of distance education since the days of “correspondence education,” namely the mass reproduction of educational content. The “remote end” can not only obtain exactly the same textual information, but also exactly the same audio-visual information; even exercises, Q&A, and grading can be automated and mass-produced. Those live-stream classes in China still require local teachers to handle Q&A and stay up all night grading papers. These tasks can be expected to be completely replaced by computers in the future; big data and artificial intelligence can, through continually expanding databases, deal with students’ childish questions.
Is this a beautiful future? Feenberg’s answer is no. For in essence, this intensifies the mechanization trend in education that has existed since the industrial age, with students increasingly resembling “products” on a factory assembly line, custom-made in batches.
For batch-produced products, they may indeed be becoming more and more “equal,” but this kind of equalization as mechanical products is not the equality of “human beings” that we have in mind. Human equality does not mean equalization as final products; it means that each person should have ample room for free choice. Equalization achieved by flattening individuality is nothing to rejoice over.
And what those live-stream classes in China seem to be pursuing is precisely this kind of mechanized equality—reducing the gap in exam scores as much as possible. Even if this ideal can be achieved, what does it mean? If more exam machines are produced in impoverished regions, will society become more harmonious? If being an “exam machine” is itself a bad thing, wouldn’t having more bad things appear in impoverished areas be even worse? Of course, some may say that it is fine to temporarily become an exam machine in high school and then develop fully in college—at least they have gained the chance to go to university, haven’t they? But the problem is, if this new educational culture continues to expand, won’t university education have to reform accordingly as well? Shouldn’t lagging universities also introduce “that screen” to copy the courses of advanced universities? When this fully “copying” mode of education expands into all areas, wouldn’t the homogenization of education be the general trend?
The key issue is that the meaning of education is viewed merely as a necessary means to achieve some specific end—for example, middle school education is for the college entrance exam, university education is for getting a job. In this way, people look at education entirely from a utilitarian and efficiency-based perspective, and the problem of educational inequality is simply understood as a gap in the efficiency of filling students’ heads with information.
But if education is not only for exams or for finding a job, but also for cultivating a healthy, rich, and free personality, then the advantages of distance education should be reconsidered.
Feenberg opposes “city” to “factory.” Rather than saying that schools are like factories, it would be better to say that they should be more like cities. Factories produce products, whereas cities give birth to “citizens.” In schools, the “rote” transmission of rigid knowledge is only one side of education. So-called “education” goes far beyond the copying of objective knowledge; it is even more deeply realized in the process of communication between teacher and student, and among students themselves. Students’ active participation in communication is a more important part of education, and this is precisely why traditional school education has always been difficult to replace with correspondence study or self-study.
“That Screen” Still Needs Bullet Chat
In this respect, the internet also contains new opportunities, because while promoting mechanical reproduction, it may also promote communication and dialogue. Feenberg himself strongly advocated the development of online educational environments centered on “interactive text.” But he also noticed that it is not easy to develop this path—“Applications based on interactive text lack the vividness of video substitutes, cannot guarantee automation, and they cannot be packaged and sold.” (Chinese translation of Critical Theory of Technology, p. 163)
Simply put, this development approach is inefficient. Obviously, if the same video is live-streamed to thousands upon thousands of people at once, then adding teacher-student interaction is extremely difficult; not to mention the various forms of communication created by parents and extracurricular activities, which are even harder to replicate. For example, as mentioned in the China Youth Daily report, parents at Chengdu No. 7 High help students secure opportunities to talk with Nobel laureates, and students have rich extracurricular activities such as boxing and swimming. In these respects, “that screen” alone cannot change anything.
But the internet is not without the potential to change all this. In terms of teacher-student communication, the relationship between streamers and “water friends” in live-streaming platforms has formed a new interactive mode: streamers receive real-time feedback through bullet chat from netizens all over the country and beyond, and the “water friends” are not merely passive viewers but active participants. In terms of student communication, various internet fandoms and interest circles have opened up new spaces. Friendships among classmates that traditionally could only be built through on-site outdoor activities (such as playing ball or jumping rubber bands) have now begun to shift toward video games, and playing video games is something that can more easily cross regional divides through the internet.
In fact, there are already many live-streamed courses being broadcast on video websites that support bullet chat, but the results are not always good. Many people’s comments are not meant to communicate with others, but simply to vent or throw insults. And some streamers’ purpose in initiating interaction is mainly just to solicit tips. In this way, the function bullet chat plays in live-streamed courses is somewhat restless and superficial. But we should realize that, no matter which path we take, education’s development does not happen overnight. It is not as if once we switch from the factory model to the city model, success is immediately achieved. The “factory” model carries the danger of mechanization, and the “city” model also carries the danger of over-commercialization or superficiality. Much effort is still needed to explore new educational models. Participation by commercial companies alone is not enough; broader involvement from traditional educators such as schools, teachers, and parents is even more necessary.
Therefore, traditional educators should break through their preconceptions and no longer focus their attention on the automated and mechanically reproducing face of the internet. Instead, they should attach more importance to digging into the communicative dimension of the internet. Bullet chat and online games—precisely these two forms of entertainment that traditional educators regard as wasting one’s time on things unrelated to one’s duties—may open up a second path for online education.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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