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The
Diversity Myth In the U.S. at least, multiculturalism is a powerful force in schools and the Internet seems to be a tool perfectly suited for its study. But here again we encounter a situation we might characterize as myth. From 1985 through 1988 my wife and I taught at Academia Cotopaxi, a private international school in Quito, Ecuador. We lived 15 kilometers out of the city, in a small village where many of our neighbors had no electricity. Each morning we would head off for the Academy, which had two well equipped Apple computer labs and was already experimenting with telecommunication. A little later our housekeeper would send her son, Patricio, off to the local public school, which not only had no computers but no phone or textbooks. Patricio's first homework assignment, like everyone else's in his class, was to bring his teacher a box of chalk because the school couldn't provide it. This school and others close to Quito, poor as they were, still reflected an acceptance of Western culture. Farther away, in the high Andes, and further east toward the Amazon basin, local cultures, still semi-isolated, struggled to maintain ancient traditions in the face of modern civilization, whose accelerating encroachment into these areas was being abetted by recent advances in telecommunication technology. Other than existing in the same country, these cultures, and the young people in them, had almost nothing in common with the wealthy students who attended Cotopaxi, who were generally widely travelled and bore a much more striking resemblance in terms of attitude, values and knowledge to students in Des Moines, Iowa, or Munich, Germany (where I taught a few years later). Today Academia Cotopaxi is one of the few schools in Ecuador where students have Net access. No doubt, teachers who connect their students with students there find, as is often celebrated on the Net, that similarities in student lives are more prevalent than differences. A group of Des Moines students found this out during one of my earliest telecommunications projects in 1993. Project Utopia, as it was called, was a collaboration between Language Arts classes at Central Campus and the International School of Kuala Lumpur (ISKL). Each class researched, discussed and formulated its separate idea of a utopian society and then shared and discussed those visions with each other. The names of the ideal societies which emerged were Fredonia and Yamagata, respectively. The former title paid homage to freedom, the ultimate articulated value of American society. The latter, drawing on the traditional emphasis on aesthetics in some Eastern societies, worked off of the motto "Happiness is Beauty, Beauty is Happiness." The potential for confrontation between very different world-views was there to be explored. It didn't happen. Instead, each group described remarkably similar utopias: governments that were democratic; economies that exhibited strong centralized controls; a heavy emphasis on environmental protection; free education and health care; and further development of high technology. Indeed, though there were certainly subtle and slight cultural differences that could be teased out of the two documents, they were so similar that one of the students wrote in her evaluation, "It got to the point where there was nothing left to discuss, and the interest level was hard to keep up" while another student got the idea that, "Through this project we learned the ideals of the other cultures. But obviously, most people's ideas will be somewhat similar." Other experiences in subsequent telecommunications projects have yielded similar observations, both from students and teachers. Within the narrow confines of the wired world, I think these observations are accurate, and they are accurate for the very reason that the wired world exists. Jacques Ellul, in analyzing the cultural character of the technological society, explained it this way:
If we had let our students investigate each other's favorite foods and pastimes they doubtless would have discovered substantial, though essentially inconsequential, differences. But when it came to an exploration of serious and fundamental world views, there was precious little diversity. This is what Ellul was getting at. Though the schools were on opposite sides of the planet, their local cultures had been subsumed by a global techno-culture, so that when it came to important socio-political matters, these students had little to argue about. They shared the same unconscious assumptions. This is why the search for multicultural diversity over the Internet seems to be, for the most part, a trivial pursuit of differences in customs rather than a serious exploration of different ways of understanding the world. Today the only really fundamental alternative views of the world are found in non-technological societies -- the few that still coexist alongside the technological ones in some countries. Exposure to these civilizations would certainly help students think outside of the technological box we are rapidly building around the world. But, of course, this leads to a paradox. As Jerry Mander's In the Absence of the Sacred (1991) and Stephan Hill's The Tragedy of Technology (1988) make depressingly clear, non-technological societies cannot use electronic communication technology without changing the way they think, the way they act, the way they live --in other words, without abandoning their traditional cultures. So experiencing their way of thinking through Net communications is impossible. There is a sad irony to this paradox, for not only is the 'Net helping to deceive our youth about cultural diversity in the world, it is helping to destroy it. Global communication requires a common language. And language exerts a very strong influence on culture. As the Internet and its technological infrastructure expand, the growing use of major languages to electronically conduct business exerts pressure on local languages and dialects. The University of Bristol Center for Theories of Language and Learning (1995) has reported that "According to reliable estimates, half of the world's six thousand languages will become extinct in the next century. Furthermore, two thousand of the remaining three thousand languages will be threatened during the century after next." Certainly the spread of the Net, which has increased the demand for the use of regional, national and global languages like English, German and Japanese to conduct its business, will contribute mightily to the extinction (or, as Ellul predicts, irrelevance) of these local languages, and with it, their cultures. And unsuspecting school children around the world, innocently seeking multicultural experiences, will contribute to their demise. Lowell Monke teaches advanced computer technology for Des Moines Public Schools. He is coauthor of the forthcoming book, The Net Effect: Telecollaboration in the Classroom, which will be published by SUNY Press. |
