“It is a truism today, in this highly technologically-developedculture, that students need technical computer skills. Equally truistic (and, not incidentally, true) is that the workplace hasbecome highly technological. Even more truistic – and farmore disturbing – are the shifts in education over the last twodecades as public elementary schools, public and private highschools, and colleges and universities have invested scoresof billions of dollars on “digital infrastructure,” computers,monitors and printers, “smart classrooms,” all to “meet thedemands” of this new technological workplace."We won’t dwell on the fact – an inconvenient truth? –that those technological investments have coincided with adecline in American reading behaviors, in reading and readingcomprehension scores, in overall academic achievement, in thephenomenon – all too familiar to us in academia – of “gradeinflation,” in an alarming collapse of our students’ understandingof their own history (to say nothing of the history of the rest of the world), rising ignorance of world and American geography, with an abandonment of the idea of objectivity, and with anincreasingly subjective, even solipsistic, emphasis on personalexperience. Ignore all this. Or, if we find it impossible to ignore,then let’s blame the teachers...”

“What makes a good teacher today is what has always made a good teacher: command of a subject, a critical mind, a demanding nature, and an ability to inspire students to pursue knowledge for some end beyond mere financial rewards. A good teacher might be entertaining and funny, but shouldn’t set out to be. A good teacher may have broad experience with and skills using technology, but the mere possession of such experience and skills doesn’t make one a good teacher.”

“But what has changed? The truth is that nothing changes...It is we who have changed, we who are beguiled by technological change, we who have ceased to believe that a certain situation exists while beginning to believe a new one has replaced it. We still love and hate, suffer and feel joy, resent and admire, covet and sacrifice. We still allow some with power to exploit and marginalize others without power, and we still look on quietly, feeling bad about it all but doing nothing. Nothing at all changes when new technologies are introduced into a culture. Nothing changes but our attitudes about what is and is not “real,” what is and is not “important,” what is and is not worth knowing. And we change because we choose to change, because media, as McLuhan tells us, are nothing more than extensions of us.”

“My advice to people who want to teach is pretty simple and very likely to be ridiculed: don’t believe the bullshit. You’re not there to help students get skills for a workplace. You’re not there to make them more marketable. You’re not there to provide them with answers to petty, superficial questions. You’re not there to impress them – or yourself – with the latest technological wonder that promises to make something “better” but will probably only shorten some algorithmic process and benefit an employer. You’re not there to mass produce replaceable parts for the machinery of the global economy. You’re there for one reason and one reason only: to make them better people than they were when they came in.”

“The changeover from one medium to another presents both opportunities and challenges. New technologies empower us, to be sure; but never without some cost which we universally fail to anticipate. We must avoid celebrating the advantages too enthusiastically, lest we miss the meaning of the challenges. For once the changeover is complete, the opportunities and challenges fully assimilated, we will certainly be impotent to undo them.”

“I see no real evolution in media ecology beyond the “shape shifting” nature that seems to have been deliberately embedded in its fabric. The one thing that must, I think, always define a study we recognize as media ecological is its acknowledgement of the interactions of cultures – and the people who constitute those cultures – and their technologies.”

“None of this is ever going to change until each of us changes. The change has to come from us, and the object of that change is us. We have to change our hearts. And we have to change our minds. We have to stop thinking in terms of stereotypes and deal with people as people. We have to stop thinking in terms of narrow self-interest and begin to reclaim the idea of the common good.”