Justin Reich is joined by Mitchell Stevens, a sociologist of education at Stanford University to discuss the history and current relationship between online learning and higher education, and how COVID has altered that relationship. “I do think this provides a moment of true uncertainty about the future, because essentially every college and university overnight had to reconceive what quality instruction would look and feel like at their institutions. It creates an openness to forward change that I honestly believe we cannot fully predict. It will depend, for example, on how American students and those who pay tuition feel about the value proposition of what they've experienced and the extent to which the utilities and advantages that they experience online are sufficiently satisfying, that they're willing to continue a conversation about online or hybrid delivery. I do believe this is the context in which how students and their families respond to these new environments will be definitive in how the fate of the sector unfolds.” - Mitchell Stevens
Justin Reich is joined by Mitchell Stevens, a sociologist of education at Stanford University to discuss the history and current relationship between online learning and higher education, and how COVID has altered that relationship.
“I do think this provides a moment of true uncertainty about the future, because essentially every college and university overnight had to reconceive what quality instruction would look and feel like at their institutions. It creates an openness to forward change that I honestly believe we cannot fully predict. It will depend, for example, on how American students and those who pay tuition feel about the value proposition of what they've experienced and the extent to which the utilities and advantages that they experience online are sufficiently satisfying, that they're willing to continue a conversation about online or hybrid delivery. I do believe this is the context in which how students and their families respond to these new environments will be definitive in how the fate of the sector unfolds.” - Mitchell Stevens
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Transcript
https://teachlabpodcast.simplecast.com/episodes/mitchell-stevens/transcript
Produced by Aimee Corrigan and Garrett Beazley
Recorded and mixed by Garrett Beazley
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Justin Reich:
From the home studios of the Teaching Systems Lab at MIT, this is TeachLab, a podcast about the art and craft of teaching. I'm Justin Reich. Today Mitchell Stevens, a sociologist of education at Stanford University and someone who I turn to often to think about higher education, the intersection between technology and higher education, and sort of the bigger institutional questions about why we have universities in the United States and around the world, anyway. Mitchell, thanks so much for joining us.
Mitchell Stevens:
My pleasure, Justin. Thanks for having me.
Justin Reich:
So Mitchell, one question that I feel like you've helped me think about in the past is a deceptively simple one. What is higher education in the United States, and how should we think about what this beast of an ecosystem is?
Mitchell Stevens:
Well, that's a nice small question, Justin. Some colleagues of mine and I over the years have developed a list of metaphors to describe universities. We call them sieves, incubators, temples, and hubs. They're sieves in that they tend to sort and stratify human beings and assign them various places in occupational and other kinds of hierarchies. So they are sorting systems. They are incubators in the extent to which they are the places where people make major transitions, historically from childhood into adulthood but also, of course, often transitions from one field of work to another. We call them-
Justin Reich:
Maybe they are more frequently incubators as people change their careers more often.
Mitchell Stevens:
Right, sort of switching stations, ideally, in which life or occupational paths can be redirected. I direct a graduate program in the School of Education here, and a lot of people use that one-year program as a pivot point, essentially, from one education-related career to another.
We call them temples because if you have a birth in the university, if the knowledge that you produce has a birth in the university, then it has a kind of special status that it otherwise wouldn't have. Part of the conversation of the Black Lives Matter movement, for example, is the extent to which knowledge about people who are not white people are adequately represented in the curriculum and faculty of universities. It's a legitimate struggle to get representation into the temple of knowledge that we call universities.
Then finally, the one that I'm most proud of is the idea that universities are hubs. You can sort of think about them as sort of intellectual airports, connecting knowledge and personnel from basically every sector of modern society to every other sector, how many roads lead into and out of the nation's great universities and how much civil society universities end up offering to the nation by virtue of that intersectional character.
Justin Reich:
So over the last three, four decades, online learning has been steadily growing and developing. How has it actually intersected with these four functions, or how have you hoped it intersected [crosstalk 00:03:54]?
Mitchell Stevens:
Yeah, that's a great question. So one of the things that's really important about American political culture is that Americans are very skeptical of systems of social provision that are associated with something called welfare. If a form of social provision sort of feels like something that the government, capital G, is giving away, that makes a lot of Americans uncomfortable. But we really like education, and we very much like higher education. We don't think of higher education as a form of social distribution or social welfare. We conveniently forget that the federal government hugely underwrites officially private universities, like Harvard and Stanford, and we place a lot of faith in colleges and universities to enable opportunity and social mobility.
So what we've seen over the last 40 years is this sort of steady expansion of movement into higher education and steady affection, I would say, for people's faith in the promise of higher education to change their lives. At the same time, we've seen colleges and universities receive ever less support from state governments especially to support their basic operations. So one of the consequences of that has been a great deal of entrepreneurial activity, both in the nonprofit and for-profit sector, to dramatically expand educational opportunities, college opportunities, often digitally mediated, sometimes by commercially traded firms, sometimes by officially public state universities, like Arizona State. So you've seen a great deal of expansion in entrepreneurial activity in the sector, a lot it happening through digital media.
Justin Reich:
So as you look back maybe over the last 60 years, there's the GI Bill. We say, "Everybody ought to go to college," and Americans can get behind that because it doesn't look like social welfare. We have generation after generation, more and more people going to college, more and more people becoming attached to the idea of more sort of public pressure that, really, if you don't go to a four-year college, there's just a whole lot of opportunities that aren't available to you.
But then sometime in the middle of that, sometime 20, 30 years ago, we have these new campaigns of state-level austerity. We say, "We're taxing people too much. We're spending too much money. So even though in our hearts, we love our state universities, we're just going to give them less money." So we've reached this kind of inflection point where everyone feels like they're supposed to go to college, but states are withdrawing the amount of funding that allows people to go to college inexpensively. So the thing that fills the void are for-profit or other entrepreneurial-looking opportunities, of which online learning is one powerful vanguard for doing that. It's a powerful vanguard because people think it'll be cheap and easy to distribute. What makes online learning sort of a good fit for that social problem?
Mitchell Stevens:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's great. I'm so glad you mentioned the GI Bill. The higher education system that you and I inherit is really a project of 20th century war craft. It was mobilization for World War II, the rewarding of veterans upon war's conclusion. With the Civil Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, the National Defense Education Act of 1958, which happened in the wake of the launch of Sputnik, and the Higher Education Act of 1965, which was a broad inclusion project that came in the wake of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements to respond to educational opportunity at a pivotal moment in higher education and national history.
But since that time, Americans have grown increasingly skeptical that their tax dollars are being spent responsible by state legislatures especially, and they have pulled back on their investment in public goods, like higher education. Just like you said, at the same time, they very much want higher education for themselves and their children. So filling the gap of public provision, especially at the state level, have been a wide variety of firms, many of them for-profit firms, offering more affordable and more accessible higher education.
Why the web? Two big reasons. One, as you write about well in your book, if you do it badly, online learning is cheap. So digital mediation done minimally is very cost-efficient on a per unit basis. The other reason is that digital media meet people where they are. So especially to the extent that people are wanting to fit higher education into complicated work and family lives, the fact that I can attend college without physically going to a campus is a huge advantage and opportunity.
So while we know a lot of the entrepreneurial activity with online provision has not been of high quality, there certainly has been a lot of it, and the sheer scale of online delivery certainly creates conditions for creative innovation and perhaps even some science, if we pursue the project responsibly.
Justin Reich:
How do you think it affects the temple? If the temple of higher education has been historically a physical place, can we build temples on the web?
Mitchell Stevens:
Why don't we talk about that temple and incubator simultaneously?
Justin Reich:
Perfect.
Mitchell Stevens:
Something that we haven't yet mentioned is while there has been a great deal of organizational and technological innovation around online learning throughout the post-secondary sector, it's the historically most admissions-selective, most well-resourced, and most expensive universities that have been most defensive and skeptical about online learning.
Justin Reich:
It was Harvard, MIT, Stanford. "We don't want any of this stuff."
Mitchell Stevens:
Harvard, MIT. Right, exactly. Exactly.
Justin Reich:
It's for community colleges. It's for the for-profit colleges.
Mitchell Stevens:
Exactly, exactly, and they have held steadfast to the notion that face-to-face residential instruction is the sine qua non of academic excellence. That boundary work, as sociologists call it, has been very effective in preserving the mystique of the temple and the mystique of the promise that something special happens on the physical campuses of the nation's most expensive universities.
Justin Reich:
We couldn't possibly offer an online degree because what happens at MIT is irreplaceable to be at MIT.
Mitchell Stevens:
Exactly. We can't really explain to you why we can't convey it online, because it's so mysterious and complicated. That you really have to be in the temple to understand how the magic works. The resistance to online instruction has been a way of, shall we say, sustaining the mystique of campus instruction, which, frankly, basically serves the status interests of the institutions that have resisted online learning.
Justin Reich:
Then a pandemic strikes, and nobody is allowed to be on campus anymore. But, universities can't just pause their operations, or ... Actually my sense is the most expensive elites, mostly the people with invulnerable reputations and admissions, have said, "We're for the most part going to not let people on campus because it's unsafe. We're going to do online learning instead." Then flagship state institutions have said, "We desperately need this revenue, and so we're going to do some effort at on-campus learning."
How does the pandemic change the calculation around the mystique? What's going to happen when Harvard undergraduates have a successful year online at Harvard?
Mitchell Stevens:
This is what has been so spectacular to watch as a student of higher education, is that the COVID pandemic, through those ongoing promises about the value of face-to-face instruction into a moment of profound ambiguity. On the one hand, if face-to-face instruction was as essential to the quality of delivery as getting a haircut, then there would've been no way for a Stanford and Harvard to continue to deliver their service, because the service itself would have been fundamentally dependent upon face-to-face instruction.
To my knowledge, no college or university in the country decided that its instruction was like a haircut. It moved forward with instruction, and thus created these conditions under which institutional leaders had to simultaneously say that online instruction could be functionally equivalent to face-to-face instruction at the same time that their entire academic project until the middle of March had been predicated on making precisely the opposite claim.
Justin Reich:
Places like the Harvard Graduate School of Education, I don't know if Stanford did something similar, decided that this year they're going to have a one-year fully online degree. They had said for however long, "We couldn't possibly do the Harvard Graduate School of Education online," but, "Now, actually we can." Where do you think they're going to find themselves in May of this year, or post vaccine, post a better future? Do they just go back to the status quo ante-pandemic, or ...
Mitchell Stevens:
Your example I think is quite poignant, because it reminds us that even some of the wealthiest and most financially secure institutions in the country still constitutionally rely on tuition-paying students to maintain their basic operations. Just in a sheer financial sense, suspending operations until face-to-face instruction is possible again is existentially unfeasible for hundreds of academic-
Justin Reich:
Everybody has to get fired. They all have ... You can't rehire these people because of the way that they're ...
Mitchell Stevens:
Right.
Justin Reich:
Even the support staff, and stuff like that. You especially can't be the first one to do it if a lot of other people aren't, because the best people will get absorbed by the system and then you're not your institution anymore.
Mitchell Stevens:
Exactly. I do think this provides a moment of true uncertainty about the future, because essentially every college and university overnight had to reconceive what quality instruction would look and feel like at their institutions. It creates an openness to forward change that I honestly believe we cannot fully predict.
It will depend, for example, on how American students and those who pay tuition feel about the value proposition of what they've experienced, and the extent to which the utilities and advantages that they experience online are sufficiently satisfying that they're willing to continue a conversation about online or hybrid delivery. I do believe this is a context in which how students and their families respond to these new environments will be definitive in how the fate of the sector unfolds.
Justin Reich:
Here's one of the things that surprised me the most, and I would love to get your take on it. Over the last two decades, tech evangelists have said we are constantly on the cusp of a whole new generation of education technology tools. We're going to have adaptive tutors. We're going to have massive open online courses. We're going to have peer network learning communities. We're going to have all of these different kinds of ways for people to learn, and they are going to force these systems to change, to reconfigure, unbundle jobs. And, they're going to be better than the existing higher education system in January of 2020.
The pandemic strikes. One of the only options that educators have is to leave their lecterns, go to their home webcams, and jury rig together, of varying quality, but for many people, pretty bad versions of what they were doing before. Just about everyone in higher education chooses that over any of the new options that are available. I hear very few places that said, "I can't possibly create a really good second half of an introductory microeconomics class from my living room, with my kids at home, in the midst of a pandemic. I'm just going to point people to Coursera or edX." They've built half a dozen introductory microeconomics classes that cost $150,000 each to make.
All of those places saw surges in enrollment, but I didn't see anywhere in higher education where people said, "This is really the moment to do things really differently." What I saw was people saying, "This is the moment to do things as exactly as the same as possible as we've been doing them before. Which technologies will allow us to do that most easily?" It's basically video conferencing and learning management systems, the oldest technology we have. Does that read sound right to you? If so, why?
Mitchell Stevens:
I think the question is quite powerful. I've been thinking about this myself. For years, educational futurists have been telling us about the imminent transformation of post-secondary delivery, and it hasn't arrived. The jury is still out on what happens in the wake of pandemic, but I think one thing that the futurists and innovation advocates neglect to see is that fiscal austerity, especially at the state level aside, the United States federal government pumps 120 billion US dollars per year into the higher education sector through the provisions of Title IV of the Higher Education Act of 1965. They come largely in the form of Pell grants and federal work study, and then additional billions of dollars are provided by federally subsidized loans.
There's been no incentive change at the federal level for colleges and universities to change their delivery formats, their business models, their price points. In fact, precisely the opposite. The CARES Act that Congress passed in this spring in the wake of COVID extended 14 billion US dollars in direct aid to colleges and universities. That aid was tied to full-time equivalent enrollment. In other words, schools were rewarded if they thought in terms of full-time, campus-based students as their bread and butter. The institutions that had been most flexible and entrepreneurial in reaching more students at broader price points on a part-time basis were entirely excluded from the CARES Act. I think one of the things that reformers and educators need to think about now is how federal funding of higher education needs to be part of the incentive structure that will encourage universities to truly innovate, not only in how they convey education, but to whom and at what price point.
Justin Reich:
A person like me who looks at educational systems and generally looks at them through the lens of, "What's the teacher doing? What's a group of students doing? What are those individual actors thinking?" I'm drawn to this story of, "It turns out that students really like traditional instruction, and there's no hue and cry for something different to happen." There weren't student strikes across the country being like, "Please, for the love of God, let us out of these crappy Zoom classes and let us just take MOOCs to pass. What you're teaching us is terrible." In fact, by contrast, I was really struck by surveys and things like that that said that students really wanted synchronous instruction with their professors, despite the fact that they're at home in their closets doing this. And my general assumption is that teachers are busy. And so in the midst of a pandemic, they say, "Oh, let's just kind of do whatever it is that we were doing before because that's what I know how to do."
But you offer this perspective that says another thing shaping all of those individual micro level decisions is the fact that the federal government said, "If you all want to keep cranking along here, you're not allowed to try alternate reconfigurations of higher education. You've got to keep these full-timers cranking away."
Mitchell Stevens:
I guess what I would suggest is that current federal government funding for higher education in no way encourages educational providers to innovate on delivery or price and, you're a scientist, no incentive to systematically measure and observe what they do. One of the great tragedies of this moment on my view is that because federal reporting standards for post-secondary delivery are so lax, it's going to be very hard for researchers or policymakers to know which of these experiments that are playing out across the whole landscape of higher education have been effective and which have been less effective for which kinds of learners in what parts of the country. We live in a country without what's called a student unit record system. There's a great deal of uncertainty about how students move through the time and place of college, because we just haven't built a national infrastructure for observing instructional or educational journeys very well. That's the site where I think ambitious federal financing in the wake of a national emergency might really help change the landscape for how teaching and learning are observed and understood.
Justin Reich:
And just to sort of infer from your view there. So the claim is that there's no way at an institution to measure learning that we've implemented. There's no way even really to get good data at scale about progress. And so we could think of a bunch of reasons why that might be bad in higher education generally. Like you don't know whether or not-
Mitchell Stevens:
That's actually not what I said. I didn't say there's no way to measure learning. I'm saying there have been very few incentives or expectations that colleges and universities must measure learning or must measure academic progress or must observe variation in how students experience their offerings.
Justin Reich:
Yeah. There's not no way in the sense that they can't do it. It's that there's no incentive for them to do it. There's no mandate for them to do it. So these are not measuring learning, they're not measuring progress. And so it's going to be very difficult for us to tell in a year or in 15 years whether or not anything that anyone tried worked. Do you have a story in mind of how the imposition, the requirements around learning measures or other kinds of assessments or things along those lines would sort of open up productive pathways for innovation and change?
Mitchell Stevens:
Yeah. First I'll say, there's a reason why the United States has not built this observational infrastructure. And that's because opacity protects providers. It's anyone who has bought a used car in this country at present can easily know more about the track record and basic quality of the vehicle she is buying than she can possibly know about a college or university. And that's because in the used car market, Americans have created an informational regime that makes it very hard for people to avoid providing systematic information about the product that they're selling. And we take it for granted that it's a consumer's right to know basic things about a car that they buy or a product that they may purchase from the manufacturer in the grocery store.
We haven't ever done the same thing for colleges and universities. And that's given colleges and universities a great deal of freedom to make promises and court audiences with very little systematic information on which potential students could rely. So it's great for the providers, but it's very risky for educational consumers.
Justin Reich:
And I would imagine that there's a tension that we could find here between sort of pedagogical progressives who are like, "Oh, come on. Our assessment systems are not that good. Look at K-12. We're bad at measuring these things. And when you measure them, you create all kinds of terrible incentives. So isn't it a good thing that we've managed to avoid all this?" And folks that are trying to regulate the for-profit educational sector, where organizations are allowed to ... And maybe elite colleges too. Organizations are allowed to make promises that are like, "Come here and X percentage, our people go on to get jobs in this field." And there's sort of no way to verify or make sense of those kinds of claims, which I also think people who are pedagogical progressives will be like, "Well, yeah, yeah. I don't want for-profit colleges claiming that 89% of their radiology tech graduates get radiology jobs when in fact 70% of them become orderlies," or whatever it is. But is one problem here that there are multiple stakeholders maybe with very different political projects that want to block measurement and learning?
Mitchell Stevens:
Yeah. I would say as you and colleagues like Andrew Ho at Harvard and Wendy Espeland at Northwestern and others have talked about, measurement itself is not politically benign and poor measurement can create perverse incentives that encourage providers and learner the like to optimize on dimensions that may or may not be the optimal ones. At the same time, my sense is that the imperative to at least document and observe educational processes is not going to go backward. For better or worse, an accountability revolution transformed K-12 education in this country in the last 25 years. I will not say that that accountability revolution made K-12 education better or more humane, but it did reorganize how public education works in this country.
I personally think that the more systematic measurements of higher education is similarly unavoidable. The question is who will be responsible for the measures and on what terms will measurement occur and who will pay for that measurement? One of the things that I think you and your colleagues at MIT can be quite proud of is that I look at a few schools like MIT and the University of Michigan and see institutions that recognize that it's in their best interests, educationally as well as scientifically, to instrument and observe their own instructional projects and do this right on their own term. I truly think that forward thinking colleges and universities across the country would be well-served to take that model and embrace the responsibility to measure and observe their educational processes with an eye toward improvement. In my more optimistic days, I'm hopeful that more schools will follow that lea., But I also know that federal funding is a very powerful mechanism for encouraging colleges and universities to do new things in new ways.
Justin Reich:
This $120 billion spigot that was sort of opened after World War II as a wartime effort, it's not going to stay open forever. Either we're going to measure ourselves or people that maybe we don't like are going to come up with these measurements for us.
Mitchell Stevens:
And I truly believe that it's an opportunity for, again, forward thinking universities to present themselves as servants in the national interest to assist perhaps a new presidential administration in devising educational relief efforts that might do two things at once. Might, again, encourage new forms of post-secondary delivery at a variety of price points and a variety of formats for a wider range of men and women. But that might also create conditions under which educational researchers could systematically observe and understand what works and what doesn't for whom.
Justin Reich:
That's like race to the top for higher ed in 2020.
Mitchell Stevens:
Could be worse on my view.
Justin Reich:
All right, Mitchell, I've got to ask you about one more thing, which I think it came out of your doctoral dissertation that you studied homeschool communities.
Mitchell Stevens:
I did.
Justin Reich:
So we have to pivot to K-12 for at least a few minutes to ask you, I think the United States has become interested in homeschooling like it never has before. It was forcibly imposed upon millions and millions of families. And now those who are forcibly imposed into homeschooling are looking around and being like, "What are the people who voluntarily did this... What are they doing and how did they make it work?" Is there anything from your homeschool research that sort of jumped out at you as you've watched Americans try to deal with schooling in a pandemic?
Mitchell Stevens:
Absolutely. That's a very prescient inquiry, I would suggest for a very prescient group of men and women. Homeschoolers really were intellectual and pedagogical pioneers, their claim as early as the 1970s was that bureaucratic forms of educational delivery were not just suboptimal, they were bad for children. Their argument was that obliging students to learn in regimented ways in age graded classrooms was deeply problematic pedagogically for many children.
Justin Reich:
Again, across a kind of political spectrum-
Mitchell Stevens:
Across the political spectrum.
Justin Reich:
... Christian evangelists think this is a problem because the state is going to teach their children things that are not aligned with revealed wisdom and pedagogical progressives are going to be offended because these regimented systems don't recognize the unique geniuses and freedoms of our particular children. There's a whole bunch of people who might disagree about a bunch of things, but agree about this.
Mitchell Stevens:
Exactly. And the other thing to remember is that it's a fairly short step intellectually from the so-called unschooling rhetoric of the 1970s to the individualized assessment educational plans that are now virtually taken for granted as best in class service in K-12 classrooms.
Justin Reich:
Mediated by education technology as kind of the next step-
Mitchell Stevens:
Exactly.
Justin Reich:
... you go from unschooling to IEPs to personalized learning.
Mitchell Stevens:
Right, right. It's all the same line of a presumption that individualized instruction is sort of always better. The big hook there of course, is the individualized instruction is very costly. So costly in terms of human investment that homeschool parents, almost always women, forego full-time work entirely so they can provide the individualized instruction that they presume that their children need and deserve. Overnight all of us became homeschoolers. And I think there's sort of two big takeaways for that... Or two big lessons from that.
One is the extent to which basically the entirety of our society is predicated on children being in school so that parents can work. And the fact that we live in a world in which all adults are obliged to work outside the home, more or less full-time in order to sustain the livelihoods of their families suggests just kind of how thin the social safety net is in this country in the absence of public schooling.
Justin Reich:
One connection that I see between these two things is sort of between higher education we were just talking about with homeschoolers is there are beliefs that get developed in the 1950s and 1960s that are unsustained in the present moment, but that you need to go to college, but we're actually not going to pay for it. That there needs to be this sort of devoted individual attention to the rearing of children provided mostly by women, but actually we need you all to go to work now.
Mitchell Stevens:
Right.
Justin Reich:
And it's our social institutions are kind of evolving at a different rate or I don't know, our social organizational units are evolving at a different rate than our beliefs, and so we get these mismatches.
Mitchell Stevens:
Yeah, I think that's right. I think something else that ties these two together, I would say is that... And we haven't talked about explicitly yet is that we talk historically about a dichotomy between home and school or families and providers, but there's a very large third sector now, and it's called them learning platforms, for want of a better term or educational businesses. Those learning platforms are both at school and in our homes, they are neither fully public and nor fully private. They are educational services, but they are also businesses.
Let's say the learning ecosystem is much more complicated than most of our cultural understandings, which tend to dichotomize being in school or being at home or being at school and being at work. As people are accumulating learning experiences, they're now interacting with a wide variety of business organizations. What am I doing when I go on YouTube to learn how to record my bathtub? Is that a learning experience? Is that a business experience? Is that like going to the library? What is my relationship between YouTube?
Justin Reich:
What's even weirder is when my home-ec teacher assigns me as a student compelled to be in public schools to go to YouTube to watch a video about caulking my tub, either on a device that the school purchased or on a device that I own myself. And then I go start messing around my bathtub and my parents yell at me and things like that. Yeah, that bridge between homeness and schoolness and public and private, I mean, there's always little antecedents of that. We had textbooks that were made by publishers that we carried back and forth between home and school-
Mitchell Stevens:
Right.
Justin Reich:
... but they didn't sort of infiltrate our lives in the same way that learning platforms do.
Mitchell Stevens:
Right. And I think that's one of the ways in which also our policy discourse about who's responsible for education and who should pay for it and what an educational relation looks like, what makes it different from a commercial transaction. Those questions are much more complicated than they were 25 years ago. And it's my sense that not only our cultural understandings of education, but our academic understandings of education. How we theorize learning processes, how we consider what appropriate regulations are, how we think about the proper ethical relationships between different kinds of educational providers. The current multi-platform environments of teaching and learning has quickly gotten far more complicated than our ability to be systematically thoughtful about it. And that's daunting, but it's also a great intellectual challenge.
Justin Reich:
Do you have... It sounds like one sort of takeaway from that is we need more people thinking and theorizing that not just at the level of do adaptive tutors make learning faster or not, but at the level of what is happening to our laws or regulations, our society, what kind of theory and language we have to describe things. Do you have anything else sort of in the current moment that you-
Mitchell Stevens:
That's a good... The industrialization that culminated at the end of the 19th century is the macro historical process that brought us the 20th century social sciences. If the digital revolution is as profound as we are often being told that it is, then we should fully expect essentially a reauthorization of basic features of human organization and ethical behavior. Like those that accompanied the last industrial revolution. Yeah. There's a lot of work to do. Let's get at it.
Justin Reich:
Let's do it. Well, Mitchell Stevens from Stanford University. Thanks so much for helping us think through all of these complex issues and these new ways of imagining futures.
Mitchell Stevens:
Thank you. See you.
Justin Reich:
That was Mitchell Stevens, he's a Sociologist and Professor of Education and Organizational Behavior and Sociology at Stanford University, the author of several books, including Creating Class and Seeing The World: How US Universities Make Knowledge in a Global Era.
In conversations with Mitchell, I always feel like I'm inspired to look up from the classroom processes, the teaching and learning that I am most naturally drawn to, and to think about how these institutions sit in broader social context and broader political economy. And then I think the project that Mitchell asks us to take seriously is, do we even have the right language for describing what's in front of us, given all of the changes that are happening through digital learning in our societies? And that I always find to be productive provocation. So I'm grateful to Mitchell for coming in and talking with us at TeachLab.
I'm Justin Reich, thanks for listening to TeachLab. Please subscribe to get future episodes on how educators from all walks of life are tackling distance learning during COVID-19. You can find us on Apple Podcasts and your favorite podcast provider. If you're enjoying the show, please take a minute and leave a review. I've also just released a new book that Mitchell referenced briefly, Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can't Transform Education available from booksellers everywhere. You can read reviews related media and sign up for online events at failuretodisrupt.com, that's failuretodisrupt.com. This episode of TeachLab was produced by Aimee Corrigan and Garrett Beazley, recorded and sound mixed by Garrett Beazley. Stay safe. Until next time.