As I read Ellen Sieter’s article “Practicing at Home: Computers, Pianos, and Cultural Capital,” I found myself having trouble with her arguments on several levels—beginning with the analogy she draws between the current push for schools to teach computer literacy and the mid-twentieth century marketing of pianos to middle class families as the high roads to culture and just possibly to a career in music.  While she does point out rightly that in both cases the job opportunities for aspiring computer programmers and composers of classical music are in short supply, require much time and dedication on the part of the student, and are therefore, something that few can actually attain, I think the analogy falls apart after that.  Sure, maybe a lot of families fell for the commercial promotions about piano training imparting culture; sure maybe quite a few middle class homes had a seldom played piano sitting in their living rooms a few decades back while the urban poor were unable to learn to play “Moonlight Sonata” from only a few hours of music instruction during the school day.  These events in no way correspond to the penetration of computers into our present culture, whether in business, school, or at home.  At the bottom line, pianos are instruments which can be used for only one thing: playing music.  They are not business tools, research engines, social networking platforms, or vehicles for broad-based dissemination of content that is unrestricted by the medium of delivery, such as computers with the Internet are.  I do not think it is fair or accurate to compare the two since pianos are never necessary (I say that as a person with a second-hand piano in my living room which I have not had time to practice since I started going to school), while computers have become so, or are on their way to such ubiquity.  Because of this disjunction in the analogy, I see her dependent arguments falling flat—that both have high barriers to entry, both must be practiced in the home for any real mastery, etc.

My second area of conflict with Seiter concerns her evaluation of the magnet schools funded and sponsored by Microsoft, Qualcomm, and other philanthropic corporate interests.  Let me begin by saying that I am no booster of a corporatized culture; I believe that powerful corporations have too much money and too much power in our lives already.  Nevertheless, I see Seiter’s judgments as unfair and as failing to take into account other factors for the problems she cites.  She claims that the corporate sponsors overly tout their positive results and make the public schools look bad by comparison.  She relates the anecdotal failures of a couple of students at High Tech High to illustrate her point.  Both Kenny and Lucas failed to obtain the benefits that their enrollments at HTH seemed to offer through access to the latest equipment and non-traditional teaching techniques.  Seiter seems to blame the school for false promises and the corporate sponsors for their philanthropy (which is admittedly partly self-interested).  It seems that teenaged Lucas had unrealistic ideas of earning a living playing video games and both boys found the unstructured, project-centered assignments easy to avoid in favor of the distractions of personal entertainment.

I would like to specify some other factors that Seiter ignores: First, taking students out of traditionally structured schools and turning them loose in a room full of computers with Internet access and few restrictions on time use seems like a specific recipe for distraction and ultimately poor performance.  I am not endorsing the traditional structure here, but simply pointing out students acculturated into a paradigm that denies them self-direction, but instead teaches them to do what they are told when they are told, are ill-prepared to take up the challenge of HTH’s open-ended pedagogy.

Secondly, Seiter excoriates corporate benefactors for their lack of constancy (they may pull their support when experiments do not yield sustained positive results) and their end-runs around the educational bureaucracy of local school boards and teachers unions.  Here, Seiter’s agenda seems to surface more clearly in the form of complaints about “hiring nonunion teachers,” “subverting teacher union rules and lowering job security for teachers,” “the erosion of teacher’s rights,” and bringing in “outside experts.”  Seiter tries to justify these blatantly political concerns by dragging in an argument about marginalized minorities and women for whom “employment as a unionized teacher is a far more likely point of entry to the middle class than employment in the high tech industries” (46-7).  This whole line of reasoning seems disingenuous and beside the point.  The discussion she began with seemed to center on benefits to students and ended up being about teacher’s unions.

Finally, Seiter’s assertions about the corporate-funded magnet schools and their efforts to create a learning environment focused on giving students the skills they need to prosper in the digital age skirt one central issue—that traditional schools have failed to do the job.  In general, many students, especially lower income students, leave public schools with marginal literacy and minimal academic or life skills.  Near the end of her article, Seiter does admit that “school credentials have become more necessary on the job market, even as the public school system has failed” (48).  Having said that, however, Seiter shows little acknowledgment of the fact that when the system with the responsibility fails (i.e., the public school system), the efforts of those with access to resources to create something new and functional can scarcely be brushed aside as inadequate.  Perhaps these attempts to construct schools that work do have shortcomings, but at least they are not mired in bureaucracy.

I want to end with Seiter’s quotation of Raymond Williams “about literacy in nineteenth century England: ‘the acquisition of literacy, then as now, almost always involved submission to a lengthy period of social training—education—in which quite other things than literacy were taught, which became, very often, inextricable from the literacy’” (49).  Seiter tries to apply that aphorism to the corporate interests and their agendas to promote digital curricula.  I say, isn’t that what all schools do?  Doesn’t public school demand submission to a lengthy period of social training that becomes interwoven with the actual reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmatic.  This is why I chose to homeschool my children—because I wanted to guide them instead of turning them over to a system that has a penchant for social indoctrination and relatively poor record for real learning.