Week 10 Response

While reading Larry Cuban's _Teachers and Machines_, I couldn't help but think of the circumstances that librarians and media specialists find themselves in today in relation to technology. Cuban discusses the ways that film, radio, "microcomputers," and in particular TV have entered the educational field, posing as panaceas, and threatening to become "surrogate teacher[s]" (Cuban 37). In discussing the tension between change and constancy in American classrooms, Cuban explains why technology simply can not and will not replace the teacher as the head of the classroom. Yet for librarians and media specialists, fear of being replaced by machines (or Internet and Web technologies) is a reality. For example, in the professional practices course I took last semester, we frequently took up the issue as to how to convince the public of the librarian's importance and role in an increasingly informationally-overloaded world. It seems to me that we were forever talking about and reassuring ourselves that librarians are even more important today given the ubiquity of informational technology and heavy reliance on the Web. But the question was - how to make the public and patrons see and appreciate this fact? And, I think for school librarians, replacement is more than a fear -- it is an actuality as school districts cut these positions. Since Cuban's central argument as to why machines can not replace teachers relates specifically to the nature and structure of schooling, it is not as though his book completely maps onto the difficulties that librarians wrestle with. Furthermore, it is only my assumption that media specialist positions are cut by tight school budgets because administrators don't value the work that media specialists do, or see their role in education as an irreplaceable one (I suppose there are other reasons). However, insofar as one of the school media specialist's roles is being a teacher, Cuban's work applies. Perhaps it would help school media specialists to identify the elements of the job that fall into the "constant" category as opposed to the "change" category (such as continuing to emphasize the importance of reading for pleasure and accessing books), and to capitalize on these things, while working to prove to administrators, fellow teachers, parents, and the broader community that seeking, finding, evaluating, and using information are not mechanical processes that children can engage in without the help of a teacher/media specialist.