I recently posted a request here on education4site.org and other places for examples of how education/classrooms/schools have been portrayed in science fiction literature, movies, etc. I got some great responses and have included them in a comment to my original post. I’m familiar with many of the sources but don’t particularly remember all of the references to education since I wasn’t really looking for them when I read them. I hope to take a better look at them when I get the chance (most of my sci-fi library is packed away in storage in Iceland, where I am not).
Michael A. Burstein especially caught my attention. I was not at all familiar with his work. Burstein’s first published sci-fi short story, TeleAbsence (published in 1995), is an excellent example as it is entirely about schooling in the future. Not surprising, considering that, in addition to writing science fiction, Burstein has been a science teacher and editor of science textbooks.
Burstein’s TeleAbsence occurs in a not-too-far-off future where private schools have adopted virtual reality (VR) immersion technology to bring together students from all over the US in simulated classrooms. The story touches on several topics that are relevant to current discourse on education, including equality issues relating to race, poverty, access to technology (US’s domestic digital divide) and private education, how future technologies will shape instruction, and how students will interact in high-tech education environments.
One of the surprising things in Burstein’s story is the seeming persistance of the traditional classroom model of education, even in a high-tech setting. Burstein has the students hooking up to simulators, where they are essentially made stationary, to engage the VR experience which has them transported to a classroom which is indistinguishable from what we would expect to see in modern classrooms (or classrooms in the 1970s for that matter). Burstein explains the reasoning for this setup in the story, but it’s not clear whether he, as author and a teacher, thinks this is an optimal educational setting or whether he’s admitting to an inability to alter the existing paradigm.
Burstein creates a very compelling and realistic vision of the future of education as it might have looked in 1995. Many of the issues that crop up in the story are very relevant today. However, as I’ve mentioned in some of my previous articles about how science fiction affects our perceptions of the future, the point, or at least the usefulness, of science fiction is not to predict the future, but rather to provide vivid scenarios of what might be to stimulate and inspire our thinking in the present. For that reason, it’s just as informative to look at what what is missing in the story as well as what is there, to consider how changes in the anticipated progression of events might change the scenario presented. For example, for Burstein, one of the benefits of the VR model that his story suggests is that it allows the students and teachers to work with holographic representations of objects, areas, etc. in a classroom setting. It makes perfect sense to think this way considering where technological development was at in 1995. Today, however, we can imagine that this will be possible in the near future in a physical classroom setting using augmented reality (AR) technologies; especially when technologies like Google’s Glass Project become available. Furthermore, many emerging technologies are very affordable (with costs trending fairly steeply downward), including tablets and smartphones. This suggests that the technologies that enable the type of education that Burstein envisions may not be as far out of the reach of people of meager means as is suggested in the story. In fact, some research suggests that the cost of technology may not be the most important factor in the US’s domestic digital divide although it seems to cut across socio-economic and racial lines (see for ex. Inequity in the Technopolis: Race, Class, Gender, and the Digital Divide in Austin, PEW Internet on minorities and the digital divide, and The Broadband Digital Divide and the Nexus of Race, Competition, and Quality).
That we can identify weaknesses in Burstein’s story when we consider it from the perspective of current contexts, by no means detracts from the value of the story and its usefulness for exploring how technology and education may develop in the future. As a compelling vision of the future, the story allows us to explore a range of issues (in fact, a remarkably broad range of issues in such a short story without it coming across as cluttered or overbearing) and contexts that will be important for educational development over the next decade, at least.
Burstein’s “TeleAbsence” has been published in his collection of short stories, I Remember the Future, and is also available as a standalone e-book from Fictionwise. The collection of short stories also includes a closely related, more recent story titled “TelePresence”. I haven’t finished reading that one yet.
