Alternative Pedagogy : the One Room Schoolhouse and the Trojan Experiment

Abstract

“We are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.” -- Donna Haraway, A Manifesto for Cyborgs

As we stand beyond the brink of the 21st Century, we are outside of the boundaries where the Ivory Tower approach to education is applicable, particularly in regards to the teaching of practical knowledge and the acquisition of necessary technical skills. We must also, however, address the very real scalability issues inherit in the One Room Schoolhouse approach, as the numbers of students who need education are not likely to shrink anytime soon. We are no longer apes on the savannah and we can no longer afford to act as robotic vessels in search of knowledge from academia’s font of knowledge. Technology is the future of our society and it is only growing in complexity. If we are to efficiently instruct our students in the ever-growing fields of general study and technology they face, we need to find a hybrid, or cyborg, approach, melding the ape and the robot.