Science, Technology, and Cultural Change
Science, Technology, and Cultural Change
What advancement brings
- Mechanical conveniences and physical comforts.
- Cultural changes that lead to serious social problems.
- The need for cultural reintegration, the root of major curriculum problems.
How invention affects social life
- Creates new jobs and wipes out others.
- Conquers distance, bringing the world’s people into close relationships.
- Concentrates people into huge population centres, breaking village face-to-face ties.
Curriculum problems do not appear from nowhere. Many of the hardest ones come from a single source: the way science and technology keep changing the culture faster than the school can keep up. Reading those changes is part of social diagnosis, and it starts with seeing both sides of progress.
Comfort on one side, social problems on the other
The advancement of science and technology has clearly delivered good things: mechanical conveniences and physical comforts that earlier generations could not imagine. But it has delivered something else alongside them: cultural changes that lead to serious social problems.
The more obvious of these problems include maintaining home and family stability, keeping the economic and industrial order steady, and preserving the peace of the world. Each is a strain that rapid technological change places on a society. Educational problems arise out of these shifting conditions, and they land on the teaching profession to handle.
At a deeper level, the advancement of science and technology creates a general problem of cultural reintegration. When parts of a culture change fast while others lag, the culture pulls out of joint and has to be knitted back together. This issue of reintegrating a culture is the root cause of major curriculum problems. A curriculum is one of the main tools a society has for pulling its culture back into a working whole.
Cultural change, social problems, and the need for cultural reintegration
Alongside conveniences come strains on family stability, the economic order, and world peace. Reintegrating a culture knocked out of joint is the root of major curriculum problems.
Three ways invention reshapes social life
Invention does not just add gadgets; it rearranges how people live. It does so in three notable ways.
- It creates new jobs and wipes out others. A new technology opens up work that never existed and closes down work that used to feed families. The shape of the workforce shifts with each major invention.
- It conquers distance. New means of travel and communication shrink the space between people, bringing the people of the world into close relationships that were once impossible.
- It concentrates people. Invention creates conditions that pull people into huge centres of population. This uproots people from the soil and breaks the face-to-face ties that were characteristic of village life.
Each of these changes the society a curriculum must serve. The third is especially important, because the move from village to city changes not just where people live but how they form their values, a thread the next articles follow.
It creates and destroys jobs, conquers distance, and concentrates people in cities
Each changes the society a curriculum serves. The pull into cities matters most, because it uproots people from the soil and breaks the face-to-face ties of village life.
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