Social discussion of CS in K-12

["Wolske, Martin B" <mwolske AT illinois.edu>]

I’m sorry I missed the discussion. George and Kerris filled me in a bit — sounds like it was quite interesting.

I read the article with interest, but also a bit of growing unease. It took me a bit to process why. Philanthropists indeed have been foundational in many big initiatives over our history. Many public libraries have computer labs because of a Gates initiative. Or going further back, many libraries started only because of funding from Carnegie. But while Carnegie libraries were relatively easy to acquire within white communities, there were significant hurdles within black communities, and so very few were started there. This would certainly jibe with the gist of the article.

I think the thing that bothered me, though, is the one I have with the idea of the philanthropist at all. In some cases - say for instance Carnegie - the wealth that was later distributed was first made through rather harsh human rights and environmental violations. And I’ve heard it argued that the value to Carnegie of the Carnegie libraries was to reframe the whole library institution as a place of quite consumption of knowledge from the learned (and well behaved) rather than as a place for community building and knowledge exchange that might further worker unrest. Today we struggle to overcome that vision of the library as the quite repository of books that remains that legacy.

Or consider Gates’ contribution, which framed the role of the public computer lab as a place for those who didn’t have access to develop the needed entry level skills to fill primarily low pay and dead end jobs. Prairienet served as a circuit rider for the Gates foundation grants so we saw the material they provided and did what we could to add additional curriculum. 

Too often philanthropists use their wealth to do things that look good, but are built upon hidden agendas or problematic foundational philosophies. Is that the nature of the beast? Or is there a way to foster better philanthropists? OR, should the goal be to break out of the consumptive framework all together, in which we wait for the altruistic philanthropist to save us, and instead champion an approach of technology and literacy for the community that helps the community address the problems directly. Including through the help not of multi-millionaires business people, but the local social entrepreneur?

— Martin

On Sep 4, 2014, at 8:11 AM, Jessica Pitcher <pitcheje AT champaignschools.org> wrote:

Thought I would pass this along after our discussion from Tuesday…

 

https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140829040920-23074630-if-bill-gates-were-black

 

Jessica

 

Jessica Pitcher

Assistant Principal

Kenwood Elementary School

1605 West Kirby Avenue

Champaign, IL 61821

(217) 351-3815

 

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