It is true that English assignments in schools aren’t keeping up with the changing world. Forget English assignments; the most modern news I received in history classes took me up to the end of World War II before we ran out of time. I did not understand what Vietnam or the Gulf War were fought over until I was well into college. It seems like schools are satisfied – no, afraid of teaching anything that hasn’t been synthesized, dissected and painted with the right perspective. Our past, but on a thirty year delay. Miller’s project of “making thought visible” is a very cool concept, especially because we have been trying to visually represent our world since the cave paintings and words still come up short describing everything in our world. So he invites the world to follow in his students’ adventure trying to use film and video for a new purpose. I think it’s a fantastic idea, because video is accessible. We are used to visual story telling, and the immediacy it offers. Students can go online to find clips they would like to edit into their projects from the night before, not thirty years before. But how practically applicable can we make an expensive project lab such as this in high schools across our nation? How can the technology required to create such thought be accessible on a national level? We already sit in a very unstable and unequal education environment, see Jonathan Kozol’s article for a glimpse into the new apartheid of education: http://www.neiu.edu/~circill/meiners/eladedfn305/stillseparate.pdf
Basically, how can we move into such a new realm of thought-processing and sharing in a classroom setting where schools cannot even currently afford books? Or to re-plaster breaking walls? Or will this project lab idea be another way to economically separate students before they even have a chance? Can we afford to transition into a new subject and medium for synthesizing thought?