Re-visioning of Education

In light of globalization and technological developments, this article argues that educators need to cultivate multiple literacies for contemporary technological and multicultural societies, that teachers need to develop a range of literacies of diverse sorts, including a more fundamental importance for print literacy, to meet the challenge of restructuring education for a hi-tech, multicultural society, and global economy and culture. Drawing on Dewey, Freire, Illich and others, the author argues for a reconstruction of education to increase democratization and to make education more relevant to the challenges of the contemporary era. In particular, it is maintained that by introducing multiple literacies to empower individuals and groups traditionally excluded, education could be reconstructed to make it more responsive to the challenges of a democratic and multicultural society. The dramatic proliferation of computer, information, communication, and multimedia technologies has been changing everything from the ways people work, to the ways they communicate with each other and spend their leisure time. This technological revolution is often interpreted as the beginnings of a knowledge or information society, and therefore ascribes education a central role in every aspect of life. It poses tremendous challenges to educators to rethink their basic tenets, to deploy the new technologies in creative and productive ways, and to restructure schooling to respond constructively and progressively to the technological and other changes currently under way. At the same time, important demographic and sociopolitical changes are taking place throughout the world. Emigration patterns have created the challenge of providing people from diverse races, classes, and backgrounds with the tools and competencies to enable them to succeed and participate in an ever more complex and changing world.