Views differ widely. By this yardstick, school reform proceeds at a pitiful pace, and schooling itself is sadly inefficient. We may be better off looking at social inventions instead. And when considering the vast variety of social organizations, growing numbers of observers recognize the importance of scale and the pace of activities. If such considerations are kept in mind, appropriate uses of technology in rural classrooms are easier to imagine.
Machines replace neither teachers nor such necessary qualities as patience and caring.
Instead, they augment the possibilities for student projects and interactions with legitimate educational purposes. Leading rural education practitioners have suggested that instruction that takes place in rural schools ought to reflect and value more faithfully the best traditions evident in local rural communities. This suggestion reflects a widely held view that effective instruction is contextualized . African American, American Indian, and Mexican American educators have made a similar point, as have reading and mathematics teachers. This view implies the need for unusually responsive adaptations to existing curricula, still largely the domain of commercial textbook publishers with little ability to take account of local contexts.