Students take on the masks and rituals that enable them to access the knowledge offered by Mrs Brown. The mask each one wears reinforces a sense of community and a system of values. In education, that value system is the arena for the sharing and pursuit of knowledge. If you like, the classroom becomes a stage, teachers and students the performers playing roles that will bring about the growth that ensues from the sharing of knowledge. When a culture shifts from one environment to the next, a loss of traditional cultural meanings is often the result.
Traditional masks lose their significance and impact.
They become mere vestiges of the power that once was. It is a similar story for the culture of education. With the change of environment from traditional lecture theatres and classrooms to distributed learning environments, such as WebCT, traditional cultural masks and rituals that reinforced the value of learning, the status of the teacher and the role and identities of students, are gone. Nothing meaningful has yet replaced them. Teachers struggle to communicate and assert authority through text alone, and students lose boundaries and guidelines commonly assumed in facetoface communication.