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Re: cluetrain's influence on schools?
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Doc Searls
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Dec 11, 2000 10:52 PST
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| | Being one of those young - hmmm - humans who still go to school I
wondered what you think the implications of the cluetrain manifesto
and its general spirit would be for schools.
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The subtitle for The Cluetrain Manifesto is "the end of business as usual."
Peter Drucker, the great business thinker and writer, points out that
the modern corporation is only about 120 years old. Modern education
is only a little older. But I believe that education as usual is far
more deeply ingrained, dangerous, and in need of clues than business.
[Nice resource:
<http://www.business2.com/content/magazine/indepth/2000/08/08/17943?pa
ge=3>]
Take the idea of compulsory education for children. This was an early
19th century German industrial idea that essentially transferred
responsibility for educating children to the state. This may have had
positive outcomes, but the most pernicious and least obvious one was
conceiving education itself as an industrial process.
[Another resource: <http://www.choiceineducation.co.uk/gatto/gatto5.html>]
Today students are still "products" of an education system that
differs little from other manufacturing processes in method or its
intent. Children are seen as empty vessels to be filled with
state-approved facts, tested for their retention of those facts, and
punished with less-than-perfect "grades" for yielding
less-than-perfect test scores. Those with imperfect grades are
discounted to varying degrees as manufactured goods. The best
students graduate to the best classes and schools, and those regarded
as inferior products are given fewer educational opportunities as
they move through a long sorting system that culls the good from the
average and the bad.
We are so accustomed to this system that it strikes few of us as
ironic that while we are appalled by statements suggesting
inequalities of race and gender, we allow schools to tell us exactly
how much more or less our children are worth than others in their
classes -- right to hundredths of a decimal point. Their brains are
weighed by IQ tests and given values that are rarely abstracted as
scores. Joey, with an IQ of 134, is, literally, a better product than
Jamie, with an IQ of 112. Never mind that on another Thursday Jamie
might score 138 and Joey just 114. These scores are seen by the
system as fixed values. They tell us what human beings are literally
worth. And we believe it.
In many less civilized cultures -- like the one we had in the U.S. in
1800, when education was far less formal yet literacy among
non-slaves verged on 100% -- the idea of "moving" children of the
same age through "grades" is deeply odd, since nothing educates
younger children more effectively than mentoring by older children;
and nothing makes older children more mature and responsible than
caring for the education of younger ones. Lessons from the the
one-room schoolhouse are lost, forgotten and ignored by the
factory-building system that persists as the norm for modern
education.
| | Obviously the Internet in general is going to change the way in
which schools work (long distance learning etc.).
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More accurately, the Internet obsoletes schools for all kinds of
practical education. Look at how many of us are learning programming
with the help of the Net. And just about every other subject.
| | IMO, however, the insight that understanding arises out of
'conversation' will change the relationship between teacher and
student in a significant way (probably make it more personal).
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The best teachers have always been the ones that turn on kids, who --
in the perfect words of the teacher John Taylor Gatto -- see
education as a subtractive rather than an additive process, by
"getting out of the way everything that keeps a child's inherent
genius from gathering itself."
Conversation, of course, is usually a necessary part of that.
| | Hmm...this is my provisional verdict *g* - with quite a lot of holes
in it - on school's future.
so......what is going to happen?
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Education as Usual will increasingly be exposed for the inefficient
factory system it really is, and something much more voluntary and
enjoyable will replace it. For lack of a better term, I'll call it a
market.
Doc
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Doc Searls do-@searls.com http://www.searls.com
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