The other night I was at dinner with a friend and she said, "We need to seize the means of production." She went on to say that, in our non-manufacturing economy, we needed to seize the means of political production, which create the policies and laws which run our lives.
I was so struck by this need to re-interpret Marx's exhortation that I sat, dumb, staring for minutes at the photos on the wall of Chipotle behind her.
She's right about seizing the means, but I don't think she's talking about the relevant means. Yes, we need to be in charge of the political system. But wasn't Marx talking about the very products and systems that influence our work and lives in the most quotidien sense? I don't actually know what Marx was talking about, but it seems important to be in control of the systems that we interact with the most frequently, and which have the strongest impact on our lives.
The systems that have the most impact on my life and the lives of the students are definitely the information systems, and the internet. Are we in charge of them? Definitely not. This article points out that while we may have our own blogs and websites and photo streams on Instagram, we are essentially renting from corporations who lend us the space... until they don't want to. They could shut down a site as soon as it pleases them. And suddenly, we'd be stripped of our opportunity to speak, share, communicate, express.
The article goes on to describe how the internet has indeed created an amazing opportunity for the proletariat to create its own products and control (by coding, app creation, blogging) its production of information and information technology. But he also notes that there are trends toward greater control over our access to production. The big actors in the Web world are increasingly limiting the openness of our systems: (the following is from his blog)
For example– did you know that you don’t really own all those songs you bought legally from iTunes? Bruce Willis found out the hard way that he could not will his $9,000 iTunes library to his daughter because he doesn’t really own those files. Did you know that Amazon can reach right into your Kindle and delete books if they want to? Ironically, they’ve already done it with George Orwell’s 1984. This episode of Planet Money explains how for the first time in history, you do not own the right to control and resell digital media like you could with physical books, CDs, and media recordings. The cost of an effortless “app store” experience may mean that you are paying for books and music that you cannot resell, return, or remix. You may find that the friendships and followers you have cultivated on Facebook cannot be exported or used in any tool outside of their walled garden.
OK, now on to education. This article talks more about the benefits of an open system over a closed one. In short, it says that having an open system guards against human error, because in an open system there are so many actors affecting the final product that one poor decision doesn't sink the ship. The example is Wikipedia, which might have a dud of a web page for some topic, but the overall encyclopedia is still impressive because there are so many other actors doing quality work.
The counterexample is Apple, where for 12 years Steve Jobs was essentially the one making the important decisions. This worked because he made very, very few errors, and his ideas and design were actually visionary. This is not a model to count on unless you think you're as brilliant as Jobs.
I've been looking at a lot of schools in the past several weeks. Some are their own closed systems - they select the applicants, decide who is let in and kept out, control (largely) what information they are exposed to, and what kind of access they have to production. I wonder if schools that let everyone in, and that let the students direct some of the choices about curriculum, would be more successful because they are more open. I don't mean more successful in getting kids to pass grades; I mean successful at changing with the times in ways that benefit the education system and society.
If a principal or head of school, or even a board of directors, is making all the decisions about how a school is run and what it's focus is, how successful can it be in the long run? It is, it seems to me, dangerously dependent on whether those few minds are consistently right. In economics, closed systems are considered to be safer because there is an assumption of perfect information and a predictable future. Yes, and these are just two of the ridiculously restrictive assumptions that make textbook economics irrelevant and backward.
Since a central actor (head of school) does not have perfect information, or any idea what is going to happen in the future, an open system is better. What would an open school look like? One where all the teachers were encouraged to drop all testing prep and choose what they saw as the most valuable, relevant content for that semester? Such a school would be insulated against being totally wrong, because at least some of the teachers would get it right. If we are all preparing for the same wrong-headed tests that assume they know what limited info the students need to master in order to succeed, are we not making the same silly mistake that AOL made in trying to guess what internet users would want to see on their computer screens?
Let teachers decide! Hang accountability! You'll attract a lot more teachers who have something they're passionate about sharing with students.
I was so struck by this need to re-interpret Marx's exhortation that I sat, dumb, staring for minutes at the photos on the wall of Chipotle behind her.
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| Karl Marx |
The systems that have the most impact on my life and the lives of the students are definitely the information systems, and the internet. Are we in charge of them? Definitely not. This article points out that while we may have our own blogs and websites and photo streams on Instagram, we are essentially renting from corporations who lend us the space... until they don't want to. They could shut down a site as soon as it pleases them. And suddenly, we'd be stripped of our opportunity to speak, share, communicate, express.
The article goes on to describe how the internet has indeed created an amazing opportunity for the proletariat to create its own products and control (by coding, app creation, blogging) its production of information and information technology. But he also notes that there are trends toward greater control over our access to production. The big actors in the Web world are increasingly limiting the openness of our systems: (the following is from his blog)
For example– did you know that you don’t really own all those songs you bought legally from iTunes? Bruce Willis found out the hard way that he could not will his $9,000 iTunes library to his daughter because he doesn’t really own those files. Did you know that Amazon can reach right into your Kindle and delete books if they want to? Ironically, they’ve already done it with George Orwell’s 1984. This episode of Planet Money explains how for the first time in history, you do not own the right to control and resell digital media like you could with physical books, CDs, and media recordings. The cost of an effortless “app store” experience may mean that you are paying for books and music that you cannot resell, return, or remix. You may find that the friendships and followers you have cultivated on Facebook cannot be exported or used in any tool outside of their walled garden.
 |
| Image from the New Yorker article: open and closed systems |
The counterexample is Apple, where for 12 years Steve Jobs was essentially the one making the important decisions. This worked because he made very, very few errors, and his ideas and design were actually visionary. This is not a model to count on unless you think you're as brilliant as Jobs.
I've been looking at a lot of schools in the past several weeks. Some are their own closed systems - they select the applicants, decide who is let in and kept out, control (largely) what information they are exposed to, and what kind of access they have to production. I wonder if schools that let everyone in, and that let the students direct some of the choices about curriculum, would be more successful because they are more open. I don't mean more successful in getting kids to pass grades; I mean successful at changing with the times in ways that benefit the education system and society.
If a principal or head of school, or even a board of directors, is making all the decisions about how a school is run and what it's focus is, how successful can it be in the long run? It is, it seems to me, dangerously dependent on whether those few minds are consistently right. In economics, closed systems are considered to be safer because there is an assumption of perfect information and a predictable future. Yes, and these are just two of the ridiculously restrictive assumptions that make textbook economics irrelevant and backward.
Since a central actor (head of school) does not have perfect information, or any idea what is going to happen in the future, an open system is better. What would an open school look like? One where all the teachers were encouraged to drop all testing prep and choose what they saw as the most valuable, relevant content for that semester? Such a school would be insulated against being totally wrong, because at least some of the teachers would get it right. If we are all preparing for the same wrong-headed tests that assume they know what limited info the students need to master in order to succeed, are we not making the same silly mistake that AOL made in trying to guess what internet users would want to see on their computer screens?
Let teachers decide! Hang accountability! You'll attract a lot more teachers who have something they're passionate about sharing with students.
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