There is a famous nine dot problem that cannot be solved unless you break its imagined boundaries — you have to “think outside the box.” But by pinning its mission to the phrase “reform in education,” the new publication Bright is trapping itself inside the box.
While some useful ideas may come out of Bright, it is likely to miss the real revolution that is fast unfolding: That is, the end of academia and its replacement by a completely new medium attuned to the science, technology, and demands of the Knowledge Age economy.
Instead, I fear that Bright will be duller than intended, spinning around in the same cul-de-sac as similar attempts at “innovation in education,” “technology in education,” and such. In my book School’s Out, I characterized such well-meaning but constricted efforts as “turbo-charging the horse.” The point, if it is not obvious, is that the automobile was not a reform of the horse, any more than electrification was a reform of gas light or the telephone a reform of the post office.
This interview I did several years later explains further:
A lot of educators and those called reformers think, to the extent you may be right, that that’s a real loss, a serious failure. They must be confused when you say that our education system is better than ever and the best in the world but, on the other hand, it’s doomed to collapse. And moreover that you seem to welcome that as progress.
It’s not a matter of failure or blame. Reformers are obsessed with better or best. They don’t recognize that those notions don’t mean much when you are dealing with major global system changes. There’s a story from modern industrial history that I have found helps to get these distinctions across. In 1952, the U.S. government decided that this country needed to have the best, biggest, and fastest transatlantic steamship. The government learned that the British liners Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth had proven to be invaluable strategic assets as troop carriers during World War II. So the government had Newport News shipyards build and launch the SS United States. On its maiden voyage, the SS United States set the all-time maritime speed record for crossing the Atlantic: a little less than 84 hours, nearly a third faster than the record set by the Queen Mary. But in that same year, a British airline introduced the first jet passenger plane, the de Havilland Comet, which, within a couple of years, was carrying people across the Atlantic in under six hours. The SS United States lost money every time it sailed; and the ship, designed for 30–40 years of service, was bankrupt in 12 years and spent the next quarter century rusting away at a pier in Turkey.
So you’re saying that because hyperlearning is as superior to classroom education as the jet was to the steamship, academia is doomed to be driven out of business. But many educators and analysts argue that multimedia, distance learning, and all that really are no better for education than the traditional classroom. Todd Oppenheimer, for instance, made that case in a recent article in The Atlantic Monthly (July 1997).
Yes, and the point of the SS United States story is that such arguments over better and best are largely irrelevant to the economic dynamics at work in this kind of system shift. Whatever may improve education matters little if what people need and want is something else. To see that, first note, particularly in regard to foolishness like national education goals, that the SS United States fully achieved the government’s national goal of building the best transport ship of its kind in history, in the world.
But the “best” wasn’t really good enough.
It was plenty good enough. It just was the wrong “best.” There is no way you can say the Newport News shipbuilders failed. They were the best in the world and they built the best ship in the world. They didn’t need to be reorganized or retrained or any of the usual nostrums of reform. They increased the top speed of a transport ship from around 30 knots to over 40 knots — a huge improvement. But there was no way then or now to get a ship to go 500 knots.
Along the same line, I recently was asked to address the question of whether Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) might be the “disruptive innovation” that would transform education, in an article in the journal Ubiquity. The gist of my answer is in the article’s abstract:
Is the MOOCs phenomenon a disruptive innovation or a transient bubble? It may be partly both. Broadcasting lectures and opening up courses via MOOCs by itself poses little change of the academic status quo. But academia is part of a broader academic-bureaucratic complex that provided a core framework for industrial-age institutions. The academic-bureaucratic complex rests on the premise that knowledge and talent must be scarce. Presumed scarcity justifies filtering access to information, to diplomas, and to jobs. But a wave of post-industrial technical, economic, and social innovations is making knowledge and talent rapidly more abundant and access more “open.” This mega-trend is driving the academic-bureaucratic complex toward bankruptcy. It is being replaced by new, radically different arrangements of learning and work. The embrace of MOOCs is a symptom, not a cause of academia’s obsolescence.
What is the replacement for academia called? In School’s Out I offered the term “hyperlearning” and in an article a few years later coined “kanbrain” to label the emerging pervasive system of on-demand learning and knowledge resources available to anyone, anywhere, anytime. Those terms got some limited traction but never became universal memes.
Today, some speak of “unschool” and “uncollege” as free and open alternatives to the constricting, costly boxes of academia. Some also call for “hacking education” — violating restrictive barriers to rearrange the elements inside to serve individual needs. While these serve to call attention to better options than the status quo, they are handicapped by focusing on what the alternatives are not rather than saying what they are.
The automotive revolution that doomed the horse as a major transport mode was similarly held back by the labeling of motorized vehicles as “horseless carriages.” It was only when the term “automobile” —first adopted in France in the late 19th century — became established in popular vocabulary that the transformation of transportation was fully unleashed.
Common terminology allowed the establishment in 1906 of the American Automobile Association, convened to lobby for paved roads and useful traffic regulations and against the legal restrictions the potent horse lobby tried to impose to contain the threat motor vehicles posed to its industry.
Whatever the language of unschool and uncollege may be, Bright does not seem designed to speak it much less craft it. Meanwhile, visions of the fast-evolving means to achieve successful communities, economies, careers, and lives without schooling are popping up elsewhere.
For instance, in a recent book, Kevin Carey of the New America Foundation offers a hopeful description of what most people want and the world needs:
“The world needs the 21st century equivalent of Carnegie libraries — beautiful, peaceful places where knowledge lives and grows and spreads. Places supported and beloved by local communities, open to everyone, that offer people all of the educational opportunities technology will make possible.”
Of course those “places” should and will be more virtual than tangible, not geographically bound but ubiquitous. And while Carey’s book is titled The End of College, what he envisions applies as much to schooling in general.
But defensive political and economic interests make the road from the existing academic-bureaucratic complex to the free learning environment Carey envisions far more arduous and contentious than he suggests. As George Lucas taught us long ago: The Empire Strikes Back.
At the beginning of American colonists’ battle for independence from British rule, Thomas Paine composed a best-selling pamphlet that provided a vision of what the revolution was for, not just what it was against. Paine’s essay sought not reform of the British monarchy but freedom from it.
Given its constrained mission, it seems unlikely that Bright will bear any resemblance to Common Sense.
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© 2015, Lewis J. Perelman
