Nacho Man, Part II

…and why this matters.

Allow me to introduce Ignacio “Nacho” Anaya, a maître d’ at the Victory Club in Piedras Negras, Mexico who, in 1943, was facing a crisis. He was asked to cook up something for a group of American military wives from Texas visiting there on a shopping trip. The kitchen was closed, and he was the only employee around. His solution? Grate some cheese on stale tortillas cut up into triangles and toasted into tortilla chips, melt the cheese, and top it with jalapeño peppers. It’s all he had to work with.

Voilá! ¡Presto! ¡Tada! ¡Tarán! In Russian, та-да! Enter the nacho, that delicious combination of fried corn tortilla chips topped with melted cheese and peppers found at every stadium concession stand and Mexican restaurant — outside of Mexico.

Though fat, salt, corn, and spice have been around a long time, it is how they were put together…and why Nachos (as we know them) were nowhere to be found in 1942. Football, for one, had been invented many years before in 1874, and Mexico had been around for even longer, but neither had anything to do with a particular crunchy, cheesy, wonderfully addictive snack.

I can picture him screwing up the courage, straightening his bow tie, and opening the double doors to present his concoction to the shoppers with a kind of Latin flourish. It was an immediate hit with these early adopters. One of the customers, Mamie Finan, enjoyed this snack enough to tell people all about it back in Texas. She simply took a good idea from one place and spread word about it in another. Taking the next step, restaurants in Texas served Nacho’s chips and cheese to their own diners. It was a success there, too.

An auspicious start. Nachos enjoyed its place as a niche Tex-Mex restaurant snack for 34 years until the next concession stand owner at Arlington Stadium in Dallas, Texas in 1977 sold a version of Nacho’s dish to sports-goers with pre-made tortilla chips and perpetually soft cheese. One of his customers was Howard Cosell, announcer of Monday Night Football, who raved about it on national TV for weeks, inspiring restaurant owners across the country to try the idea themselves. Early and late majorities.

He used assembled available resources in new ways. His recipe was elegantly simple to reproduce and scale. He knew his customers and how to package the humdrum into the exotic. He allowed the idea to spread by word of mouth — literally. After a while, everybody wanted to be a nacho man. Sports and nachos, became a Pavlovian association.

This story about how nachos became a global phenomenon — a good idea being recognized, hailed, and adapted in other places — is, albeit a stretch, similar to how educational ideas have made their way around the globe.

I mean no disrespect either to Ignacio “Nacho” Anaya or to the field of comparative education when I assert that the educational equivalent of Nacho Man can be found 400 years ago in Bohemia, what’s now the Czech Republic. There, a man named John Amos Comenius had some new ideas about how education should be. What he offered then has endured, even flourished, in its various forms ever since — just like nachos. Educational equality. The development of school systems catering to kindergarten, elementary and secondary school, and higher education. Innovative pedagogy. The use of illustrations in textbooks to enhance the delivery of content. Experiential education. Holistic education. The scaffolding of curriculum based upon student needs. Hands-on learning. Even native language instruction. Each of these contributions was replicable and scalable within the context of one’s own culture. Variations, like nachos, abound.

Comenius didn’t start school until he was sixteen years old, and when he did he trained to join the Protestant ministry as part of the Moravian Brethren, the sect his parents belonged to before they died. He was quite content to be a minister, but in 1618 the emperor Ferdinand II launched a campaign to reclaim Bohemia for the Catholic Church, forcing Comenius and other Protestant leaders to flee to Poland. Settling in the town of Leszno, Comenius took charge of the school and the Bohemian churches.

The school in Leszno was his connection, environment, and inspiration for leadership in education. Convinced that he could return to Bohemia after the war and rebuild the society based upon these new ideas, he proffered the notion that education should be a process that students enjoy, and that teaching techniques should be centered around the ways that students learn best.

The education as a customizable, child-centric concept is widely viewed as an indispensable component of schooling today, but in the 17th century it was quite new. Not so many early adopters. Education at that time was something to be beaten forcefully and painfully into children, just like manners and religion. With this — let’s say lighter — approach in mind, Comenius persisted and wrote the first picture textbook for little children, teaching them through images and objects than by words alone. The idea was to move children along from simpler stuff to more complicated concepts (the scaffold). Then, with an eye to help older students, he wrote the first textbook that used native languages as an aid to teach students Latin.

In short, Comenius can be credited with the notion that knowledge should be accessible and adaptable. He believed that anyone — and every child — could learn. All of these concepts were tied to his religious faith, having given him the strength and inspiration to embrace fresh thinking, put pieces together, and construct something new.

People liked his ideas (just like Mamie liked Nacho’s food) and translated them into many European and Asian languages. Samuel Hartlib, a German merchant living in London at the time, invited Comenius to come to England and establish a college and test out his methods. He spent time there and more offers came rolling in. After the civil war broke out in England, he had to decide whether to accept Cardinal Richelieu’s offer to reform education in France, or take up John Winthrop Jr.’s offer to become the president of Harvard College in the USA, or say yes to the government of Sweden’s offer to reform education there and write a series of textbooks. Not bad.

Sounds great, but great ideas are never embraced so seamlessly. More often than not, great ideas (and the people that popularize them) are often the subject of derision and blasphemy (pity, knowing Comenius was also a theologian). Though his breakthroughs were capable of changing society for the better, his timing was abysmal because religious wars had begun to ravage Europe. He lost his writings. His house was burnt down. He was exiled.

He looked for the most hospitable place he could find and picked Sweden. From there, he traveled around Europe writing textbooks, organizing schools, and spreading his education reform ideas. His great ideas, like flowers, needed pollinators and fertile soil — a community willing to feed and water those ideas in their own backyards. It took a while, but his garden has borne fruit.

Today, John Amos Comenius is recognized as “the father of modern education,” and he and his long white beard can be seen on the UNESCO Comenius Medal for outstanding achievement in education research and innovation, along with sculptures, postage stamps, and paintings throughout Eastern Europe.

All these educational conventions we take for granted — required attendance (sounds better if we call it universal education), professional development for teachers, national testing, and standardized curriculum (to ensure equal access, rather than impose governmental will), largely attributable to Comenius, flourished in Prussia during the 1000s and 1800s. The Kingdom of Prussia was one of the first countries in the world to provide state-sponsored primary education for its citizens. The King of Prussia’s idea was to train his youth to become loyal citizens of the crown, and to equip them to take over the functions of the aristocracy.

His motives, however, were not exactly pure, no less a distortion of Comenius’s vision. He wanted to influence generations of Prussians to believe in the King, trust him, and if need be go to war for him. His knew that he couldn’t just tell the people to do so (and reinforce it with strong horses and weapons, alas a popular idea today, still), he chose to integrate these ideas into a system that would have the people believe these ideas deep down in their cores. He threw the people a bone by instituting literacy and math as basic job and life skills, and placing a strong emphasis on teaching ethics, obedience, and civic duty. By the time Horace Mann visited Prussia to get ideas about public education in 1843, Prussia already had made education compulsory for 5–13 year olds, established the national school exit exam (called the Abitur), and had instituted state certification requirements for teachers — for better and worse.

It was a simple matter, then, for Horace Mann, the first U.S. Secretary of Education from Massachusetts, to recognize good ideas and massage them to fit America, with particular emphasis on dissemination. He took elements of the Prussian system and molded them into a policy governing Massachusetts state law. The system was formally adopted in 1852. Soon afterwards, many northern American states adopted their own versions of Mann’s Prussian-inspired Massachusetts public education.

Prussia was once the educational mecca. Today, education reformers look to Japan and Singapore for insights on collaborative learning and new techniques in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). They make pilgrimages to Finland to discover how a country could be so successful in educational attainment, as measured on global comparative tests, even when they discourage teachers from drilling the students to ace them, do no assign homework, hold off teaching kids how to read until the age of 7, and use the thinnest textbooks in the world.

Comenius may be credited with a stunning array of transformational concepts in the education, but his contribution is far more than the sum of its parts. He showed the world an eminently embraceable view that all cultures recognize as part of their DNA — the unimpeachable longing for — and right to — education, along with the sharing of ideas.

This idea of universal education as a right, rather than a privilege, is enshrined in Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948. “Everyone has the right to education.” In the aftermath of World War II, the Declaration’s purpose was to outline priorities for international cooperation so that we might never have such a devastating war ever again. The Declaration, including Article 26, was recognized around the world by diplomats, heads of state, and policy makers; has been translated into nearly 250 languages; and is the most cited human rights document in the world. Language from the Declaration has been remixed for incorporation into constitutions, laws, and international treaties.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights represents the widespread acceptance of what were once radical ideas. I am not about to claim that Comenius was the founder of the modern human rights movement, but I am prepared to say that he contributed to a transcendent notion of Nacho goodness without borders because today most would agree that universal education is only be possible as a globally shared commitment. In so doing, it paved the way for the development and explosion of international comparative education as a valid field of study, and is what allows organizations like UNESCO, the World Bank, and USAID to engage in education development projects around the world.

But visionary, vital, transportable, adaptable, and adoptable ideas with irrepressible lives of their own hit speed-bumps along the way. They also activate death squads. The Boko Haram — the group that kidnapped girls and hid them in northern Nigeria, doesn’t agree with this sweeping view of education as a right. The words, boko haram, translate into western education is evil. In several regions of the world, schools and teachers are targeted for attack just because they are, well, teaching.

Even then, when it seems as if all hope is lost, a bold, visual, pubic act somehow captivates the imagination and ordinary citizens spill out into the streets of a large public square to tweet reports of repression, citizen journalists who share ideas, even when thugs pull up in pickup trucks with black flags and masks or white hoods and burning crosses.

So, whether they are inspired by Ignacio Anaya, John Amos Comenius, or the King of Prussia, great ideas in education inspire others to follow in their footsteps. They invite experimentation and mashups and spectacular failure or success. Along the way, those same patterns that spread Nachos from the Victory Club in Piedras Negras to restaurants everywhere are the same processes that stimulate the accessibility to, and adaptability of, reasonable ideas about education, human rights, and civic responsibility around the world, and they continue to do so to this day.