A good educational system should have three purposes: it should provide all who want to learn with access to available resources at any time in their lives; empower all who want to share what they know to find those who want to learn it from them; and, finally, furnish all who want to present an issue to the public with the opportunity to make their challenge known. Such a system would require the application of constitutional guarantees to education. Learners should not be forced to submit to an obligatory curriculum, or to discrimination based on whether they possess a certificate or a diploma. Nor should the public be forced to support, through a regressive taxation, a huge professional apparatus of educators and buildings which in fact restricts the public's chances for learning to the services the profession is willing to put on the market. It should use modern technology to make free speech, free assembly, and a free press truly universal and, therefore, fully educational.
Writing in the late 60s and early 70s, Illich, though prescient, did not anticipate the emergence of a cheap and dirty world wide communications network. Nevertheless, this description of post institutionalized, decentralized, learner directed education built around real needs and real interests and independent of endorsement by a cabal of self-selected and self-important "experts" is strongly suggestive of emerging social networks.
Illich refers to the work of Thomas Kuhn (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions) and points out that "leadership also does not depend on being right... Charlatans, demagogues, proselytizers, corrupt masters, and simoniacal priests, tricksters, miracle workers, and messiahs have proven capable of assuming leadership roles and thus show the dangers of any dependence of a disciple on the master."
The so-called blogging revolution is a case in point. News bloggers, coalescing into a massively distributed network, have demonstrated that they can react more quickly, move closer to the sources, and collectively offer a depth of analysis, thoroughness of observation, and an understanding of political and social contexts that puts corporate news producers to shame, despite commanding massive budgets and armies of professional journalists.
I dislike the term "social capital". People make and people do but they are not value and they are not capital. The internet is only a communications tool. It does not create, invent, or transform anymore than does a hammer, a club, or a sharpened stick. The curse of a people without history is to forever invent the wheel.
Believe it or not I have actually read Kuhn. Ilich's ideas are certainly radical. Would this free choice of ideas and knowledge work equally well at all levels of development? What if a five year old chose not to learn to identify numerals?
ReplyDeletePeople are not capital, but they may possess it. I was once thanked by my department chairman for writing a letter to the university president. The chairman had recently exerted some pressure to achieve a particular goal and was wise enough to realize that he had moved beyond the interest into the capital in his relationship. I also advised a young man to contact the instructor of an online course about a technical failure (His final paper, which should have attached to an email to the instructor, didn't get sent.) I suggested that since he had posted all other assignments in a timely fashion, he would have a certain social capital that might buy him some credibility with the instructor. I was not thinking of either the student or the instructor as capital, but the relationship between them had some investments on both sides.
"The curse of a people without history is to forever invent the wheel."
ReplyDeleteThis is exactly why I think teaching social studies is so important, even from a young age. Students need to know the successes and failures of the past, and learn from them. If this "sharpened stick" internet tool can help us achieve that, then it is a bonus.