Should schooling be compulsory?

My wife is attending a terrific conference, Educon 2.1, the 2nd annual, sponsored by the Science Leadership Academy here in Philly. It's a gathering of progressive educators, talking a lot about the future of education and they talk/act a lot about integrating Web 2.0 practices. (A number of them are live-blogging and live-Twittering the conference.)

Last night, I joined my wife to attend the keynote panel at the Franklin Institute, entitled "What is the purpose of school?" It was a really impressive group of panelists, including African-American scholar Molefi Asante who has authored over 65 books; Jeff Han, inventor of the multi-touch screen; and Stephen Squyrers, Principal Investigator for the Mars Exploration Rover Mission. Their comments and subsequent discussion were very interesting, and I'm glad I went. BUT, I'm disappointed that this powerful panel discussion, within this really progressive conference, never even questioned the premise of compulsory schooling.

The idea of compulsory schooling is so ingrained, so taken for granted that we fail to remember that it is less than 300 years old -- the tiniest of slivers of human history. Its logic is compelling and attractive: "We need compulsory schooling to prepare young people for a complex world. And, besides, what else would we do with all those kids?" And I don't have an easy answer for that (certainly not conveniently contained within a blog post). But lots of others have been thinking about this. I'm sensitive to it because my undergraduate honors thesis 30 years ago (yikes!) focussed on three authors (Ivan Illich, Paulo Freire and John Holt) who boldly and lucidly questioned compulsory schooling.

And, now, a just-published book by John Gatto, Weapons of Mass Instruction, apparently does the same. I haven't read a book about education for many years. But I've become aware that I'm not hearing anybody around me raise the issue of compulsory schooling. And, my own ability to articulate the arguments is rusty. Maybe time to get the book. (And if anyone else has read it, please let me know what you thought.)

The Tools, they are a-changing

I’ve been reading The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual by Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls and David Weinberger. I’d heard of it before, but decided to take a closer look when it was recommended by Alex Hillman of IndyHall. It’s an outgrowth of the website of the same name, with its 95 Theses of the new paradigm heralded by the web. Although it’s focused on the implications of the web for business, its dominant theme is really all about how the web enables authentic voices and meaningful connections.

Its biggest drawback is that it was published way, way back in the year 2000 – eons ago in Internet time. But, as I read it, it still seemed fresh and interesting, and didn’t seem out of date, until we “... take a tour of the various conversational modalities the Net offers”: e-mail, mailing lists, newsgroups, chat and web pages”. Let’s call these “Group A”; they are all great and unprecedentedly important tools which have dramatically empowered people by liberating their voices and making possible fluid, dynamic and serendipitous human connections.

But what feels dramatically and profoundly missing, what hadn’t been invented (or at least weren’t popularized) back in those olden days, are blogs, podcasts, videoblogs, Twitter, social bookmarks, YouTube, Flickr, Slideshare, Craig’s List, much of what passes for “social networking” and much, much more. These are “Group B”.

The absence of Group B tools in the book struck me harder than I would have expected. Group A tools are not out-of-date clunkers; they are all mainstays of the cyberworld. And in retrospect, it certainly seems like Group B represents a natural progression and evolution of empowering Group A communication tools. But on the other hand, something about Group B feels deeply and profoundly different.

So, what’s different about them? All I come up with at the moment is that, when you speak through the tools in Group A (except for “web pages”), you have some degree of sense and control over who the audience is. Sure, it’s likely you don’t know all the readers in your mailing lists or newsgroups (and not knowing much or most of the audience is a critical part of their value). But, you likely have some sense of who the audiences are, because each mailing list, newsgroup or chat channel has some sort of name, identity, purpose. And you have some control over who hears your message, at least to the extent of being able to quit one mailing list or join another.

But Group B tools enjoy an audience of the whole world. Put out a blog post (like this one), or a Flickr pic or even a Craig’s List listing, and anyone can see it, link to it, love it, hate it. These newer tools carry voices anywhere, everywhere. Sure, groups of audience do emerge (a Twitterer has a certain number of followers; a podcast has a certain group of RSS subscribers). But these “groups” form even more dynamically, organically and unpredictably than the groups who subscribe to a mailing list or newsgroup.

Relatively speaking, a newsgroup is a silo. A blog is an open door.

But I don’t think this quite captures it. What am I missing? What do you think?

Here Comes Everybody

I've just begun reading a terrific brand new book (publication date February 2008!), Here Comes Everybody : The Power of Organizing without Organizations by Clay Shirky. It's about how people are spontaneously and organically forming all sorts of groups and achieving all sorts of tasks via new electronic media.

He offers, for me, the clearest explanation of economic theory for how this works, and why we are at the beginning of a permanent, profound change in how people can relate to one another to act differently within, and upon, the world. (It's definitely clear, but a bit dense -- I had to reread portions a couple times.)

Example: after the London terrorist bombings, people on the scene uploaded a flood of photos (many from cell phones) immediately onto Flickr. These photos (and the people who submitted them) are linked together by common tags. Gathering this corpus of photos so quickly could not have been achieved by a formal "organization"; only a platform that facilitated lots of spontaneous, individual actions could enable it.

More to come.