2008 April | stimulant - changing things around. . .

a few, tasty links (april 14th - april 21st):¹

If you’re interested, you can access my del.icio.us bookmarks here. [↩]

At the Student Center, amidst throngs of people. Her two friends consoled her.

Her test went poorly, apparently.

The next twenty minutes were spent tearily complaining about the test and the teacher and her other classes. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen this.

People pay money to feel shitty, because feeling shitty is — via masochism (or is it machismo?) — is seen as a necessary consequence of doing something hard. This in turn does a tremendous disservice to the vigor of their relationship with learning.

Not that there’s anything new here.

a few, tasty links (april 9th - april 14th):¹

If you’re interested, you can access my del.icio.us bookmarks here. [↩]

On the craziness feeling guilty about not doing homework:

B: I think I can get paid [by MIT, via scholarship] $2000 per semester to feel guilty.

a few, tasty links (april 1st - april 8th):¹

If you’re interested, you can access my del.icio.us bookmarks here. [↩]

Last week, Chris Bisignani was kind enough to leave a careful, detailed reply to a post of mine about structural problems with modern reform. I finally sat down and sketched out the beginnings of replies to the myriad questions he raised. So here it is, an ongoing discussion about the nature of reform.¹ Enjoy!

the danger of powerlessly initiating serious reform

These questions have been on my mind for quite a while now (the past 6 months) - how do we reform? How do we bootstrap?

One of my main worries in attempting serious (so-called “destructive”) reform is that the system will necessarily try to protect itself - regardless of whether the reform comes from the inside or out. One way to protect yourself against its attacks is to have some credibility (so that people will know of the attacks on you and it will give you more credibility). Without such a shield, I view reform as relatively dangerous.

You are correct, and your concern raises an interesting question about reform’s tone. It is a mistake to believe that explicitly undertaking reform and undertaking explicit reform are equivalent. Personal and public decisions to work toward reform differ. Historically, successful reforms have been had little or no fanfare². More specifically, the most succesful reforms did not couch themselves in opposition to anything, instead finding ways to coexist with the model or paradigm eventually replaced, making incremental progress. Note that the typical instinct in listing reforms runs counter to this; however, if we couch this more broadly as the reshaping of an institution, there are countless reforms and revolutions that go uncounted for their subtlety (e.g. the Internet: its lack of intention has not meant a lack of direction in completely reforming many domains).

I’ve struggled with choosing how multifaceted to make my presentation of beliefs. We all express ourselves differently in different contexts. My question is how straightforwardly to conceptualize my efforts as reform. My [relatively recent] conclusion is that I should couch it as a reform only insofar as a reform is “constructive” (as opposed to destructive). This is at odds with the fact that I’m surrounded by broken, educational institutions (and by the fact that a lot of thinking I do about education is stimulated by these failures). But, I think that this bit of mental hygiene is in my best interest. It’s too easy to draw comfort from working to revolutionize education, without concrete feedback.

So for now, at least, I think a very local context (starting a university and the steps constituting that process) makes sense when paired with my desires for broader reform (e.g. thinking carefully about streamlining and decentralizing the startup process for a university, looking for a form of organization that is cheap, scalable, and robust, etc.)

the hollowness of reforms

“Reform efforts frequently couch themselves one-dimensionally, in opposition to the status quo, failing to offer — and make central — the positive, alternative they propose.”

God, I feel like I could write an entire book on this. Too bad no one would read it and it would take forever to write.

I note that there is a general lack of creativity in many reform movements. They seek to eliminate a culture - but what is to take its place?

For instance, I think that vegetarianism as a movement underestimates the extent to which meat has social and cultural significance. I’ll leave it at that because I’m sure you can see what I’m getting at.

I think that one of the main failings of many reform movements is - as you say - their tendency to define themselves as a reaction to a dominant culture/structure without creating their own new set of symbols/cultural forms.

Ron Paul actually acts as an interesting example of a “good attempt” - an attempt that was beaten largely because of its scale (I think if he had aimed for something less difficult than President he could have had a much more significant impact). The culture and symbols were in place - and they had a long tradition behind them.

The “hollowness” of a reform is important, in this way.

Two points here are particularly valuable: you finger a “general lack of creativity,” and the failure to “[create] their own new set of symbols/cultural forms,” as problems with current reform movements. Because reform movements often start among those who are not in control of the derelict institution, their efforts inevitably grow out of reactions to mishandling. Beyond constraining the vocabulary and culture available to a reform movement, this frequently carries with it the added baggage of narrowing the field of solutions considered. Reform movements only make sense in the context of inflexible or inertial institutions, where experimentation is not possible (otherwise, the institution — equipped with the appropriate feedback — would evolve solutions). As a result, reforms are consistently handicapped by their decision to adopt the language of the dominant institution. For most institutions, this language allows the institution to frame any and all debates to their advantage. Chomsky describes this phenomenon well in the context of propaganda; however, the difficulty is only compounded when it comes to reform, which is much more complicated than the simple dissemination of information and opinion.

What if instead, the problem unaddressed by the institution were attacked head-on? The concern of the “reform movement” is then limited to those ways in which the institution interferes with attempts to fix the problem. Of course, this often means that (in the short term, at least), reformers will be limiting their scope. Nonetheless, I think this is the most powerful choice, not only because it affords reformers the space to create their own language and solutions, but it allows for the tweaking and demonstration of reforms’ efficacy. This is much stronger rhetoric than any a priori statements. Everyone — even policymakers — are incompetent forecasters of social change. This is why the infrastructure of an institution is so much more important than its particular policies. Rarely is an institution’s mission statement off the mark; it is how these sentiments translate into action. As a result, in a flexible institution allowing for experimentation, there is greater opportunity to take advantage of real-world feedback about policy choices. In top-heavy bureaucracies, these feedback loops are attenuated to the point that those within the institution adapt to the institution, instead of vice versa. When this happens, many confounding variables are introduced that not only make it difficult to strategize, but even to imagine the “ideal” solution.

designing a revolution versus designing a culture

“How do we design an educational revolution?”

This question makes me somewhat wary and I’ll tell you why.

Obviously you’re aware of the differences in methods/difficulties associated with top-down vs. bottom-up design. You speak about how “something in the middle is preferable.”

Is the real aim to -design a revolution?- I guess I’d like some clarification here. What is your -real and specific aim?- This is a question I haven’t really seen you answer (or if you have, I’m not aware of it).

I want to create a revolution in the functional, not cultural, sense. I think the act of defining revolution is actually very subtle. In this context, I “simply” mean a widespread change in the way people think and behave regarding education. Furthermore, I’m hoping to accomplish this through proof of concept, first: many of the difficulties of reform stem from the tendency to argue goals from a set of principles instead of demonstrating their efficacy at the proper scale. To be fair, in inflexibile institutions like education, this is often impossible. Furthermore, those contexts which are flexible enough (e.g. pilot, private, and sometimes charter schools) are often sufficiently different in their infrastructure and funding to make it easy to discount their improvements as non-portable. My hope is to avoid these problems by thinking carefully about building a university in as general and scalable a way possible. In this sense, I’m hoping to create a market for a particular, university model, rather than work forward from people’s principles or my philosophy as instantiated in a reform culture. I’m currently working on a clear, specific statement of these aims that will be forthcoming; however, this should do, for now.

The reason that I am wary is that this sort of expression - “I want to create an education revolution” - expresses a sort of distance from you. This is subtle, but important. It creates a monolithic desire. It expresses one standard by which a movement created by it can be judged; is it revolutionary?

I believe that to create a good revolution is not to express and attempt to forward such a monolithic goal. Instead, as I alluded to above, I think what’s really important is creating a whole structure of desires/symbols/etc. which inter-relate and also relate to things external. This is the creation of a cultural entity.

You can reduce this one step further: this whole structure of desires and symbols should be built upon the concrete changes made. Obama has manufactured this structure of desires and symbols from political discontent. If you stop and consider the nature of most campaigns, one of their most amazing characteristics is how easily (and infamously) they excite people with nothing more than the prospect of change, which itself remains unsubstantiated for years.

Reforms should work in reverse, moving forward from concrete successes to build that lexicon of symbols and desires with the credibility lent by real-world success. Pedagogy and philosophy are easily espoused and disregarded. This emasculates them by letting people feel as though they are doing right without doing right. Creating a powerful, engaging solution and then describing it is not only intellectually more honest, but I think more effective, as well.

Such cultural entities are difficult to engineer (and I’m not sure that anyone has even tried) but I think they’re vastly more successful to succeed (they’re the form that most unspoken revolutions take - when a ton of symbols/emotional context are created spontaneously and simultaneously by widespread conditions).

Man, this is extremely abstract, but also kind of an exciting idea.

So instead of asking “how do we start an educational revolution?” let’s ask “how do we create a self-reproducing cultural entity whose result will be consistent with a well-defined set of principals?”

This is a “constitutional approach,” I guess

And it is the correct one! That “self-reproducing cultural entity” is exactly what I want to work on at the scale of a community (and its school) — c.f. the beginning of this section.

it doesn’t look like a duck, it doesn’t swim like a duck, and it doesn’t quack like a duck, but we’re calling it a duck

I think that something you should not underestimate is the power of symbols. Calling something a “university” makes the problem extraordinarily complex because you’re dragging in like a thousand years of tradition. People will not only have to grapple with the nuance of what you’re doing - but will necessarily view it in terms of its difference with traditional structures.

Eh, I don’t know. So hard! I feel like I have tons of ideas about this, but I’m having trouble tying them together into a coherent thrust.

It’s actually exactly those thousand years of tradition that I am counting on to provide broader, reformative context. For instance, Nagle has no trouble getting parents to send their children to his camp. But he has comparative difficulty finding parents for his ~~school~~ center, despite essentially identical philosophies and implementations. Parents expect school to be serious and mainstream. No unified assessment of summer activities exist, so parents act more consistently in light of their interest in nurturing happy, curious kids.

Note this means parents can send their children to Nagle’s camp and then to a traditional school, and without thinking too carefully, completely miss the fundamental inconsistency. This is one of several reasons I’d like to start a university: I think it is much easier to confront that inconsistency and effectively debunk the assumptions people make about the value of traditional schooling in the university context.

Given how charter and pilot and private schools’ innovations and successes are written off as “unsurprising” consequences of their fundamentally different (and therefore, [allegedly] unscalable) structures, I want to avoid my radicalism undermining my credibility and rendering ostensibly irrelvant my conclusions (through their [alleged] impracticality). When people take for granted the immutability of a significant part of the institution you seek to change, rejection of the status quo (even when paired with success!) does too much damage to one’s credibility to be effective.

The real success will be to use people’s tendency to drag in those thousand years of tradition to hide how radically different this endeavor. Once a university [with the appropriate “curricula” and fiscal model] exists in this model, the question of the model’s relevance and portability is mostly answered.

To see this, we can look at two, competing trends in education. On the one hand, as undergraduate education becomes increasingly common, its relative value decreases insofar as a credentialist market for education commodifies learning. This has led to a dramatic increase in graduate school applications. The traditional, educational market is currently taking its cues from the graduate and postgraduate domains (e.g. note the many-fold increase in undergraduate research and publication). On the other hand, the technology sector is growing so quickly and so broadly as to make startups and industry potent, again. People like Paul Graham now claim that college is irrelevant for those interested in technology startups.

Both of these trends agree on the increasing irrelevance of college (though not its necessity), motivated by different metrics: success in the credentialist context and success in the economic context. If we recognize college’s symbolic power as a symptom of underlying valuations (of credentials and economic success), it becomes clear that we can co-opt these underlying values. Johnathan Kozol notes that the ultimate strategic victory for a nontraditional school would be to create students who could “run circles around [in standardized testing]” those from traditional schools, while avoiding the emotional and pedagogical baggage of traditional methods. I think it’s dangerous to give traditional metrics an implicit endorsement; nonetheless, capitalizing on our knowledge of the status quo’s priorities is a valuable strategy.

Similarly, I think that if I can connect a radical university to success in the economic and academic senses (that is, if it is regarded as good preparation for graduate work and good preparation for the “real world”), it will be possible to capitalize on these market pressures to expand this model. But, positioning this model correctly initially (i.e. as a “university”) is essential to redirecting these market pressures effectively.

all the cool kids aren’t doing it

I’m just going to throw out a few ideas that this post inspires in me.

First of all, I think that you should think about these questions in terms of the language of “common knowledge.”

I think that a reform has power in proportion not only to its immediate appeal, but in proportion to n-th order appeal. Namely, how does a person perceive this idea as appealing to others?

An idea is not just powerful if one person likes it, it’s powerful if that person also imagines everyone else liking it. Powerful forms like national media and highly-read bloggers are able to create this common knowledge (or similarly destroy it), but it is also an innate property of an idea (at least w/r/t the cultural context it is defined in terms of).

An obvious consequence of this thinking is that ideas that are “too radical” (even if everyone individually likes them) are going to meet social resistance.

This is definitely true, and unfortunately, a problem I’ve yet to solve. I don’t use radical language when pitching an afterschool program to a school. In a lot of ways (particularly with older students), this limits the efficacy of a program. Much of what I think needs to change about schooling has less to do with the efficiency with which we teach information, and more to do with the culture we build around learning and working. As a result, I find introspection and discussion about pedagogy and the nature of education (and subordinately, the nature of the domain within which you’re working) essential. Unfortunately, confronting a lot of these ideas seems to require the radical language that could pose a problem for many. My only solution thus far is the creation of environments that are effective and engaging. With these in hand, I’m working to move students to tease out why this unfamiliar model works so well. Later, we’ll see that your point about orthogonalization can be well-paired with this sense of radicalism by placing your orthogonal language in uncontroversial (but exciting and engaging) domains (namely, research and social entrepreneurship).

An interesting characterization of radicalness is that it is in some sense a measure of the dot-product of the idea w/r/t pertinent social vectors. Hehe. What I mean is that an idea that is radically different (in a sense) but also orthogonal to cultural norms (expressible in terms of a new set of symbols, for instance) will not cause as much of an immediately negative reaction. Oh my god this is so abstract.

I’ll give you an example to tie it in to experience, though. My argument against a lot of Christians is something to the effect of “What is your definition of god?”

This is an “orthogonal question” because it is not expressible in terms of commonly known elements of the space of religious discourse. Thus, reactions to it aren’t as negative as reactions to blatantly atheistic rhetoric (“why do you believe in god?”).

Similarly an “orthogonal reform” would be one like…say, the atkin’s diet. It was sufficiently new and strange that it was able to accumulate cultural capital before growing a strong negatively reactive base.

To summarize, orthogonality is a powerful tool for creating common knowledge - without it an idea is straining against well-defined and powerful cultural forms (on every scale).

This is a great point, and the metaphor of dot product is powerful. This needs to be clarified. Your claim that a reform’s efficacy is parameterized by its radicalism and its choice of language is spot-on; however, it is incomplete. You characterize new language and symbols as essential, suggesting that orthogonality is necessary. With this, I disagree. The damage done by adopting existing language and symbols comes from the tension between the existing lexicon and what a reform is actually looking to say. That is to say, when the dot product is small enough, discussion is rarely subtle enough to note the built-in failure of existing ideas. Instead, the discussion is dominated by the assumptions of the traditional language, creating a disabling tension between what you want to say and what other people can hear. Nonetheless, there are plenty of reforms whose expression in familiar terms is necessary for their efficacy, simply because people’s counterreaction to their radicalism is not the primary issue.

Concretely, education reform suffers for adopting the current language of assessment and performance in part because nobody makes explicit their definition of education’s goals (which are, in theory, responsible for how we engineer the subordinate goals of assessment and performance). But, there are many issues (politics in particular) in which reform groups are looking to make changes that are appropriately described by existing language. Barack Obama and Ron Paul do not fall into this category. Note that this is not to say that reforms cannot stand to benefit from broadening their language (almost all can, given the potency of building a culture around an idae).

This point returns to the distinction between couching one’s efforts as reform and working toward the object of the reform, itself. Most reforms identify low-level symptoms of underlying problems and focus on these as their metrics, inevitably leading to misguided reforms and stagnated methods. Couching one’s efforts as reform leads to a different mentality (and more importantly, often leads to a decreased sensitivity to feedback) than “simply” trying to solve a problem. To again make this point in the context of education: we’ve never seen (as a society) an effective K-12 education system. We don’t know what it looks like. Despite this, many feel that tweaking it in the direction we’ve been moving is all that is necessary. We don’t see the culture that we’ve put in place as feedback about the methods we employ; instead, we see the choice to create such a culture as a method, in and of itself.

More specifically, the host of rules and regulations, the adversarial relationship between teacher and student, the close regulation of behavior, the use of grades as coercion — the list of cultural kludges disguised as “method” goes on and on. Essentially, teachers are performing a bad experiment. The efficacy of incremental reform is washed out by the noise of the existing culture, hindering separation of cause and effect.

A sidenote about your argument against Christians: it relies not only on people having poorly justified spiritual outlooks (a good thing — your reliance, that is), but on the difficulty intrinsic to the task, a factor which does not, a priori, threaten the value of believing in God. To elaborate: there is clearly a set of spiritual phenomena and beliefs which people want to have access to in a superficially consistent way. Like all jargon, the language of spirituality borrows extensively from the language of religion, which itself borrows language extensively from the human world — specifically, human organization. Mismatch between these roots and the ideas people want to express is inevitable. For instance, the intuition of God as a single, unified object is extremely constraining. In particular, it is the constraint I would guess is responsible for most of the confusion accompanying your request to define God.

What I think some really want to is that they believe in this host of ideas about the character of the functioning of a spiritual world. Knowledge about the spiritual world exists on a spectrum of specificity ranging from ritual to dogma to theism to the simple belief in unobserv{ed,able} phenomena. People find religious discourse powerful because they can relate to it. The impulse to make religion powerful often results in the injection of the specific (particularly, the familiar; e.g., the human form cherubs and angels take).

The instincts and desires creating people’s spirituality are complex, and I’m not suggesting that this accurately describes’people’s inner workings. I am claiming that its truth for a subset of believers means that the question of definition is an obstacle but not an indictment.

Eliezer’s comment about Type-A materialism over at Overcoming Bias is pertinent:

I think that someone who asks “What is consciousness?” is asking a legitimate question, has a legitimate demand for insight; I don’t necessarily think that the answer takes the form of “Here is this stuff that has all the properties you would attribute to consciousness, for such-and-such reason”, but may to some extent consist of insights that cause you to realize you were asking the question the wrong way.

This is not being eliminative about consciousness. It is being realistic about what kind of insights to expect, faced with a problem that (1) seems like it must have some solution, (2) seems like it cannot possibly have any solution, and (3) is being discussed in a fashion that has a great big dependence on the not-fully-understood ad-hoc architecture of human cognition

it’s all you need

Another idea is love. It’s strange, I know, but the proof is in the pudding (c.f. Ghandi).

I think that it is important to have an overwhelmingly positive message phrased in terms of some “universal set of human symbols.”

All too often reform efforts get caught up in the technical and therefore miss out on important meta-conversation/meta-action (iteration) and miss out on very important abstractions (creation of new symbols). The Paulites just argued political theory - there are SO MANY other ways they could have phrased their arguments. There are so many things they could have created. But most importantly, they could have couched their message in a rhetoric of hope and promises of “good.”

There’s a more subtle reason such an approach is important. People don’t like to be reduced/essentialized. Creating a culture of tolerance (even of really vociferous opponents) around a political movement is extremely important. After all, even our enemies are people - if we’re going to change the world to be better, we want it to be better for them too.

Metaphorically, I think that this positive emotion - this hope - this compassion is really the heart of any movement. Jockeying for power - looking for change for change’s sake - these sorts of movements are going to die out or attract the “wrong crowd.” Nothing good can come of them.

Of course, the question of how to create positive emotion within a movement is orthogonal to the movement itself - which means that it’s hard to iterate. (Principal: orthogonal iteration is hard!)

Something I haven’t been good about is building that language of tolerance into my own discussions, precisely because of the seeds of my discontent. What I’ve been thinking a lot about lately is the role of the institution I envision as a place where people are empowered to change the world. Typically, college is seen as a prudential investment. Even at MIT, it’s taken for granted. I think this is one of many opportunities for cultural change at the institutional level. I know relatively few people whose definition of success is defined by their effect upon the world, rather than the effect of their position in the world upon them. Which is to say, I know lots of people who see success in terms of their own position in life, instead of in terms of their accomplishments, independent of their identity.

This is a shame, because there’s a great deal of emotional capital to be drawn upon in the context of a research university. Ranging from the romance of science to the righteousness of social entrepreneurship to the well-developed engineering culture, there are many potential contexts that naturally lead to a more empowered, more ambitious population. And I think that moving in this direction is the most straightforward way to make the question of reform moot: enthusiastic, orthogonal activity.

Fundamentally, calling my ambition a university is a misnomer. It takes for granted none of the traditional assumptions about what it means to be educated. It’s much closer to a think tank, or to steal Beth Noveck’s’s phrase, a “do tank,” powered by curiosity and real-world need. Instead of focusing on the language of education and pedagogy, I think that couching this effort in a completely separate domain is exactly the type of strategic orthogonalization you suggest. And I think it’s a good solution to the problem of reform, returning to the idea of working backwards from real, unannotated success instead of forward from “guiding principles.”

fin

It should go without saying that these ideas are all in flux, poorly formed, and in desperate need of critical feedback. Reading over this post now, it’s clear that I’ve bitten off more than I want to chew in one post; there are glaring problems with it. Nonetheless, the brain dump has been useful (and hopefully, in its dilapidated state, will prompt more energetic criticism!).

Thanks so much for taking the time and energy to respond so thoughtfully to my post; I’ve only scratched the surface of the various issues you raise, and they will figure prominently in my thinking for a while. Please don’t hesitate to ask for clarification (or even better, respond in kind³ ).

Note that I plan to talk more about the various issues raised more in the coming weeks, with independent posts. [↩]
Notable exceptions, like the civil rights movement, reform the mismatch between what an institution says and what an institution does, as opposed to changing the aims of the institution. [↩]
A better way to exchange essays in thoughtful discussions is needed. Suggestions welcome [↩]

Evidence over at FOUND magazine:

Note number 2. While it is disheartening, it is hard for me to imagine most parents saying that schools are the best environment possible for curiosity’s growth and satisfaction. Inevitably, pragmatic and prudential concerns intervene. Unfortunately, even that intervention is misguided.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with FOUND magazine:

We collect FOUND stuff: love letters, birthday cards, kids’ homework, to-do lists, ticket stubs, poetry on napkins, telephone bills, doodles - anything that gives a glimpse into someone
else’s life. Anything goes…[and then we post it online!]

a few, tasty links (march 23rd - march 31st):¹

If you’re interested, you can access my del.icio.us bookmarks here. [↩]

stimulant

changing things around. . .

things to look at (april 14th - april 21st)

a girl just broke down crying in front of me

things to look at (april 9th - april 14th)

overheard in front of 11-120

things to look at (april 1st - april 8th)

reform is compl{ex,icated}: a dialog

the danger of powerlessly initiating serious reform

the hollowness of reforms

designing a revolution versus designing a culture

it doesn’t look like a duck, it doesn’t swim like a duck, and it doesn’t quack like a duck, but we’re calling it a duck

all the cool kids aren’t doing it

it’s all you need

fin

school, curiosity bad mix?

things to look at (march 23rd - march 31st)

whoami

static

find old things