stimulant

Definitions

So, I recently hinted at the ways in which blame, power, responsibility, and guilt inform our ideas about social reform when it comes to a minority¹ .

Exploring this requires we constrain our definitions of action and reaction. To do that, let’s [re-]introduce the idea of locus of control.

“Locus of control” simply refers to the degree to which a person feels as though they control themselves and their life. Typically, “internal” and “external” loci are discussed. For the purposes of this discussion, we will soften this definition to yield a spectrum of loci. For our purposes, the locus of control will depend on a mixture of internal and external factors whose ratio changes depending on the context and situation. For instance, someone may feel powerless in the context of their job, but completely confident in romantic relationships.

Our definitions of action and reaction now follow similarly. An act is committed as an “action” to the extent that the locus of control is internal. Conversely, an act is a “reaction” to the extent that the locus of control is external. These definitions are subjective. Whether an act is committed as an “action” is independent of its reception by others. Regardless of this post’s title, I won’t be drawing a line between action and reaction. It is necessary to note, however, that most people think we draw such a line.

We already support such a spectrum in our language. When people say that someone is accountable, at fault, to blame, responsible, behind [an event], or guilty of [something], they choose their language by the moral tincture of their vocabulary (which is in turn parametrized by the perceived locus of control). We can choose very carefully how to couch culpability. And for most people, how we do so is a function of how easily averted we see the circumstances in question. If we feel that we would have acted similarly — if there simply wasn’t enough information, or if it was the lesser of two evils, or there is some other mitigating factor — we see the choice as a product of circumstances, not bad judgment. If we feel that the person’s acts were poorly informed and justified, if we feel that we would have acted differently (i.e. better), we will see the choice and its consequences in personal terms of responsibility (e.g. “They should have known better”). Unfortunately, hindsight and foresight are very different. It is simple (and self-satisfying) to be judgmental in hindsight: we often hear about the need to “walk a mile in someone else’s shoes” precisely because hindsights distorts the projected locus of control It is when this intuition fails us that we approach our personal threshold between internal and external loci. And it is there that you can easily concoct moral gray areas.

The reasons these definitions matter

The idea of responsibility is frequently behind-the-scenes in our thinking: from the judicial system to our personal sense of guilt, the concept is the social manifestation of how we think about causality² .

I’m not going to cover all that ground today. In future posts, I will discuss how this definition controls our approach to social reform generally and education specifically.

For instance, I think that giving people an artificial sense of control is one of the primary strategies employed to motivate work under arbitrary constraints. In social reform, the seed from which all assumptions and tactical decisions grow is precisely the question of to what degree and in what contexts those you’re aiming to help are empowered (or disempowered). As a special case of working on someone else’s behalf, school is shielded by its good intentions, creating the illusion of partial, intellectual autonomy, despite the fact that the learning program instituted by most schools determines to what extent students are intellectually autonomous.

Physical restraint constrains a freedom that is fully developed and knowable (i.e. the freedom to move around, unhindered). Intellectual freedom is significantly muddied by the fact that its full, unhindered exercise requires careful care and practice. Traditional pedagogies actively train against this capacity. As such, even straightforward opportunities for autonomy are routinely perverted.

I’m eager to understand the nature of the hooks school (and more broadly, well-intentioned but incompetent social reform) has in students (and more broadly, those whom the reform aims to help, as well as those who support reform).

Many such duplicities are built into the foundation of the system we’re trying to reform. Figuring out how to discuss and think about responsibility is as important to social reform as a careful conception of causality is to scientific investigation: it is a component fundamental to the phenomena we seek to control and understand.

1. By this I mean a minority of power, not of number. [↩]
2. Which is itself a pretty sticky situation [↩]

Which is where I’ve been spending a lot of my time, lately. Given my ambition [to start a university], I have a significant interest in open source, low cost, high quality scientific equipment. The interest in NMR of a friend of mine¹ and the availability of funds from the Eloranta Foundation and Tau Beta Pi means that this summer, courtesy Prof. David Cory and Drs. Scott Sewell and Jay Kirsch, Sarah, Emma, and I get to design and build a low-cost NMR machine kit from the ground up, control software and all.

There are several aims:

• Figure out how open source hardware/software development works. In a lot of ways, my experience doing this project overlaps significantly with the type of experiences and environments I want to design and provide as part of an educational institution.
• Discern where the failings of current, available workflows (in terms of tools for things like SCM and knowledge capture) are.
• Make scientific equipment for which I will have a need and use.
• Play around with the idea of “citizen science,” creating a tool that could provide for a much larger capacity and context for people to play around with the idea of science being a cultural activity.
• Learn some electronics; have some fun.

In any case, these aims mean that documentation is a primary concern. So, you can find the project’s blog here², the code/CAD files/schematics will be hosted by Google Code at the opeNMR project page, and there will probably be two, separate wikis for building tips and electronics knowledge? I don’t know yet (feedback welcome). In either case, I’ll post a link when that happens. And finally, photos from the endeavor (and hopefully others’ attempts, in the long run) can be found in the opeNMR flickr pool.

Comments and suggestions as to any of these components, from something as broad as the conceptual aims of the project to as detailed as a design flaw on the blog, are welcome.

1. Sarah Ackley [↩]
2. Soon, the URL won’t be so terrible. Soon, it will be http://openmr.mit.edu [↩]

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 ).

1. Note that I plan to talk more about the various issues raised more in the coming weeks, with independent posts. [↩]
2. 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. [↩]
3. 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!]

When most teachers walk into a classroom, they’ve already put in hours of work preparing for the next forty minutes. What they say, what they do, what materials are made available, how they organize students — to some extent, all the teacher’s moves have been orchestrated ahead of time. For many teachers, careful orchestration is necessary: the only way to squeeze in a burgeoning curriculum is micromanaging class time. Most schools even require the advance submission of a lesson plan, in some form.

When people talk about good teachers, they usually mean that a particular teacher is effective. Even people excited about educational reform and those critical of traditional education conflate being a good teacher with effectively transmitting information and skills.

I won’t try to define, “a good teacher.” Instead, let’s examine teachers’ interactions with students. We ask teachers to excise their personal life and opinions from the classroom. Touching is prohibited. There is no room for informal conversation or off-topic discussion. The classroom is regulated into an artificial, bloodless place.

Teachers strategize constantly to keep students’ attention, to evoke a desire to work, to foster willing — even eager — obedience. We have made the teacher into a behavioral engineer. Unfortunately, the line between behavioral engineering and “pedagogy” is not as clear as connotation would suggest. We measure teachers via students’ performance on tests which at best [attempt to] measure the retention of knowledge. What else do we expect?

We have defined education in such a way that coercion is intrinsic. To compensate for tihs, teachers call on a variety of tools. “Great” teachers master the art of drama, crafting a stage persona to engage students. Hours are spent “sugarcoating” a subject to make its study palatable, as with naturally noxious but unfortunately necessary medicine.

As teachers, when we walk into a classroom, we try to hide all the preparation and microengineering that goes into the lesson. “Effective” preparation is invisible: the activity will run smoothly, students will enjoy it, and they’ll learn something, to boot! What’s wrong with that?

Basic to our efforts is a duplicity that is compatible with the best of intentions. When I teach, there is an unresolved tension: do I work to effectively teach knowledge, or do I aim to create the type of environment I wish were available for students? There is a hidden battle between the implicit purpose and explicit aims of education. In differentiating aims and purpose, I mean to separate what many people refer to as “deliverables” (verifiable, explicit goals) from the long term reason for our efforts, the underlying motivation bringing us to articulate these “aims.”

When I teach, I could set out to transmit skills and information as effectively, pleasantly, and engagingly as possible. Or, I could create an honest and empowering environment. These are incompatible insofar as they occur within a coercive institution, no matter how pleasant and well-mannered the coercion is.

Education is a myopic institution oblivious to its own disability. Unaware of its own systemic design flaws (though not its real-world failures), educators — and in turn, the public — inadvertently hyperfocus on the explicit aims of education.¹ I fundamentally disagree not only with the methods employed to satisfy our current, explicit, educational aims, but the underlying trend they comprise.

Generally, solutions that address issues closest to a problem tempt people most strongly. The proximate cause is more prominent than the underlying cause when people see a problem. This human instinct is disastrous qua social reform, where the infrastructures involved are so large as to preclude looking at only proximate causes. In most large systems, the network of causality is dense and subtle, and it is foolish to mistake symptoms for causes. This problem is well understood in medicine. There is a clear difference between symptomatic and curative treatment. Both doctors and patients distinguish between the two; furthermore, everyone is aware of the potential for interacting symptoms, treatments, and disseases.

Unfortunately, most people fail to bring the same subtlety to a consideration of schooling (or most other social institutions). Certainly, teachers will gladly cite home, neighborhood, or cultural factors as causes of in-school problems. And this is even true! These problems are also outside of the control of educational institutions. While I would never suggest expanding schools’ jurisdiction, I do think that this handicap should inform our strategies. But, these are not the most salient factors. At best, we should acknowledge that our current policies interact poorly with problems of this type. The cultural factors fingered as problematic deal in terms like empowerment, happiness, safety, and respect. Our institutions should foster these in students, rather than looking to solve society’s ills directly.

For instance, misbehavior in the classroom is often seen as a result of boredom. And it’s true: boredom is a proximate cause which, if removed, can suppress the symptom of misbehavior. Some teachers see disrespect as a proximate cause of classroom trouble, and strive to enforce obedience. With obedience in hand, they declare the problem solved. But it isn’t. School is still a fundamentally coercive institution that does harm to students’ autonomy, intellect, and spirit.

Despite MIT students’ mastery of the educational system, they often have a perverse relationship to their own learning. Without a schedule and teacher in hand, they find themselves incapable of learning academic content. Worse, they have no idea of what they would like to learn. Setting their compass by the prudence or popularity of a given choice, natural curiosity disappears. Yet these students love class: they are among the best schoolgoers I know. Assignments excite them, questions incite further investigation, tests prompt all-night study sessions. Overachievers have mastered the art of teacher-pleasing to the point that this feedback is a basic value. Doing well — notably, as defined by others — is fundamental to their self-worth. Countless conversations with students have highlighted grades and tests as both stressful scourges and necessary metrics to give students a sense of their own progress. “Tests let me know if I’ve really learned a subject,” many will say.

Step back for a moment and reconsider that statement: school has created an environment in which its best and brightest have difficulty understanding how well they know something without one-dimensional and ultimately shallow feedback about their mastery. This is the result of solving a systemic problem incrementally, improving the local situation by moving up the gradient of academic performance. Obedient, motivated, hard-working, attentive, and “gifted” students are not enough: this is what our academic trials cull.

This trend toward disempowerment and dependency is the closest thing to a purpose our educational system has. Words like “purpose” and “mission” bring along the assumption of intent. While I would never suggest that teachers wake up in the morning and rejoice in another opportunity to disempower the next generation, I would suggest that they set other goals that end up equivalent (e.g. “preparing students for the job market,” or “teaching students to follow directions,” etc.). Within a coercive institution, it is still possible to create compelling, creative classes. And this is dangerous.

Seymour Papert first introduced me to this problem in his book, Mindstorms:

Knowledge is a collection of facts about the world and procedures for how to solve problems. Facts are statements like “The earth is tilted on its axis by 23.45 degrees” and procedures are step-by-step instructions like how to do multidigit addition by carrying to the next column. The goal of schooling is to get these facts and procedures into the student’s head. People are considered to be educated when they possess a large collection of these facts and procedures. Teachers know these facts and procedures, and their job is to transmit them to students. Simpler facts and procedures should be learned first, followed by progressively more complex facts and procedures. The definitions of “simplicity” and “complexity” and the proper sequencing of material were determined either by teachers, by textbook authors, or by asking expert adults like mathematicians, scientists, or historians — not by studying how children actually learn.

Today’s educators have allegedly renounced this knowledge- and skill-centric philosophy, trading it in for a “constructivist teaching philosophy.” What’s ironic about the transition is that constructivism is an epistemological theory concerning learning, not teaching. Papert clarifies the distinction by coining the term “instructionism:”

What I was going to talk about if I had been [at the site of an intended speech], is about how technology can change the way that children learn mathematics. I said how children can learn mathematics differently, not so much how we can teach mathematics differently. This is an important distinction. All my work is focused on helping children learn, not on just teaching. Now I’ve coined a phrase for this: Constructionism and Instructionism are names for two approaches to educational innovation. Instructionism is the theory that says, “To get better education, we must improve instruction. […] ” Well, teaching is important, but learning is much more important. And Constructionism means “Giving children good things to do so that they can learn by doing much better than they could before.”

People see learning not as a skill, but as a process determined primarily by a combination of talent intrinsic to the learner and difficulty intrinsic to the topic. This misconception offloads responsibility for learning from learner to teacher. Unfortunately, the reality is that the difference between teaching and learning is the difference between giving a man a fish and teaching that same man how to fish. Empowerment and satisfaction differ fundamentally. Worse, the teacher ends up fighting a losing battle, holding the teacher accountable for something over which they ultimately have no a priori control.

This confusion is central to the friction created by inflexible curricula. Educators’ contortions aim to finagle attention and effort from students, procuring motivation where there is none. To torture our analogy a bit, this is something like starving the man to whom we give a fish for the purpose of teaching them the specifics of gutting and cooking seafood.

The fundamental duplicity into which all teachers buy unwittingly grows from the fact that we are dealing with a captive population, unable to choose their intellectual course and constrained by legal, social, and economic pressures. No matter how personable or hard-working we are, we cannot erase that fact. But we can mitigate it. It is in doing so that our duplicity takes root.

We try to trick students into learning. We are not honest about our motives, we are not transparent in our expectations, and we draw inconsistently on the capital provided by the students’ captivity. And it is here that my dilemma arises: providing freedom and providing an effective learning environment are different — though thankfully compatible — goals when pursued within current educational institutions.

During every afterschool program I run sans school supervision, I make it clear that not only do I not expect students to participate if uninterested, but I am eager to cover for them if they would like to leave school or otherwise skip class. I try to create a haven for the type of real freedom and autonomy to which I believe everyone has a right. These efforts are often at odds with attempts to create the focused atmosphere of energy that characterizes effective learning environments in schools, often resulting in a range of engagement. Instead of having a class in which three-quarters are excited and entirely engaged, only one third of the group entirely engaged, one half is interested and partially engaged, and the remainder are engaged with something entirely unrelated to my efforts.

I am uncomfortable with this compromise. I know I could easily improve how effective and engaging my teaching is in the narrow context of “education;” furthermore, I know that in doing so, it is likely that students’ experiences with me will contribute significantly not only to their long term academic success, but to their long term intellectual (and academic) acuity and creativity. But for me, their attention is poison fruit, tainted by the methods providing it. And until that tension is resolved, every attempt to “teach better” will be an effort in well-intentioned duplicity.

1. This is one reason testing such an easy cause — or, addiction — to pick up. [↩]

a problem

Reform efforts exist on a spectrum spanning two extremes. One extreme feels that reform can only start outside the ailing institution. The other extreme thinks that only by working within the system can we change it. Unsurprisingly, the answer usually lies between the two extremes. Those who think that outside reform is the only possibility think the existing infrastructure offers no hope, that the system is beyond repair. These reformers feel disenchanted with and disenfranchised from the channels that are intended to address their calls for change. These channels typically include the judicial and legal resources nominally available, as well as the organization within the object of reform itself (i.e. the mythical complaint department and its relatives). Unfortunately, those dedicated to working solely from within [the system] are often also disempowered, being sabotaged by their misplaced trust of the creaky institutions “outside” reformers eschew.

Given that the sweet spot of empowerment is somewhere in between refusing to participate and being co-opted by the existing infrastructure, it is unfortunate that the methods of education reform are so polarized. In relying on existing infrastructures, “insider” efforts are intrinsically self-documenting, but stagnate quickly. For this same reason, “outsider” efforts are intrinsically incomplete and poorly documented, which is a shame, since they are often more dynamic, but less influential.

a linchpin

Both approaches to reform seek to empower collective action. Insiders point collective action at our governing institutions, outsiders seek to empower collective action to create alternative institutions. It is a truism that grassroots efforts are desirable, robust, and effective. Despite this, Barack Obama’s netroots campaign has captured a great deal of attention for its success. The success of Obama’s campaign is due in part to his ability to create emotional and social capital among voters. But I think the piece missing historically has been a good understanding of the profile of scales involved. By this I mean the character of the organization of power and action within an effort. While it’s clear that we’re looking to differentiate between top-down and bottom-up organization, this vocabulary ends up being incomplete.

Consider the United States government: we have multiple scales (federal, state, and municipal), and at each of these, there is a strongly hierarchical bureaucracy in place. What we’re really talking about are the scales at which structure exists, and then the type of structure in place at these scales.

My involvement with the Center for the Future of Civic via MAS.712 has shown me a number of projects aiming to empower people in civic contexts by creating tools intended to facilitate collective action and communication. Historically, I’ve found efforts that focus on raising awareness or fervor around an issue underwhelming. Typically, they fail to mobilize the emotional and social capital they create. For many reform movements, this means that their primary functionality is promoting socialization and bringing like-minded people together: a function that falls frustratingly short of the promise (and often, self-stated mission) of these organizations.

Reform efforts frequently couch themselves one-dimensionally, in opposition to the status quo, failing to offer — and make central — the positive, alternative they propose.¹ An unfortunate consequence of this habit is the marginalization and isolation of the reform effort. The more serious this mistake, the less permeable the line between the reformers and everyone else, meaning the reform efforts are more likely to be seen as extremist.

To oversimplify: successful reform efforts focus on the problem, not the problem-solvers. This is not to say that the problem should be the focus to the exclusion of the problem solvers, but reform efforts emasculate their efforts by hyperfocusing on the group’s identity. When everyone is working on a problem, the primary function of a reform effort is not social[ization]. When a reform falters, taking longer and occurring slower than expected, reformers understandably band together, seeing themselves as a cohesive (and unfortunately, separate) social unit. Integrating opposition into your identity encodes at a very low level the assumptions your group makes. Reform efforts set themselves up for failure by taking for granted an adversarial rather than cooperative process.

a recipe

Thus we seek to bestir the people into an awareness of their own condition, provide inspiration for their thoughts and rouse them to pursue their true interests.

So ends the principles of the Knight Foundation. It’s an exciting, articulate sentiment that directs our attention to the raw materials of change: awareness and motivation.

Many projects aiming to empower a population first focus on bringing those involved together, facilitating communication, and enabling the group to make their needs and desires heard in a cohesive way. Given that we can “rouse them to pursue their true interests,” how do we capitalize on that? This is a question reforms rarely answer. Bringing people together gives you access to social, emotional, technological, and even fiscal capital. But how do you transform that into meaningful action? While grassroots efforts are made robust by the power of decentralized systems, the problem of coupling that to action is difficult. Essentially, we’re looking to design leadership into an effort, from the ground up. The concerns raised by the types of infrastructure in place at various scales is difficult and poorly addressed.

I have no general answer for this question. Even the direction to proceed is unclear. But going back to the specific case of education makes clear that this framework makes some progress.

a guess hope

a friend of mine runs summer camp which will be in its third year this summer. Parents and kids love it.

Camp Kaleidoscope, a summer day camp in Somerville for 6-12 year olds, will be running this summer for its third year! At Camp Kaleidoscope we build kites, launch rockets, make video games, paint pictures, control robots, and do whatever else seems like a good idea.

Essentially, Camp Kaleidoscope is a hands-on instantiation of a free-school for two months. This same friend is looking to start a creative, hands-on school for kids this fall. Whereas parents beat a path to his door to enroll their kids in camp, finding parents willing to employ the same pedagogy during the school year are few and far between. Parents have a prudential interest in their children’s future, meaning that they see school as a serious endeavor (in contradistinction to summer camp).

We see a diluted analogy to this in the progression of pedagogical flexibility from pre-school to high school. Unfortunately, this makes extending pedagogy shown to be successful in the primary grades an uphill battle. But, I had fingered the relative ease of experimentation as the cause of primary school’s comparative progressivism.

It wasn’t until recently, when reading Scott Nearing’s The New Education that I came across a historical explanation for this, as well. The early 20th century was a time wherein many students (particularly among poor and rural neighborhoods) did not finish middle school. Progressives decided that if they were to be reached by the edifying hand of the Movement, this must be done in primary school.

Setting history aside, what lesson do these observations suggest about the nature of successful reform? How do we design an educational revolution?

a guess

What if a university were to plunge students into real world pursuits? What if students were innovators and inventors who were learning core skills and knowledge on the fly, as they solve real world problems? What if this school were revolutionary in a host of ways which did not threaten the conventionally prudential value of the education? I’m betting that the vision of high school students taking on world-class research and design problems is not only possible, but the closest thing to a positive defense available to pedagogies implemented within the traditional schooling framework.

I’m guessing that the successes of students at this university will endorse our pedagogy strongly enough to catch people’s attention. This attention would lubricate dealings with the traditional educational infrastructure, and the model and design of the university itself would be scalable and easily decentralizable, giving grassroots support a natural, actionable outlet: making your own [university]!

The fundamental tension between top-down and bottom-up reform efforts comes from the fact that the institutions involved in each approach are coupled by design. Our government is designed to serve our needs and desires. Unfortunately, we are afforded a tiny sliver of experimental leeway to explore how we want to solve the problem of education, meaning we end up with poorly articulated — and worse, wrong — “desires” because we haven’t had the time and space to iterate. My hope is that a single, educational institution will be able to not only capture the ear of the traditional infrastructure, but provide people with a blueprint for changing education at its most flexible point by anticipating the excuses people usually use to exclude evidence (dissimilar demographics, financial situation, etc.)

a rain check

I’m sure my rambling has made it clear by now: I’m struggling with the framework and vocabulary with which I want to discuss and design this reform effort. Everything feels sloppy, still. Nonetheless, I believe that there is a fundamental structure to reform, and I think that we can take advantage of this for real change. However, I am dubious of my tendency to abstract and generalize. I’m wary of hidden assumptions and this convoluted discussion. So please, push back and help me refine these ideas.

1. Worse, they often lack a sufficiently concrete, positive, alternative vision. Even if the status quo were to do an about-face and give reform groups the reins, many would not be prepared to take action [↩]

Nearly a month ago, prompted by a well-attended MIT Faculty Meeting regarding the “Star Simpson affair” and the concerns raised by Patrick Winston and Kenneth Manning about MIT’s conduct in the matter, I started to look into how Faculty Meetings might be recorded and archived. The meeting was lively and surprisingly revealing. The next Faculty Meeting that went around came from Lily Burns, a staff associate in the Office of the President. I emailed her, asking about having Faculty Meetings recorded. After a month of stonewalling, I haven’t made much progress in my efforts to have faculty meetings broadcast. Chancellor Philip Clay said that finding a faculty member to sponsor the motion would be necessary, and I’ll be following up on that lead this week.

But, in looking over my conversation with Lily Burns, I thought people might be interested in one of the least productive 22-message email threads ever:

---

Alec Resnick <aresnick@mit.edu>	Sat, Feb 16, 2008 at 4:46 PM
To: "Lily U. Burns" <lub@mit.edu>
Hi Lily! I had a quick question: to whom should I speak about the possibility of recording faculty meetings?  I’d love to make them publicly available; unfortunately, I won’t be able to make the Wednesday afternoon times this term… Thanks a bunch. Gratefully, a. 2008/2/15 Lily U. Burns <lub@mit.edu>: [Quoted text hidden] > _______________________________________________ > Facmtgs mailing list > Facmtgs@mit.edu > http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/facmtgs > >  —  alec resnick aresnick@mit.edu http://aresnick.mit.edu/ 617.229.5036 256 Brookline St. / #2 Cambridge, MA  02139  —

---

Lily U. Burns <lub@mit.edu>	Tue, Feb 19, 2008 at 11:12 AM
To: Alec Resnick <aresnick@mit.edu>
Hi- This has come up before. At present there is not a plan to record the Faculty Meetings. You can look at the minutes on line through the archives website after the meetings however. Thank you, Lily [Quoted text hidden]

---

Alec Resnick <aresnick@mit.edu>	Tue, Feb 19, 2008 at 11:22 AM
To: "Lily U. Burns" <lub@mit.edu>
Hi Lily —  I’d be happy to set up the necessary equipment and personnel to do this.  Thanks! Gratefully, a. [Quoted text hidden]  —  [Quoted text hidden]

---

Lily U. Burns <lub@mit.edu>	Tue, Feb 19, 2008 at 11:29 AM
To: Alec Resnick <aresnick@mit.edu> Cc: "Bevin P. Engelward" <bevin@mit.edu>
Alec- Thank you for your enthusiasm. At this point, we are not ready to do this. There are no recording devices allowed at the Faculty Meetings other than those for the Secretary of the Faculty. Again, you can read the minutes following the meeting if you want to find out what happened. Thank you, Lily [Quoted text hidden]

---

Alec Resnick <aresnick@mit.edu>	Tue, Feb 19, 2008 at 12:19 PM
To: "Lily U. Burns" <lub@mit.edu>
Alright; whom should I speak to about setting something like this up? Really, I’m happy to undertake it as a project. Thanks for your help! Gratefully, a. [Quoted text hidden]  —  [Quoted text hidden]

---

Lily U. Burns <lub@mit.edu>	Tue, Feb 19, 2008 at 12:32 PM
To: Alec Resnick <aresnick@mit.edu>
I am the right person. I can bring it up at a Faculty Officers Meeting the next time we meet. Lily [Quoted text hidden]

---

Alec Resnick <aresnick@mit.edu>	Tue, Feb 19, 2008 at 12:34 PM
To: "Lily U. Burns" <lub@mit.edu>
Great, thanks a lot.  I appreciate it.  When is the next Faculty Officers Meeting? I’d be happy to scrounge up the supplies, get the appropriate paperwork signed (if releases are necessary), and implement whatever online component would be necessary. Thanks again!  And please don’t hesitate to let me know what else I can do to help. Gratefully, a. [Quoted text hidden]  —  [Quoted text hidden]

---

Lily U. Burns <lub@mit.edu>	Tue, Feb 19, 2008 at 12:47 PM
To: Alec Resnick <aresnick@mit.edu>
Alec- This is a lot more complicated that you seem to think. Again, I appreciate your enthusiasm, I really do, but this is not something that can just start all of the sudden. I will keep you posted. Lily [Quoted text hidden]

---

Alec Resnick <aresnick@mit.edu>	Tue, Feb 19, 2008 at 12:52 PM
To: "Lily U. Burns" <lub@mit.edu>
Oh?  I guess I haven’t necessarily thought _too_ carefully about it. What’s subtle about it?  I’d be interested to meet sometime to talk about it, if it is that complicated. Thanks again! -a. [Quoted text hidden]  —  [Quoted text hidden]

---

Alec Resnick <aresnick@mit.edu>	Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 5:21 PM
To: "Lily U. Burns" <lub@mit.edu>
Hi Lily! I was wondering how the Faculty Officers’ Meeting went, and what I should do to start working toward getting faculty meetings recorded? Thanks! Gratefully, a. [Quoted text hidden]  —  [Quoted text hidden]

---

Lily U. Burns <lub@mit.edu>	Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 5:25 PM
To: Alec Resnick <aresnick@mit.edu>
Alec- There are no recordings at the Faculty Meetings. Thank you- Lily [Quoted text hidden]

---

Alec Resnick <aresnick@mit.edu>	Tue, Mar 11, 2008 at 12:58 PM
To: "Lily U. Burns" <lub@mit.edu>
Hi Lily! Can you tell me a bit more about what people said at the Faculty Officers’ Meeting?  I understand that the current policy allows no recordings, but I’d appreciate it if you helped me to try to find the right people or channels to look to change this. Thanks for your time. Gratefully, <