stimulant

During an open house at the Sudbury Valley School in Framingham, Massachusetts, I listened to one of the school’s founders speak extensively about how quickly technology changes, pointing out — with a mixture of nostalgia and amazement — the rapid cycles of technological obsolescence in the past three decades. Just as I thought he was getting ready to talk about the self-governance and free model that gave the school its reputation, he ended the talk. Needless to say, I was disappointed. The friend of mine who had brought me to the open house commented that it seemed as though the founder had intended to build up to the point that our current, instruction-heavy curricular model is broken. Given how quickly our world is changing and how rapidly it is expanding, the idea of “preparing” a high school student with the “right knowledge” for the world is increasingly irrelevant. Despite this, many see credentials as more important than ever. But, [the founder] never made it that far.

I’ve complained before about the senseless spiral of credentialism. As the high school diploma lost its scarcity, the college diploma supplanted it, and now, educational inflation has led people to see graduate degrees as increasingly desirable. The politics of manufactured scarcity mean that the same ubiquity of access we seek on people’s behalves creates an economic pressure to keep up the distribution of haves and have-nots, leading to an ever-lengthening list of “necessary” credentials. Simply put: making schooling more accessible is not enough to flatten the distribution of those correlates we associate with education (namely, economic security).

On one hand, there is a conservative push toward increasing specialization qua credentials, characterized by the group who were termed “millennials” several years ago. The other shift¹ , there is a movement toward the disestablishment of credentialism as people find broader and broader contexts in which to monetize their creativity. People like Paul Graham have pointed out that the ease with which startups can now be founded seems to mean that an increasing number of alternatives will be provided outside the successes within the traditional infrastructure of the academic and corporate world. Non-traditional programs and curricula in vaguely defined fields like “design” and “innovation” are cropping up in the face of intense demand. Websites like Etsy are giving individuals’ creations direct exposure to consumers. Despite this broadening of our vocational imaginations, it has favored decidedly “cognitive” or “academic” aspects of work.

Crawford notes that,

Today, in our schools, the manual trades are given little honor. The egalitarian worry that has always attended tracking students into “college prep” and “vocational ed” is overlaid with another: the fear that acquiring a specific skill set means that one’s life is determined. In college, by contrast, many students don’t learn anything of particular application; college is the ticket to an open future. Craftsmanship entails learning to do one thing really well, while the ideal of the new economy is to be able to learn new things, celebrating potential rather than achievement.

Ironically, this “egalitarian worry” is paralleled at college as post-secondary education’s openness, in concert with atrophied intellectual autonomies, force students into what feels like a painfully underdetermined system. High-achieving students anxiety balloons to fill this void, hyperfocusing on their choice of a major, often to the exclusion of their genuine interests or even an awareness of what interests them. At finer scales, students obsess over the long term prudence of class choices, planning out courseloads years in advance. Even in relatively portable² fields like math and physics, students operate with the implicit assumption that their life (academic, intellectual, economic) is extremely sensitive to initial conditions. Not only does this create bad habits (like taking at face value the alleged inviolability of prerequisites), but in trying to engineer this, students create absurdities not unlike those of hyperprudent parents who select kindergartens by the schools’ long-term college admissions track record.

But, things are changing. Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class documents the trend among creative professionals to prefer a “horizontal job market.” By this, Florida means that creative professionals anticipate holding many, different jobs, as opposed to many, increasingly senior positions within one company:

When asked about the importance of employment, the people in my interviews and focus groups repeatedly say they are not looking just for a single job but for many employment opportunities. The reason, they tell me, is simple. They do not expect to stay with the same company for very long. Companies are disloyal and careers are increasingly horizontal.³ To be attractive, places need to offer a job market that is conducive to a horizontal career path. In other words, places have to offer a thick labor market.⁴

For most, this type of comfort with mobility and turnover is only possible given assurances of economic security. As the job landscape flattens and widens, it becomes easier to ignore the credentials that guaranteed you admission to what used to be the only games in town. By far, one of the most exciting threads tying themes like personal fabrication, “Web 2.0”, revised visions of intellectual property, and my own plans for changing education is that of economic empowerment through personal creativity. Instead of living on someone else’s terms, people are making the tools and communities that will one day naturally support living on your own.

1. and to me, the inevitably dominant trend [↩]
2. In the context of the job market, that is [↩]
3. From The Next American City:

   Because the Creative Class career trajectory tends to be horizontal (movement from job to job within an industry) rather than vertical (movement up within one company), creative workers look for places with a thick job market. They may not move to follow one particular company, but they will choose places that offer many possible job choices.

   [↩]
4. Emphasis Florida’s. [↩]