Children Live Life Knowing They Live it Against The Law. That Realization is Extraordinarily Corrosive.

I’m creating a new category on this website in honor of Lawrence Lessig. It’s called the Open-Source Consortium, and it consists of a group of people preaching the virtues of opening up content, letting it be tinkered played with, so long as we’re not profiting off of someone else’s intellectual property.

Is there a difference between making a mix tape (something my students have never done in their lifetimes) and re-mixing a song on your computer for your friends?

But I digress. Lawrence Lessig is a Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and founder of the school’s Center for Internet and Society. He chairs the Creative Commons (CC) project, the most vital Internet non-profit operating today:

“Too often the debate over creative control tends to the extremes. At one pole is a vision of total control — a world in which every last use of a work is regulated and in which “all rights reserved” (and then some) is the norm. At the other end is a vision of anarchy — a world in which creators enjoy a wide range of freedom but are left vulnerable to exploitation. Balance, compromise, and moderation — once the driving forces of a copyright system that valued innovation and protection equally — have become endangered species.”

Lessig has a wonderful speech that’s recently been opened up to the public which he presented at TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) last Spring. Lessig’s fundamental thesis is that user-generated content (usg) is what the Internet is all about (duh), that shifting BACK to a Read-Write society, from the read-only society we were accustomed to before computers became affordable, democratizes usg. It no longer belongs to studios. It belongs to everyone. This is important because currently usg by anyone BUT a studio is generally considered illegal. In a read-only culture the consumer is definitely NOT the creator. There is a very big difference, Lessig argues between piracy and re-mixing (which is the foundation of the CC philosophy).

So What Does This Have to do with Education? (I get the technology component)

Right now our educational system is based on the strong belief, slowly and strongly reinforced by over a century of conventional wisdom, that a “read-only” approach is the way to go. Children are empty vessels.

The antithesis to this common wisdom is one of the platforms of open-source education. Remixing. Students tearing up textbooks and putting them back together again, only using our entire civilizations written and oral history to fill in the blanks.

As Lessig argues:
“We can’t kill the instinct that technology produces, we can only criminalize it.
We can’t stop our kids from using it, we can only drive them underground.
We can’t make our kids passive again, we can only make them “pirates”.

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