Why Everyone and Everything Involved with Education is Interchangeable and Expendable.

Except the Students That is.

[Ed: This is a weekly series detailing my plan for a new way of thinking about education, including, but not limited to, the way we use teachers in the classroom, school materials, curriculum, and school design/space.]

I couldn’t sleep last night. I generally can’t sleep Sunday nights: my body’s out of whack from the weekend, I’m anxious about the coming week and what needs to get done, and some combination of these two things often leads to great, or at least interesting, ideas. This is the biggest one I’ve ever had, and I’m still trying to wrap my head around it, so bear with me. (By the way, what’s great about having a BIG idea re: education, is that it’s one of the few things in this country just about everyone can agree we’re doing a terrible job at. It’s one of the few universal failures. Even those who can afford to send there children to great schools have their lives affected by people with poor educations. It’s just impossible to hide from, which takes so much pressure off when you’re starting the whole thing from scratch!
Open Source Education rests on the following principles:
• Teachers, for the most part, are ineffective, not because they lack the will or fortitude or training, but because they’re placed in environments where success (or lack thereof) has been predetermined by existing environmental/social influences.
• Textbooks, in the traditional sense, are so idiotic it’s embarrassing, while at the same costing schools A FORTUNE to buy. Every year = a new edition. It’s the biggest racket in the education world, and textbook publishers will be the first ones to admit it.

Common Misconception #1: “Well, I had textbooks growing up, and they did me just fine.”

Unfortunately, sir, that’s slightly inaccurate. Despite what you may believe, or have been conditioned to believe, studies show that your education was about as good as the one being provided today (namely, crap). In fact, we spend WAY more today per-pupil than we did when you were going to High School.
The difference is that because you didn’t really NEED a great education, at the pre-college level, to obtain a job, you simply assumed that you were learning a lot. We can do this the easy way or the hard way. The hard way is I ask you some extremely basic questions in just about any High School subject, and see how you do. The easy way is you admit you’re wrong.
• New technologies without new training are just about the most pathetic things you’ve ever seen. Picture this: the principal uses a $3,000 Smart Board, not as a Smart Board, but as a screen he can project an imagine onto, using his $800 projector, connected to his $1,200 laptop, whose image has to be shrunken down so small that no one can see what the hell he’s presenting. Now THAT’S a good use of technology!
• We want to move our educational system into the 21st century, yet still house our educational system in buildings over a hundred years old. It’s not about building new structures—New York doesn’t have the room anyway—It’s about redesigning our spaces so that they’re more open and conducive to collaborative learning.
• “A student starting school this year will retire in 2065. We have not idea what’s going to happen in five years time, yet were meant to be educating them for it.” (Robinson) Our curriculum needs to become Open Source. It needs to have certain fundamental “spaces” (formerly known as subjects), within which students can move freely, at their own pace, collaborating with different teachers based on their needs (why should they have to wait an hour to get learn how to incorporate statistics into a project of theirs if there’s a teacher with the skills to help her?).
• The educational system works for students, are employed by students and their Guardian’s taxes. Students do no work for the school, nor should they be confined by it. A student should never have to hear the words, “we don’t have that ______” Fill in the blank with: Program, Book, Option, Knowledge.

Common Misconception #2: The More Freedom You Give Children the Easier School is (less structure, etc.)

I can’t refute this misconception (yet) with hard numbers, but from my observations the opposite is true: the more freedom students are given to pursue their interests the harder they work, because they’re working on something they actually care about.

Common Misconception #3: This sounds expensive.

As you’ll see, this way of thinking about education costs dramatically less than our current philosophy, because it works with a bottom-up approach: namely, that students are responsible for their own education, and that they will be the ones finding the appropriate resources for that to happen. The current method involves the Federal and State governments giving schools supplies, schools parceling those supplies out to classrooms, and teachers trying to use them.

The following graphs illustrate a very basic contrast between the organizational model of an Open-Source Educational system and a Traditional Educational system. The graphs, however, are useless without each box being broken down, getting into the specifics, so let’s get it going.

THEIR WAY:

MY WAY:

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