Nearly seven million people have watched this video on YouTube. It is inspirational in many ways, most powerfully for me in its haunting echos of those trapped below the decks of slave ships. The video radiates creativity and beauty of the music that emerged from the black slaves and their descendants in early America.
There is a specter from those days that haunts us once again: the increasing servitude and dependency being spun out of public schools that are mainly black and broadly inferior to schools for other kinds of kids. To great fanfare the Obama administration promises to spend billions of dollars making some failing schools better. But is that anything more than cleaning up the slave ships a bit? We will continue to have one kind of school that turns out minimally employable descendants of slaves and the other kind of school that turns out the competent class — unless fundamental educational reconfiguring takes place.
A way is now increasingly effective for jumping ship from the limitations of awful public schools. It is possible learn whatever these schools teach very easily online — and to learn online a very great deal more. And as posted here yesterday, online learning does not know if the hand clicking in is black, white, or even Neptune green.
One of the big, simple, marvelous truths about the future of global learning is that knowledge itself will be post racial.
Post racial knowledge is not dollops of parts of subjects measured to form standards for the average student in a school or state or nation. Post racial knowledge resources for learning are not tailored to kids expected to learn not so much — as happens routinely in inner city public schools. Post racial knowledge is not conformed to a particular religion. Post racial knowledge is not designed to teach students to be loyal to a tribal chief or to support a nation’s tyrant.
Yet almost never considered in the schooling milieu is that fact that what can be learned has become readily available online at little or no cost students. A wonderful aspect of this ready access of knowledge to learn is that the experience is post racial when a student uses online sources. The internet, and the mobile online browsers kids around the world increasing use, have no idea who is holding a connective device in his or her hand.
The learner has no need to tell the device who his daddy is. The expectations for each learner are just the same if he or she is a Harvard grad student, a projects resident in the Bronx, or a small gnome from Neptune.
My blogging here has slowed down because I am working on finishing an eBook about handschooling. Hopefully, I can make it available here before the end of September.
Today, though, I must respond to the inexcusable arrogance about bribing educators with tax money that Obama showed yesterday in his press conference. I cannot find the transcript online, but recall his bragging about over 40% of states are working on innovations for failing schools because the feds are dangling prize money for what they call Race to the Top.
Even on the most fortunate and accelerated schedule, any improvement from these innovations will be years away and will affect only a few students. Obama is not offering a solution to education failures. He is beginning the federal government take over of American education.
The working title of the book I am writing is: Taking schooling into your own hands: Tools and tips for kids caught in the education mess. So how can kids do that?
I think just one first step can do more in a few months than the specious Race to the Top could do in years. Here is what I wrote today for the eBook about that first step:
As a student who is entering the second decade of the 21st century, you can make a key move toward taking your schooling into your own hands by owning and using a mobile device that browses the internet. Doing so connects you into the open online network of the sum total of what is known by humankind. You can click into a webpage about mammals and follow links to study rodents or primates. You can connect to the Perseus Library to study classic literature. You can visit what humankind has thought about the cosmos and and what we are learning about the nano world. Whatever may be happening in your analog schooling, you will have a way to really learn anything you want to learn.
If you are too young to navigate the internet yet, you can use your mobile to practice skills with flashcards and other apps. Doing so will give you understanding and practice in writing with a keyboard.
The tipping factor that will transform failing schools and schooling may well be as simple as providing every individual student with personal mobile access to the internet. It is absurd instead to be pouring millions of dollars toward states to incentivize new ideas.
We do not need states racing to the top of a federal money pile. We should put each student on top of knowledge by putting a smartphone into his hands.
Does your daughter? granddaughter? have her own mobile internet browser? What about other people’s children in you area? The old saying tells us that we save one child at a time. Each kid who has what is known in his own hands is intellectually armed for the his 21st century future.
The Naked CIO writes this week about: Apple’s iPad – why it’s iBad for business IT. The article delves into this: “No one could fault the innovation behind Apple’s iPad tablet but the fact remains that this immature technology will cause problems for the IT department . . . .”
Delving into the same issue for schools raises this question: Should the devices a student uses be limited to those the school is equipped and staffed to control? There is a range of issues. On the practical end: Should student devices be able to interface the school’s content management and other IT (if any) designed for use in instruction? At the privacy end: Should students only be allowed to use devices in school that the IT staff can monitor?
There are two separate areas to which these questions apply to schools:
1) Tech stuff that is only inside the ivy wall of the school: When it comes to the internal applications the school uses, innovative devices like the iPad may well be iBad for the reasons described by the Naked CIO.
2) Browsing the internet: Issues of censorship by schools arise when they limit or prohibit internet browsing — issues that are very different than when schools require devices that work with the instruction technology within their own walls. A key policy of Tim Berners-Lee’s W3C, which sets Web standards, is One Web: the critical standard that the devices all essentially interface the same content from the open internet. Any device that allows a student to browse the internet should be welcome in schools, and the authorities at the schools should not take it upon themselves to alter and/or block that content before their students can browse.
You may disagree with this in terms of the safety of allowing kids to have full access to the internet. That is, however, a separate issue from the wading in by educators to manage learning content from the open internet before students are allowed to access it.
These are fascinating new issues that are just beginning to come over the horizon into mainstream schooling.
Network laws are causing schooling to unbundle, just as they have been doing to other sectors: music, journalism, merchandising and more. The image above mashes a traditional school that is breaking into little pieces as it engages the Map of Science which reflects online networking of academic subjects.
The force behind school unbundling is the network out there which the Map of Science depicts. The map of academics subjects is not an illustration; it is the plotting of real data and relationships among the nodes of the network that emerges from the data.
Unbundling of schooling allows the individual student to connect directly to individual knowledge nodes. In spite of years of standing back, and then of pushing hard against it by established education, schooling is being broken apart and reconfigured to individual students by the spontaneous online academic knowledge network.
Brick and mortar of buildings or of curriculum cannot for much longer systematically keep the student from connecting directly. A mobile internet browser is all it takes for a student to be able to become a node who links and learns individually to the global commons of what is known by humankind.
Why future education is emerging around handschooling
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Soon every student will be connecting directly with the global knowledge commons. Schooling has to be reconfigured around this fundamental change.
The strong echo continues in schools and across the world of what Jonathan Kozol indelibly named savage inequalities. The mobile window opens a global commons that is the same for each and oblivious to who is visiting it to learn.
