1, 2, 3 on my mark... pretend

I am struggling with a piece of scribbling for a book (web2 and education, groan!) but came across some writing of one of my favourite thinkers in this hype-ridden space: Michael Wesch. He enjoys mixed reviews. The academy can be downright bitchy at times, particularly when it sees a relatively junior academic draw serious attention to himself due to some pretty clever and interesting YouTube contributions as well as some excellent presentations that have been posted online. I'm a fan as you may have gathered. Michael was contributing to a recent debate run by Britannica called Brave New Classroom 2. He was writing about students just playing a game to get by and noted a piece by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner written over 40 years ago. In a piece entitled "Pursuing Relevance: where is the problem?" they wrote about a project assignment around ancient cultures (Greek and Roman). A small portion of their commentary runs like this:

The most depressing aspect of this piece of pretentious trivia is that to most people nothing seems wrong with it. Indeed, it may even be thought of as reflecting a “progressive” idea or two. (After all, aren’t students asked to work in small groups and do ‘projects’?) Clearly, defenders of ‘high standards’ would have no cause for complaint here. The same is true for makers of standardized texts, ‘transmitters of our cultural heritage’, and lovers of ‘basic education’ everywhere. Perhaps even most of the students for whom this ‘unit of work’ is intended would approve of it. But if they do, we can be sure their approval rests largely on a carefully cultivated schizophrenia that is necessary, in present circumstances, to their academic survival. (Mencken once wrote that the main thing children learn in school is how to lie.) The children know that none of these questions has anything to do with them, and the game that is being played does not require that the questions do. The game is called ‘Let’s Pretend’, and if its name was chiselled into the front of every school building in America, we would at least have an honest announcement of what takes place there. The game is based upon a series of pretences which include: ‘let’s pretend that you are not who you are and that this sort of work makes a difference to your lives; let’s pretend that what bores you is important, and that the more you are bored, the more important it is; let’s pretend that there are certain things everyone must know, and that both the questions and answers about them have been fixed for all time; let’s pretend that your intellectual competence can be judged on the basis of how well you can play Let’s Pretend.

Which simply says that the issues that KPS-style work is seeking to address ain't new!

Setting minds or cranial concrete

The weekly newsletter came in from school the other day. On the back was a little graph and a heading about windspeed. I thought, neat, kids have been looking at wind, etc. Well, it was true that they were doing all sorts of measurements but what was depicted in the graph was data taken from the bureau of meteorology of that week!!!!

The mindset that says that kids can only do pretend stuff, stuff that no one is really interested in, stuff that no one will pay attention to is so pervasive among teachers. What possesses a teacher to discard however many days of data gathering and defer to the "official" data, taken over 100 kilometers from the school?

The "other" world is rapidly appreciating that having lots of eyeballs, minds, data collections, can in fact work pretty well in terms of tackling the interesting challenges the world poses. Crowd sourcing as it is sometimes referred to is emerging as a sometime very useful and efficient means of tackling certain kinds of problems. The one thing that schools have is lots and lots of minds, eyeballs, folk to collect, observe, record. And for the most part, this resource is ignored and made to do dumb, pretend, patently stupid activities that benefit no-one.