Chapter Seven — Fundamental Infrastructures: Education and Credentialing

[This is the twelfth installment in my serialization of my book-in-progress, tentatively titled Desktop Regulatory State] , and the second of two installments on Chapter Seven. Because I have split some chapters into multiple new ones since the previously posted excerpts, there is a loss of continuity in numbering. The current Table of Contents with active links can be found here.]

I. Alternative Models

Almost a century before Ivan Illich, and well over a century before the network communications revolution, Nietzsche wrote (Human, All-Too-Human):

Now that self-education and fraternal education are becoming more general, the teacher must, in the form he now normally assumes, become almost redundant. Friends anxious to learn, who want to acquire knowledge of something together, can find in our age of books a shorter and more natural way than ‘school’ and ‘teacher’ are.

Robert Pirsig, in the “Church of Reason” passage of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, describes the functioning of an education system when it becomes a tool for self-directed learning, rather than processing human resources for institutional consumers. Phaedrus speculated on the likely career of a good cramming, résumé-padding student who was exposed for the first time to an educational system in which grades and degrees had been eliminated.

Such a student… would go to his first class, get his first assignment and probably do it out of habit. He might go to his second and third as well. But eventually the novelty of the course would wear off and, because his academic life was not his only life, the pressure of other obligations or desires would create circumstances where he just would not be able to get an assignment in.

Since there was no degree or grading system he would incur no penalty for this. Subsequent lectures which presumed he’d completed the assignment might be a little more difficult to understand, however, and this difficulty, in turn, might weaken his interest to a point where the next assignment, which he would find quite hard, would also be dropped. Again no penalty.

In time his weaker and weaker understanding of what the lectures were about would make it more and more difficult for him to pay attention in class. Eventually he would see he wasn’t learning much; and facing the continual pressure of outside obligations, he would stop studying, feel guilty about this and stop attending class. Again, no penalty would be attached.

But what had happened? The student, with no hard feelings on anybody’s part, would have flunked himself out. Good! This is what should have happened. He wasn’t there for a real education in the first place and had no real business there at all. A large amount of money and effort had been saved and there would be no stigma of failure and ruin to haunt him the rest of his life. No bridges had been burned.

The student’s biggest problem was a slave mentality which had been built into him by years of carrot-and-whip grading, a mule mentality which said, “If you don’t whip me, I won’t work.” He didn’t get whipped. He didn’t work. And the cart of civilization, which he supposedly was being trained to pull, was just going to have to creak along a little slower without him.

This is a tragedy, however, only if you presume that the cart of civilization, “the system,” is pulled by mules. This is a common, vocational, “location” point of view, but it’s not the Church attitude.

The Church attitude is that civilization, or “the system” or “society” or whatever you want to call it, is best served not by mules but by free men. The purpose of abolishing grades and degrees is not to punish mules or to get rid of them but to provide an environment in which that mule can turn into a free man.

The hypothetical student, still a mule, would drift around for a while. He would get another kind of education quite as valuable as the one he’d abandoned, in what used to be called the “school of hard knocks.” Instead of wasting money and time as a high-status mule, he would now have to get a job as a low-status mule, maybe as a mechanic. Actually his real status would go up. He would be making a contribution for a change. Maybe that’s what he would do for the rest of his life. Maybe he’d found his level. But don’t count on it.

In time…six months; five years, perhaps…a change could easily begin to take place. He would become less and less satisfied with a kind of dumb, day-to-day shopwork. His creative intelligence, stifled by too much theory and too many grades in college, would now become reawakened by the boredom of the shop. Thousands of hours of frustrating mechanical problems would have made him more interested in machine design. He would like to design machinery himself. He’d think he could do a better job. He would try modifying a few engines, meet with success, look for more success, but feel blocked because he didn’t have the theoretical information. He would discover that when before he felt stupid because of his lack of interest in theoretical information, he’d now find a brand of theoretical information which he’d have a lot of respect for, namely, mechanical engineering.

So he would come back to our degreeless and gradeless school, but with a difference. He’d no longer be a grade-motivated person. He’d be a knowledge-motivated person. He would need no external pushing to learn. His push would come from inside. He’d be a free man. He wouldn’t need a lot of discipline to shape him up. In fact, if the instructors assigned him were slacking on the job he would be likely to shape them up by asking rude questions. He’d be there to learn something, would be paying to learn something and they’d better come up with it.

Motivation of this sort, once it catches hold, is a ferocious force, and in the gradeless, degreeless institution where our student would find himself, he wouldn’t stop with rote engineering information. Physics and mathematics were going to come within his sphere of interest because he’d see he needed them. Metallurgy and electrical engineering would come up for attention. And, in the process of intellectual maturing that these abstract studies gave him, he would he likely to branch out into other theoretical areas that weren’t directly related to machines but had become a part of a newer larger goal. This larger goal wouldn’t be the imitation of education in Universities today, glossed over and concealed by grades and degrees that give the appearance of something happening when, in fact, almost nothing is going on. It would be the real thing.

That sounds a lot like Paulo Freire’s pedagogical philosophy, in which students “meet around a problem chosen and defined by their own initiative.”

[The Brazilian teacher Paulo Freire] discovered that any adult can begin to read in a matter of forty hours if the first words he deciphers are charged with political meaning. Freire trains his teachers to move into a village and to discover the words which designate current important issues, such as the access to a well or the compound interest on the debts owed to the patron. In the evening the villagers meet for the discussion of these key words. They begin to realize that each word stays on the blackboard even after its sound has faded. The letters continue to unlock reality and to make it manageable as a problem. I have frequently witnessed how discussants grow in social awareness and how they are impelled to take political action as fast as they learn to read. They seem to take reality into their hands as they write it down.

Compare this to the working-class discussion groups in early industrial Britain, where newly literate or perhaps illiterate workmen gathered to hear passages read from some radical periodical or from the works of Thomas Paine, before discussing them. E.P. Thompson provides one especially vivid example of learning path of coal miners in the British north country, whose self-education and radicalization quickly fed on one another to reach critical mass (as evidenced by this note left in the house of a supervisor during an 1831 strike:

I dinna pretend to be a profit, but I naw this, and lots of ma marrows na’s te, that wer not tret as we owt to be, and a great filosopher says, to get noledge is to naw wer ignerent. But weve just begun to find that oot, and ye maisters and owners may luk oot, for yor not gon to get se much o yor own way, wer gan to heve some o wors now….

Networked learning writer Will Richardson, in an open letter to his kids, takes a similar “life as classroom” approach:

I promise to support you for as long as I can in your quest to learn after high school, whatever that might look like. I’ll do everything I can to help you find what your passions are and pursue them in whatever ways you decide will allow you to learn as much as you can about them. I’ll help you put together your own plan to achieve expertise in that passion, and that plan may include many different activities and environments that look nothing like (and in all likelihood will cost much less than) a traditional college experience. Some of your plan may include classrooms, some may include training or certification programs. But some may also include learning through online video games, virtual communities, and informal networks that you will build around your interests, all moving you further along toward expertise. (Remind me at some point to tell you what a guy named George Siemens says about this.)

And throughout this process, I will support you in the creation of your learning portfolio, the artifact which when the time comes, you will share to prospective employers or collaborators to begin your life’s work. (In all likelihood, in fact, you will probably find these people as a part of this process.) Instead of the piece of paper on the wall that says you are an expert, you will have an array of products and experiences, reflections and conversations that show your expertise, show what you know, make it transparent. It will be comprised of a body of work and a network of learners that you will continually turn to over time, that will evolve as you evolve, and will capture your most important learning.

Once we abandon the idea of schools as institutions run by “educational professionals,” and of learning as an activity that takes place at a designated location under the supervision of such professionals, the possibilities for linking individual learners to sources of knowledge are almost infinite.

If the institutionalized educational system is a mass-production factory with the human resource as its product and the employer as its customer, an educational system organized around the agency of the learner will be a lean, demand-pull system. Rather than moving human beings to an assembly line to be processed, it will move knowledge to the point of consumption, when and where it is needed. If young people are alienated from the old mass-production schools, they understand instinctively how to use new networked learning tools for their own autonomous purposes. Mimi Ito writes:

It is no wonder my daughter wants to mess around with the guitar and the Internet and pursue some interests at a pace that doesn’t feel like the relentlessly scheduled pressure of school and structured activities. For her, the Internet has been a lifeline for self-directed learning and connection to peers. In our research, we found that parents more often than not have a negative view of the role of the Internet in learning, but young people almost always have a positive one.

When we interview young people, they will talk about how the Internet makes it easy for them to look around and surf for information in low risk and unstructured ways. Some kids immerse themselves in online tutorials, forums, and expert communities where they dive deep into topics and areas of interest, whether it is fandom, creative writing, making online videos, or gaming communities….

Young people are desperate for learning that is relevant and part of the fabric of their social lives, where they are making choices about how, when, and what to learn, without it all being mapped for them in advance. Learning on the Internet is about posting a burning question on a forum like Quora or Stack Exchange, searching for a how to video on YouTube or Vimeo, or browsing a site like Instructables, Skillshare, and Mentormob for a new project to pick up. It’s not just professors who have something to share, but everyone who has knowledge and skills.

When my daughter graduates from college, I want her to be able to ask interesting questions, make wise choices in where to direct her time and attention, and find a career that is about contributing to a purpose that’s more than her own self-advancement. I am proud of her for managing a rigorous course of study both in school and out of school, but I’m also delighted that she finds the time to cultivate interests in a self-directed way that is about contributing to her community of peers. The Internet and her friends have offered my daughter a lifeline to explore new interests that are not just about the resume and getting ahead of everyone else. In today’s high-pressure climate for teens, the Internet is feeling more and more like one of the few havens they can find for the lessons that matter most.

Sugata Mitra’s model of self-directed learning, in which students are given free access to laptops and left alone to explore, individually or cooperatively as they see fit, is a high-tech update of the Montessori approach. It was put into practice by Sergio Juárez Correa in a run-down, impoverished school in Matamoros, Mexico. The result was a 12-year-old girl who scored first in mathematics out of all the students in Mexico, and ten more who scored at the 99.99th percentile. It’s hard to imagine a better answer to the elitists who say “self-directed learning is great for students who are capable of benefiting from it, but what about the majority of ordinary kids who need the structure and discipline of the traditional system?”

Proudhon, writing in the mid-19th century, wrote of breaking down barriers between the rest of society in ways that anticipated Ivan Illich. His provisions for technical training, for example, relied heavily on linking the public education system with the workers’ associations, the latter serving as

both centers of production and centers for education…. Labor and study, which have for so long and so foolishly been kept apart, will finally emerge side-by-side in their natural state of union.

lProudhonian ideas of apprenticeship, merging of schooling apparatus with agro-industrial federations, etc.]

Contemporary ideas of p2p education, likewise, usually envision some sort of horizontal integration between learning groups and production groups in an organic p2p culture (although the quote below arguably puts heavy emphasis on what we would call post-secondary educational functions rather than primary education).

The P2P mode of production ovecomes [sic] the division between doing and knowing that characterizes the currently hegemonic system. Project development communities (OSE, WikiSpeed, Mozilla, etc.) generate both “products” and the research and innovation associated with them.

• “Schools of the Commons,” including our much-anticipated “School of Economics of the Commons,” would make sense as facilitators of free research on general social theory and basic scientific research. They would not offer training or degrees, but they would generate pedgaogical materials of all kinds by themselves or with the help of specialized work groups.

• The local learning groups would use these materials, as well as those developed by the development communities, to become, hand in hand with the local production groups, facilitators of local P2P culture everywhere, by building the structure that would facilitate access to pedgaogical materials and tutors for those who would like to learn.

Over forty years ago, Ivan Illich envisioned low-tech “learning exchanges” or “educational webs” based on widespread distribution of small tape recorders/players, educational tapes, and local peer-matching services that maintained lists of skills available for teaching and desired for learning and facilitated connections between students and mentors. The system would consist of four parallel networks:

1. Reference Services to Educational Objects-which facilitate access to things or processes used for formal learning. Some of these things can be reserved for this purpose, stored in libraries, rental agencies, laboratories, and showrooms like museums and theaters; others can be in daily use in factories, airports, or on farms, but made available to students as apprentices or on off hours.

2. Skill Exchanges–which permit persons to list their skills, the conditions under which they are willing to serve as modelsfor others who want to learn these skills, and the addresses at which they can be reached.

3. Peer-Matching–a communications network which permits persons to describe the learning activity in which they wish to engage, in the hope of finding a partner for the inquiry.

4. Reference Services to Educators-at-Large–who can be listed in a directory giving the addresses and self-descriptions of professionals, paraprofessionals, and free-lancers, along with conditions of access to their services. Such educators, as we will see, could be chosen by polling or consulting their former clients.

Read Illich’s description of the functioning of a peer-learning network, and then imagine the same functions organized today through the Internet:

Someone who wants to learn knows that he needs both information and critical response to its use from somebody else. Information can be stored in things and in persons. In a good educational system access to things ought to be available at the sole bidding of the learner, while access to informants requires, in addition, others’ consent. Criticism can also come from two directions: from peers or from elders, that is, from fellow learners whose immediate interests match mine, or from those who will grant me a share in their superior experience. Peers can be colleagues with whom to raise a question, companions for playful and enjoyable (or arduous) reading or walking, challengers at any type of game. Elders can be consultants on which skill to learn, which method to use, what company to seek at a given moment. They can be guides to the right questions to be raised among peers and to the deficiency of the answers they arrive at. Most of these resources are plentiful. But they are neither conventionally perceived as educational resources, nor is access to them for learning purposes easy, especially for the poor. We must conceive of new relational structures which are deliberately set up to facilitate access to these resources for the use of anybody who is motivated to seek them for his education. Administrative, technological, and especially legal arrangements are required to set up such web-like structures.

* * *

The operation of a peer-matching network would be simple. The user would identify himself by name and address and describe the activity for which he sought a peer. A computer would send him back the names and addresses of all those who had inserted the same description. It is amazing that such a simple utility has never been used on a broad scale for publicly valued activity.

In its most rudimentary form, communication between client and computer could be established by return mail. In big cities typewriter terminals could provide instantaneous responses. The only way to retrieve a name and address from the computer would be to list an activity for which a peer was sought. People using the system would become known only to their potential peers.

A complement to the computer could be a network of bulletin boards and classified newspaper ads, listing the activities for which the computer could not produce a match. No names would have to be given. Interested readers would then introduce their names into the system….

The integration of education into the community can be physical, as well as functional. In Claude Lewenz’s Villages, classroom space—rather than being concentrated in some centrally located specimen of Stalinist architecture and serviced by a bus system—is decentralized throughout the community. He quotes Christopher Alexander’s Pattern No. 18 (from A Pattern Language):

Instead of the lock-step of compulsory schooling in a fixed place, work in piecemeal ways to decentralise the process of learning and enrich it through contact with many places and people all over the city: workshops, teachers at home or walking through the city, professionals willing to take on the young as helpers, older children teaching younger children, museums, youth groups travelling, scholarly seminars, industrial workshops, old people and so on.

“The Village,” Lewenz writes, “serves as a life-long classroom.” By decentralizing control of education to the primary community of a few thousand people, the Village can greatly reduce overhead. Lewenz again quotes Alexander on the elimination of expenses from overpriced, centrally located buildings and administrative salaries, and the use of the savings to reduce student-teacher ratios down to ten or so. He recommends building small schools, one at a time, located in the public part of the community, “with a shopfront and three or four rooms.”

The parallel to the platforms and the local economies plugged into them, from the previous section, to my mind seems obvious.

The old educational system was a classic example of the kinds of authoritarian institutions described by Paul Goodman in People or Personnel and Ivan Illich in Tools for Conviviality: characterized by a bureaucratic, hierarchical culture, enormous overhead, cost-plus accounting, and markups of 300% or more over and above the costs required by the purely technical considerations involved in doing anything.

As John Robb has pointed out, a system of higher education that fully exploited all the possibilities of new forms of organization—networked platforms and open-source materials—could make the equivalent of a college education available for $20 a month.

One central principle that’s apt to govern any liberatory, user-driven model of education is—in Michael Staton’s phrase—the disaggregation or unbundling of services currently performed by the education system.

The Internet has challenged business models that serve bundled services by offering unbundled alternatives. Offering direct access to targeted services tends to disintermediate (the process of cutting out middlemen between producers and consumers) institutions whose value proposition relies on placing a premium on the aggregation of services and resources. We have seen these forces disrupt the music and journalism industries, and similar forces are beginning to affect the education sector.

Besides housing and all the ancillary services associated with colleges, this will mean unbundling the curriculum itself. The current credentialling system offers curricula—designed by higher education bureaucracies in collaboration with human resources bureaucracies—presented as a package deal. In order to get a credential acceptable to a corporate employer, the student is typically forced to pay for an entire curriculum of 100-plus credit-hours mostly unrelated to the skill she’ll actually be using.

Daniel de Vise describes unbundling the curriculum, eliminating the middleman, as an “Arab Spring in Education”:

For thousands of years now, the university has been the middleman of the higher education system. The university provided the needed infrastructure, the branding, and an easy route to a white collar job or graduate school. In return, students had to agree to taking courses that the faculty thought were needed. The courses could be recommended because they would help the student understand the subject, or for other completely unrelated reasons (to make them a “well rounded” person, or to give a faculty colleague some students to teach). Faculty, on the other hand, did not have to look for students, could bask in the reflected glory of the university name, and still had a regular paycheck. Accreditors were the accountants of academia, making sure that “quality” was maintained.

The astonishing pace of technology in the last few years has changed the landscape of academia completely in several ways:

(1) There is an excess of information available. Instructors are no longer required to be a source of information. Rather, they curate existing information.

(2) Students today want practical skills that they can use to get a job, and not necessarily a degree. Even if they don’t use the same words, students are looking for outcomes (e.g. actionable skills, and not just knowledge about a subject).

(3) Infrastructure, at least in the West, has improved to the extent that anyone with a video camera and basic tools can design, deliver, and take payment for courses.

(4) Students are no longer just your typical 18-22 year olds. They can be a mom who wants to get a certification, a soldier in Afghanistan, or an office worker in Hanoi. Educators need to be flexible about the place, time, format and frequency of courses.

(5) Technology has eliminated a lot of the manual work teachers (grading) and administrators (registration) used to do.

(6) Students want short courses that utilize all the technology available (multimedia, social media, games).

This has created a situation where technology is freely available and can let anyone teach or learn: students who want flexibility, teachers who can now become one-man or -woman universities. Yet many schools are still stuck in the past.

Radical changes in educational content and delivery mechanisms will lead to an unbundling of the university as we know it.

David Blake argues that unbundling will amount to a long tail in the education market.

Currently, the degree is the only meaningful “unit” of education to which employers give any credence. Of this dependency, TIME magazine writes, “The tight connection between college degrees and economic success may be a nearly unquestioned part of our social order. Future generations may look back and shudder at the cruelty of it… It is inefficient, both because it wastes a lot of money and because it locks people who would have done good work out of some jobs.”

The traditional degree, with its four-year time commitment and steep price tag, made sense when the university centrally aggregated top academic minds with residency-based students. Education required extensive logistics, demanding deep commitment from students worthy of being rewarded with the all-or-nothing degree.

But education isn’t all-or-nothing. College and its primary credential, the degree, needn’t be either. The benefit of modern, online education is that the burden of logistics and infrastructure are greatly reduced, allowing for the potential of a fluid, lifelong education model. The problem, to date, is that formal, online education is still being packaged in all-or-nothing degree programs, falsely constraining education innovation. The New Republic writes, “Online for-profit colleges haven’t disrupted the industry because while their business methods are different, their product—traditional credentials in the form of a degree—is not.”

Technology creates efficiencies by decreasing unit size while increasing utility.  To falsely constrain anything to historically larger canons is to render technology impotent to do what it does best.

Clay Christensen predicts, “I bet what happens as [higher education] becomes more modular is that accreditation occurs at the level of the course, not the university; so they can then offer degrees as collection of the best courses taught in the world. A barrier that historically kept people out of university [is] blown away by the modularization and the change in [course-by-course] accreditation.”

With education, there is a particularly strong analog to what iTunes and the digital single did to the album:

Why buy a whole album when I only value a few songs enough to purchase? Why am I required to finance an entire degree only to be forced to take courses that I do not value? By bundling education into its most popular format, the four-year degree, we are inevitably adding low-utility courses that the consumer should be enabled to avoid.

The great majority of education at present is probably driven either by the signaling needs of HR departments (is able to show up on time, take orders, and put up with bullshit) or the need for licensing cartels to erect artificial barriers against practitioners. When most production is uncoupled from institutional employment, and individual learning programs and course selections are driven by the needs of the student, we can expect course selections to be made on an ad hoc basis and tailored to the immediate requirements of the situation (as illustrated by Pirsig’s lifelong learner). As Stephen Downes argues,

Earning a degree will, in such a world, resemble less a series of tests and hurdles, and will come to resemble more a process of making a name for oneself in a community. The recommendation of one person by another as a peer will, in the end, become the standard of educational value, not the grade or degree.