Tag Archives: institutions

The education factory

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The exchange on yesterday’s post about the importance of ‘Open’ schools and organisations took me to read John Dewey’s Pedagogical Creed of 1897 – it’s well worth reading in full:

“With the advent of democracy and modern industrial conditions, it is impossible to foretell definitely just what civilization will be twenty years from now. Hence it is impossible to prepare the child for any precise set of conditions. To prepare him for the future life means to give him command of himself; it means so to train him that he will have the full and ready use of all his capacities; that his eye and ear and hand may be tools ready to command, that his judgment may be capable of grasping the conditions under which it has to work, and the executive forces be trained to act economically and efficiently.

“I believe that much of present education fails because it neglects this fundamental principle of the school as a form of community life. It conceives the school as a place where certain information is to be given, where certain lessons are to be ]earned, or where certain habits are to be formed. The value of these is conceived as lying largely in the remote future; the child must do these things for the sake of something else he is to do; they are mere preparation. As a result they do not become a part of the life experience of the child and so are not truly educative.”

And again, I recommend [amazon_link id=”1909979015″ target=”_blank” ]Open [/amazon_link]by David Price – it’s about work as well as education, by someone who is frustrated that our post-post-industrial societies cling stubbornly the mass-production model of learning. We churn out factory-processed young people and expect them to work at the frontier of the high-tech, creative economy – no wonder everyone is getting worried about robots, who are better than humans at the factory tasks.

[amazon_image id=”1909979015″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Open: How we’ll work, live and learn in the future[/amazon_image]

On being open

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In 1981 the Labour MP George Foulkes drafted the ‘Control of Space Invaders (and other electronic games) Bill’ because he thought it was addictive and causing deviant behaviour. The bill was defeated – but by only 20 votes in the House of Commons.Mr Foulkes was obviously very persuasive in his speech about the effects of games on the young:

“They play truant, miss meals, and give up other normal activity to play “space invaders”. They become crazed, with eyes glazed, oblivious to everything around them, as they play the machines. It is difficult to appreciate unless one has seen it for oneself. I suggest that right hon. and hon. Members who have not seen it should go incognito to an arcade or café in their own areas and see the effect that it is having on young people.”

It’s tempting to laugh, but recall that there are still serious voices urging control over childrens’ use of video games or online access in general. Anybody who watches children using online resources either in play or study will know how enormous the potential is for their learning and creativity. Of course, most schools ban mobile use and constrain use of social media and  internet access, and there are obvious risks to be managed, but it means that the enormous potential is untapped.

For the first chapter or so of [amazon_link id=”1909979015″ target=”_blank” ]Open[/amazon_link] by David Price, I was disappointed, although (because?) it had been praised so enormously by people I respect. The first part sets out the case that we are churning out mass produced children for the post-industrial age, and it isn’t working. The children are as bored as can be, the testing and league tables distort incentives for schools and discourage them from innovating, and by the time they get to 18 young people have been drilled into expecting to be told whatever they need to know to jump through the next hoop. No politician can risk being honest about this. Of course, this is all true. But it’s been known for years, decades even. (I even wrote about it myself in 2001.)

[amazon_image id=”1909979015″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Open: How we’ll work, live and learn in the future[/amazon_image]

But before long, I was thoroughly enjoying this book. Part of the enjoyment comes from agreeing so wholeheartedly with what David Price has to say about the need for a complete re-engineering of so many organisations – schools and businesses so that they face outwards, engage with all relevant communities, and above all enable their students or employees to become creative and enthusiastic learners. Schools in particular are set up to do exactly the opposite – testing of individuals is seen as the only way to measure educational success yet it actively discourages collaboration, a key skill in the workplace.

Price urges readers to just get on with remodelling their organisations. “We are beginning to realise that we don’t have to wait for those who govern locally or nationally to act on our behalf. We now have the means to act autonomously.” Of course there are constraints – schools have to jump over the league table and testing hurdles. But there’s scope to just go ahead and remodel the approach to learning beyond that.

The book touches on MOOCs, quoting Arthur C Clarke: “Teachers who can be replaced by a machine should be.” Price, like me, believes that some successors to today’s MOOCs will overturn universities in the way file-sharing did for albums and the record industry. Universities are vital civic and educational institutions but they will need to find new delivery models both in what they offer online and what they offer face-to-face.

There are lots of examples of open organisations in [amazon_link id=”1909979015″ target=”_blank” ]Open[/amazon_link]. I was especially struck by a quotation from Patrick McKenna of Ingenious Media: “We give a lot of our knowledge away… The reason we don’t worry about giving that knowledge away is because most people can’t implement what they know. The capital value of something these days is the ability to implement it rather than to create it originally.” This is a profound point with lots of implications.

Finally, the book notes the disjuncture between life and politics: “If schools are coming directly into competition with the learning opportunities available in the informal social space, it has to be said that this is a pressure which barely registers within the political discourse. The gaping hole in the middle of the public debate on schooling is that we can’t even agree on what schools are actually for.” Preparation for jobs? Child development? National economic competitiveness? Civic cohesion? Policy mushes all of these together and compels children to find their own way through the obstacle course in between them and the thrill of learning. Anybody with a teenager will know how thoroughly they’ve had all the enthusiasm beaten out of them by a decade of compulsory schooling for tests.

The book is slightly prone to educationalese but it’s very clearly written. Even if you start out agreeing – as I do – the many examples are interesting and useful. I’ll be giving this book to quite a few people, I think.

As a final treat, it introduced me to this fabulous course.

 

We’re all Coasians now

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Of course there has been a lot written about Ronald Coase this week, marking his death at the age of 102. I thought Joshua Gans was very good, and this short paper by Herbert Hovenkamp usefully sets Coase in the context of the economic debates of the times. Justin Wolfers linked to this terrific (pdf) Deirdre McCloskey note on the Coase Theorem from 1998. There’s a lot of commentary, though, and it’s interesting to see how many different perspectives on his work there are – truly, there is a Coase for everyone.

As it happened, Tim Harford wrote last weekend (FT) about one of the intellectual heirs of the Coasian tradition of institutional economics, Elinor Ostrom, in an article contrasting her richness of thought with the catchy but shallower work of Garrett Hardin on the ‘tragedy of the commons’. Ostrom had researched how disputes over water rights in and around Los Angeles had been resolved by negotation, Harford writes:

“She knew of other examples, too, in which common resources had been managed sustainably without Hardin’s black-or-white solutions.

The problem with Hardin’s logic was the very first step: the assumption that communally owned land was a free-for-all. It wasn’t. The commons were owned by a community. They were managed by a community. These people were neighbours. They lived next door to each other. In many cases, they set their own rules and policed those rules.”

Ostrom’s co-winner of the Nobel Prize was Oliver Williamson, who took the Coasian tradition in a different direction, equally fascinating. He studied the structure and activity of businesses, taking forward Coase’s original research questions – why do firms exist? What explains why a large firm can succeed whereas a planned economy like the Soviet Union runs into trouble? I always think Williamson’s brilliant books [amazon_link id=”068486374X” target=”_blank” ]The Economic Institutions of Capitalism[/amazon_link] and [amazon_link id=”0195083563″ target=”_blank” ]The Nature of the Firm[/amazon_link] should be read alongside Herbert Simon’s [amazon_link id=”0684835827″ target=”_blank” ]Administrative Behaviour[/amazon_link]. Simon brings another perspective to understanding business organisations and the institutions of capitalism, introducing the wrinkles of actual human decision-making. As Simon famously observed, an alien landing in a capitalist economy would note that the domain of administered organisations including firms would far exceed the domain of market transactions.

[amazon_image id=”068486374X” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Economic Institutions of Capitalism[/amazon_image]

[amazon_image id=”0684835827″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Administrative Behavior: A Study of Decision-making Processes in Administrative Organizations: A Study of Decision-making Processes in Administrative Organisations[/amazon_image]

There is a terrific recent guide to using economic theory, including transaction cost and information economics, to the world of modern business in [amazon_link id=”1455525200″ target=”_blank” ]The Org: The Underlying Logic of the Office[/amazon_link] by Ray Fisman and Tim Sullivan – I reviewed it here.

[amazon_image id=”1455525200″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Org: The Underlying Logic of the Office[/amazon_image]

The importance of containers, continued

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We just spent a few days in Scotland and spotted this shipping container being used for storage at the harbour in Stonehaven, Aberdeenshire.

Storage container in Stonehaven

Meanwhile, news of the BBC News container: it’s now in its 3rd year of post-shipping existence as a soup kitchen in Kleinvei, South Africa. According to Tim Smith of Breadline Africa: “The Children’s World Kitchen project has benefited enormously when they received this container.  It is three years since this container was received and began serving the need of the community.”

The post-shipping BBC Box in the Cape Flats

My containers correspondent, Captain Thomas Marnane, followed up our previous discussion about the importance of standardisation in shipping with some observations on the environmental benefits of containers – not a standard angle on the globalisation of trade, it must be said. In an email he wrote:

“The conservation of resources by reducing container weight and saving fuel (hauling on land and at sea), increasing cargo weight available, reducing losses, etc. is an example of what I call “closet environmentalism”.  It is not all altruistic.  That is that, in general, I believe environmental improvements and resource conservation is most brought about by individuals and businesses who have  incentives to improve by using and wasting fewer resources to provide a  product or service and  improve either quality of life and/or the bottom line, and for the most part they do it without fanfare or publicity.”

We should add the recycling of containers to other uses as part of his environmental tally.

This whole discussion was of course set off by the container that appeared in my local park, and [amazon_link id=”0691136408″ target=”_blank” ]The Box[/amazon_link] by Marc Levinson.

[amazon_image id=”0691136408″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger (New in Paper)[/amazon_image]