Craig Newmark from his Wikipedia entry.
You probably haven’t heard of “Craigslist” if you don’t live in the USA. Essentially it is the small ads website that has killed all other small ads websites. In addition it has performed the small feat of killing all private and most property advertising in US newspapers. The internet entrepreneur behind this is the tremendously laid back Craig Newmark. When asking how to build a business, he famously said, give your service users what they need to do what they want to do, and then, “get out of the way”.
This whole idea assumes that users know what they want, and that they are in charge of the experience. Craigslist, along with Facebook, and Twitter, and Google, are platforms, not solutions. They support the clients in what they want to do and reduce the control of users, even opening their platform to other people to add programmes, (or apps), that users want to use. It’s an interesting, and phenomenally successful paradigm, and it is beginning to define our modern world.
If the education service took the same view, give them what they want and then “get out of the way”, what would this mean for us? I wouldn’t pretend to know the answer to that, but I think it would do us all good to think about the model that the worlds’ current most successful businesses use. As author Jeff Jarvis asks, “what would Google do”? What would Google, or Facebook, or Twitter or Craigslist do if they were running education instead?
Some thoughts:
- They would simply not deal with people who didn’t want to be there! Perhaps its time to address the real failing at the heart of our system; we force people to attend. In poorer countries children walk miles to get an education, I’ll bet they are great to teach! If you don’t want to be there, go home. Eventually, the system will figure out some new ideas that will appeal to those kids and their parents. In fact most will want to go back to schools that are full of people who want to be there and who are making the schools magical and bringing academic and economic success. If you don’t want to use Facebook, you just don’t; if you abuse their rules and norms, then you are asked to leave.
- They would provide buildings and frameworks for learning. Anyone external who had a better way of teaching something, would be allowed to fit in to the new schooling. Perhaps Tesco’s would have a module of “commercial skills and commercial marketing”. The new schools would provide rules and protocols, but stand aside and let Tesco’s do it. Only those clients/pupils who want it will access it however.
- If learners want to use their own laptops and net access, they can. If they want to choose their own course duration, they can, if they feel ready to sit the exams, they can, if they don’t, then they choose when they want to. In other words, they want to achieve something, they know what their preferred approach is, we “get out of their way” and facilitate their needs.
A bit unrealistic, for schools? Maybe, but ask how much a frustrated high school teacher loves teaching a class of badly behaving conscripts, ask how many learners love 6 periods of command and control a day, and tell me we should ignore everything in what I’m saying. The future of education won’t look like it does at present. If it does, we should move our pension funds to countries where kids walk miles to school because they want to be there; they might just end up kicking our “—–” in economic terms.