[NetBehaviour] Iteracy and the Digital Humanites/7 year old does what CNN can't

[Edward Picot]

Dear all -

Apologies for coming so late to this. I was reading through the thread 
yesterday at work, instead of getting on with what I was meant to be 
doing. A big "right on" to James for his remarks about gardening. And a 
big thanks to Mark Cooley for that lovely video.

If everybody needs to understand code because our society is to a large 
extent controlled and regulated by code, then everybody should also take 
a course in economics... and of course politics... and social sciences, 
and environmental science, and God knows what else.

There's too much stuff out there that we really "ought" to know - too 
much stuff for any one person to understand. If we try to force feed it 
to our kids, they'll just get bored and pissed off. If we try to learn 
it all ourselves, we'll just end up in a state of despair. The real 
thing is, people ought to be able to involve themselves, get their hands 
dirty, and get rewards - both real and spiritual rewards - for their 
efforts. The gardening model is the correct one. It's not necessarily 
the difference between being a consumer and being a producer, although 
that comes into it. It's the difference between being a consumer and 
being an active participant, a creative invidual.

I completely agree that schools shouldn't be teaching their pupils 
simply how to align text and change font in Microsoft Word. They should 
be teaching them OpenOffice for a start, and they should not only be 
encouraging them to explore how to do some of the more interesting 
things with it (sticking a video in a document, running a macro, setting 
up a relational database etc.) but also explaining to them how 
OpenOffice is run and maintained, and how they could make their own 
improvements to it if they wanted to. How, in other words, they could 
become participants instead of just being consumers. How that model of 
participation works.

Here in the Uk lots of us have been watching a documentary series on 
Channel 4 called "Educating Essex". I bet Michael's been glued to it, 
for a start, as it's set in Harlow where he lives. It's a great 
documentary series, but the trouble with it is that it seems to focus on 
kids with problems, and it gives the impression that all the teachers 
are involved in a desperate struggle to get these problem kids a decent 
education, because if they don't get a decent education then they'll 
never get decent jobs, and they'll be on the social scrapheap as a 
result, running the risk of poverty, ill health, drug abuse and crime. 
What it doesn't show is that as well as being difficult, emotionally 
unstable, sexually volatile, hilarious and sometimes nasty, adolescent 
kids are very often incredibly creative, and schools these days are 
hardly giving that creativity anywhere to go, because they're so busy 
focussing on this priority of getting the kids good qualifications so 
they can get good jobs.

My daughter's at secondary school at the moment, and needless to say 
she's got creativity coming out of her ears. She's doing drawings, 
making videos, writing stories, you name it. She's really chuffed if 
they get pinned up on the wall, but they never go anywhere further than 
that. There's no school magazine. There's a big posh school website, but 
they never show any examples of pupils' work on it. It seems to me that 
every school should have a participatory website, and they should be 
publishing drawings, stories, poems, videos, music by kids who are in 
bands, animations if the kids are doing animations, interactive art if 
the kids are doing that. If someone has designed a space-rocket or a 
robot, put it on the website. If someone's come up with a good dance 
routine, take a video of it and put that on too. A good rap; a good 
joke; a good impersonation of a teacher; a really funny face, etc. etc. 
Probably the kids should be designing the website itself. But the 
schools are so busy focussing on exam results and league-tables that 
anything which doesn't contribute towards their targets tends to get 
overlooked, and their websites are basically online brochures designed 
to sell the school to outsiders, instead of ways of promoting creativity 
within the school and a sense of community and identity. Anything which 
doesn't fit into the curriculum is getting shoved to one side, and the 
schools are basically starting the process of alienation which for most 
people will dominate their adult lives - the separation between what you 
really are and really want to do one the one hand, and what you are 
obliged to do in order to fit into society on the other - the dividing 
up of existence into a working life which is unfulfilling but earns you 
the money you need to survive, and a private life or "leisure time" 
where you spend your earnings as a consumer trying to buy back some of 
the personal fulfillment of which you have been deprived during your 
working hours.

Our idea of creativity and people getting a chance to show their talents 
is something like "The X Factor" or "Britain's Got Talent" - programmes 
which are basically all about trying to find inviduals who fit into 
pre-existent entertainment industry moulds, rather than people who can 
really do something new and original. A top-down view of talent, instead 
of a bottom-up one. It's like teaching people how to use Microsoft Word 
instead of teaching them the principles of word processing and how they 
could create their own software if they wanted to. It's a whole vision 
of society where you have to fit into a mould in order to get anywhere, 
rather than being able to create your own alternative way of doing things.

This is exactly where the big corporations want us to be, of course - 
they want us to be passive consumers gobbling up their products, not 
creative self-empowered individuals or collectives, coming up with our 
own alternatives. We tend to demonise the big corporations and assume 
that they're deliberately conspiring to crush the little people, whereas 
in fact if you talked to the people who work in those corporations 
they're probably not really monsters at all, and they'd probably protest 
that all they're trying to do is the best job they can for the 
businesses they work in. I daresay Steve Jobs and Bill Gates saw 
themselves as good guys, not bad guys. But modern capitalism tends 
towards big corporations and mass-marketing techniques - a process which 
has only been enhanced by the power of the internet and the web - and 
the end result is that ordinary people have to live their lives amongst 
the consequences of global marketing events with which they have no 
engagement and over which they have no control. It seems to me that 
there's a direct relationship between the process of alienation which 
begins in our schools and the situation portrayed in the "7 year old 
does what CNN can't" video - a situation in which the "little people" 
are driven to protesting on street corners while the banks, the 
corporations and the governments dismantle parts of the social fabric in 
an attempt to repair the financial disasters they've created themselves.

So yes, teach people code: but what you really need to teach them is 
what code symbolises: how to get under the skin of a system, be it a 
piece of software or a social organisation - how to pull up the hood and 
fiddle about with the engine, how to get your hands dirty, get involved, 
participate, don't accept things as you find them, try to build your own 
alternative.

- Edward

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