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

Fri Oct 21 10:53:29 CEST 2011

This is a beautiful, passionate, piece of writing! It should be widely disseminated....
michael
PS I can't watch Educating Essex - I'm allergic to reality TV in general but I'm cynical about this one in particular because it's part of a publicity drive by the school to legitimise their breaking ranks with opposition to academies &c within Harlow  - Janet is glued to it as she's worked with many of the participants over the years...
Both Jan and I are deeply worried about the long-term consequences for children forever recorded on endlessly reproducible, genie-out-of-the-bottle,  film as "liars" or "troubled" or whatever...

________________________________
From: Edward Picot <edward at edwardpicot.com>
To: netbehaviour at netbehaviour.org
Sent: Sunday, October 16, 2011 4:41 PM
Subject: Re: [NetBehaviour] Iteracy and the Digital Humanites/7 year old does what CNN can't

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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