The Long Tail In Education

BACK IN THE nineteenth century education reformer Horace Mann promised that centralized, professional, government schooling would work wonders. He said:

Let the Common School be expanded to its capabilities… and nine tenths of the crimes in the penal code would become obsolete.

Fortunately, he didn’t say when.

Mann was inspired by the Prussian state education system that had been designed to help create an army that could beat the French. He didn’t explain how the Prussian situation applied to the United States.

Ever since education has been centralized, politicized, and run on Prussian lines by the government and its functionaries. In the United States in the early nineteenth century, before the advent of the common school, literacy stood at about 90 percent. It is no higher today.

But there is hope. With the rise of the Internet the vast government education monopolies are facing competition. And people can experiment, try new ideas out, and find other people with similar needs and ideas.

There are even education bloggers like Mr. Chalk who are busy spilling the beans on the nightmare in the inner city schools.

Here’s a education site that’s recently joined the conversation. Whole Teaching is a project of teacher and parent Teresa Piddington of Seattle. Teresa is developing the site to provide information and resources related to the use of Creative Systems Theory in child education. The theory, she writes, appreciates and enhances

what is unique about each child while simultaneously supporting every student as he or she engages in the formative process of learning.

In her article Temperament and The Writing Process with Young Children Piddington writes about her experience in applying the Creative Systems Personality Typology developed by Charles M. Johnston MD.

[The typology] correlates temperament type to particular stages in creative, formative processes... For example, in formative processes such as learning, teaching, and writing there is an early (inspiration) stage, a middle (perspiration) stage, and a late (finishing and polishing) stage.

Piddington describes how this typology helped her to respond to the different needs of her students in a second grade project to create cloth-bound books. It helped her to identify strengths and problem areas for each child and develop strategies that responded to the individual strengths and anxieties of each child.

Understanding that "earlies" need creative freedom within structure, "middles", timely feedback and affirmation, and "lates" ample time to embellish their work has strengthened my ability to differentiate and respond to the individual needs of my students.

Projects like Whole Teaching help us to realize that there is a whole new world out there. We are all so used to the top-down hierarchy of the education system that we fail to see what is staring us in the face. Education is an obvious area where the Internet can help teachers, parents,and students get together to solve problems from the bottom up. In fact Google has already stepped in with Google for Educators to help get things going.

Then there is Chris Anderson’s idea of The Long Tail. So far people have tended to think only of its potential in business where a host of small niche firms can thrive alongside the behemoth market leaders.

But why shouldn’t the Long Tail be just as powerful in education? If the Internet can bring together buyers and sellers why can’t it bring together teachers and students? Nowhere is the need more urgent than in the area of child education, perhaps the most regulated and cartelized area of American life.

It is now 160 years since Horace Mann gave us the government “common school.” Alas, nine-tenths of the crimes in the penal code are nowhere close to obsolete.

Perhaps we are already have the solution in our hands.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Drang nach Osten

There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

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