A Library for the Jetsons

We all remember the Jetsons, right? A cheesy cartoon about a stereotypical '60s family set in the future? The Jetsons travel everywhere by either rocket or helicopter and talk on videophones all the time.

I was reminded of the Jetsons when I read this story in the Boston Globe: the headmaster at Cushing Academy is all fired up about how the library there is going to shed all of its books. “When I look at books, I see an outdated technology, like scrolls before books,’’ is what the headmaster told the paper. The plan is to create "A Learning Center" (a hilarious name, I think, because if the library is now the center of learning on campus, what are we supposed to think about the rest of the school?). This includes the replacement of 20,000 volumes with a set of 18 Amazon Kindles. Maybe this figure is based on the library's circulation data from recent years, but it seems a little low for a school of 450 students. I will admit that the cappucino bar sounds appealing, but the whole project starts to sound to me more like a Café with good wifi than a "Learning Center."

So is this the wave of the future? Is the bound book (and printed media generally) headed to the fate of the scroll? I don't think so; and this is where the Jetsons come into it. Fifty years ago, many people made assumptions about the future based on the new technologies of the present. Videophones would become normative; everything would be atomic powered and automated; communications would be constant (well, they got that right), all buildings would be high-rise; and the wheel would be as obsolete as , well, the scroll.

Fifty years later, the Jetsons were obviously wrong, even though the technology was (in many ways) right. We could all live in high-rises, but we don't. Video-chatting is easy and cheap, but far from normative. And we still travel on wheels, every day. The reason for this is technological progress is not a zero sum game. New technology only rarely supplants old tech; it supplements it. Often it comes to dominate the old tech, but the old tech remains (an example: the printed book superceded the handwritten book, but did not supercede handwriting). We still have a land line in our house, ands we still have one phone where the receiver is attached to it by wires. The cordless and mobile phones are fine, except when they aren't (their charge runs down, or they get lost), and then it is a good thing to have a hard line.

Bound books are the like the wheel: a simple and elegant technology that requires nothing more than itself. Once made they can be read through any kind of conditions with minimal care, and no external technology to support their use. They require no batteries, no electricity, no signal, no annual subscription fee, no changes in licensing agreement. Are they sometimes heavy? Sure. But for all that, they are incredibly liberating in a way that a kindle, for all its stunning capabilities, just isn't.

As for Cushing, I think this is not much more than a recruiting/publicity stunt. I know that sounds cynical, but times are hard for boarding schools, and Cushing is venerable without being particularly notable. No one will care if they end up keeping some of their books, but by announcing their radical plan they did manage to get themselves on the front page of a major (albeit struggling) newspaper, and tout their new Wifi Café. On the other hand, the whole thing could be totally sincere: I see that the Cushing head likes to be addressed as "Dr. James Tracy," a vanity that the Globe (bless them) declined to indulge. There is no surer sign of an educational windbag than wanting to be called "doctor" based on an Ed. degree.

A friend (tanyabraganti.com) sent me a video about performance pay for teachers based on a "value-added" approach. This is my reply...

Don't get me started. Too late, I am starting....The performance evaluation question isn't likely to find an answer at all. Of course teachers should be paid based on how well they do their jobs; shouldn't everyone? (CEO's? How about THEM apples?) But looking for a quantifiable basis for performance evaluation in teachers is a Snark Hunt of the first order. The problem, I think, lies in our world view which is dominated by tropes of money and science (think of all scientific formulae in the video, or the use of the term "value-added" which is straight out of manufacturing). These are very good lenses in their proper areas (business, say, or medicine) but they have a deeply distorting effect on education. The value of an education (I can't even talk about it without resorting to that monetized word "value") cannot be measured by the tools of science and business, because the things that an education should carry, must carry, go so far beyond so-called "basic skills" and beyond anything testable.

On some level, "education" isn't synonymous with "school"; "education" is really synonymous with "childhood." As a father of three, I can see that only a very small part of what my children learn comes through school. As a high school teacher, I see the same thing: the most interesting prior learning my students bring to the table is almost never from school, but from life.

Here is what school does do, and I think this is more or less true even of a pretty weak school: it provides a structured and limited environment for the learning of skills that cannot easily be absorbed by our spongelike childhood brains without some repetition, some discipline, and the partial elimination of the blooming buzzing wondrous confusion of daily life. By doing that it sets us up with some extra tools for living and learning—but we still have to do most of that on our own.

But instead we look to (and credit or blame) schools for children's entire success or failure at life. And in private—excuse me—"independent" schools, the monetizing side, the "mere cash nexus" of education can be particularly vile and open, because of the nature of the transaction. The sense is that by shelling out $80,000 or more over a period of years, one should be guaranteed a successful "product," usually in the form of admission to a prestigious college, which in turn will (through the infusion of even more ridiculous amounts of money) lead to a successful (i.e. moneymaking) adulthood. The spiritual poverty of this entire view of education is hard to bear. And to be fair, almost all individual parents, when speaking and thinking of their own particular children, have a deeper, richer, and more intuitive hopes and dreams about what education and life might hold for them. But these individual aspirations are completely lacking from collective and public discourse about education and schools.

I could go on... and on... and on. But I will stop. For now....

I like this graphic. Something about the way it suggests that there is a tidiness to knowledge is appealing. Of course it is easy to dismiss it as simplistic or naive. But the thing about knowledge is that it is kind of limited and limiting. Maybe this schematic is simplistic, but the idea that raw knowledge can be systematized isn't really. It's just that knowledge by itself isn't really that useful or important.

PHB's Mad Skills

Peter Boisvert is a child of many accomplishments.

Spring Break Productivity

One of my goals for Spring Break (and for 2009 in general) is to complete the ongoing video project I have been working on called Rotten Dock.  It is the kind of project I could fuss over for years, and which could stretch on for hours when finished.  I would just as soon neither of those things happened.

The movie concerns my grandparents' house on Harbor View, Marblehead, which was sold in 2007 and demolished in 2008.   The House (caps intentional) played an enormous role in the life our family, and the movie is meant to pay tribute to that, and also to preserve its memory for those too young, or yet unborn, to get a sense of its quirks and pleasures.

I will continue to post new bits here and on YouTube as they become completed.

Settling In

I am getting used to a new laptop.  I don't want to say "breaking in," because of the damage that implies to something we can barely afford or justify.  One expects a new computer to arrive, trailing clouds of glory, solving every problem that had become so irksome about the old machine.  It doesn't really work that way, however.  The new MacBook has many excellent qualities, mind you. But it is also a little bit like moving into a new house.  It takes forever to unpack, to get used to the new appliances, to figure out how to configure the furniture relative to the electric outlets and so forth.  Every ten minutes, it seems like it is time to make another trip to the hardware store.

It is the same with a computer.  This external thingy needs a different adapter.  That application's license doesn't transfer to the new machine.  There is an uneasy period of being neither in the old world nor the new...

But the electric ukelele sounds UNBELIEVABLE in the new version of GarageBand.  Oh, yeaahhhh.  Clouds of glory.  Uh huh.

Dining Out for Lent

DID YOU KNOW?

Taco Bell has special menus for Lent.  That makes it the first fast food chain I am aware of to demonstrate any awareness of the potential for a spiritual life on the part of its customers.  I am still in awe.  I was trying to imagine the MacDo' Lenten Menu for instance.  That also reminds me that Oliver was musing today on the subject of fast food, and he said that when he was in preschool (ancient times, in his book), he thought that Burger King was a restaurant where "people sneezed a lot,"  "burger" being preschool-cognate with "booger."