What Kids Can Teach Us

Yesterday, I came across this article via metafilter, and it is easily one of the most interesting pieces I've read in a very long time. In it, two teachers describe how their elementary school-aged after school kids went from playing with legos to deconstructing capitalism over the course of a school year.

Certainly, the ethics of teaching social justice in an elementary school classroom are up for debate, but I'd rather not focus on that here. Instead, what I found striking was the amount that these 8-year-olds were already a product of their environment. I think elementary school interactions socialize kids in broader ways than merely helping them form interpersonal relationships. These kids were clearly savvy to their societal environment. By the age of 8, many were already products of capitalism, completely accultured to the socioeconomic system in which they were growing up. Moreover, as I read further into the article, I realized that they were speaking in terms that were already defined by that system. For American schoolchildren, inequality is a natural way of life.

Back to the ethics of teaching social justice. In college I took a class on the Cold War in which we read a number of texts relating to propaganda. One of the texts discussed how social values are promulgated in small children. One of the most striking examples was how math texts are used to surreptitiously convey values to children. Look at an American high school or grade school math textbook. Look at the word problems. They almost always talk about buying things. Even when people buy them together, they rarely split the cost evenly. This isn't the case everywhere, and it certainly wasn't the case in Soviet Russia, where most math texts involved sharing or producing. So regardless of what teachers do in the classroom, children are constantly being instilled with social values in the classroom.

Not your average internet education

With Wikibooks and its peers came free, open-source education by and for the people. And now, with iTunes, comes the webcasted lecture. Prestigious universities like UC Berkeley and MIT (and previously Stanford, Oxford, and Yale with AllLearn) are offering webcasts--audio and sometimes video--of many of their courses, from physics to philosophy to art.

The way traditional "distance learning" courses for credit work is by combining readings and audio/video lectures with online communication through a chatroom or forum. Assignments are sent to the professor and assessed. Most of the courses available through Berkeley Webcasts and similar sites don't offer any meaningful interaction with the professor or other students, but some, like this environmental history course, provide all the salient details. The only difference from traditional DL courses is that you don't get your assignments graded.

It's not a free degree, but it IS free education as long as you have a computer, some kind of audio player, and speakers or headphones. This still excludes the poorest of the poor except through access via a library or other public internet location, but it's a pretty significant improvement in the quality of education you can get for free.

I'm doing PACS 164A: Introduction to Nonviolence right now. I'll tell you how it goes. In the meantime, educate yourselves.