A Catholic Take on “Stop Stealing Dreams”

You too could write a manifesto if you looked this cool

New media maven/Big thinker Seth Godin released a free e-book recently, Stop Stealing Dreams. He rants against the outmoded way the U.S. educational system functions and offers his ideas for how teachers, librarians, and colleges can truly educate young people in the new connected, networked world.

Diagnosis on Target

Godin’s diagnosis of what’s wrong with our educational system is on target. He even realizes that the current schooling paradigm was largely the brain-child of Horace Mann and later John Dewey, who wanted to produce a certain kind of citizen for the industrial economy.

The school system even operates more and more like a factory: add inputs and measure outputs through standardized testing. The test is what matters. Isolate students in their work so we can make sure we are correctly testing individual results. Even though this isn’t how the business or science world works. Collaboration is the norm. Answers don’t need to be memorized, because the internet puts facts, trivia, and formulas at our fingertips in an instant.

Colleges have become (expensive) extensions of high school. Their benefit is decreasing, as the new networked economy doesn’t need “competent” people who are good at fitting widgets into sockets–there’s not enough of those jobs anymore and the ones that still exist are going away, being outsourced to countries with cheaper labor–it needs innovative, inspired people who connect ideas and people together and make things happen. Teachers need to be about instilling this passion and guiding the students along the areas they are interested in.

Homeschool not a Solution?

Godin disses homeschooling, dismissing it as a potential solution, since he thinks that homeschooling means isolated parents trying to teach their children their own homemade curriculum, and parents have varying abilities so its a crapshoot.

He doesn’t realize that homeschooling has come a long way, and now great curricula exist, online courses (which he does praise, from the Khan academy and others), cottage schools, co-operatives where homeschooling families come together for special classes on a weekly basis, and so on.

So homeschooling can and will absolutely be part of the solution of our failing educational system.

Missing the Agrarian Elephant

Godin also doesn’t realize that people still have to eat. And that the way we provide food for people is also the industrial model (which is failing, like schools). He actually mentions in passing how modern mandatory schooling came out of people leaving the farms and moving to the factories in the cities. But he doesn’t connect the dots that this was not a good thing in many, many ways. Or realize that people could move back to the land.

The new networked economy is only as good as the country is stable and the people are healthy. There is a whole other world outside of iPhones and Apple and Google, a world where people need to live whole lives and connect with the natural world. There are innovators in the new agrarian movement that are just as brilliant as Steve Jobs, and providing a universal human need (food) in a way that helps the environment and land, but Godin doesn’t seem to value this.

To his credit, he does list one bullet point of a class he would like to see in the new kind of schools: How to Build Your Own House. Right on. That’s the kind of real skill that is valuable. We need food and shelter, and though we have taken these things for granted in the past era of cheap (and cheaply produced) food and housing, in the way the economy and country are going, these staples of human existence will become high priorities again.

The Value of an Idea

An idea is worth about ten cents in the game development world. In other words, someone comes up and says “I have a unique and brilliant idea for a new video game.” You tell them, “that’s worth a dime.” Actually implementing the game, programming it and finishing it: that’s worth a lot more.

Godin admits he has no clue how to change the system to embrace the new connected economic reality. But he hopes people will spread these ideas and figure that out. That’s a noble goal, and I hope to be a small part of that. But something as entrenched as the U.S. educational system will not change. It will break first rather than bend that far.

It’s like trying to change industrial agriculture. There’s too much money, government grants, patents, and monstrous, hundred thousand dollar John Deere combines out there to reverse its course. Instead, we will change agriculture by growing our own gardens, starting farms small and large, and choosing to buy food that is grown better. Same with schooling: we will change it by doing it ourselves, by banding together with like-minded parents, and doing schooling in a new way, a better way.

I enjoyed Godin’s manifesto and recommend it for everyone. Much of it were things that my family and friends had already been talking about, but he’s always insightful and interesting.