If you went looking for the foundations of the electromagnetic field concept, who would you expect to find there – a famous scientist and Royal Society member, or his self-taught valet and sometime lab assistant?
If you were searching for the person who kicked off the public health revolution in mid-1800s England, you might look for a forward-thinking doctor. But you’d be wrong. Instead, look for a philosopher and his assistant, both trained in the law. And the mental health revolution, half a century later, was launched not by a physician, but by a former inmate of a mental hospital.
In the late 19th century, if you wanted to perfect an efficient incandescent light bulb, you might have gone to the best educated scientists for help, but probably not to a semi-educated tinkerer in New Jersey. Why?
Someone interested in an economical operating system for the emerging personal computer market might also have asked the experts, perhaps at IBM. But IBM themselves got theirs from a college dropout whose software business was barely out of his garage.
When nobody bought the electric cars coming from the teams of experts at GM and Nissan, Elon Musk, a software businessman and PayPal investor, pushed them aside with the Tesla.
What about something big, like the moon shot? Didn’t it take experts to do that? Well, it certainly took a pile of money that only a government (big fan of experts) could provide. But once the technology was democratized and the costs came down, true innovation in space travel came not from NASA, but from a guy with an online bookstore.
And yet we still believe that the experts will give us the education (or health care!) system that we want.
The fact is, there’s a tried and true paradigm for getting what we want for our money: A few years ago, Apple put out their latest iPhone, but everyone bought the Samsung instead because of the big screen and a great camera. Can you guess what features Apple put on its next phone? If you said a bigger screen and better camera…
Imagine if this was how schools worked. They offer possibilities, and we respond by buying what we want. Foreign language immersion? Project-based learning? STEM-focused curriculum? If you want it, schools will provide it (and more schools will provide it if they see consumers rushing to schools that already do) – but only if the experts stop dictating what schools can do and where all the education money goes.
The common refrain is that education is too important to leave “to the market.” That case can be made for nutrition, too. But still we let corporations provide our food. Hell, we let parents decide what their kids eat. Where are the cries for a government-provided, thrice-daily gruel – exactly how many calories you need to clear the bar and no more? After all, in educational terms, that’s what our government schools serve up, day after day.
“Expert advice is indispensable to the democratic process,” wrote Harry Rosenfield in the Spring 1949 Antioch Review. “But it is not a substitute for that process.” The best illustration of that process would be millions of Americans voting … with their pocketbooks.
More: To paraphrase Michael Strong, imagine if the education system we had now was something we had paid an education company to build for us – think of an education Halliburton. Be honest: wouldn't we look at that system ... and call for that company to be fired?
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