Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future, Joi Ito, Director,
MIT Media Lab & Jeff Howe
Grand Central Publishing 2016
Kirkus calls this book “exhilarating and authoritative,” two cybergurus
offering a “user’s manual to the twenty-first century.”
As a longtime teacher, I find the manual to be
flawed. I was interested in the authors’ observation that the failure of
Microsoft’s
professionally designed
Encarta encyclopedia contrasted with the
success of Wikipedia’s amateur-led platform as examples of
push-pull consumerism, with suppliers “pushing”
goods toward consumers and consumers “pulling” goods according to their needs,
with
Encarta being push and Wikipedia
pull. Similarly, AOL, with its traditional push approach originally faltered
and Twitter’s pull flourished.
Certainly it’s not surprising that the director
and visiting scholar at the MIT Media Lab
would be cheerleaders for technology, but I guess I’m too old to embrace
Moore’s law, which the authors explain thusly:
“everything digital gets faster, cheaper, and smaller at an exponential rate,”
and this results in “wearable computers. Robots building robots.” We are told that we live in exponential times and “Change doesn’t care if you’re
ready.”
One assertions strikes me as particularly whacky. The authors insist that compasses are way more useful
than maps. “A map implies a detailed knowledge of the terrain, and the
existence of an optimum route; the compass is a far more flexible tool and
requires the user to employ creativity and autonomy in discovering his or her
own path…..a good compass…will always take you were you need to go.” I’d say it
depends on where you are and where you want to go. I’m comfortable watching the
compass when my hand is on the tiller only because of my husband’s careful study of the charts that have given him detailed knowledge of the shallows and hazards of Lake Champlain.
It seems astounding that authors who have extolled compasses over maps can
be so enthusiastic about KIPP schools, gushing,“KIPP schools have achieved
admirable results in communities saddled with failing public schools. They
focus on discipline, longer school days, and a steady diet of math, reading,
writing, and homework.” The authors choose to ignore devastating research by scholars
such as Professor Jim Horn whose
Work
Hard, Be Hard: Journeys Through “No Excuses” documents what it’s like to
teach and be taught in KIPP with its straightjacket classroom conditions. No
compasses here, only strict schedules that must be obeyed. With breathtaking
and heartbreaking examples, Horn shows that teacher behavior becomes
reminiscent of subjects in Stanley Milgram’s infamous experiments—all to
produce a corps of Blacks who obey orders.
The authors intone about the importance of maintaining “a culture of
creative disobedience,” emphasizing that human systems are most resilient at
their most diverse.
In promoting the assertion that all kids should learn coding, the authors nod toward research showing that “people learn best when they can connect
the things they’re learning to their interests, their personal relationships.” After all, the Media Lab did much to promote this. Think of Seymour Papert, the educational theorist, and Logo. But not for
those kids, who need to bark on command.
I can’t think of any school policy further from the
Whiplash trumpet of “nonlinear innovation that can act quickly to
the kind of rapid changes that characterize the network age.” For a reality
check, I would recommend Frank McCourt’s wonderful description of his first attempt
at classroom management in
New York
City.
In
Teacher Man he describes the chaos that ensues when
kids swipe a kid’s baloney sandwich and toss
it around.
McCourt restores order by grabbing
the sandwich, standing in front of the class, and eating it.
The authors insist “When you emphasize practice over theory,
you don’t need to wait for permission or explain yourself before you begin. And
once you’ve started, if your circumstances change or your development process
takes an unexpected turn, you don’t always need to stop and figure out what
happened before you go on.” Maybe being married to a theoretical physicist is
what caused me to jump at the first part
of this assertion. Think Peter Higgs. In the 1960s Higgs proposed a theory that could explain the origin of the mass of elementary
particles. Fifty-odd years later CERN announced
that they had established the existence of a Higgs-like boson. Experimentally. Theory waiting a long
time for practice to catch up.
Not to mention Einstein.
I also thought of my
own experience as a teacher whose classroom practice was transformed
by the “messing around in science”
principle introduced by David Hawkins, founder of the Elementary Science Advisory Center. Hawkins’
work emerged from well-developed child development theory and I drew on it to change
the way I taught remedial reading. Yes,
I did need to ask permission before I started buying bones, pendulums, test
tubes, and the like. And every day I watched the children very closely, thinking
about what kids were doing , figuring out what it meant, and where and when I
could give a nudge. When inspectors from the New York State Education
Department came to see why the children’s standardized reading scores had
soared, what they saw in practice left them more bewildered than when they had
arrived. I am sure they would have
understood a KIPP classroom.
The authors promote some educational principles I applaud, but they are too quick to dismiss public schools and the teachers in them. Years ago, an education foundation hired me to travel the country looking at how elementary teachers were struggling to change the way they taught math. Visiting classrooms in twenty-eight states and looking closely at what was going on taught me that just because teachers weren't doing things my way didn't mean they weren't doing good in addition to doing well. The resulting book was titled
Garbage Pizza, Patchwork Quilts, and Math Magic: Stories about Teachers Who Love to Teach and Children Who Love to Learn. It was named "best book for parents" by Child Magazine.
Frank McCourt noted that
in all his years of teaching, only
one parent asked, "Is my child happy in school?" And when he said
yes, she expressed approval and left. That's all she wanted to know. It was a
big plenty.
It’s a question all parents should ask. Teachers, too.
Susan Ohanian
