Nacho Man, Part 1
“Oh, the leaky boundaries of man-made states! How many clouds float past them with impunity; how many desert sand shifts from one land to another; how many mountain pebbles tumble onto foreign soil in provocative hops!”
—Wisława Szymborska
As old as curiosity itself, the concept of comparative education is relatively easy to understand—an idea generated in one place and tried out in another by the means available at the time. It was a field built for travel. Lighting a fire by rubbing sticks together or by striking flint need not be discovered again and again, but demonstrated and practiced. stories embellished by charismatic adventurers; carried by word of mouth or drawn on cave walls to depict the hunt or instruct others in the ways of the world, erotica notwithstanding. Oral memes, inherited knowledge, and the wisdom of elders reached villages far away.
In the 1st and 2nd centuries BCE, great Inner Asian empires were comprised of both stable populations and nomads with Long before the Silk Road, A narrative about the construction of meaning—woven into pile carpets, stamped onto coins, unfolded in Silk Road narratives where mercantilists, adventurers, and predators crossed over borders to fill caravans with hoards of coins and precious metals, spices, perfumes, and slaves. They also picked up new cultural perspectives and stolen ideologies.
In 1946, a teenage shepherd looking for a stray goat in the hillside overlooking the Dead Sea stumbles upon a limestone cave. Inside, he discovers a collection of clay jars. He lifts a lid to peek inside and pulls out old scrolls that had not been read for 2,000 years. A few years later, a Syrian Archbishop smuggles four scrolls out of the country, where they sat in a New Jersey Syrian Church. In 1954, the Archbishop places an ad in the Wall Street Journal to sell “biblical manuscripts dating back to at least 200 BC,” along with this incentive: “This would be an ideal gift to an educational or religious institution by an individual or group.” The Israelis buy it back—to study and to teach. The origin of the word, Torah, is commonly referred to as “the law.” Another interpretation of its root comes from ירה, or “to guide/teach.” The Qu’ran originates from the word “Qara-a,” meaning “to read.”
A biblical story, a missionary journal, a story conceived by a bard and dictated to a scribe, a cartographer’s conception of where the oceans meet the shore. What they learn, and how they have learned it, gets passed along. Pythagoras borrows a concept from the Egyptians. Gandhi inspires Martin Luther King. “Omwana ni wa bhone” (roughly translated into “it takes a village to raise a child”).
We long to learn about the world. The 9th century Muslim philosopher, Al-Kindi, expressed an emerging cosmopolitan spirit by emphasizing scholarship’s highest value: a search for the truth, regardless of its origin. From the 9th to the 13th century in Baghdad, the House of Wisdom included a private library and a gathering place for scholars to share intellectual pursuits and culture. Rustichello da Pisa’s Book of the Marvels of the World catalogued Marco Polo’s travels between 1271 and 1295 through the Middle East and Central Asia on his way to China and his encounters in Xanadu with Kublai Khan, then onward through Japan, India, Sri Lanka, Southeast Asia, and the east coast of Africa, followed by descriptions of Mongol wars and his journey to Russia. The Marvels was on board Christopher Columbus’s vessel as he attempted to reach Asia by sailing west.
Sometimes learning is a trickle or a current or a wave. Fourteenth-century plates of moveable type replicated stories without needing to meet the storyteller. Seventeenth-century “grand tours” for European men of means — to view art, listen to music, and collect snuff boxes, statuary, and other cultural artifacts — were considered an educational rite of passage. On the bottom rung of the social and economic ladder, slave narratives told stories of home, music, learning.
In John Bunyan’s 1678 Christian allegory, Pilgrim’s Progress, we read about characters and settings with names like Christian; Mr. Legality and his son Civility; the Evangelist; the Flatterer; Mr. Worldly Wiseman; Mr. Feeble-Mind; Mr. By-Ends; Mr. Sagacity; Mrs. Bat’s-Eyes and Mrs. Inconsiderate; Pliable; Obstinate; Goodwill; Mistrust; Atheist; Talkative; two dapper men named Formality and Hypocrisy; Giant Despair; Giantess Diffidence; the House of the Interpreter, the Hill of Difficulty, the City of Destruction, Hill Error, Mountain Caution, Forgetful Green, Ready-to-Halt, the Valley of Humiliation. The allegories may feel obtuse, but the journey to redemption has infiltrated our contemporary 10th grade reading list: Charlotte Brontë’s quest narrative, Jane Eyre; John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, tinged with the redemption that accompanies the drive for social justice; Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-5, whose protagonist — Billy Pilgrim — sets out on a quest for enlightenment and reaches a fundamentally different conclusion about life far from spiritual redemption. Either way, word spreads.
Fast forward to America. In 1860, the Pony Express initiated a relay race across the country, each rider carrying about 350 letters and required to stop every fifteen miles or so for fresh horses and a two-minute break. Surely, they must have peeked at post-cards during their sojourn across the great plains. By 1866, the Western Union monopoly made telegraphic journalism possible, aided by cable laid across the floor of the Atlantic. Alexander Graham Bell’s patent for the telephone launched a new era of communication. Industrialism enabled immigrants standing shoulder to shoulder, to interpret their culture to each other to pass the time rather than submit to the hypnotic monotony of the assembly line.
These mechanisms of scale began to amplify a voice of one in order to be heard by many: the megaphone itself, the daily newspaper, radio serials, aerograms, the nightly news, situation comedies, courtroom dramas. In 1951, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I becomes an instant hit on Broadway, romanticizing the 1860s story of a British schoolteacher, Anna, hired by King Mongkut of Siam to modernize his country. Thai music and dance are made accessible to American audiences.
Western People Funny
Western People Funny
Western People Funny
Of that there is no doubt
They feel so sentimental
About the Oriental
They always try to turn us
Inside down down and upside out!
and later…
They think they civilise us Ah
Whenever they advise us
To learn to make the same mistake
That they are making too!
Ah……..h!
Passports accessible at post-offices lower prices for transcontinental flights, made first-hand experiences of education someplace else more accessible for the masses. Ideas cross pollinated on vacations and edutours, student year-abroad programs and Model United Nations conferences.
Now, we phone, ping, chat, blog, tag, tweet, and comment. We scroll shopping sites, swipe through faces for possible dates, and reconnect on Facebook. We schmooze our Lyft or Uber drivers on our way to and from the airport. We charm AirBnB hosts in order to secure a room. We rate restaurants or trust the taste-buds of those we will never meet.
We text, friend, follow, Facetime, YouTube. We trust big data sets reduced to infographics. We “like” a post either because we appreciate it or simply acknowledge we have seen it, and throw in an emoji for good measure. We watch TED Talks by innovators and instructive YouTube videos by amateurs. We show up at makerspaces, hackathons, STEM olympiads. We send off our DNA to find out where we’re from.
We organize political events without the help of an organization. We sign online petitions. We crowd fund. We game globally. We choose an avatar to simulate social interaction. We offer and receive medical, psychological, and fashion advice. . When we’re on the move, we broadcast where we are, and in a video-conference, we can be in two places at once. We teach and we tutor.
We recognize the price we pay for access. We may even protest against a loss of privacy or risk the theft of our identity, but we share, share, share nonetheless — memes, pics of our parties, our meals, ourselves. We buy products we have not touched or felt. We set alerts for preferred news sites that could have originated from a propaganda farm. We read facts and alternative facts. We learn from machines, yet machines learn about us. We have settled on a personal policy of fair trade: I give you x data and you can have access to, or even take over, my contacts, my photos, my location. Open educational resources have inspired an unprecedented level of access for communities otherwise marginalized, acts of heroic generosity, massive open online courses (MOOCs), and seasoned intellectual discourse. The price? Equal access to, and affordability of, misogyny; hate networks; human trafficking; state-sponsored tampering with elections; or instructions for 3D printers to produce a bump stocks for transforming a semi-automatic weapon into a machine gun.
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Our phones, watches, cars, reading lights, security systems, clothes, our bluetooth speakers, and even our vacuum cleaners are “smart” not only because they respond to what we say, but also because they hoover up data about how we spend our free time, what we talk about, when we are likely to drink too much, and why we agree with those whose politics match our own. We offer and gain much.
Our digital assistants are “smart cookies,” indeed. They remind us to head out for work earlier than usual because of heavy traffic or tell us when the next bus will arrive. They function as earworms in our earbuds, capable of translating a foreign language in real time and responding to our curiosity while we multitask. Reality is real or virtual, immersive or actual. We can travel to Egypt or we can strap on glasses to experience the pyramids. Our screens are both mirrors and windows that both reflect our changing image and arrange our scenery of self. Like it or not, our education is a composite of school, home, and the internet. The internet of things is smart, and getting smarter, because it is always on, always aware.
In an awareness economy, information we generate blends with information from elsewhere. Sometimes we deliberate about what we have seen or heard. Sometimes ideas sneak into our consciousness—a headline on our news feed here, a compelling podcast or “must-read” article there—on little cybercat feet.
The internet toothpaste will not return to its tube anytime soon, nor should it be. The accessibility to—and affordability of—an unlimited reservoir of knowledge is too exhilarating, the intermittent dopamine rush too intoxicating to slam on the brakes. We must acknowledge, however, that the boundaries between global and personal learning, as well as human and machine interactions, are permeable.
It has always been difficult to teach an old dogma new tricks, no less convince someone to embrace a new perspective. Our minds can be an amazingly impenetrable, intractable—a steel trap, windows permanently shuttered, and impervious to input that may contradict our profile. Educators for millennia have maintained that an educated person is defined by a finely-honed shit detector or critical thinking intelligence.
Bad ideas—corporal punishment, the exclusion of girls, forced child labor—remain alive and well in dozens of countries throughout the world—their proponents as dug-in today as they were when these abominations were conceived.
A good idea, like free access to primary education, may hold universal appeal, but remains hardly universal. Like the urge toward freedom, it has early roots. Major religions and ancient civilizations claim credit for introducing compulsory education. The American National Education Association claims that the Babylonian talmud has made clear that the maximum class size should be 25.
In 1524, Martin Luther called for mandatory schooling to ensure that children were literate enough to read the Bible as a precondition for salvation. In the nineteenth century, industrialism’s voracious appetite required a workforce literate enough to follow directions. Governments recognized literacy (for some, not for others) as a vehicle for fostering patriotism. Global agreements signed by member states of the United Nations have asserted that Education for All must be considered a human right. It is, nonetheless, a universal practice, despite our ubiquitous and instant access to the world’s information.
Ideas about education travel. Kindergarten is a German concept. Teachers create lessons and customize teaching by integrating concepts of cognitive development created by Jean Piaget, a Swiss psychologist. We scaffold our teaching by adjusting our responses to student levels of performance and interaction with content using a social cognition learning model developed by a Russian psychologist, Lev Vygotsky. Montessori Schools (Italy). We view students as active learners, rather than as empty vessels to be filled, a concept developed by the eighteenth century French philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, adapted for the masses as an act of social conscience and reconstruction by the Brazilian activist, Paulo Freire, and institutionalized by the American philosopher, John Dewey’s emphasis on pragmatic interactions with ideas and hands-on learning. Educators have always learned by looking elsewhere.
Implementation is another matter entirely. One would naturally think that, in order to travel well and resonate, an educational idea must embody enough resilience, adaptability, and utility to pollinate more ideas.
Technology has raised the stakes. Today, a data-driven educational approach based on solid research must compete with fake news or a half-baked, wholly unsubstantiated or overblown “trending topics.” Information flow can be exhausting. Teachers report innovation and app fatigue. “I don’t want any more new ideas,” a colleague once complained, “just good ones. I used to search everywhere for lesson plan ideas. Now, I have to search through a haystack to find that needle.”
There is credible evidence of patterns that could propel an idea toward virality, but the list is long, and the combination of factors elusive and reductive: its unique content, breaking news, the ability to hold emotion, a wow factor, humor, positivity, intensity, creativity, brevity, shareability.
Diffusion theorists look for clues by examining patterns and stages of adoption. Diffusion (of innovation) theorists divide us up into five categories, based upon how we interact with novelty — innovators, early adopters, the early majority, the late majority, and the laggards. Innovators who fail quickly and often are in vogue these days.Take the onslaught of digital devices for example. Innovators who fail quickly and often are in vogue these days. Early adopters are willing to take a chance on the newest thing, and are even willing to help iron out the kinks. They catch fire. The early majority read the reviews and dive in after a critical mass of 3–4 stars from a trusted source. They never buy anything the first of its release. The late majority ride the wave. They catch on.
Laggards are often dismissed as Luddites, unwilling even to catch up, no less catch on. Wikipedia’s definition of Luddites might even seem somewhat prophetic: “a group of English textile workers and weavers in the 19th century who destroyed weaving machinery as a form of protest. The group was protesting the use of machinery in a ‘fraudulent and deceitful manner’ to get around standard labour practices. Luddites feared that the time spent learning the skills of their craft would go to waste as machines would replace their role in the industry.” I might give Luddites much more credit for not embracing something just because everyone else has. To me, they may simply let ideas percolate. Let’s not underestimate.
It takes all kinds. Some believe things only when they see it. Others believe things because they see it.
Diffusion theorists in education strive to know how and when ideas flourish. They examine the algorithms of keystroke and consumer choice, the epidemiology of computing patterns that provide clues to determine the relative advantage of one idea over another. Ideas that are embraced immediately because they study the signs of an idea that can be understood quickly and visualized, repackaged when the occasion arises, and reapplied in multiple new iterations (think open-source code made available for imaginative new uses the creators had never imagined).
But then again, a breakthrough idea perfectly suited for travel may never make it out of the locked suitcase in the attic or is considered simply too ahead of its time. Electric cars were around in the 1930s, but the oil and gas industry crushed the idea. These vehicles made sense back then, but they are only popular today because of a host of reasons: more advanced technology, a realization that oil and gas are a nonrenewable resource contributing to climate change, and slick marketing. Others may take a more telescopic approach. The French philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin once wrote: “Remain true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge.” In other words, hang on. There is some hard evidence for this somewhat abstruse perspective. Shared research, accessible big data, and global networks have accelerated the rate of scientific breakthroughs.
When an inchoate idea in its gestation stage finally cracks through time or resistance and transforms the unfamiliar into the familiar or points a way to a solution that has heretofore eluded us, we react with delight. A complex idea, like a well-engineered driverless car, may become a no-brainer for the consumer. A simple idea, like the body healing itself, may be made accessible through advanced bio-engineering.
But the research on the secret sauce that enables an idea to taste good anywhere is still somewhat flimsy. We may never know how to bottle a complex combination of culture, context, history, political readiness, or capacity.
But, you ask, what about nachos? I did not, dear reader, suck you in with a tasty title. I have a point to make.
