Nerds and Tribes

It is truly fascinating to see the modern school system from an outsider's perspective, stripped down to its absurdities and bereft of its insular modularity, a strange cultural machine that only seems mundane because we know no other. Paul Graham does just that in the introduction to his book, Hackers and Painters, where he de-constructs the social ranking of junior high in all its glory, and subsequently strikes at the heart of the argument Daniel Quinn makes in My Ishmael for a radical tribal revolution of the current education system. He also strikes at the heart of why such a revolution, in this productivity-obsessed day and age, would never find more than marginal support.

And as for the schools, they were just holding pens within this fake world. Officially the purpose of schools is to teach kids. In fact their primary purpose is to keep kids locked up in one place for a big chunk of the day so adults can get things done. And I have no problem with this: in a specialized industrial society, it would be a disaster to have kids running around loose.

Specialization. There's the word I have been repeating over and over since this dilemma came to light - the dilemma of learning, of polymathism, of the need for a bird's eye view when it comes to taking on the educational bureaucracy. Wherever you find programs directed at "change," you will also find people caught in this mindset that it is essential for progress to be built upon specialization, no one person more than a few steps away from a single discipline, as if they might fall off some precipice (unfocused is the word) if they wandered too far. There can be no question in their minds that the greater good is the deeper, the narrower, the assembly line of intellectual probing. Which, of course, brings us inevitably back to the 4-point scale and the standardized alphabet soup, criteria that are easy to digest in large quantities. Graham ties this up neatly with a quote that shows us things really do not change from the halls of junior high:

"We have a phrase to describe what happens when rankings have to be created without any meaningful criteria. We say that the situation degenerates into a popularity contest."

And what surprise should it be then, that our children congregate in tribes the same way that the system judges them? This ancient social structure has worked for humans the same way that flocks have worked for geese and herds have worked for buffalo, as Quinn points out. It is only in a different context we, modernity, give it another name. But make no mistake, the "freaks" and "nerds" as Graham describes the cliques, clung to their tribal identity as much as the popular students did. For the former, "never studying (or at least never appearing to) was an important tribal value," whereas the latter, though besieged on all sides by the cruelty of their more popular peers, chose intelligence over a place at the feeding trough. Neither is right or wrong. All are merely responding to the human need to belong.

From this, it's apparent what must be done. Take advantage of a centuries old social organization that's worked all along, or continue throwing money at a failing one we created? The choice is no choice at all.

In tribal societies, the three-year-old is free to explore the world around it as far as it likes...There simply are no walls shutting the child in or out at any age, no doors closed against it. There is no age when it 'should' learn a given thing. Nor would anyone ever dream of giving thought to such a thing. Ultimately, all the things grown-ups do are fascinating to a child, and it eventually and inevitably wants to do them itself - not necessarily on the same day as every other child, nor in the same week or the same year. This process isn't cultural, it's genetic.

At the same time, Ishmael sees the criticism in this before it's even spoken.

But, of course, having your children underfoot in the workplace would seriously reduce efficiency and productivity. Even though sending them to educational detention centers is terrible for children, it's unquestionably wonderful for business. The system I've outlined here will never be implemented among the people of your culture as long as you value business over people.

Progress, as defined by the market we so ironically created, is what impedes our children's progress.

In the end, we produce what we value in a capitalist society - shouldn't that productivity then reflect our children's education, if we care about it so much? Who, really, are we making more computers and automobiles and cell phones for but ourselves? It's time to re-define "progress" and "production," straighten out our priorities for the sake of our future generation. We do not need to give up anything to make this tribal educational system succeed. We must only trade that which we have no use for more of, in exchange for what our children essentially need.