Silicon Valley is a lot of things. An innovation engine. A money-making machine. A geek magnet.
It’s also a world apart. This week, WIRED’s Jason Tanz published a feature story on techie homeschoolers alienated by traditional schools and in some cases by the idea of schooling itself. Not liking school isn’t exactly a radical notion—ask any kid. But at a time when the surge in tech-industry wealth is driving an ever-deeper wedge between haves and have-nots, the homeschooling trend plays into the suspicion that techies would rather live in a bubble than the world we all share. It’s not that any parents should be faulted for making what they see as the best choices for their kids. The issue is a Silicon Valley culture that can too often prize breaking away at the expense of chipping in.
As Tanz describes it, the same do-it-yourself mentality idealized by Silicon Valley’s startup scene is fueling the tech-minded move to homeschooling. One Silicon Valley parent tells Tanz, “We are going direct to learning. We don’t need to hold to this old paradigm of top-down, someone tells me what to do.” An app designer from Brooklyn, meanwhile, reaches straight for Silicon Valley’s origin story: “The only possible conclusion is ‘Heck, I could do this better myself out of my garage!'”
There’s much about DIY culture that I cherish. The drive to question received wisdom. The commitment to using rather than being used by technology. At its best, DIY is about making knowledge and skills as accessible to as many people as possible, a democratizing impulse that empowers creativity over unearned privilege or institutional authority. But those same values, as positive as they can be, also have unintended consequences that we shouldn’t accept blithely. To name just one: Good intentions can breed solutionist fantasies where “disruption” is the only answer. But disruption has a way of leaving the disrupted behind.
In business, is how the innovation cycle works. Education, by contrast, isn’t supposed to have winners and losers.
Every kid deserves to have the best chance possible. It’s understandable, even admirable, that homeschoolers want to seek a better model. But without the hard, messy work of trying to integrate these models into the lives of all children, these efforts will remain symbolic gestures without much substance. As Tanz writes, “To put this in tech terms, it’s an approach that doesn’t scale very well.”
Learning to Listen
Full confession: I’ve been re-watching The Wire lately (thank you, Amazon Prime). I’m almost up to season four, the “education” season when disgraced ex-detective Roland “Prez” Pryzbylewski seeks redemption as a teacher in Baltimore’s dysfunctional public school system. Showrunner David Simon has described the overarching theme of The Wire as institutional breakdown, and I can’t help but note how tinny Silicon Valley’s rhetoric of “changing the world” sounds when stacked against the suffering inflicted as civic life disintegrates. Facebook has certainly changed how big swaths of the world communicate. But when Mark Zuckerberg tried to bring Silicon Valley’s disruptive way of thinking (and $100 million) to remaking Newark, New Jersey’s public schools, the effort blew up in his face.
One reasonable response to seeing even Mark Zuckerberg fail at fixing public education would be to say, forget it. If he can’t do it, what chance does anyone else have? But imagine if Silicon Valley really applied itself and all its resources—its talent, its creativity, its money—to solving the most intractable problems, not by moving fast and breaking things, but by acknowledging complexity and listening hard.
One of the parents profiled by Tanz, Samantha Cook, runs a network of hackerspaces for kids called Curiosity Hacked. By all appearances, this is DIY culture at its best, a place where kids learn to make and do, where they’re instilled with the belief that technology belongs to them, that they can use it to make things, not just consume them. This is a place I want to take my own kid. But in the best-case scenario, I wouldn’t have to. It would be a part of his school already. Bringing the best of what alternative education models offer into the mainstream is a monumental challenge. It won’t be easy. It’s not just a matter of coming up with the right hack. But it’s the kind of challenge that Silicon Valley, if it truly aspires to change the world, should relish. It just might take a little less doing-it-yourself and a little more doing-it-together.
