Government Innovation: Liberty (Part 2 of 3)

“There is but one method of rendering a republican form of government durable, and that is by disseminating the seeds of virtue and knowledge through every part of the state by means of proper places and modes of education and this can be done effectively only by the aid of the legislature.”

To ensure the liberty of our people, and indeed all people, we have created a democratically elected government split into three branches each which balances the others, created publicly funded education, infrastructure, information, public safety and military resources and reshaped our public policies —albeit often slowly — as people realized we could do better.

Our ability to progressively re-evaluate current practices is based on the assumption that people have access to all of the information available and are best able to use that information to move forward a new idea.

But, throughout the past few decades, our values have shifted. Creativity has become bogged down by drudgery, thoughtfulness by superficiality and education by bureaucracy. The most interesting classes are getting cut from curricula, national debate is shaped by sound-bites not real discussion and our process of educating young people, so that they can overcome these challenges, has slowly been re-focused. Our attention is no longer on what knowledge and values we are imparting or what people need to learn to be successful in our times but rather on how we can most efficiently measure what we are doing. But there is hope, and it has a lot to do with leveraging new technology.

Technology, Entertainment, Design, or TED, as many of us know it, is an organization that fosters global innovation through the inspiration of, aggregation and mass free distribution of some of the most brilliant talks on pressing issues that exists on this planet. All of TED’s content is made available online for free and has been translated into more than 50 languages by a corps of volunteers.

The lesson: Education doesn’t always need to take place in a classroom or by a textbook. Sometimes a media platform delivers information better than a book can, and if it can reach people a classroom textbook otherwise wouldn’t, so much the better.

Does this mean all schools should take place online? Certainly not. But does it mean that through public schools the government should invest in ways to inspire, education and connect people using the internet, much like many colleges have been doing for years? Absolutely.

Public schools should be our most connected institutions, using online media, social networking, online games that foster curiosity and real-time audio/visual communication to connect students with all of the resources the world has to offer. Schools don’t need to offer every single class in every single subject. Just by having a well-connected accessible library or study space, schools could connect all of their students to nearly infinite outside resources. Yet many schools still operate under primitive IT policies that often prohibit students from accessing the most valuable online platforms, and few go as far as to actually encourage them.

In another field that is one of the most productive to invest in, we see libraries across the country getting their funding cut, even as patron usage steadily increases.
Even in South Orange, where the library has taken many proactive financial steps already, it voluntarily eliminated a full-time staff position worth $62,000, and is forced to cut another $25,000 out of the budget between 2009 and 2010.

People need these knowledge centers where they can perform research, connect with other people and be linked to the rest of the world, especially if they cannot afford home broadband access.

Guaranteeing both that all people have equal access to information and know they have such access is one of the best safeguards against tyranny, ignorance, polarization and hatred, all things that I know I am not alone in seeing more and more of in national debate these days. A truly excellent education will allow people the chance to rise above this.

Education is our assurance that when, for example, looking at racially-biased drug laws, the complex implications of immigration policies or military strategies that will influence decades of international relations, that we can approach these issues in educated, nuanced and thoughtful ways with the shared values of progress, community betterment and rationality. That is what the founding fathers meant by liberty and that is what we must work towards. And the first step is education.

How Important Are Our Values in Education?

Watching Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown’s campaign director talk about their campaign strategies earlier this summer made me realize that something really profound was taking place in our country.

As he detailed all of the innovations their campaign used to try and convince people to vote for their candidate I couldn’t help but wonder why it was so difficult to get people out to vote, an activity that is most certainly in their own best interest. And then I took that question one step further - why is so much time, energy and money spent attempting to convince people to do things that are in their best interest?

Whether it is a get out the vote campaign, public service ads telling people to stop smoking or to eat healthier, government mandated programs that force people to save money (which the majority wouldn’t do otherwise) or any other host of initiatives aimed at bettering people’s lives - Why is this costly practice of convincing necessary? Why don’t people know they should vote, know they should eat healthy or know they should be responsible with their money?

In a rare, and hopefully not precedent-setting, occurrence I actually would like to answer the question I raise. And I believe that the answer, sadly, is that these values, though perhaps once of import to our culture, and certainly valued in some sub-cultures or other parts of the world, are just not part of our process of socialization anymore.

For some strange reason, being raised in this country doesn’t guarantee you will understand the stock market, marketing and financial decisions, how to choose a healthy diet, how to exercise your political rights much less global economic and political dynamics.

Schools incessantly pound facts into young people while imparting very few, if any, practical skills or critical thinking concepts, not in a dissimilar fashion to Ray Bradbury predictions in Fahrenheit 451. True, many kids can do math at a level that would have surely categorized them as a witch in the not too distant past, but have they the same ability to question the world around them or an understanding of the complex and serious issues that they will have to grapple with throughout their lives?

If anything, school curricula have become even narrower because of the monumental over-standardization that has taken place over the past decade. The focus of our public education seems to have shifted from helping educate and socialize our youngest to just measuring the ‘quality’ of schools as to determine next year’s federal funding.

The idea of socialization, whereby the eldest help teach the youngest how best to survive and develop in a given environment is an incredible process. Humans spend more time on this process than any other animal by far. Our youngest today spend often 18 years or more under supervision, far greater than even our mammal relatives like dogs who spend only a few months or dolphins, perhaps the closest, who spend 3-6 years. This enormous focus humans have had on raising offspring is one of the primary reasons we have such robust culture - an incredible amount of information is passed from generation to generation, even before written or recorded materials existed. And now that we have such accesible and global mediums to record and share information, we should be able to further improve upon this practice.

For the first time in human history, we have unprecedented opportunity (resources and incentive) to enter into an entirely new level of thought, discourse and freedom. Critical thinking combined with vast and easy access to information is a powerful tool of democracy, science and thought that we have yet to tap into fully.

Perhaps we would not need so many complicated laws around financial markets if people simply were too well educated about finances to be tricked into poor decisions. Or if we had a better understanding of our bodies and diets we would no longer need the government to intervene for us. And if we could better engage with public policy issues, we wouldn’t need voter registration drives or overly-complicated (and ineffective) election rules.

Instead of attempting to solve all of these problems by creating cumbersome government interventions after the problem has arisen, we should, as a culture, take a more proactive approach and re-shape our education and enculturalization processes to better prepare people to make these decisions themselves.