The No Ghetto Manifesto
“Don’t touch the children! Only professionals are allowed to handle children! You know the rules.” This was a flash from one of our possible futures. Well, actually it’s a quote from Lucy Hawking’s 2018 novel George and the Ship of Time, the final book in the famous series she authored together with her father Stephen Hawking. Staring back at us from the book is a society where segregation by age and ability is taken to a dystopian extreme, aided by crowd surveillance tech. It’s a society where childhood has been standardized to such a degree that children are no longer allowed to live with their parents and are being minded by robots.
We don’t need to turn to science fiction for a glimpse of how destructive the dehumanizing standard formula can be when personal well-being is bulldozed: we’ve got plenty of examples from our colonial past or from those parts of the world where standardization was taken to the highest degree. Just think back of what was done to the indigenous populations when kids were taken away from their parents to be given a “proper education by professionals” (as was done by the Danish authorities and Save the Children Denmark to the Inuit children in Greenland, for example). The same happened in Maoist China, where many children were forced into boarding nurseries as early as the age of three (a personal experience so vividly portrayed by Jung Chang in her autobiography Wild Swans, that has sold over 13 million copies worldwide but is still banned in China).
Whenever you break a child’s will, your rudimentary missionary zeal may delude you into thinking you have succeeded in converting another soul to your set of normative values, but what you have really done is plant the seeds of wrath and distrust and undermine the complex intrinsic motivations essential for learning. Authoritarianism towards children and prioritizing obedience, promoted by most conventional schools to this day, even if in diffused and subtle ways, have been linked to aggression and xenophobia in multiple studies.
In The Netherlands anno 2020, parents are put under unprecedented pressure to cooperate in forcing their school-traumatized children back to the classroom, threatened with highly intrusive sanctions that can go as far as placing the children in foster homes. Remedial educationalists brag about fighting school refusal by pulling the children from their beds — even breaking a bathroom door where one child hid himself from the school police —convoying them to school in their pajamas in screaming agony, while “they have to earn their clothes back”. I don’t know about you, but there’s only one analogy striped pajamas and this sort of dehumanizing treatment brings to my mind.
Meanwhile, even though a growing number of countries today oblige their children to spend fixed hours completing standardized duties in guarded ghettos and increasingly employ crowd surveillance tech to segregate “families at risk” or “predict” a child’s “success”, our ship of time hasn’t quite landed in Lucy Hawking’s book. Yet.
Our future doesn’t have to take that course. In fact, the same tech that can deprive us of any freedom of meaningful choice and thus segregate our society even further (racially, economically, by age) if employed to benefit institutions, can also empower us to build an interconnected web of opportunity for fulfillment if employed to benefit individuals. And I don’t mean select individuals. We have arrived at the point where tech can provide cheap access to the world’s pool of accumulated knowledge and drive active, inclusive civic participation for all individuals, on a deeply personalized level.
A living embodiment of this empowering use of technology is Audrey Tang, the brain behind Taiwan’s amazing tackling of the covid-19 crisis through a combination of very fast, radically transparent digital democracy and open source tracking that have created a collective intelligence system that crowdsources information and ideas and has helped avoid a nationwide shutdown. A vocal proponent of autodidacticism (self-education), Tang taught herself to program at age 12 and dropped out from school two years later, having discovered that “all the future human knowledge was on the world wide web and all her textbooks were outdated”. Luckily, no one had dragged her out of bed and back to school where she had felt miserable. Tang founded a number of successful startups, helped create Apple’s Siri and is now transforming government as Taiwan’s youngest and first transgender minister. “When we see the internet of things, let’s make an internet of beings. When we see virtual reality, let’s make it a shared reality,” says Audrey Tang, instilling broadband as a human right.
Institutions resist that change. Their main goal being efficiency, institutions only run as well oiled machines once we are somehow subdivided into categories, tagged, rated and ranked. Institutions treat individuality as a nuisance, sometimes even as a hazard. This way, institutionalization perpetuates segregation. We can never overcome racism or any other sort of “shapism” if our culture continues to be based on ranking.
It doesn’t bother institutions whether we feel happy and fulfilled, even whether we feel human, as long as we carry on with our standardized mundane duties that keep the institution rolling. We can never overcome segregation unless we deinstitutionalize our basic human needs, such as learning. That is unless we begin to welcome individuality in all its multidimensional jaggedness instead of reducing that multidimensionality to a straitjacket of linear achievement, to a bunch of digits in a comparative chart.
The conventional schooling ecosystem and the rigid institutionalized mindset it generates wouldn’t budge. It has taken a pandemic to recognize the urgency to make the change and to see the opportunities that lay dormant. Opinion polls in the US and the UK (countries where parents still hold a legal right to pull their kids out of school) reveal that millions of families don’t want their children to return to schools full-time after the post-covid world slowly resets. Only a quarter of the pupils returned as schools reopened in England at the beginning of June. Wherever this reluctance to reclaim their seats in conventional classrooms originally stemmed from — fear of contagion, embracing a new learning style or both — it’s going to result in a new reality where school as we know it will play a lesser role.
An exploding number of homeschoolers will mean an inevitable shrinking of the conventional school system, creating a field of opportunity for a diversity of new educational services to emerge. Those may be non-profit natural learning centers, online startups offering self-paced educational opportunities, libraries that would function as tech hubs, maker spaces and spaces for joint art or science projects.
Homeschooling is a privilege, I’m often told. What about the less privileged kids with both parents working long hours? What about the less privileged kids who suffer various forms of abuse at home? What about those whose families can’t facilitate access to learning resources or even provide some quiet time? These are very valid questions.
Some answers are revealed in the documentary Unschooled (not only a film but a new movement) that follows several African-American teens as they transition from the Philadelphia public school system that has failed them to a newly opened educational resource center called the Natural Creativity Center (NCC) in the north Philadelphia neighborhood of Germantown. NCC’s founder Peter Bergson practices an unschooling educational approach, developed over several decades at another center called Open Connections that he and his late wife Susan started 30 years ago in the suburbs, “empowering students to direct their own education, favoring dialogue, discovery and self-discipline over tests, teachers and timelines”.
Even though the inner-city teens put Bergson’s ideas to a test, it’s a feast to watch them slowly open up to him and other facilitators at the NCC. Once defined by what they were not or could not, now they are finally given some time and space to just be there without anyone ranking them. Slowly they unfold and reveal their hidden talents and self-motivations that become the opening moves of exciting personal journeys.
Evaluated against a standardized scale based on a formalized curriculum vastly disconnected from their real life situations, these kids had ended up segregated into ghettos where drugs, violence and — worst of all — apathy prevailed. After all, this is the main objective that the Industrial Age school model was coined for: separate the fit from the unfit, then segregate the workers from the managers, stream them ready to join the production line. This is how the Industrial Age school model perpetuates inequality and racism.
Free and honored for exploring for themselves, supported in that process, even traumatized kids gain confidence. Several years into the project, the kids from Unschooled are no longer living their lives in ghettos. They mix with the Philadelphia artists community, they have been given a camera and discovered they can photograph, they have been given editing software and discovered they can edit, they take internships at the zoo because they are great with animals, they dare to come out of the closet because they feel heard.
There is a growing number of natural learning centers opening across the world today, most of them funded by private donations. As the dinosaur of Industrial Age schooling weakens its grip on public funding, channelling that funding towards learner-directed networks, prioritizing personal fulfillment, will secure a better equal fit for all of us jagged individuals. It will do so much better than even the best conventional schools do today because they move their students towards standardized success. For the vast majority of our kids, whose future job tittles are yet to be invented in this rapidly changing world, standardized success can only be achieved at the cost of never learning to know themselves.
We should ask ourselves whether we really know our children enough to continue externally motivating them to finish a course/ encouraging them along that straight path for a degree or is it exclusively the child herself who can know what drives her and we as parents can only make sure she is safe to continue her winded spiritual journey. Imagine all her life’s possible turns as a 3D hypergraph and imagine her arriving at a yet more precise definition of her thing as her hypergraph is allowed to unfold following her unique individual rule, like a beautiful decision tree.
“Unquestioning obedience to a system of talent development that ignores personal fulfillment has profound consequences for all of us. Most notably, it compels you to experience a crisis of soul-searching doubt when you realize you are not living a life of authenticity”, one of my favorite contemporary thinkers, the author of The End of Average Todd Rose writes in his 2018 book Dark Horse.
For the Dark Horse Project at the The Laboratory for the Science of the Individual at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Rose and neuroscientist Ogi Ogas collected massive amounts of data on men and women who achieved impressive success even though nobody saw them coming. All of those men and women had a very winded path behind them. They had either ditched the straight path towards standardized success or never had the privilege to embark on a straight path to begin with.
The researchers came to a startling revelation that no matter how one-of-a-kind the winded paths were, there was one common rule they followed: at every turning point, they prioritized personal fulfillment. Not status, salary expectations, security, resume, school ranking or a dream destination of what they wanted to become. No, they simply devoted their time to what made them tick.
Rose thus very strictly distinguishes between standardized success and personal success. Standardized success is what the society envisions as an ideal career destination, claiming one of the limited places on a narrow ladder, the higher the more successful, outcompeting others. Personal success is finding fulfillment in your daily occupations because they perfectly fit you, are deeply meaningful to you and feel genuinely satisfying. Rose outlines this as the practical principle of ignoring your destination and following your micro-motives instead. I have decided to stop asking children what they want to be when they grow up (or where they see themselves several years down the road — a question that once made my 10-year-old son very distraught as he repeated “I’m just having fun. I just want to do more math and programming”).
Ignoring the destination is difficult if you have made yourself part of the conventional educational system that encourages tunnel vision, staying the course, not getting distracted until you reach your long-term goal.
The way the conventional system expects you to achieve your long-term goal is by stiffening that upper lip every time your track disagrees with you. In other words, you’re expected not to listen to yourself on a small scale. Once you’ve picked your destination from the options on the menu, you’re expected to keep moving in that direction.
The problem is, Rose writes, we all have different “landscapes of excellence”, our unique patters of micro-motives and hidden little strengths that form a unique topography of peaks and valleys on our personal maps. Standing near the sea level, how do you find the route to the highest peak you personally can achieve? In mathematics, this problem is called “the global optimization problem” and the way to solve it is by using the gradient ascent algorithm.
As my mathematician son adds: “To see how natural this is, flip the landscape upside-down. Then your highest peak becomes the lowest valley, and gradient ascent becomes gradient descent, a fancy term for ‘rolling a ball down a landscape‘. This is something even an inanimate object can do! Also, gradient descent happens to be how neural nets learn.“
What Rose has discovered in his subjects is that the elements of the dark horse mindset function as a gradient ascent algorithm:
Look around at all the slopes near your starting point and choose the steepest (something you care about most).
Start climbing that slope (becoming even better at that particular thing), then pause and see whether there might be an even steeper slope showing now.
If there is, go there.
This way, following a winded trail, you will reach your very own personal peak of excellence, the best version of yourself. No universal path can take you there. The straight path you may be offered as part of the standard formula breaks down here: there is a very serious probability it is leading you towards someone else’s peak of excellence, or yours but from years ago, as your landscape is dynamic. Worse yet, there’s an even higher chance that the standard path is leading you towards a mythical average peak of excellence and that you will arrive at your aspired long-term destination only to discover it’s suspended in mid-air.
As a society, we are still holding on to standard formulas about straight paths because we are still holding on to the worldview that life rotates around institutions, not individuals. Todd Rose compares this to holding on to the geocentric mindset after Copernicus and later Galileo revealed that the Earth goes around the Sun, not the Sun around the Earth. For many years, many philosophers of the time tried to find a compromise between the geocentric and the heliocentric world views, reluctant to let go of something intuitively satisfying and for the lack of a practical alternative to old Ptolemy’s fudged equations. Until Newton came along.
If you’re to search for the truth, you have to choose sides, Rose concludes. Are you sticking with the universe where the Sun revolves around the Earth or the Earth revolves around the Sun? Are you sticking with the negative-sum game of excellence where the lucky few make the cut, attaining wealth and status by climbing the institutional ladder or the positive-sum game of excellence, as we’re entering a new epoch demanding a very different formula for success based on how meaningful, fulfilling and sustainable your daily life is?
Post-covid, let’s choose for a world where individuality matters and where individuals are defined by their sense of fulfillment, not by how well they mimic the standard. With enough context for meaningful human achievement, in the right environment of communal trust, everyone has something to offer, no matter their age, cultural or economic background. By segregating people by category we make the institutions stronger but the individuals confined in them more vulnerable than if they were dissolved in a diverse population and a variety of environments (more than half of those who have died of covid-19 in Europe were residents of institutionalized care facilities).
Let’s choose for a world where young people are trusted to mess around with what they care about most instead of professional groups exerting a 'radical monopoly' on basic human activities as health and learning. I am paraphrasing philosopher Ivan Illich here, who predicted the world wide web back in the early 1970s and whose vision had a significant influence on the first developers of the personal computer.
Let’s choose for a world where technology empowers us to freely mix, share responsible data that everybody can trust and help each other, creating communities of practice, not ghettos for the fit and the unfit.
Things to read and play with:
Todd Rose and Ogi Ogas, Dark Horse (HarperOne, HarperCollins Publishers, 2018)
Vi Heart and Nicky Case, Parable of the Polygons, a playable essay on the shape of society
Iván Illich, Deschooling Society (first published in 1970)
Iván Illich, Tools for Conviviality (first published in 1973)
Things to watch:
Unschooled, documentary by Rachel Beth Anderson and Timothy Grucza, and a May 2020 post-screening Q&A featuring the makers of the film, Natural Creativity Co-Director Krystal Dillard, parents and students
Audrey Tang’s 2019 TEDxVitoriaGasteiz talk “Digital Social Innovation to Empower Democracy”