We moved to America in 2015, in time for my kid to start third grade. Now she’s a year away from graduating high school (!) and I’ve had a front-row seat for the US K-12 system in a district rated as one of the best in the country. There were ups and downs, but high school has been a monster.
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If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/16/flexibility-in-the-margins/#a-commons
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The thing is, there’s a reason that standardization takes hold in so many domains. Agreeing on a common standard enables collaboration by many entities without any need for explicit agreements or coordination. The existence of the ANSI/SAE J563 standard automobile auxiliary power outlet (AKA “car cigarette lighter”) didn’t just allow many manufacturers to make replacement lighter plugs.
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The existence of a standardized receptacle delivering standardized voltage to standardized contacts let all kinds of gadgets be designed to fit in that socket.
Standards crystallize the space of all possible ways of solving a problem into a range of solutions. This inevitably has a downside, because the standardized range might not be optimal for all applications.
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Think of the EU’s requirement for USB-C charger tips on all devices. There’s a lot of reasons that manufacturers prefer different charger tips for different gadgets. Some of those reasons are bad (gouging you on replacement chargers), but some are good (unique form-factor, specific smart-charging needs).
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USB-C is a very flexible standard (indeed, it’s so flexible that some people complain that it’s not a standard at all!) but there are some applications where the optimal solution is outside its parameters.
And still, I think that the standardization on USB-C is a force for good. I have drawers full of gadgets that need proprietary charger tips, and other drawers full of chargers with proprietary tips, and damned if I can make half of them match up.
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We’ve continued our pandemic lockdown tradition of my wife cutting my hair in the back yard, and just tracking the three different charger tips for the three clippers she uses is an ongoing source of frustration. I’d happily trade slightly sub-optimal charging for just being able to plug any of those clippers into the same cable I charge my headphones, phone, tablet and laptop on.
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The standardization of American education has produced all the downsides of standardization - a rigid, often suboptimal, one-size-fits-all system - without the benefits. With teachers across America teaching in lockstep, often from the same set texts (especially in the AP courses), there’s a massive opportunity for a #commons to go with the common core.
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For example, the AP English and History classes my kid takes use standard texts that are often centuries old and hard to puzzle out. I watched my kid struggle with texts for learning about “persuasive rhetoric” like 17th century pamphlets that inspired anti-indigenous pogroms with fictional accounts of “Indian atrocities.”
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It’s good for American schoolkids to learn about the use of these blood libels to excuse genocide, but these pamphlets are a slog. Even with glossaries in the textbooks, it’s a slow, word-by-word matter to parse these out. I can’t imagine anyone learning a single thing about how speech persuades people just by reading that text.
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But there’s nothing in the standardized curriculum that prevents teachers from adding more texts to the unit. We live in an unfortunate golden age for persuasive texts that inspire terrible deeds - for example, kids could also read core #Pizzagate texts and connect the guy who shot up the pizza parlor to the racists who formed a 17th century lynchmob.
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