IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

some kind of Learning Central, that the head teacher had to read and feed
into her school’s already overloaded curriculum.
Whether we are SysOps running databases or teachers running a school,
distant planners and developers often overload us with precooked input.
The result is a paté de foie gras effect: Overregimented teachers are forced to
cram too much predetermined content into students who spend so much
time learning that they have no time to think. It’s a downward spiral. The
more important learning becomes, the more demands we put on teachers
and students within rigidly organized institutions.
When Illich proposed that we should ‘‘deschool’’ society, his idea was
that we should use existing technologies and spaces—the telephone, local
radio, town hall meetings—to create learning webs through which learners
would connect with their peers and with new contexts in which to learn.
‘‘We can provide the learner with new links to the world,’’ said Illich, ‘‘instead
of continuing to funnel all education through the teacher.’’ Illich was
right then, and he is surely right now. But a huge gulf separates his vision
of what learning could and should be like from today’s reality. 28 Our educational
institutions remain, in the words of David Hargreaves, ‘‘a curious
mixture of the factory, the asylum and the prison.’’ 29 A command-andcontrol
model, based on long lists of the new skills we all need, simply
adds pressure to an overloaded system and people inside it.
From Factory to Farm
Learning 143
A better design approach to learning is to shift our attention from
outputs—courses taught, facts learned, certificates awarded—to the inputs
of learning and, in particular, to focus on the interaction between networks
and contexts. In chapter 6, economist Hazel Henderson talked about the
need to decentralize health systems. Another think tanker, Tom Bentley
of Demos, in the United Kingdom, says similar things in Learning beyond
the Classroom: ‘‘We should think of learning as an ecology of people and
groups, projects, tools and infrastructures’’—and allow stakeholders in
each situation to take care of content issues. We need to reconceptualize
education, he says, as an ‘‘open, living system whose intelligence is distributed
and shared among all its participants. Schools and colleges need to become
network organisations, to establish themselves as hubs at the center
of diverse, overlapping networks of learning which reach out to the fullest