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Information technology people seek to create an economy close to the model capitalism in Adam
Smith’s mind, a model which assumes the world to be composed not of childish and incompetent
masses, but of individuals who can be trusted to pursue their own interests competently—if they
are first given access to accurate information and then left relatively free of interference to make
something of it. The Internet advances Smith’s case dramatically 1 . Computerization is pushing
political debate in a libertarian direction, linking markets to the necessary personal freedoms
which markets need to work, threatening countries that fail to follow this course of streamlining
government with disaster. At least this was true before the great tech-wreck of 2001–2002.
It can only be a matter of time before America rides on the back of the computer age into a new
form of educational schooling once called for by Adam Smith, that and a general reincorporation
of children back into the greater social body from which they were excised a century and more
ago will cure the problem of modern schooling. We can’t afford to waste the resources young
lives represent much longer. Nobody’s that rich. Nor is anybody smart enough to marshal those
resources and use them most efficiently. Individuals have to do that for themselves.
On October 30, 1999, The Economist printed a warning that decision-making was being dispersed
around global networks of individuals that fall beyond the control of national governments and
nothing could be done about it. "Innovation is now so fast and furious that big organizations
increasingly look like dinosaurs while wired individuals race past them." That critique
encompasses the problem of modern schooling, which cannot educate for fear the social order will
explode. Yet the Siliconizing of the industrial world is up-ending hierarchies based on a few
knowing inside information and a mass knowing relatively less in descending layers, right on
down to schoolchildren given propaganda and fairy tales in place of knowledge.
The full significance of what Adam Smith saw several centuries ago is hardly well understood
today, even among those who claim to be his descendants. He saw that human potential, once
educated, was beyond the reach of any system of analysis to comprehend or predict, or of any
system of regulation to enhance. Fixed orders of social hierarchy and economic destiny are
barricades put up to stem the surprising human inventiveness which would surely turn the world
inside out if unleashed; they secure privilege by holding individuals in place.
Smith saw that over time wealth would follow the release of constraints on human inventiveness
and imagination. The larger the group invited to play, the more spectacular the results. For all the
ignorance and untrustworthiness in the world, he correctly perceived that the overwhelming
majority of human beings could indeed be trusted to act in a way that over time is good for all.
The only kind of education this system needs to be efficient is intellectual schooling for all,
schooling to enlarge the imagination and strengthen the natural abilities to analyze, experiment,
and communicate. Bringing the young up in somebody else’s grand socialization scheme, or
bringing them up to play a fixed role in the existing economy and society, and nothing more, is
like setting fire to a fortune and burning it up because you don’t understand money.
Smith would recognize our current public schools as the same kind of indoctrination project for
the masses, albeit infinitely subtler, that the Hindus employed for centuries, a project whose
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