Professor Greenspun’s first post to his new blog about public education and politics has lit up a firestorm. It’s certainly what Charlie Nesson would call a stimulus piece — more hits to his blog today, on day one, than to the perhaps all the blogs we’re hosting in the aggregate. There’s value in that, somehow. I’m reflexively interested in what he says; he’s a brilliant man. But the idea seems so hard to believe (someone who’s spent their life in education really thinks that non-rich-kids shouldn’t be critical thinkers because they can never impact politics?) that I’m shocked that so many people have flocked to it. I’m also a preppie interested in politics, so I imagine it’s a dig at the likes of me, on some level, and as such I figure I have to engage, not let it go unmentioned. I guess I’ve fallen for the “post something outrageous and get flow” by thinking about it and linking to it; or maybe I should just enjoy the satire (one hopes) of it. If we just say outrageous things in blogs, though, don’t we risk the technology being seen as frivolous?
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You raise a good point, John. What I was really trying to show with my absurb/inflammatory posting is the difficulty of making meaningful improvements to mass education in a world where (a) the ruling class opts out (there is a long waiting list of parents who would be happy to pay $24,000/year to get their kids into Dalton School), (b) 1/2 to 2/3rds of public school spending is on things other than teachers and classrooms, and (c) the good public school teachers that I’ve talked to are all quitting because they don’t like being part of the bureaucracy. But as you can see from reading this comment it is too boring to address this problem directly (maybe not compared to reading legal briefs :-)). And boring the reader is an unforgiveable sin in my book.