The Long Tail in Education

Back in the nineteenth century education reformer Horace Mann promised that centralized, professional, government schooling would work wonders. He said:

Let the Common School be expanded to its capabilities... and nine tenths of the crimes in the penal code would become obsolete.

Fortunately, he didn’t say when.

Mann was inspired by the Prussian state education system that had been designed to help create an army that could beat the French. He didn’t explain how the Prussian situation applied to the United States.

Ever since education has been centralized, politicized, and run on Prussian lines by the government and its functionaries. In the United States in the early nineteenth century, before the advent of the common school, literacy stood at about 90 percent. It is no higher today.

But there is hope. With the rise of the Internet the vast government education monopolies are facing competition. And people can experiment, try new ideas out, and find other people with similar needs and ideas.

There are even education bloggers like Mr. Chalk who are busy spilling the beans on the nightmare in the inner city schools.

Here’s a education site that’s recently joined the conversation. Whole Teaching is a project of teacher and parent Teresa Piddington of Seattle. Teresa is developing the site to provide information and resources related to the use of Creative Systems Theory in child education. The theory, she writes, appreciates and enhances

what is unique about each child while simultaneously supporting every student as he or she engages in the formative process of learning.

In her article Temperament and The Writing Process with Young Children Piddington writes about her experience in applying the Creative Systems Personality Typology developed by Charles M. Johnston MD.

[The typology] correlates temperament type to particular stages in creative, formative processes... For example, in formative processes such as learning, teaching, and writing there is an early (inspiration) stage, a middle (perspiration) stage, and a late (finishing and polishing) stage.

Piddington describes how this typology helped her to respond to the different needs of her students in a second grade project to create cloth-bound books. It helped her to identify strengths and problem areas for each child and develop strategies that responded to the individual strengths and anxieties of each child.

Understanding that "earlies" need creative freedom within structure, "middles", timely feedback and affirmation, and "lates" ample time to embellish their work has strengthened my ability to differentiate and respond to the individual needs of my students.

Projects like Whole Teaching help us to realize that there is a whole new world out there. We are all so used to the top-down hierarchy of the education system that we fail to see what is staring us in the face. Education is an obvious area where the Internet can help teachers, parents,and students get together to solve problems from the bottom up. In fact Google has already stepped in with Google for Educators to help get things going.

Then there is Chris Anderson’s idea of

The Long Tail.

So far people have tended to think only of its potential in business where a host of small niche firms can thrive alongside the behemoth market leaders.

But why shouldn’t the Long Tail be just as powerful in education? If the Internet can bring together buyers and sellers why can’t it bring together teachers and students? Nowhere is the need more urgent than in the area of child education, perhaps the most regulated and cartelized area of American life.

It is now 160 years since Horace Mann gave us the government “common school.” Alas, nine-tenths of the crimes in the penal code are nowhere close to obsolete.

Perhaps we are already have the solution in our hands.