Letter: Student offers new model for education in economic crisis

11/20/08 - To the Cigar,We are in crisis on all fronts. This presents an opportunity for us to face reality and develop a strategy to deal with it. How and where is this to be done? Fundamentally it is a decision that we must make as individuals, according to our wont. As a practical matter, our problems as a society are so vast that it seems that making this decision will have little effect. But this is not true. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

I made this decision on Friday, Nov. 7. I was at the "A Better World by Design" conference at Brown University. Dr. Bernard Amadei gave a presentation on his work founding Engineers Without Borders, and he challenged the attendees from the lectern: "What are you going to do about it? Who among you will be the first to change?" I realized I had to do something, and I began to research.

I believe that our problems as a nation are primarily the result of a crisis of education. People are inherently good and want to do the right thing, but the pervasive message in our society, that an individual's quality can best be judged by the amount he or she consumes, overpowers our own impulse to do good. We have been tricked by the mass media, and even the educational system follows the producer/consumer model. But it is not working. To survive and progress we must break the vicious cycle of consumption in which we are trapped.

I propose a new model of education. I like to call it the Technology Access Organization, or TAO. The goal of TAO is simply to provide an education to anyone who wants it for free. How would this be possible? The first step would be to find a site, a vacant school or mill perhaps. And then to fill it with the materials which are needed to educate people: blackboards, computers, laboratory equipment, musical instruments, furniture and the like.

At this point, the practically minded person screams in protest, "But all these things cost money!" Look around you at the wasted resources that we as Americans throw away every day - more than enough to furnish a small pilot school in no time.

This is the prime directive of TAO, a concept I like to call tech-collect, but it can be described variously as scavenging or recycling. We discard enough computers annually in this country to furnish thousands of schools. Corporations throw away obscene amounts of materials, which we could use.

But what about the people, the teachers and students? If we build it, they will come. We have pressing issues in this country, which can only be resolved by education in mathematics and science. We all want to solve these problems, but the obstacles we have faced are the barriers to entry to university level study coupled with the appalling failure of the current primary and secondary educational systems to prepare students.

The time is now - a new, collective intelligence is emerging, fostered by the rise of the internet. Witness open-source software, Google, MIT's OCW initiative, Providence's AS220. We are waking up. The old model is broken, but it is not too late. We can save ourselves, and what we have left of our planet, if we come together in an all-inclusive, all-out effort to engineer solutions to the daunting challenges we face.



Glade William Blake Wittwer