Comments on: Complaints

By: Jay Cross

Jay Cross — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 02:00:49 +0000

Breezing through HBR’s Breakthrough Ideals for 2007, I came upon this apt piece from David Weinberger:

Accountability has gone horribly wrong. It has become “accountabalism,” the practice of eating sacrificial victims in an attempt to magically ward off evil.

The emphasis on accountability was an understandable response to some god-awful bookkeeping-based scandals. But the notion would never have evolved from a buzzword into the focus of voluminous legislation if we hadn’t also been lured by the myth of precision: Because accountability suggests that there is a right and a wrong answer to every question, it flourishes where we can measure results exactly. It spread to schools—where it is eating our young—as a result of our recent irrational exuberance about testing, which forces education to become something that can be measured precisely.

When such disincentives as the threat of having to wear an orange jumpsuit for eight to ten years didn’t stop the Enron nightmare and other bad things from happening, accountabalism whispered two seductive lies to us: Systems go wrong because of individuals; and the right set of controls will enable us to prevent individuals from creating disasters. Accountabalism is a type of superstitious thinking that allows us to live in a state of denial about just how little control we individuals have over our environment.

By: Carol Thomas

Carol Thomas — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 21:00:39 +0000

Jay, I want to thank you for the work you’ve done and the contributions you’ve made to my own learning (as have Stephen and many many others). I really like the idea of putting this conversation into a public setting in a relatively formal way. I’m wondering if we might not be able to organize an online conference to do so.

I for one would enjoy the discourse and would be delighted to help organize such an event.

By: Tom Haskins

Tom Haskins — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 15:42:51 +0000

Thanks for this transparency Jay. I met a friend last Sunday at our “third place” for a Starbucks. A month ago I was telling him about your book and he became an instant fan of yours. He’s producing a documentary about empowering approaches to elementary classroom education. There are oodles of connections between your “Informal Learning” and what he is advocating and showing how others can join in. This week I explained what I had learned about Stephen’s approach that stirred up so much controversy in the Manitoba conference, and then on your “All or Nothing” posting. As we usually do, we attempted to apply “Appreciative Inquiry” to Stephen’s stance. My friend made sense of Stephen’s rant as a theoretical purist, like A.S. Neil (Summerhill) or Rudolf Steiner (Waldorf Schools). I saw similarities to John Taylor Gatto (we saw him in person years ago) who questions all classroom instruction (factory schooling) more pragmatically, less idealistically or theoretically. I then proposed that Stephen’s rant needed to be seen politically. We’ve been exploring advocates of “democratizing” and “restoring the rights of citizens”. Stephen’s list (decentralized, distributed, disintermediated, disaggregated, dis-integrated, democratic, dynamic, desegregated) makes more sense as questions of the learners’ rights, self control, freedom to be spontaneous – than as “opposition to informal learning”, character assassination or making you a lightening rod for controversy. Where you are coming from, the difference you’re making and the wisdom of your approach is easily understood, related to and valued by me and my filmmaker friend. Stephen’s rant is “none of the above” and takes major “thinking out loud” to incorporate usefully. Hopefully that gives you a sense of where I’m coming from.
Tom