I’m working my way through Seth Godin’s Small is the New Big
. It’s a random collection of blog posts, commentary, and reflections by the new media guy famous for the remarkable purple cow. I’m thinking in particular about “Guillotine or Rack?” and how it applies to the situation in many American schools right now. Godin argues that most people in organizations are motivated by fear of the guillotine’s sudden, overwhelming violence: having your idea shot down in a meeting, getting fired, not making a sale. But he convincingly argues that everyone in the organization also has to keep their eyes open for the rack: a long, painful death that occurs as companies and individuals doggedly pursue outdated strategies in spite of insistent and growing pressures to change. In Godin’s words, “We don’t quake in our boots about a layoff that’s going to happen two years from now if we don’t migrate our systems before our competition does.”
Godin is talking primarily about the corporate world but I can’t help thinking that so many school organizations and individuals within schools suffer from the same short-sightedness. We don’t implement a new program because the parents might not support it. When deciding on a new piece of software, we ask what the five districts around us are using – not so we can find something better but so we can find something good enough, safe. We worry over state test results that measure skills that grow less important by the day.
I’m thinking today about how I could weave this into an upcoming panel discussion on “cyber safety,” at which I intend to argue that the answer isn’t just to hide our heads in the sand by telling our kids to stay off of Facebook (which they won’t) instead of helping them to learn how to use it safely. Yes, by “just saying no” we may be dodging that predator bullet – the All the while, the rack is stretching us and killing our kids.
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