Education system, emphasis on system

David Weinberger summing up Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations at one point talks of the Internet as having helped facilitate a "community of practice where people help one another get better" (e.g. Flickr's HDR group) without being told to do it. That last part is important.

In order for systems to work at all, there must be people on the same wavelength doing something together in a way that benefits the individual more than it does the group. This is exactly Adam Smith's invisible hand. The economy that we, the people of Planet Earth, have created and implemented follows this principle. We do it almost instinctively, with nobody telling us to do it because the individuals involved know they'll get something out of it. Our economy is our biggest success -- with all its glorious by-products: physical infrastructure, legal frameworks, the ready acceptance of the need to build relationships between perfect strangers, and so on.

When a so-called system requires a lot of prodding in order to work, and cattle herders have to be hired to manage the system (trainers have to constantly train trainers, facilitators must constantly facilitate, and devil's advocates have to be introduced to zap the participants into action from time to time) then you know it's lost its system-ness. It's turned into a hierarchical organization with uncertain benefits for the individual.

Sometimes we need central command to provide public goods that are good for us but where it isn't wise to for us to leave it up to a private company to provide. This is because of biases that that company could potentially introduce in the production and delivery of that good. Education is usually thought of as a public good, and it's provided by states. Education is extremely hierarchical. But increasingly, states are widening the space for educators to experiment with different ways to deliver learning (UK, Singapore). More and more, states are loosening up the hierarchy within the education field and using the Internet as a medium to turn it from a rigid hierarchical thing into a more fluid system for learning. In a true education system, exams are not used to judge students but exist for the benign reason of collecting data on the system itself: to see if the learning system is working, and to examine how the learning system affects different types of children/adults.

Hopefully, the individuals belonging to that system (both the educators and learners) come to understand that they belong to a community of practice, and that they're all getting something extremely valuable out of belonging to that system: personal development.