A few days ago, I had the following Twitter exchange with Anya Kamenetz:
Me: @opencontent @anya1anya Here’s why I fear the university system may be unable to adapt to open education: http://bit.ly/cF0Hby
Anya: @mfeldstein67 as a system, probably not. Legacy assets/components? Yes. Roman Empire falls. Rome (city) thrives to this day.
Me: @anya1anya Easier to be blithe about the fall of the Roman Empire given that the Romans who suffered through it are all dead.
Anya: @mfeldstein67 I’m not blithe about any of this. I think the times we live in are utterly terrifying.
Me: @anya1anya Terrifying is the right word. The question we face is, what was Pandora’s moral obligation *after* she opened the box?
Anya: @mfeldstein67 Pandora or Cassandra? tbc on http://diyubook.com/
Me: @anya1anya Depends. Are we agents or witnesses? Maybe both. But I think it’s easier to be Cassandra than Pandora. No responsibility.
Anya: @mfeldstein67 Actually, I’m just the kid in The Emperor’s New Clothes.
Me: @anya1anya I don’t buy that. If you believe it, then why bother writing the book? You are only Cassandra if you choose to be.
I was surprised (but probably shouldn’t have been) to then see her reflect on this exchange thusly:
We just need to start being very creative about how we deal with the acceleration. I want to be a friend of change. I think there’s been a little bit of a debate already about the book coming out. I get asked, Are you a Pandora opening up Pandora’s Box, or are you a Cassandra, declaiming that things are doomed and that other things are coming up in their place? I kind of don’t want to take responsibility for either of these [viewpoints]. I think we are all imagining a different kind of future and I want to be on the side of the future and not on the side of the past.
It certainly wasn’t my intention to imply that Anya personally is releasing all the horrors from the box. Nor, I see now, was the idea I have in my head regarding Pandora (and Cassandra, for that matter) what came through in my tweets. Apparently, Twitter is not a good medium for midrash. I have also struggled to communicate the same feelings in conversations with folks like Jim Groom and Stephen Downes. So I’m going to try something a little different here and take an uncharacteristic flight of literary fancy. I hope you will indulge me.
The question I want to address is this: Should Pandora have opened the box?
There are many variants of the Pandora story. Most of them are somewhere between the mildly misogynistic and the wildly misogynistic. Let’s set that part aside. (Elision is part of the art of midrash.) In a number of different variants, Pandora has some relationship to Prometheus. Sometimes she is his wife. Other times she is Man’s punishment for accepting fire from Prometheus. Either way, she is associated with humankind gaining fire, i.e., practical knowledge. In most of the better known versions of the story, Pandora is motivated by curiosity, not spite. She just wants to know what’s in the damned box.
What comes out of the box are disease, despair, malice, greed, old age, hatred, death, violence, cruelty, war…and hope. Mostly pretty sucky stuff. But I want to make two points here. First, the gods, who are not exactly all sweetness and light in Greek mythology, trick Pandora by playing on the essential human thirst for knowledge—the thing that truly brought us fire. In Aeschylus’ version of the story, Prometheus also gave humans the arts of civilization, including writing, mathematics, agriculture, medicine and science. We want to know, and the spiteful gods use that against us. Second, would you go for a world without war, disease, death, etc., if it also had no hope? Would you make that trade? I don’t think humans are wired to make that trade. Even Jeremy Bentham, the father of hedonistic calculus, thought that is was “better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied.” The Pandora story, to me, is a variant of the Eve story. And for the record, I’m with Eve on this one. I’d pick that apple. In my book, Pandora and Eve are heroes. They have to do what they do. It is what humans were made to do. We inquire. To be Pandoran is to be Promethean.1
But knowledge has consequences. If you know, then you are responsible. That is the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. We now have to take responsibility for the consequences of what we learn. And that, really, has been my point. If we know the system is broken, we have a responsibility to fix it. If we know that changing the system will have the consequence of hurting people, then we have to take responsibility for addressing that harm. We must remember that the second half of Kierkegaard’s famous expression “a leap of faith” is “in fear and trembling.” We have to take that leap of faith. But we do so knowing that there could be terrible consequences. That we could be wrong. That people could get hurt. We are responsible for the consequences of what we learn.
As for Cassandra, she is a ghost. On the downside, she is impotent. On the upside, she is free of responsibility. I don’t want to be Cassandra. I don’t want to just wave my hands in alarm and end up with only the cold comfort of “I told you so.” The boy in “The Emperor’s New Clothes” is slightly better—he gets other people to see what he sees—but in the end, the Emperor keeps walking, convincing himself that he is right.
No. I want to be Pandora. I want to do something. I want to open the box. But opening the box is only where the story starts. I see a lot of enthusiasm for changing the education system, and that is good. All I wanted to add is that we have to look squarely at the scope of the consequences and to own them. If we need to change our system of education, then let’s do it. Let’s take that leap of faith—but in fear and trembling.
- Please, no James Cameron jokes. I’m begging you. [↩]
I have written four different comments for this blog post and mercifully threw them all away. No I have come up with this gentle formulation of my ideas.
I start with this quote from the Wikipedia page on EduPunk:
… Stephen Downes, an online education theorist and an editor for the International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning, noted that “the concept of Edupunk has totally caught wind, spreading through the blogosphere like wildfire”.
I actually have some experience with the word “Edu”, “Punk” and “DIY” because I am a teacher that is always looking at ways to fight the system and doit my own way. My son is in a Punk band – so I hang out with a bunch of young punk types wearing my black band T-Shirts and his band plays at lots of DIY music venues. SO while I am not an expert on “EduPunk” and “DIYUniversity” – I actually have some real experience in the underlying metaphors that you are borrowing from.
I would suggest the following exercise to give you both a little experience in the sustainability of the Punk/DIY approach – take a look at this web page:
http://www.dodiy.org/
And go through and figure out how many of these registered DIY venues are still operating one year later.
My son’s band wants to go on tour this summer and they want to go DIY all-the-way – but nearly all DIY music venues close up shop after a few short months because they are a labor of love by some special person but then that special person becomes tired of spending their weekends hosting demanding out-of-town bands with a station wagon and a ratty trailer who bitch about the crappy sound systems in the DIY venues.
So the DIY music venues which are the hives of creativity and clever innovation appear and disappear and never get close to any kind of tipping point – appear and vanish sadly – way too quickly. It is clearly a movement – just not a mainstream movement and a movement that is uninterested in affecting the mainstream in any way. All they want to do is make a place where they can express what they want unhindered by “the man” and in doing that they learn something about themselves and learn something about creativity.
This is really sad because when you find and interact with one of these DIY music venues, it is a very freeing and very uplifting feeling and the people are so cool and fun and you so badly want it to be a “movement” and you want everyone to be able to experience this. But sadly, they generally only exist for a short while after which they go away.
Punk music at a DIY venue is like the most intensely creative group activity I have ever seen – the performers and the crowd function as one – there is continuous sharing and remixing of ideas and fluid group memberships – it is magnificent. It just does not last – it is sustainable as a concept – but no individual stays punk their whole life – it is the domain of the young who are experiencing it for the first time (and the scene-parents) who were squares in High School and so they are experiencing it for the first time in their fifties.
And as I have said before when you first experience this amazing freedom and creativity – you wish it were the future for everything. The bad news is that punk is not the future of all music – sorry about that. But the super-duper good news is that if you have not yet experienced it – punk will still be there 20 years from now – it will still be alternative and underground and will be happy to see you when you get there and you will paint your nails black and wear black t-shirts and “hate the man”.
Bringing this back to your post a little bit, neither of you are Pandora, and there is no Pandora’s box – and there was no “opening of a box” that has brought into being some new profound sea change that we cannot undo.
All that happened is that you noticed something that has been happening since the beginning of time and will happen forever going forward. You mis-interpret this marginal, small, continuous, alternative, underground, situation as something that “just happened” and “is coming to get us all” – and a few pundits collectively named it “edupunk” so you could sell some books and sell some Google Adsense.
By the way, you can take a look at Google’s Keyword Value Calculator to see how valuable the word “edupunk” in the advertising markets.
According to my recent calculations, the word “edupunk” is worth about 0.05 per click and was entered 1000 times in the last month roughly generating $50.00 in ad revenue for Google last month.
As contrast the query “lms” is worth $4.14 and was entered 823,000 times last month roughly generating 3.2 million dollars for Google last month. A rough calculation of the variations on the “lms” query says that Google made a little over 15 million dollars total ad revenue for Google last month.
If we do some multiplication – that means for last year LMS systems represented nearly 200 million dollars of ad revenue for Google and edupunk represented nearly $600.00 per year in terms of Google ad revenue.
Just as another data point, the search for “Charles Severance” represents roughly $2016 of ad revenue for Google last year – roughly four times as much interest as “edupunk”. Maybe I am a movement.
P.S. I am still looking for a DIY punk music venue in Nashville or Memphis for a summer visit.
P.P.S. If you really want to see the worlds most awesome DIY punk venue in action – I claim it is in Lansing, Michigan – http://www.b414.org – I have so much DIY punk video – I pick one of the earlier ones here – http://www
– their second concert ever.
Two points. First, knowing something about “thunder” and “birds” makes one knowledgeable about neither Mozilla Thunderbird nor Ford Thunderbird. Likewise, it would be a mistake to assume that you know what edupunk is all about just because you are an educator who likes punk.
More importantly, because you haven’t been following the context of the conversation, you misunderstand the analogy. Edupunk isn’t the phenomenon that is the heart of the concern that motivated our interchange (and this post); it is just one possible response to it. The crisis we are talking about is the confluence of chronically rising cost of a college degree, the growing body of data showing that the economic payback for the majority of students is small and diminishing, and the fact that students are increasingly looking for more affordable career paths with better cost/benefit ratios than non-elite colleges currently offer them. Whether students go to self-education via OER or University of Phoenix or non-college-based internships/apprenticeships or someplace else, the concern is about a possible dramatic decline in demand for non-elite university degrees at a time when the system is already dangerously underfunded. The value of the term “edupunk” on Google AdSense is irrelevant.
You might want to read Anya’s book.
Good post, good response.
I would add that the post also misses the meaning of DIY. There are many ways to DIY without doing the equivalent of forming a punk band and going on the road – “the most intensely creative group activity I have ever seen – the performers and the crowd function as one – there is continuous sharing and remixing of ideas and fluid group memberships.”
Consider one example I have read about, the sending of a fax. When the fax was first developed, it was used by courier companies as some kind of electronic service. It was analogous to a telegraph, where you went to the office, and they did it for you. The DIY alternative to that is to buy a fax machine and send it yourself. No ‘intensive group activity’ required. Just as ‘making a phone call’ is the DIY alternative to the telegraph.
The list of DIY-enabling technology is long and impressive. Television is DIY theatre. Cars are DIY trains. The typewriter is the DIY typesetting machine. A notebook and pencil is a DIY scribe. An atlas is a DIY geographer. The record album is the DIY home orchestra. DIY emerges any time a new technology allows us to replace an existing service.
Yes, a new community often emerges around the new technology when it is nascent. People played with cars and mechanics and machines for decades. An entire telephony career developed (my father was a ‘telephone pioneer’ and I still recall hearing a speech from a fellow student about the ‘Metcalfe rural telephone company’). But while DIY may be created by these communities, it isn’t defined by these communities.
For another take on Pandora check out the opening page of Richard Sennett’s The Craftsmen ( http://tinyurl.com/y4hd2xq ). For Sennett, as for Arendt, Thoreau, Langdon Winner, Mary Shelly, and many others, the Pandora story is emblematic of human kind’s penchant to succumb to “technological somnambulism” (c.f http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_Somnambulism ). A malady, by the way, which your blog helps to mitigate!