Teachers Leave Those Kids Alone

A number of articles have been floating around the interwebs offering a powerful argument against centralized education or instruction. The following quote from Dvice.com’s article “Ethiopian kids hack OLPCs in 5 months with zero instruction” contains a particularly striking quote:

“We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut. No instruction, no human being. I thought, the kids will play with the boxes! Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, but found the on/off switch. He’d never seen an on/off switch. He powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs [in English] in the village. And within five months, they had hacked Android. Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera! And they figured out it had a camera, and they hacked Android.”

Once the “utilitarian” arguments for state sponsored social capitalization are stripped away, through mountains of practical experiments and demonstrative case studies, the only remaining argument for the continued existence of these structures and institutions is “power”. The political class needs “power” to maintain its position and livelihood and the other, industrious class, doesn’t – and would flourish beyond imagine in its absence.