Writing about bureaucracy as a response to terrorism, David Brooks writes in yesterday’s New York Times,
At some point, it’s worth pointing out that it wasn’t the centralized system that stopped terrorism in this instance. As with the shoe bomber, as with the plane that went down in Shanksville, Pa., it was decentralized citizen action. The plot was foiled by nonexpert civilians who had the advantage of the concrete information right in front of them — and the spirit to take the initiative.
There are two points relevant to education. First: are the systems we are building in the name of “reform” equipping teachers and students to take advantage of the information in front of them in active, entrepreneurial, concrete ways? Or are we building (in Brooks’ words) “more protocols, more layers and more review systems?” These diverging approaches are built on two very different understandings of what knowledge looks like.
I’ll let Brooks make the second, regarding the inherent fallibility of bureaucracies:
we shouldn’t imagine that these centralized institutions are going to work perfectly or even well most of the time. It would be nice if we reacted to their inevitable failures not with rabid denunciation and cynicism, but with a little resiliency, an awareness that human systems fail and bad things will happen and we don’t have to lose our heads every time they do.