Expert, Schmexpert
Why
does the American faith in education experts persist?
If you went looking for the foundations of the electromagnetic
field concept, who would you expect to find there – a famous scientist and
Royal Society member, or his self-taught valet and sometime lab assistant?
If you were searching for the person who kicked off
the public health revolution in mid-1800s England, you might look for a
forward-thinking doctor. But you’d be wrong. Instead, look for a philosopher
and his assistant, both trained in the law. And the mental health revolution,
half a century later, was launched not by a physician, but by a former inmate
of a mental hospital.
In the late 19th century, if you wanted
to perfect an efficient incandescent light bulb, you might have gone to the best
educated scientists for help, but probably not to a semi-educated tinkerer in
New Jersey. Why?
Someone interested in an economical operating system
for the emerging personal computer market might also have asked the experts, perhaps
at IBM. But IBM themselves got theirs from a college dropout whose software business
was barely out of his garage.
When nobody bought the electric cars coming from the
teams of experts at GM and Nissan, Elon Musk, a software businessman and PayPal
investor, pushed them aside with the Tesla.
What about something big, like the moon shot? Didn’t
it take experts to do that? Well, it certainly took a pile of money that only a
government (big fan of experts) could provide. But once the technology was
democratized and the costs came down, true innovation in space travel came not
from NASA, but from a guy with an online bookstore.
And yet we still believe that the experts will give
us the education or health care system that we want.
The fact is, there’s a tried and true paradigm for
getting what we want for our money: A few years ago, Apple put out their latest
iPhone, but everyone bought the Samsung instead because of the big screen and
great camera. Can you guess what features Apple put on its next phone? If you said a bigger screen and better
camera…
Imagine if this was how schools worked. They offer
possibilities, and we respond by buying what we want. Foreign language
immersion? Project-based learning? STEM-focused curriculum? If you want it,
schools will provide it (and more schools will provide it if they see consumers
rushing to schools that already do) – but only if the experts stop dictating
what schools can do and where all the education money goes.
The common refrain is that education is too
important to leave “to the market.” That case can be made for nutrition, too.
But still we let corporations provide our food. Hell, we let parents decide
what their kids eat. Where are the cries for a government-provided, thrice-daily
gruel – exactly how many calories you need to clear the bar and no more? After
all, in educational terms, that’s what our government schools serve up, day
after day.
“Expert advice is indispensable to the democratic
process,” wrote Harry Rosenfield in the Spring 1949 Antioch Review. “But it is
not a substitute for that process.” The best illustration of that process would
be millions of Americans voting … with their pocketbooks.
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