Dazibao 6: The ELF is Flat

So, I've recently started reading Thomas L. Friedman's book The World is Flat, the basic premise of which is that America is broken, but don't worry, we can fix it. The way in which America is broken is that we're still thinking vertically, in the concept of hierarchies within a single system getting the job done, instead collaboration between multiple different systems. We want to believe that America will always be on top, but the concept of "top" is rapidly shrinking as the world gets flattened, mostly thanks to outsourcing (there's actually ten "flatteners" mentioned in his book, but outsourcing is one of the more obvious ones). We can't compete with people in India because they'll work for so much less than us, so we have to do the jobs they can't. That means mindless number-crunching is out, and things like innovation and design are very much in.

During the chapter on education, he brought up the same issue everyone else and their dog has, that American High School Seniors regularly score lower on standardized tests than Japanese students still in the womb, but his approach to actually solving the problem seemed, to me, haphazard in a lot of ways. He suggested, first off, that we start making school teach things faster, as in Japan, Germany, Romania, and basically every other country on the planet, and in the sense that American students are mostly slackers he's on to something, but he's failed to identify a good method of stopping it. In a flat world, ordering students to do as they're told via an arbitrary hierarchy is dissonant with reality. Other than that, he's mostly just looked at what other educators have already done to improve the quality of education (as opposed to just its quantity) and said "More of this." And in a lot of ways, that's what we need.

Take, for example, the methods employed in recent years at Georgia Tech. There are multiple different "threads" which all follow the same basic formula of "Computing and X," where X is people, marketing, communications, whatever. By mixing and matching two of these threads, the system becomes highly adaptable, and that's with one half of each thread dictated to you by the nature of the school you're in. In the ELF system, you don't need to be "Computing and X," you'd be "X and Y." There is a mind-numbingly massive amount of combinations in a system like that, and if you require students to take two or three of them, they'll have the multiple specialties necesarry to compete in the world, in case work for one of their specialties ever dries up. They can still avoid specialized information in things they despise altogether, though, which is important as such things are more or less a waste of time.

There are other things which are in line with both the ELF philosophy and The World is Flat, but I haven't got the space to point them all out here. The point is that in a flat world, a world where we're competing not just with the people down the street or in the next town over, but rather the people in New Delhi, we need an education system that teaches people to flexible, adaptable, and multi-specialized, not rigid, routine-obsessed generalists who are hopelessly under-specialized or, for that matter, over-specialized to the point of uselessness.