In all the rhetoric...

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness."

I won't usually get political on this blog, but as an educator listening to all the harsh and absurd rhetoric going on during this interminable campaign season, I had to quote one of our fundamental documents. Education is what allows people to pursue their happiness, and governance is supposed to help secure our rights. What I'm proposing in this blog seems to fly in the face of institutionalized education, and in some ways it does, yet while education is a right secured by our common governance, it should also be considered a self-pursuit, with responsibility and choices left as much as possible to each individual.

Another piece of rhetoric we're hearing these days involves the annoying phrase job creators. We are being told that people with money are the job creators. Again, I have to disagree. I know wealthy people whose desire to create jobs is one of the last things they'd ever want to think about. Job creators are you and me who have prepared ourselves to do a job. Again, that's where I want my proposed mechanism for self-charting the educational paths available to help - in providing a crowd-sourced view of what is considered necessary and appropriate education and qualifications for the kind of jobs someone wants to do. (See Personal Learning Map below)

As any self-employed business person will tell you, their business generates revenue by providing goods or services someone else is willing to pay for. Ask any business employee, and they'll say essentially the same thing - they're paid to produce goods or services onsite. Did the business owner create that job? I say no. The business had a need and somebody came along to satisfy it for the owner. The skilled person created the job through preparation, and the owner of the business paid them to do it for the business concern that needed them.

Going back to the Declaration: the unalienable rights of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness are secured with powers emanating from the will and consent of the governed. They aren't created by us, but are given an opportunity to exist and do their work in our behalf. We need them, and we must take steps to protect them.

Education is something that protects us from repeating past mistakes, helps us acquaint ourselves with a larger variety of variables found in our world, gives us the opportunity to practice as we learn our skills, and gives us the tools to codify and pass on to succeeding generations all that we accumulate in our knowledge base. Most importantly, it gives us the strength and confidence to go our own way - liberty. But the institutional approach to education is acting these days like a government that has "become destructive to these ends" and it is up to us "to abolish it and to institute new government" of schools, that is.

The only way to disrupt the current approach is to democratize the process itself. In other words, we need to take away the capacity of institutions to imprint us with their marks, and to rely on the common understanding of the group to determine what the standards of "educated" really should be. After all, if we believe the marketing hype of the most revered institutions of education, we must reflect on whether the degree program at one institution is truly superior to that elsewhere. According to these bold marketers of their programs, it is, of course, and it must be so, of course, because this leading institution has said so.

And then we have the U.S. News and World Report surveys that rank schools in the U.S. They're certainly not the only ones that do this, but they made it popular in the first place. Nevertheless, many students (and their parents) as well as many school administrators want to believe these rankings have merit. USNWR tells us their methodology, but does it really speak to what we want to know? Perhaps not. As the Internet abbreviation YMMV says, "your mileage may vary."

So, here's where the crowd enters into my scenario. Each of us offers some sage advice based on our actual experiences with what we've learned through schooling, what we've learned on the job, what we've learned through trial-and-error (especially error), and what we've learned when we, in essence, "color outside the lines." If we can codify peoples' opinions, perhaps the crowd-sourced view will be superior to any institution's curricular view of what constitutes an appropriately educated individual in a field of study.

And then again, maybe it won't. But if we could provide a specific summary of existing courses and compare some of them simultaneously, side-by-side, perhaps the student could come up with their own conclusions. Either way, it would make a great service.