A nickname for the education establishment is The Blob. The Economist ran a story earlier this month called “The golden boy and The Blob,” with the above illustration of the new US Education Secretary Arne Duncan. The illustration gives you the idea of where The Blob gets its name.
The Economist article concluding section “Enemies of promise” is pessimistic about things getting better for education — because of The Blob. It is also unsettling that the WhiteHouse.gov section on education now online describes what looks like about 100 billion dollars that will soon be flowing toward The Blob.
One of the chapters in my book 109 Ideas for Virtual Learning is about The Blob. The point I make is that virtual learning is a real bummer for The Blob because it is emergent from the open internet and increasingly available to individual students beyond The Blob.
Already a great deal can be learned individually by students through the mobile device under their arm or in their hand. This is a new intellectual liberty and 21st century civil right. The mobile device places the option to learn this way outside of the education establishment. As I wrote about The Blob in 109 IDEAS:
Does The Blob really know more than you and I do about education? Does The Blob have any sort of real handle on the digital age we have entered? Is this ogre really better qualified than you are to judge your children and help them choose their path in life—and then to decide with what they should be equipped for the twenty-first century? Should we really commit our kids by law to twelve years of confinement under The Blob?
The biggest threat The Blob has ever faced is the migration of education’s most obvious commodity, knowledge, into the virtual knowledge ecology.
