Mark Pesce’s ‘accidental revolution’

Listen to Mr Pesce (‘Technological and Generational Factors’) for a little while and his natural charm and evident enthusiasm lulls you into agreement by soft-sell. Oddly, since I am already a huge advocate of moving our educative systems into the future, you’d think that listening to Mark would have me smiling and nodding in happy concert with his innovative vision.

And I was, but there’s a ‘but’.

He had me ticking all the “yes, must do this” boxes with his identification of the ‘new’ normal, and the fact that people (both children and adults) are either living with or adapting to constant and exponential change. His enunciation of “co-presence” is clear; his Theory of Hyperconnectivity, and even the notion that those of us conceived before the Web are mutants and dinosaurs, is comprehensible. All this and more was a soothing canticle to the already converted.

Even when Mark started his damning dissection of the contemporary classroom, I was still hooked. His statement that students were forced to ‘unplug’ when they come to class resonated strongly as only yesterday I had to ask a student to choose whether to be in my class or to answer his constantly ringing mobile.

I think it was when Mark talked about the “hidden curriculum [which] is implicitly denying the new reality” that the first discordant note sounded, not that I actually disagreed with his statement, but because that comment struck me as provocation for its own sake rather than to instigate a change in the mindset of educational policy-makers. It was around this point I remembered Mr Pesce is a ‘consultant’ and it is in his professional interest to be as convincing as possible in order to maintain his potential market.

This being so, I listened to the remainder of the discussion with a little more objectivity and, while a great deal of what Mark was saying scored a bullseye, I was also aware of a growing sense of his reckless disregard for today’s reality. In his fascination with everything of tomorrow, his firm belief that today’s education system will go the way of the Dodo if it doesn’t change revealed a depth of naiveté that even I found jarring.

His argument that we are all change-agents is difficult to contest, and I am already one of those people who agree with the cliché that ‘if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem’. BUT there are ways and there are ways, and Mark’s headlong rush into the reality of the new was missing one very important feature: a transition.

I may be maligning Mr Pesce unfairly as I am not familiar with the body of his work, but if the rest of his material comes from the same stock as this talk, then he appears to be abdicating the responsibility of managing change while demanding its occurrence. In leaving the sticky bits to other people, Mark Pesce is giving us only fragmented wisdom. I can see why he condemns the education system, and agree that it’s not in a good way. I can also see the future he argues for, and I can’t disagree with that either. But what I need from him now is a serious examination of the concrete steps we have to take in order to accomplish the change from today into tomorrow.

How are we going to make such a change? Incrementally, by educational sector? By institution? State? Do we begin in the home where all social movement must be embraced in order to succeed? What about State and Federal politics and politicians? This change is going to cost, so who will pay? Voting for such a major evolution in education is akin to asking State politicians to vote themselves out of a job. I never thought I’d be demanding answers to such proletarian questions, but I am. Mark Pesce is playing Devil’s Advocate and that’s just not good enough in this kind of situation. I really like what he says, but find myself annoyed at the things he’s left out.

In the movies, such change would only need a neat fade-in on a rising sun, but as we are dealing with a monstrous systemic machine, a deus ex machina won’t cut it.