Looking past the current disaster

I could spend this morning lamenting the current state of our government and leadership, but I would add nothing original to the discussion. I accept that most of our government institutions are going to be broken, and we need to start thinking about how to pick up the pieces. It is an opportunity – we get to rebuild anew.

Rebuilding Education

We all know that our educational system has problems.  For instance, math and reading scores are declining, a trend that started even before COVID. We are below average in math relative to the rest of the developed world. You can find plenty more stats – we should aspire to improve and be the best, and we aren't close.

At the national level, there is no meaningful commitment to even considering the problem.   The administration is moving full speed ahead to dismantle the Department of Education.    Perhaps we should embrace this dismantling.  One has to admit that under the current education department, results have been declining as noted above.  Federal mandates like No Child Left Behind have not had the hoped-for impact.  New ideas and approaches are needed.

And so maybe encouraging experimentation and diversity of approaches at the state level or even local level is the right thing to do. Perhaps Florida has the right idea, and it is time to try out many approaches to education and rediscover which are best.  

Gall’s law says: “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.”  Maybe it is time to admit that we need to reboot our educational system. Or perhaps we have to accept that a reboot is upon us, whether we want it or not, and take advantage of it.

And as we reboot, we need a strong commitment to trying out a variety of approaches. None of us has the answer to educational excellence, and there may be many answers depending on a community's circumstances. Let's allow a phase of experimentation and trial.

Rebuilding media

Ramez Naam puts the blame for much of our societal division on “the toxic, outrage-driven news environment””

We have the problem that people can opt into their own news universes. And almost every news platform (especially TV and social media) uses outrage and division to attract and hold viewers.

This is a deep and pervasive problem.   I sat in a book club meeting this week and listened to 3 smart, accomplished people talk about how they fight bias in media:

• One of them watches Fox News and other broadcast news to get his balance.
• One of them uses ChatGPT and Claude, and prefaces each prompt with “As a conservative voter, tell me…”
• One of them uses X in 2 column view — one the default feed that X proposes, and one that is the feed of his follows.

Oof.  These are not stupid guys, but they are trapped in a news flow that will reinforce their views and feed their outrage — and they are doing it to themselves!  I struggle to connect with folks who have willingly submitted to being programmed.

I doubt that the media industry is going to reform itself. It is on all of us to seek out a broad, rich, challenging set of news inputs and news analysis. There are kajillions of voices out there – newsletters, foreign media, alternative media, unbiased aggregators, etc. We need to open our eyes and minds to all of them.