This past weekend I took my kids to the Maker Faire for the second year in a row. The energy — of both the innovative and electrical varieties — was almost painfully intense. There was a raw excitement everywhere, coupled with a sense of danger as flames shot into the air and high-voltage electricity buzzed from giant Tesla coils. “Take pictures of your kids,” shouted an official at the entrance, “so we know what to look for when you lose them.” He was joking, mostly.
Perhaps nothing was so perfect a metaphor for our current educational system as the Colossus, a 70-foot-tall statue in the middle of the Faire. This is my son Theo doing his part to drag the gigantic rocks suspended over his head around in a circle:
Most of the exhibits were much smaller, of course, and many exemplified the kinds of microeducational learning opportunities I like to promote. For example, here’s Theo learning to solder for the first time at the sparkfun.com booth:
This is the kind of intense concentration that shows true learning. Here’s a nine-year-old boy holding a 400°C soldering iron for the first time, going slowly at first, then more fluidly, until he ends up with a complete working simon game.
The Colossus and the soldering workshop represent, in my mind, the two pillars of education: creativity and standards. Too often standards-based curricula stifle creativity, as educators are forced to “teach to the test” and cannot follow their students down a divergent learning path. In one sense the Maker Faire stands as a vibrant refutation of such a closed-minded approach.
But at the same time, certain kinds of standards help to guide learning by constraining the student to a well-thought-out path. The simon game that Theo made was a simple kit: the game itself was included on a self-contained chip, so that all Theo had to do was follow a series of instructions to solder pieces through a board. In short, by constraining his tasks, the kit allowed Theo to learn a very specific skill in a short amount of time, and to create something much more sophisticated that he could have by making the game from scratch.
In a way, the discussion about creativity and standards comes down to the distinction between risk and danger — both present in droves at the Maker Faire. Stifling creativity usually arises out of a sense of risk aversion: meeting standards “ensures” that our children are receiving a “high-quality” education, but can prevent teachers from experimenting with new and innovative ways to interact with their classes. On the positive side, standards do help minimize danger, allowing even a child to use a soldering iron to great effect.
So I’m grateful for the creativity of artists like Zachary Coffin, who made the Colossus. But I’m also grateful for the engineering standards the steel manufacturers whose product, suspending those giant rocks above my son’s head, had to meet. And as I think about how to contribute to a better education for Theo and his peers, I leave the Maker Faire with a renewed passion for fostering creativity, and a renewed respect for the utility of standards in achieving that goal.
