Go Geek

We don’t need Teach for America.

We need Geeks for America.

The TFA program, at best, is only a plug in the dike of an exacerbated American educational system. It assigns recent college grads to two-year terms as instructors in our most under-resourced schools as if it were sending them out on a tour of duty to Afghanistan. Or even worse, as Ira Socol put it in an interview with Open Education:

“Teach for America is a ‘colonial project.’ It is a ‘missionary project.’ It begins with the basic premise that the solution for the underclass in America is to make them ‘as much like’ rich white folks as possible. When you listen to the TFA leadership, they don’t really talk about ‘education,’ probably because they don’t really believe in education. They talk about ‘leadership’ instead.

“This is essentially the British Colonial conversion concept. ‘We’ll fix Nigeria/Ireland/South Africa/India. We’ll just teach them to speak the Queen’s English, give them a Parliament, and make them wear powdered wigs in court. Then they’ll be civilized.’ And like the British Empire, this strategy is adopted because TFA’s board and supporters have no desire to ever relinquish power to a rising colonial population. If it’s all about ‘follow the leader,’ the leader never changes."

Whichever way you see it, the last thing our most needy kids need is another person with opportunities lined up down the road to come in and ‘handle’ them for a few years before getting out.

What we need are Geeks for America. Geeks who aren’t there to put another pretty smile in front of the poor kids, but to help reconstruct and build their local infrastructures to sustain local community development in the Digital Age. Geeks whose mission has nothing to do specifically with teaching, but rather with erasing the Digital Divide so that real teachers can begin the 21st century teaching that needs to happen in every neighborhood in America.

Erasing the Digital Divide is not a matter of charity or volunteerism. It’s a matter of justice and community empowerment.

We need geeks to help get Wi-Fi and access devices into our school buildings. We need geeks to mentor and advise our career teachers on the best ways that they can personalize tech naturally into their teaching so that they can best keep on top of things happening in the culture-at-large and best prepare our children for a 21st century future. We need geeks to demonstrate to our administrators that they could save thousands upon thousands of dollars a year by going open source and weaning the schools off of textbooks, paper, and proprietary software packages. We need geeks to find out what our kids know about tech and help them build on that knowledge to become responsible digital citizens.

One of the most ludicrous things I have ever heard is that younger teachers are either a) better teachers or b) more Geek. The two best teachers I’ve ever worked with have both been 35+ year veterans. The first was the feisty chair of large high school English department where a fifth of the incoming freshmen were functionally illiterate. She took it upon herself to personally teach each and every one of these kids. The second is the current chair of my art department; a veteran and old-fashioned photography teacher with nothing to prove. He’s the one who has so fully embraced Web 2.0 that he worked out an entire school wide summer reading program to introduce students to interactive digital graphic novel creation.

Many of the younger teachers I’ve met, meanwhile, as I travel to different schools and conferences, tend to know how to use Facebook and iTunes but are lost when it comes to integrating real viable social and participartory media into the classroom. And that’s not to dog younger teachers. It was not so long ago that I was one of them. But I fully consider my first three years of teaching to have been a time where I was learning how to teach. It wasn’t until my fourth or fifth year that I really hit my stride. By that time, most TFA volunteers are off working in a different profession.

So we need to stop the blatant agism associated with the likes of TFA and open up a Geeks for America program that includes Geeks of all ages who wish to volunteer.

Geeks are different. They don’t have to be your teachers (though as I mentioned in a post a few weeks back on my blog, it sure helps if you hire teachers who are geeks). The Geeks are your support system. The Geeks for America are the folks who will support your teachers. They will support your administration. They will support your students and parents.

I envision the Geeks going out into the community itself and teaching workshops on Internet access and social media. I see an entire non-profit movement towards closing the digital divide by supplying communities with free hardware and devices with which to access free and universal Wi-Fi, whether in our inner-cities or on our rural byways. I see groups of organized Geeks being there in those communities, almost like Voting Rights volunteers were so many years ago. Geeks to organize, educate, motivate, and supply access. Geeks to teach the communities how to do it themselves; and Geeks to advocate on behalf of universal digital rights.

The TechFoundation in Cambridge, MA has laid down some ground work (including, as far as I can tell, coining the title 'Geeks for America'); but as evidenced by what's on their webpage, noble as it is, this is only a small step towards taking on the big problem. We need a continent-wide tech volunteer core to go into every neighborhood and to bring technology, ed tech mentoring, and tech mentoring for community development.

Will this in and of itself answer all of our problems? No. But, a serious national movement backed by the support of the White House and Congress with the express purpose of ending the Digital Divide is exactly what we need in this moment. Because only with that divide closed can we start to take on the serious problems that face us in the 21st century.

To deny this now, is to tempt fate as we trod further into the Digital Age.

Photo by Half Alive cc 2.0.