Open Source Education – The Key to Meritocracy in America

Part 1 of 3: Finding the Right Words

No one has ever been “self-educated.” The term itself is wrong. It is a misnomer that is evidence of society’s inability to find the right words to describe the education process behind those who have not been educated in formal institutions. Frederick Douglass, as an example, is described as “self-educated,” since he had no formal education whatsoever. “Self-educated,” however, is not descriptive of how Douglass, or others who learn outside of formal institutions, gain their skills and expertise. The term implies that a person had no help — that wisdom sprang spontaneously from within. Douglass, and others like Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, and Thomas Edison, were self-motivated, and self-directed perhaps, but they were not self-educated. There is, and always has been, a social aspect to education that is essential.

In the case of Frederick Douglass, he was taught to read by his Master’s wife, Sofia Auld, and when that instruction ended, he begged lessons from the poor white children in the neighborhood. After much struggle, he successfully learned to read by the age of thirteen. He put his reading to good use by devouring books and newspapers that came in his possession. As a young adult, he joined the East Baltimore Mental Improvement Society, a group made up primarily of freed blacks that “had high notions about mental improvement.” Upon gaining his freedom, he was mentored by William Lloyd Garrison, who edited the Liberator, an abolitionist newspaper. Douglass’ effort to become educated was boundless, but he did not become educated without the assistance of others. Douglass was not self-educated; he was open-source educated. He used that education to battle slavery with clear forceful prose in the newspaper he founded and edited — The North Star — and in his autobiographies.

The term “open-source” was coined to describe software projects, like Linux, that are products of a community and not an institution, such as Microsoft. The open-source model, given to us by the software development community, gives us the appropriate terminology that is applicable to education. Open-source does not mean watered down, even though it is free. According to Wikipedia, Linux contains about 30 million source lines of code and took an estimated 8,000 man-years of development time. The estimated value of the effort is placed at 1.08 billion dollars. Yet the software is free because the software community, unselfishly and collectively, collaborated to build it.

For something to be open-source it must be free (or nearly so), and collaborative. In terms of technology, we have the operating system, Linux, and the browser, Firefox. Open-source education examples include Frederick Douglass’ East Baltimore Mental Improvement Society, Benjamin Franklin’s Junto, and Albert Einstein’s Olympia Academy. The Wright brothers collaborated primarily with each other, proving that the group does not need to be large to be effective. In all these examples, however, the participants were all limited to geographically imposed communication restraints. In other words, the members of these groups could only collaborate in real-time for free with people they could meet with in person. Now the world is a different place. While local groups can still be a catalyst for meaningful education, collaboration can now happen nationally, and even internationally, in real time, for free.

Part 2