Making Education More Geek Friendly

That’s right. Making schools geekier is the way to reform education. In a recent article by Daniel Roth at Wired Magazine, Making Geeks Cool Could Reform Education. He sites an inner-city educator, Alex Grodd who says a teacher can’t just have a “digital culture” in the classroom.

"The driving force in the life of a child, starting much earlier than it used to be, is to be cool, to fit in," Grodd states. "And pretty universally, it's cool to rebel." In other words, prepare for you and your net book to be jeered out of the room. "The best schools are able to make learning cool, so the cool kids are the ones who get A's. That's an art."

Grodd’s formula is used at Roxbury Prep in Boston. “Almost 80 percent of its eighth graders—nearly all of whom come from families earning less than $28,000 a year—go to college. Their teachers work nonstop to stamp out youth culture: Kids eat lunch in the classroom, they're not allowed to talk in the halls, and they're disciplined for using the word nerd. But it's about the nerdiest school you can imagine; every week, the faculty awards one child a "spirit stick"—a bedpost painted a rainbow of colors—for good grades.”

Roth laments, “In the public school I attended, that would be a homing beacon for a beating: "There's the nerd with the stick. Jump him!" But in geeked-out schools, that wouldn't happen—because everyone would be a nerd. At the final spirit-stick ceremony last year, 220 kids erupted in applause as a teacher read aloud the 14-year-old honoree's thesis. It started by calling America an "unfair and superficial nation." Hey, kids are going to rebel; better to have them cheered for doing it with contentious ideas.”

I’m not sure this formula would work everywhere. I was never a geek, but I wasn’t one of the “cool” kids either. I think the concept is interesting and if it can keep kids interested in academics to ensure their further education, then it should be modeled in as many schools as possible.