I just read the excerpt from Tim Harford's new book, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure, in Slate today. The article discussed the development of the Supermarine Spitfire in WWII. The Spitfire was developed well below specification and behind deadline, but, thanks to a RAF Commodore, was commissioned for prototyping and proved to be a world-saving and industry-changing innovation.
Harford talks about the importance of risk-taking and creating safeharbors to protect space for innovation and blue-sky research. The article has a ton of interesting quotes and ideas, so I won't repeat them here and encourage checking it out. But as I was reading, I started thinking about ed. Where are our safeharbors? How can we foster innovation when the risks of investment are so very great? How do we actually come to terms with the fact that maybe we don't have any idea as to "what works"? Can we get over our understanding of what's possible so that we can embrace fantasy enough to push past boundaries? What would it take?
There's hope for me here, because there are some real parallels. As Harford points out, the Spitfire was developed at a time of high-resource constraint as well as "in an atmosphere of almost total uncertainty about what the future of flying might be." Right now, as our ed budgets are getting cut, we face tremendous human resource constraints, and we fall ever further behind in our goal of educating all kids to college-ready levels, we face a similar war-time scenario. If we can harness the catastrophe, maybe we can grow some backbone and will. Further, the RAF had developed an air strategy that was entirely misconceived when seen in the rearview. Yet somehow, the forces of innovation prevailed-- the Spitfire managed to be developed in spite of expectations and preconceptions.
Harford argues that the lesson lies in variation and isolation-- there was sufficient space for developing the new idea an testing it out before it got quashed. I would argue that he's partially correct; variation is certainly core to transforming education-- we need to develop our own "Galapagos Islands"-- but also think the challenge involves recognizing the innovation amongst the piles of non-innovation, particularly in education where we're so bad at defining success. We need our "skunk-works" in addition to cultivating a culture in which we're open to new ideas and open to saying what is a good idea and what isn't up to snuff.
I actually think the latter will be the real challenge in a sector where we're so fixated on compliance and what best practice is, as well as what other people are doing (cough... Finland... cough... Ontario...). We've got to harden up and be willing to fight for new ideas. Only then will education develop its own elliptical wings.
