I love Stephen. I really do. He pushes my thinking. In a recent comment he has got me thinking about how hard it is to provide help (or, by extension, to educate someone) in a morally appropriate manner. Below I pull out several quotes from his comments on my previous post and respond. It’s moderately long, but in the end I believe I find that help is not so hard to give and that education is not a dirty word.
opencontent
Why is it all my recent posts are about immorality?
I keep reflecting on Teemu’s recent comment…
The aim of reaching everyone is immoral. It seems to be a project of expanding the banking concept of education where “knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing.”
Going back several blog posts to the original statement, it seems that much of the stir was caused by my (perhaps unfortunate) use of the word “education.” Some will say that “education” is evil because it is traditionally forced on people who don’t want it by people who feel like they need it.
Another word on scalability
So, I’m still hearing from people about my scalability comments. Just to restate: there’s nothing evil about scalability itself. Scalability is about reaching lots of people, and reaching lots of people is an important intermediate goal. My only concern is that we might stop there – we might stop when our business plans and technology … Read more