Education Reform by Subtraction

How the maker movement is repeating history

The maker movement purports to empower students by encouraging them to pursue their own interests, but it ignores how those interests are shaped by the culture and society we grow up in. Human beings develop differently depending on the surrounding environment. This is the old nurture versus nature debate. If we do have a natural self, the person we’d be if we weren’t influenced by anything, it would be impossible to untangle that natural self from the person we’ve developed into over time.

Once we set aside the faulty notion that we can liberate the individual from society, we can start to evaluate maker culture, and the experiences children have within that culture, on its own merits. The maker movement is not liberating or culturally neutral—it shapes our values, interests, and ways of thinking just like any other culture. So, the question we should be asking is: Does maker culture guide us to experiences which are healthy and educative or unhealthy and non-educative?

As an educator, I personally have concerns about the emphasis on tinkering over engineering — and on making cool things right away by leveraging the work of others through hardware kits and software libraries. Are we trading short-term engagement for long-term understanding? It’d be easy to accuse me of trying to impose my old-school engineering mindset on students, but the maker movement is just as guilty of trying to cultivate maker mindsets in the same students. We shouldn’t be analyzing experiences through the lens of liberation or control—but through the lens of educative or non-educative. Which mindset will be more empowering in the long run?

In How Teachers Taught: Constancy and Change in American Classrooms, 1890–1990, Larry Cuban found that “a core of progressive teaching practices did penetrate a considerable number of elementary schools”, but these practices “seldom appeared in more than a quarter of the classrooms in any district that systematically tried to install these reforms.” And when teachers did make a conscious effort to adopt progressive practices, the result tended to be a hybrid mix of both teacher-centered and child-centered methods. In Getting to Scale with Good Educational Practice, Richard Elmore argues that the reason why progressive practices didn’t penetrate farther wasn’t because of inertia or active resistance by educators, but because most schools lacked the internal capacity to implement the reforms effectively.

If the maker movement continues pushing the notion it’s liberating students from society without helping teachers understand that they are cultivating a new culture with different values and ways of thinking, it’ll create a vacuum, which teachers will attempt to fill in as best they can using what they know. The result will be another ineffective hybrid, inviting another backlash and a return to traditional methods.

The maker movement has been selling itself as liberation from the factory model of schools + STEM skills. So far, this pitch has been compelling and effective, but ultimately, it’s also limiting. As long as the maker movement is viewed as liberating, there can’t be a serious analysis or evaluation of maker culture itself, which means we can’t improve the culture so it’s more educative—and the majority of teachers will end up implementing a hybrid of traditional and superficial maker practices in a vacuum.

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