What's the big idea? Toward a pedagogy of idea power

A key to understanding why School is what it is lies in recognizing a systematic tendency to deform ideas in specific ways in order to make them fit into a pedagogical framework. One of these deformations is described here as " disempowering ideas. " The insight leads to a new direction for innovation in education: re-empowering the disempowered ideas. Doing so is not easy: it needs a new epistemology with a focus on power as a property of ideas and a challenge to the School culture. On the positive side, the insight also leads to a new vision of what technology can offer education. O ne can take two approaches to renovating School 1 — or indeed anything else. The problem solving approach identifies the many problems that afflict individual schools and tries to solve them. A systemic approach requires one to step back from the immediate problems and develop an understanding of how the whole thing works. Educators faced with day-today operation of schools are forced by circumstances to rely on problem solving for local fixes. They do not have time for " big ideas. " This essay offers a big idea in a reflexive way: the most neglected big idea is the very idea of bigness of ideas. I want to argue that the neglect of big ideas— or rather of the bigness of ideas— has become pervasive in the culture of School to the point where it dominates thinking about the content of what schools teach, as well as thinking about how to run them. A learning story The presentation of this rather abstract, theoretically oriented thesis begins with a concrete story. Michael's side. Last fall I worked almost daily with a small group of deeply troubled teenagers. One day I brought a rattrap into our meeting place. Several boys, impressed by this ferocious-looking version of the familiar mousetrap, gathered around and began to make macho remarks: " you can break someone's fingers with that " and " that's nothing, I've set bear traps. " After this kind of talk had died down, a quiet member of the group, whom I will call Michael, piped up with: " Awesome. That's a wonderful idea! " It took me a few minutes to be sure that he meant what I hoped he did: he was saying that the mouse trap is based on a wonderfully clever idea; he found …