This is an extension of the commentary from this post from MichaelW.
Have you heard the truism that a person is smart, but people are dumb?
On the one hand it’s profoundly true. On the other hand we fail to understand that the opposite is also profoundly true. A person is dumb, but people are smart.
Dumb people, making sub-optimal individual decisions, somehow manage to combine in aggregate into communities that most often are remarkably robust and remarkably effective.
It works with a market, where individuals make poor decisions about what to produce and what to buy. Somehow, with all those individual mistakes the result is highly effective and highly responsive. Compare that flawed mish-mash of poor decisions to what happens when there is directed organization and decision making, usually by experts, and the unwashed masses directing their own lives come out on top. Waaaay on top.
It would also work in education, given a chance.
Do I trust my fundie neighbor to do the best possible job teaching her children? Do I trust the secular unschooler down the street? Do I trust the Muslim who recently immigrated and would rather not have his child in public school? Do I trust the Amish who don’t (I’m told) educate past 8th grade? Do I trust the polyamorist wiccan coven who wants to start a day school?
Not only no, but hell no.
But do I trust them in aggregate? Do I trust the robust nature of the way all of our various choices work together to optimize the end result? Do I trust the flexibility and diversity of knowledge and ideas to mesh into a whole that is by far the most desirable and effective totality of education to advance our country and perhaps our world into an unknowable future?
Yes, I do.
I trust people.
You are saying essentially what Hayek did in all his challenges to a command economy, and most particularly in The Road to Serfdom. There is simply too much information out there to be effectively organized by any subset of people, no matter how well-intentioned, in a manner that arrives at a fundamentally better outcome than that achieved by self-organization of the information.
I guess you could say that an organic system will always work better than an mechanized one (e.g. human brain vs. computer) in the long run, with the exception of accomplishing very discrete tasks. Of course, while mechanized (centralized, etc.) systems may accomplish discrete tasks faster and more efficiently, how those tasks are picked (and more importantly, who gets to do the picking) is where the problem lies.
If the task is to, say, “educate the children,” then the goal may be accomplished quickly and perhaps even efficiently, but not likely with the same satisfaction and quality as if self-organization had set about to accomplish the same goal.
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