Legibility, New Education Options, And John O’Donovan

From 1829 to 1846 a team of British cartographers created a world first: a complete ordnance map of a country. It was a monumental undertaking. Led by Thomas Colby, engineers from the Royal Sappers and Miners used what were at the time cutting edge triangulation techniques to accurately measure and record the entirety of the island of Ireland at a six inch to one mile scale. If you are a map geek like me, Ordnance Survey Ireland has digitized those records and you can search them all here.

This was an effort in what James C. Scott termed legibility in his landmark volume Seeing Like A State. To efficiently govern, the state needs to be able to “read” its territory and the people that live in it. States create maps and institute regular censuses to know exactly what is going on.

As Scott argues and any historian can tell you, while it is great to have detailed maps of territory and accurate censuses, their purposes are not always pure of heart. A major reason for the ordnance survey of Ireland was so that the Crown could better tax its inhabitants. Censuses were often used as tools to know who to conscript into the army when leaders wanted to go off to war.

So what does this have to do with education? Right now, there are thousands of new educational models cropping up around the country: microschools, homeschool co-ops, hybrid homeschools, pods, tutoring networks, the list goes on and on. It is not currently clear how many people are participating in them and how many of these organizations exist. We at EdChoice have tried to put an estimate together, and the total number ranges from two to eight percent of the total US student population. That is a range of 1.1 to 4.4 million children. Not particularly accurate!

There is a strong argument that in order to help support these nascent efforts, and to better match families to them, we need to create some kind of census or ordnance survey-like map of all of the existing providers. While there is much to recommend in trying to better wrap our arms around the web of providers that are emerging, we do need to be careful about how any such survey is done. There are some risks.

To illustrate one risk let’s look at some Irish place names. The city of Kilkenny got its name from the Irish “Cill Chainnigh,” “Cill” meaning “Church” and “Chainnigh” being the Irish form of Canice or Kenneth. St. Canice founded a monastery there in the 6^th century and the townland grew up around it, so the town became known as the place where Canice’s church was. Tramore, a seaside town not far from where I live, comes from the Irish Trá Mhór or “Big Beach.” You’ll never guess why it’s named that. In English, the language that map makers translated their names into, “Kilkenny” and “Tramore” are completely meaningless and tell us nothing about the underlying places. Their old names did.

Maps have to standardize and categorize things, and in so doing, can take rich and textured realities and flatten them. Many of the new educational options sprouting up around the country resist easy categorization. They aren’t exactly schools but people aren’t homeschooling. They aren’t entirely online but do leverage technology. They don’t always meet in the same place with consistent instructors. They exist to solve particular problems and serve often hyper-local communities and fit just fine in that area.

But when we try to map or count them, we have to flatten out those differences to link them to other people doing kind of similar but not exactly the same things. We risk pushing those organizations into boxes to make them easier to understand, rather than allowing them to be what they are with all of the messiness that goes along with it.

And this doesn’t even mention the fact that by creating a map or census of all of these learning options we are making it much easier for opponents of educational innovation to know who to target and regulators who to bother.

All of these issues notwithstanding, it would be absolute chaos to live in a map-less world. If we want to build roads, plumb pipes, or build schools and hospitals we have to have some understanding of the land and its people. The same is true for education. If we want parents to know what options are available to them, philanthropists to know where to donate money, and providers themselves to know who else is working in their community, we need some kind of map.

Those thinking about mapping the landscape of new education models can take a few lessons from history.

When it is an external power doing the mapping, it is usually doing so to its own benefit. It writes in its own language and tracks what it values. By contrast, when maps or censuses emerge from the population itself, they are more likely to redound to the good of that population. They will be in a language that captures what that population values. They will track the things that population cares about. In short, they will serve that population’s purposes. Any effort to map new educational providers should come from within that community, not from outside of it.

There are also ways to avoid, or at least dampen, mapping’s flattening effects. To the original ordnance survey’s credit, Thomas Colby employed several knowledgeable Irish historians and experts in the Irish language to aid in accurately capturing place names, the most famous of whom was a Kilkenny man, John O’Donovan. In the official records, after the anglicized name was spelled, there were additional columns to capture alternative spellings and a brief description of the place and any known origins for its orthography. O’Donovan and his compatriots captured a wealth of information that is still useful today in understanding why places are called what they are called. (You can see some of his original notes here).

Any effort to map new school models needs to lean heavily on those who are in the field to accurately capture what is going on. It needs a John O’Donovan. It needs to capture the information in educators’ own language and have space to give all of the necessary texture and color. That doesn’t mean that things don’t need to get standardized and categorized. That is a necessary part of coming to understand anything or anywhere. There just needs to be some extra space so that we don’t lose the foraois for the crainn.