Richard Stallman and how easily we have traded away our freedom to share.

I enjoyed Richard Stallman’s talk on Copyright vs Community in the Age of Computer Networks in Auckland on Friday.  Nix has gazumped me, her post and the links provided well capture the way in which rms unwrapped his thinking for the audience.  I much admired the way in which complex ideas were simplified and framed in historical, legal, economic, political and societal contexts to maximise the connections made.  Stallman must have given this presentation many times before, yet apart from a sense that none of the questions asked at the end of the session challenged what he had heard before, he was persuasively passionate in his delivery.   Powerful thinking and provocative ideas were shared in a way that made them available for all.

While rms explained that sharing is the basis of society I was struck by the alignment of this insight with our MoE's identification of the key competencies as the basis for learning what it is to be human   ... all that: thinking, making meaning from language symbols and text, managing self, participating and contributing and relating to others.

Whilst Stallman calls for “sharing” , in New Zealand schools we identify “relating to others” and “participating and contributing” as worthy

But listening to our current arguments over copyright, DRM, A2K makes me suspect that many of us no longer understand what sharing might be .... probably because we have unconsciously adopted the thinking of consumerism and business ... we can only imagine living in a society predicated upon consumption and the accumulation of personal advantage/ wealth.   

That we can no longer imagine how sharing could or should be the basis of what it is to be human ... is pretty frightening

And it doesn’t surprise me that Illich was alert to this

I believe that a desirable future depends on our deliberately choosing a life of action over a life of consumption, on our engendering a lifestyle which will enable us to be spontaneous, independent, yet related to each other, rather than maintaining a lifestyle which only allows to make and unmake, produce and consume - a style of life which is merely a way station on the road to the depletion and pollution of the environment. The future depends more upon our choice of institutions which support a life of action than on our developing new ideologies and technologies (Illich, 1973)

And I think Gatto gets close to the same analysis in the context of schools

The sheer craziness of what we do to our children should have been sufficient cause to stop it once the lunacy was manifest in increased social pathology, but a crucial development forestalled corrective action: schooling became the biggest business of all. Suddenly there were jobs, titles, careers, prestige, and contracts to protect. As a country we've never had the luxury of a political or a religious or a cultural consensus. As a synthetic state, we've had only economic consensus: unity is achieved by making everyone want to get rich, or making them envy those who are. Gatto Confederacy of Dunces

And while rms was taking about what it took for something to be free  The Four Freedoms - “free as in speech, not free as in beer” I was thinking about what it means to be free to learn in the context of the different ways we design for learning in libraries, museums and schools.  

It is interesting to think about how learning available in a library or museum is different from the learning available in school

It becomes more interesting when we do this in the context of learning that respects the learner’s freedom ....

... especially when we frame the freedoms a learner must have through Stallman’s The four freedoms

We believe that there are 4 essential freedoms that a software user must have:

Freedom 0: The freedom to run program as you wish, for any purpose.
Freedom 1: The freedom to study the program’s source code to learn how it works and make changes to it. You need access to the source code to do this.
Freedom 2: The freedom to help neighbour, by being able to distribute copies of the software.
Freedom 3: The freedom to contribute to community by being able to give away your modified versions of the software.

And Gatto’s analysis of libraries and schools in A Confederacy of Dunces  is a great start to this imagining ....

Museums and institutes of useful knowledge travel a different road than schools. Consider the difference between librarians and schoolteachers. Librarians are custodians of real books and real readers; schoolteachers are custodians of schoolbooks and indentured readers. Somewhere in the difference is the Rosetta Stone that reveals how education is one thing, schooling another.