Who the **** is Buying the Blueberries?
Three years ago, if you would have told me that I was going to start a business where I would be working with kids I would have laughed in your face. I never thought that 1) I would be a part of making a code school for ages 7–18, or 2) That I would have regular interactions with the education system.
Over the last few years, I have been a part of conversations I never thought I would be a part of. From the various program administrators that we work with to the teachers on the frontline, we have had a lot of conversations about education. I think we get a pretty wide view of the range of people that are impacted by education and the education system as well. Students, teachers, admins, parents, staff, etc, school is a big industry that has a lot of different ins and outs. Sometimes (okay, all the time) it’s hard to understand how all of it is supposed to work.
In education there is a famous story that a lot of people like to tell. I’ll call it the “Blueberry Story”. Here is a link to the story if you want the long read.
The gist of the story is that an overconfident business man goes into a conference full of teachers and informs them that if he ran his business the way that schools were being run, he wouldn’t have a business for very long. One of the teachers gets up and asks this business man (who has a very successful ice cream business) if he uses the finest ingredients, specifically blueberries. He replies that he does and the teacher says something like, “We have to work with all of the blueberries not just the best ones.” Then, by modern accounts, that teacher drops the mic and everyone makes booing sounds at the businessman who falls to his knees in defeat. (Okay, I might have added that last sentence for dramatic effect)
The first time I heard this my response was something along the lines of, “But wait, students are the customer, not the product.” Jamie Vollmer addresses that in his account of the story linked earlier in this post. Vollmer also talks about the different people who actually pay for education and the possibility that they might be the customer. In this category you have students, parents, colleges, taxpayers, government, and industry. There are plenty of other arguments as well.
I have yet to hear an answer that everyone can appreciate. By my observations so far, education quickly dissolves into the wild west. We are out here in gunfights at high noon slinging bullets through the streets in an effort to get the best possible education we can. It’s a complicated system with a lot of factors that make it harder to understand than the instruction manual to a rocket ship written in Klingon.
So…Who should pay for education? Who is the customer? What should they be paying for? What should they be getting in return? Does the government owe everyone education? Is education in place to serve industry? Do corporations own education? Is up to the student or the student’s family to figure out what the cost of education should be? Is it up to the education provider to determine what the cost of education should be? Is education a privilege? Is it a right? Is it a commodity? WHO THE **** IS BUYING THE BLUEBERRIES?
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Alex Sejdinaj is a cofounder of South Bend Code School, GiveGrove, and Code Works. He loves building cool stuff that helps people.
