Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation will Change the Way the World Learns by Clayton M. Christensen, Michael B. Horn and Curtis W. Johnson; McGraw-Hill; Price: $32.95 (Rs.1,615); 288 pp
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One of the greatest virtues of this book is that it has not been authored by education professors. This may seem an uncharitable way to begin a book review. So rather than lodge a “some-of-my-best-friends-are-education-faculty” defence, let me explain this is really what the theory of disruptive innovation is about.
According to Christensen et al, paradigmatic change is often the consequence of an outsider looking in — someone with the temerity to declare that the emperor is without clothes. In the context of this book, the ‘emperor’ is the US public education system, but it might just as easily be the British, Australian, or Indian education system.
The empire is crumbling, but imperial power continues to be unchallenged because there is a critical mass of satisfied subjects — a sufficient number of individuals who benefit materially from the system. From time to time, the emperor will act upon requests of these loyal subjects to improve the system, and minor tinkering sustains the system — a process the authors refer to as “sustaining innovation”.
Over time, however, without any fundamental change to the imperial system, the number of disgruntled subjects grows as they become increasingly poorly served (or not served at all). This is where the outsider comes in and exerts a disruptive influence, not by challenging the imperial power head-to-head, but by servicing the under-served. At first, the emperor perceives this to be little more than minor skirmishes on the peripheries of the empire. After a while, however, the standing of the impostor may grow to the point where erstwhile loyal subjects defect to the new regime. When this happens, in Christensen’s view, “disruptive innovation” has occurred.
The book is chock full of examples from other vocations and industries illustrating the power of disruptive innovation. Steamships disrupted sailing ships; telephones disrupted the telegraph, mini-computers disrupted mainframes; digital photography disrupted chemically-produced photography, and so on. In the process, seemingly dominant companies lost their markets, and were forced to close or undergo major restructuring. Christensen et al pose the same questions in relation to the education industry. Specifically, how is it that in an era when a vast array of information and communication technologies (ICTs) is at our fingertips (literally and metaphorically!), so many of our schools deliver lessons in a manner that has changed very little in a century or more?
The key message early in the book is that schools are typically mono-dimensional in their approach. Drawing upon Howard Gardener’s theory of multiple intelligences, the authors stress the importance of catering to different learning styles, warning that not doing so will inevitably create disaffected learners.
With the judicious employment of ICTs, on the other hand, it is possible to adopt learner-centric pedagogies, with each student given individualised learning paths (ILPs). But according to the authors, larger IT budgets in education don’t guarantee superior learning outcomes. In other words, there is little point in throwing technology at existing systems to make them work harder. Indeed, as the title of the book suggests, if technology is effectively harnessed, it will disrupt class, or at least educators’ traditional concept of a class.
The ramifications of disruptive innovation for teachers are considerable. First, it raises the fundamental question of ‘what is teaching’? Is it still appropriate to use the word ‘teach’ if the person who once stood at the front of the classroom entrusted with the job of information transmission is now a facilitator, who mentors and guides students on how they might best acquire knowledge and skills?
This point is engagingly illustrated in the book through the use of a running fictional narrative that appears at the beginning of each chapter, telling the story of a newly appointed principal of a high school grappling with the challenges of a socially and culturally diverse student population. This dramatisation of ideas discussed in the book is a useful device for getting the authors’ message across, not least because anyone in the public education sector will find the story to be quite authentic. For example, a girl with an interest in learning Arabic (the ‘unserved consumer’) can do so by enrolling for a course offered online, while the star soccer player struggling in his chemistry class (the ‘poorly served consumer’) finally gets to understand a concept when he has the opportunity to draw on his ‘spatial intelligence’ as defined by Gardener.
The authors predict that by 2013, 25 percent of K-12 education in the US will be computer based, and this percentage will rise to 50 percent by 2020. These projections might appear too optimistic but for the Web 2.0 revolution, and the multiplying applications that facilitate learner-centric pedagogies. This phenomenon provides an increasing number of engaging ways to learn that will ultimately render the current ‘industrial model’ of schooling obsolete.
In summary, Disrupting Class is a book highly recommended to teachers, conscientious parents, principals, school boards, and local education authorities. It is an important harbinger of the shape of things to come.
Jeremy Williams
Overdue biography
Behenji — A Political Biography of Mayawati by Ajoy Bose; Penguin Viking; Price: Rs.499; 277 pp
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Almost a fifth of India’s 1.2 billion strong population is constituted by the scheduled castes, formerly referred to as ‘untouchables’ and now increasingly as Dalits (‘oppressed’), at the bottom of the invidious Hindu caste hierarchy. For several millennia Dalits have been at the receiving end of perhaps the most brutal system of social discrimination ever devised by mankind — the caste system or varna vyavastha — which has religious sanction in orthodox Hinduism. According to authoritative Hindu scriptures, the servile shudra castes were born out of the feet of Manu, the first ever man, while Brahmins emanated from his head. Therefore they were considered so ‘polluting’ as to have no association with the primal man, Manu. For all practical purposes, they were perceived to be outside the pale of the caste system, and hence were — and are — branded and treated as outcastes.
The Dalit population of India is estimated at 200 million and is divided into hundreds of subcastes and groups, ranked on strict hierarchical lines. The vast majority of India’s Dalits remain desperately poor and suffer deep discrimination and oppression at the hands of the upper caste Hindu majority, as they have done for several thousand years, ever since the indigenous people of India, forebears of today’s Dalits, were enslaved by invader fair-skinned Aryans.
But even though the plight of India’s Dalits continues to be pathetic, things are beginning to change, says this remarkable book — a detailed political biography of Mayawati, known to her supporters as behenji or ‘sister’, a Dalit woman leader who has risen from the ranks of the outcastes to become the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous Hindi heartland state (pop. 166 million). It tells the story of this never-say-die Dalit icon who has managed the impossible: to rise to the top of Indian politics defying the wrath and contempt of upper caste Hindus and build a 100 million-strong vote-bank for her Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), which rules Uttar Pradesh with a clear majority in the state legislative assembly. “It is perhaps just a matter of time before she does become the prime minister of this country,” writes Ajoy Bose in this intensively researched biography of Mayawati, the only one available in English. A seasoned journalist, Bose interviewed his protagonist on several occasions and has put together a welter of detail from a wide range of sources, including Mayawati herself, her supporters and numerous detractors, to paint a picture of a maverick populist, who has made a stunning impact on Indian politics and has re-written the history of Dalits.
Tracing Mayawati’s political career, Bose describes the origins and development of the BSP, founded by her mentor, the charismatic Kanshi Ram, a Punjabi Dalit convert to Sikhism. In the mid-1970s, Kanshi Ram, then a middle-ranking government servant, established a powerful Dalit government employees’ federation, which after assuming several other forms, finally emerged as the Bahujan Samaj Party. Bose describes the emergence and development of the ‘Bahujan’ ideology in considerable detail.
According to Kanshi Ram, the true majority (bahujan) in India are not caste Hindus, a disparate and divided community which constitutes a mere 15 percent of India’s population. The real majority community or Bahujan Samaj of India, Kanshi Ram declared, echoing Dr. Ambedkar before him, are the oppressed castes, or all those who were excluded by the upper castes. The excluded majority includes Dalits, Adivasis or Scheduled Tribes, the Backward Castes (a major section of the shudras), as well as most Muslims, Christians, Sikhs and Buddhists, whose forebears converted in search of liberation from the inflexible caste system and Hindu oppression. Kanshi Ram believed these hitherto excluded castes deserve to rule the country, and if they capture political power, they would finally be able to overthrow the socio-economic and intellectual hegemony of upper caste Hindus.
The daughter of a low-paid government servant of the Chamar caste from western Uttar Pradesh who lived in a Delhi slum, Mayawati’s rags to riches story, as Bose describes it, is as astonishing as it is inspiring. Guided by her mentor Kanshi Ram, she threw up her job as a government school teacher and aspirations of joining the Indian Administrative Service and plunged into politics, playing a key role in the growth of the BSP, first in UP, and then elsewhere in India. This, says Bose, required great personal sacrifice, for she was literally thrown out of her home by her father and for want of an alternative, had to live with Kanshi Ram, who remained a life-long bachelor and the butt of much gossip and speculation.
As an account of the phenomenal rise of a Dalit woman from a poor and oppressed background who has captured the nation’s attention, this book excels. Behenji is inspirational, but has its limitations. There is little discussion of the BSP’s socio-economic agenda. Nor does the book enlighten the reader how the Dalits and other communities of the Bahujan Samaj have actually fared during Mayawati’s terms as chief minister of India’s most populous state. The title’s chief virtue is that it serves as an overdue biography of a doggedly ambitious woman who makes no bones about her aspiration to become India’s first Dalit prime minister. If she doesn’t shoot herself in the foot first.
Yoginder Sikand
