spider controls everything that happens on its web through the single node of its brain: it is highly centralised. A starfish has no brain and is a radically decentralised organism with local neural control of its arms. In education, spider systems were designed in the nineteenth century, essentially to build nations to legitimate regimes. Those centralised systems are worse than useless at facing the educational challenges of today, and of innovating. Pritchett’s solution is to encourage local evolution of an education system open to variety and experimentation: to make education much more
...more
