Geeks get things done, but they're still geeks

Senior Wired editor Daniel Roth quotes Larry Rosenstock, founding principal of High Tech High, in his essay Making Geeks Cool Could Reform Education:

"Geeks get things done. They're possessed. They can't help themselves," says Larry Rosenstock, founding principal of eight charter schools in San Diego County collectively called High Tech High. He has come up with a curriculum that forces kids to embrace their inner geek by pushing them to create. The walls, desks, and ceilings of his classrooms teem with projects, from field guides on local wildlife to human-powered submarines. (A High Tech High art project called Calculicious, based entirely on math principles, now hangs in the San Diego airport.) The students all work in small groups as a way to foster shared enthusiasm: Get two kids excited about something and it's harder for a third to poke fun at them.

Well, true, sort of. I do believe that geeks have an inherit drive to be artists and create. What this school seems to be doing is inspiring focus and direction in geeks, who have a tendency towards ferret-like ADD. That's admirable. But the overall point of the essay is that if you foster an environment where academic achievement and creativity is positively reinforced by peers, it somehow becomes "cool" or socially acceptable.

Well, again, true, sort of. While it may be true reform in academics to make learning socially acceptable, it's artificial geekiness, less "education reform" and probably only cool in the bubble of the education system itself. Out in the real world it's still socially awkward to be brainy and creative, no matter how cool you make it seem. Geeks are still different from people in general who don't care as much about less life-practical things, say, like, the fibonacci sequence, quantum computing, or the human genome. Creating an environment where these guys can get together and socially reinforce each other is great, but I'm not convinced it's really the "education reform" we need. Education prepares students for the real world, including the world outside of academics. Out there, true Geekdom will always be a sliver of the population, no matter whether individual schools themselves are completely geeked-out.

I think a true reform would be to foster an environment that celebrates and integrates diversity, rather than an environment that just replaces one homogeneous population (wedgy givers) with another (wedgy recievers). The real problem, especially at a high school level, is the obsession students have with fitting in, being cool. Simply encouraging them to fit in with a different group, changing the definition of "cool", doesn't address the underlying issue, doesn't teach them that there's nothing wrong with being different. Different is fine. Encouraging this principle would be true reform, with life-long benefits that carry over into the real world.