Last week, Mark Surman (director of the Mozilla Foundation) posted an article titled, “I need help explaining ‘why?’” In it, he roughed out a five liner to explain why Mozilla cares so much about web literacy:

1. Our goal: help 100Ms more people become makers who understand and tap the full power of the web.
2. Why? The web has fueled massive creativity, productivity and wealth. We want this to continue.
3. When the web was young: people looked under the hood, figured out how it worked and made things.
4. This ‘just figure it out and make it’ is harder to come by today. The hood is harder to open. Learning as you go is not so easy.
5. Mozilla want to turn this upside down. We want to make it easy easy to open again, to learn how things work and to tap the full power of the web.

I’ve been trying ever since to find a quotation from one of the civil rights leaders of the 1950s (I thought it was Septima Clarke), who said, “We’re not going to change the world by teaching these people how to read—we’re going to change it by teaching them how to write.”  What I found instead was something from Matthew Crawford’s thought-provoking (and sometimes infuriating) Shop Class as Soulcraft:

We in the West have arranged our institutions to prevent the concentration of political power… But we have failed utterly to prevent the concentration of economic power, or take account of how such concentration damages the conditions under which full human flourishing becomes possible… Too often, the defenders of free markets forget that what we really want is free men.

Crawford believes that removing the experience of working with things from everyday life hasn’t just deskilled us; it has demoralized us. Modern knowledge workers are just as alienated from their labor as any other assembly line worker; the gradual substitution of process for judgment is only “progress” if pride in one’s work and connection with one’s peers is left out of the equation.

He is most definitely not playing the “dignity of manual labor” horn blown by the Arts & Crafters or back-to-the-land dreamers: he is coolly scathing when discussing their cuddly inanity. But he makes a convincing case that skilled trades are not only better paid and steadier occupations these days than most so-called “knowledge work”, they also demand more intellectually, and more personally rewarding.

That, for me, is what we’re really fighting for. Making “hands-on” part of everyday life once again will, I hope, help children (and grownups) learn perseverance, curiosity, conscientiousness, optimism, and self-control. It’s also my answer to the big question Mark asks at the end of his post:

[H]ow do we deal with the YouTube/Facebook factor? I.e. people are already ‘making stuff’ on social media. What are we talking about that is different? What does ‘the full power of the web’ really offer?

If you give a five-year-old a LEGO Avengers set that can only be put together in one “right” way, you’re teaching her that someone else gets to decide what she should do with her imagination. If you give her a box full of parts, you’re doing this:

You see that smile? My daughter’s never going to that proud of “personalizing” her home page using one of a dozen canned themes that someone else put together. And you see the title over the box, on the right? It says “Universal Building Sets”. That’s our web, and that’s what we’re fighting for.

Back in the late 1990s, I volunteered for a while with the CNIB helping a young woman finish off her high school diploma. (She was already in college, but they wouldn’t let her graduate until she’d officially completed Grade 12.) The first course I helped her with was Family Studies, and I remember very clearly how I felt when Question 1 on the final exam began with the words, “Examine the graph in Figure 1…” This course was officially rated “Accessible to the Visually Impaired” by the Ministry of Education, but clearly, somebody hadn’t actually tested the materials. As an answer to the question, she had me write, “I can’t—I’m blind,” but it still took four months of phone calls and letters to get someone to mark that exam out of 75 instead of out of 100.

Jump ahead to the fall of 2010. I had (literally) bumped into a computer science instructor at the University of Toronto who happens to be unsighted, and I mentioned the videos I’d been posting on the Software Carpentry site. He was teaching an introductory programming class; maybe the material would be useful to his students? He hemmed and hawed for a moment, then admitted that he’d actually visited the site, but hadn’t been able to follow the lectures. Yes, there were full-text transcripts of what I was saying, but (and here he actually sounded apologetic) he wasn’t deaf: he was blind. Whenever I referred to a diagram or mentioned “the highlighted bit of code”, he lost the thread. Those diagrams and highlights only existed as pixels, not as some kind of markup that a screen reader or other tool could “render” for him.

Now, take a moment and go pretty much any online education site, like the Khan Academy or MIT’s OpenCourseWare. Close your eyes, and see how much of the lecture you can follow. Some aren’t bad—Prof. Wyn Kelley’s American Literature course, for example, works almost as well on an iPod as it does with video. But every time an instructor actually relies on a diagram to explain something, everyone student who’s visually impaired loses a couple of marks, either because they can’t follow at all, or because the extra time it take sthem to figure it out is time their sighted peers are spending mastering the next topic. Things like the in-browser “code and sketch” tool that John Resig is building for the Khan Academy may look very cool, but what happens to people who can’t look? It’s no good saying, “Let us figure out how to teach online, then we’ll worry about special needs,” because experience shows that adding accessibility after the fact works just about as well as adding security after the fact (i.e., it doesn’t).

Ed-tech’s advocates keep saying that they want to make the best teaching accessible to everyone. Respectfully, they’re not doing that, and as schools rush to get students online in order to save money, people who are already disadvantaged will be left even further behind. I don’t have any answers—I don’t think there are any easy ones—but those of us who can see shouldn’t lose sight of the needs of those who can’t.