ABSTRACT
What good is education for? Schools, as our cultural inventions designed for education, necessarily struggle between the tensions of social reproduction needed for intergenerational projects and the emergence of new intentions that might transcend the politics of the old world. Makerspaces as a potential learning sites for schools could ‘plug in’ to the dominant intentions for schooling and serve as a tool to help achieve our current aims. Optimistically, makerspaces might also serve to change the way schools function, leading to different goals for school. However, it is important here to avoid the ways in which we have failed in the past. One particularly poignant failure is cargo cultism, which describes how Pacific Islanders developed strange rituals which they believed would bring highly feted ‘cargo’ from visitors back to the island. While we imagine we are immune to such folly, it is more likely that in our blind copying of the rituals of makerspace and innovation from elsewhere, we actually commit cargo cultism more than we care to admit. We also have to guard against the kind of thinking that machines and new tech will necessarily change schools without much effort. From all that we know, it is almost always the slow, unglamorous change in culture that needs to happen before technologies amplify it.
