IF 0-RING BOOSTER SEALS WERE ALIVE
Gary Shank
gshank who-is-at niu.edu
Copyright 1996, Gary Shank
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I was on my way to pick up my younger daughter from
kindergarten on the morning of Tuesday, January 28, 1986,
when I heard the news on the radio. The space shuttle
Challenger had exploded shortly after liftoff. It is trivial to
dwell upon the sick feelings I felt, and to reminisce about
daydreams of space flight and interstellar exploration from
my childhood. I was already far from being alone in my grief
and disbelief. I picked up my daughter and we rode quietly
until we got home and turned on the television.
After months of investigation, NASA acknowledged what
many rocket engineers knew almost immediately -- the O-
Ring seals on the solid rocket boosters had grown brittle in
the cold, and had not sealed properly. These seals were
designed to be supple and plastic, and to create a seal, much
as Fixodent seals dentures, to keep the combustion within the
booster rockets. Tiny flames leaked out of the booster, and
created an explosive burst which ignited the main propellant
tank and split the parts of the shuttle asunder. Out of
control, the shuttle cabin hurtled to the bottom of the
relatively shallow ocean off the Florida coast. All the
astronauts, including the one and only Teacher in Space,
were killed.
The question that came to mind immediately was, of
course, how could this tragedy have been prevented? The
seals were redesigned, and presumably they have been
working well ever since. But in this essay, I would first like to
offer a different, albeit impossible, solution. Suppose that the
engineers had found a way for the O-Ring booster seals to be
alive? Putting aside the huge ethical questions of using a
living organism for such a task, how would the use of living
O-Ring booster seals have worked to prevent the Challenger
disaster?
As the reports seemed to picture the matter, apparently the
failure of the seals was a borderline failure. By this, I mean
that the seals had almost worked. When they blew, the
rockets were thrusting at their maximum levels, oddly
enough, at 104% of engine thrust capacity. If they had held
for just a few more minutes, the solid fuel boosters would
have been spent, and would have dropped harmlessly to the
ocean. In fact, according to engineer recollections, at least
one previous set of booster seals had just barely held together
through the burn on a prior shuttle mission. In the case of
the Challenger, the 25 degree launch temperature was just
cold enough to pass the critical level that the other launch
had barely averted.
How would a living O-Ring seal have reacted to these
borderline conditions? We know how an inanimate seal
indeed performed. When the critical level was reached, the
seal gave out. One reason for the failure of the ring is the fact
that there was nothing at stake for the ring. It was a
perfectly passive item -- it reacted to the forces that impinged
upon it. A living O-Ring, on the other hand, would have
much more at stake. Given whatever ability it might have to
understand the threat the circumstances presented to it, the
O-Ring would surely be trying to keep from being ripped
asunder by the explosive leak. As a motile being, it might
deform itself, warm itself via increased motion, reoriented
parts of itself to plug emerging leaks -- in other words,
whatever actions it might need to take to make sure that its
seal held, and that it lived to see another launch.
Suppose a living O-Ring had been used on the morning of
January 28, 1986? If my fantasy scenario is correct, it most
likely would have held together, and the shuttle would have
successfully reached orbit. Christa McAuliffe would have
taught her lesson from space to hordes of spellbound school
children. Reagan would have praised the achievements of
NASA in that evening's State of the Union address. And the
engineers would have taken credit for designing and
implementing a successful launch system, including the use
of the living O-Ring seals as a highly satisfactory solution to
the problem of working with reuseable boosters. The problem
is this: the system only works because of the heroic efforts of
the booster seals to preserve themselves in marginal
circumstances, and those very efforts were disguised by the
larger apparent success. In other words, the O-Ring seals
were doing what came naturally and necessarily to them --
they were trying to preserve their lives. The system depended
upon that basic instinct to give the appearance of a process
that was functioning in a smooth and successful fashion.
This leads me to the real point of my essay: what are we
expecting from our children in order to make the system we
call schooling work? Put another way, do our schools work
because of what we as teachers and researchers do, or in
spite of that? That is, to what extent are children in the
schooling process like living O-Ring booster seals?
Our children are certainly not like the inanimate O-Ring
booster seals. They will not just blow when the system
exceeds the bounds of what we can reasonably expect of them.
Instead, they act via two powerful instincts.
The first instinct is that of self-preservation. When we put
children into understaffed and undersupported classrooms,
where there are too many children in too small a space, with
too few books and other materials, and too much time to fill,
how can we expect them to function smoothly day after day?
The disparity between the information-dense and
everchanging lives our children lead outside of school, and
the linear relatively information-sparse and curriculum-
driven activities they do in school, are growing every
moment. For now, only the brightest and the most fidgety
and most troubled students are totally opting out of the
process, but how can this trend not continue? When I watch
MTV, and realize that the blur of images I see is real-time for
these kids, how can I expect them to keep sitting still and
waiting for instruction to crawl incessantly across their
paths? What are they really doing as they sit there, trying not
to get into too much trouble, and trying to get through school
while a rich and appealing world, calling out like the Pied
Piper, beckons their attention and their hearts at every turn?
It is nothing short of heroic of us to ask our children to
endure what the alternative rock band Phish so aptly called
"Chalk Dust Torture." As the song goes on; "Can't this wait
til I'm old? Can't I live while I'm young? (Phish, 1992)"
Secondly, the classroom in particular and schooling in
general depends on what I have called elsewhere the notion
of education as a fundamental human process (Shank, 1994).
By this, I mean that if you put three people together, within
five minutes, one person is teaching something to the other
two. When we take this sort of instinct and professionalize it,
then we artificially truncate it and restrict its range of
legitimacy. It is no accident that the notion of legitimacy is a
paramount concern. After all, when you are trying to
regulate and control the flow and access of something as
basic as, say, eating or sleeping, then creating a labyrinth of
accreditation and certification and other conceptual and
operational bureaucratic tangles, is an effective way to
discourage those who might just seek to return the process to
its roots. Ironically enough, the creation of layers of
bureaucracy serves to insulate the incompetent from the
fruits of their incompetence. When there is nothing to hide
behind, responsibility is the only path. For instance, the
engineers of the booster seals warned NASA that the
temperatures were too cold for the seals to work safely, and
their predictions were tragically correct. To their credit,
some of the engineers took on responsibility that they rightly
did not have to take upon themselves, apologizing for not
designing seals with higher tolerances to begin with, or for
not being as effective as they could have been in warning
NASA and others of the dangers. But for those who live and
work in the educational system, where the instincts of the
student-participants act as a major shield, the aura of
responsibility is diluted from the most abstract educational
researcher to the most situated teacher aide.
I could go on, but I think I call summarize and conclude
with one final point. We built our educational system as if it
were designed to enhance and facilitate the transmission of
culture to our children. That is, we designed a system which
is supposed to benefit children, but in fact which works as
best as it can because it depends upon the instinctual need of
our children for education. If kids were like O-Rings, the
whole mess would have exploded long ago. Rather than
continuing to pat ourselves on the back for being educators,
and blaming children for failing in a system that exploits
their need to learn, why not explore other approaches? What
would our educational system look like, if we acknowledged
that education is a fundamental human activity, and not an
institutional phenomenon? How would we who research and
practice education view our efforts, if we did not have the
instincts of the children actively rescuing the whole endeavor
and keeping it afloat? What responsibilities would we have to
face, if the actions of the children did not shield us from the
direct consequences of our theories and practices?
Nothing will bring the crew of the Challenger back. But
maybe we can use their tragedy, in an allegorical way, to
offset another massive tragedy that is unfolding every day, as
we speak, around us. That would serve as a fitting
monument to a project that was designed to extend education
into space.
References
Phish (1992). Chalk dust torture. From A Picture of
Nectar. NY: Elektra Records.
Shank, G. (1994). Shaping qualitative research in
educational psychology. Contemporary Educational
Psychology, 19, 340-359.