For some days I've been involved in a set of interlocking conversations with different people which prompt thinking across their boundaries. This morning, after starting to reply to one strand in that web, I've withdrawn to try and weave them together here.
The themes of the conversations have, broadly, been education and the definition of “have” vs “have not”. These are subjects that expose fundamental differences in thinking between US Americans and Europeans (particularly Britons). The people, for the record, are Dirk Dusharme, Frank Jones, William McRostie, Karol Morphew, Gayle Reynolds, Jim Putnam (though not, so far at least, in his web log), Marrianna Putnam, Clarissa Vincent and Chris Waller. I shan't clutter the narrative by persistently trying to credit parts of the process to the individuals who sparked them; I'll content myself with occasional signpost attributions and let the rest flow; I hope that if the others feel inclined to read this they will not think that I have forgotten their vital contributions.
A quick summary of the story so far...
Morph (that's Karol Morphew) started the have & have not half of it with a personal manifesto that kicked off with a quotation from W B Yeats’ Remorse for Intemperate Speech: «I carry from my mother's womb a fanatic heart». He asserted his polarisation in the «cause to which I am willing to commit ... global conflict of the haves vs the have nots». He also offered a definition of “have”, which involved a price indicator of economic capacity. The conversations then continued through a series of alternative definitions which, broadly speaking, continued to consider where the boundary between have and have not might be drawn in economic terms. We all recognised the slippery and hazy relativistic nature of such a definition, and no real conclusions were reached. Then Jim offered the opinion that we were collectively barking up the wrong tree: that the most important distinction between have and have not was not tangible but spiritual.
I am myself to blame for starting the education strand, with my tears for fears post of six days ago; it broke surface again in the subsequent something about Jennifer and musing from the museum posts but most of it, as with any self respecting iceberg, remained below the surface: it wended its way through revisited arguments over the value of testing, the consequences of testing, the degree to which education affects the life of the educated, and so on. The most recent spark, once again, was from Jim who raised the questions of education funding (how it affects quality) and education stress (whose responsibility its management should be).
Dropping back to the have & have not strand first, the neglected spiritual dimension is, I think, key to our inability to define an economic dividing line between the two conditions. (A word about a word: specifically, the word “spiritual”. It means different things to different people. I am myself a proximate atheist, and I use the word without any necessarily religious meaning. I take full responsibility for defining it in the current context as a collective term for those non material aspects which comprise our “inner life” – which we all have, and which may or may not, for any given individual, include religion.)
I willingly agree the spiritual is an important aspect we've neglected in discussion of have and have not; but I can't agree that it's the important one. To make it the important one has the effect (which I know that Jim, of all people, would never intend) of allowing us to say “it's OK that they are starving because that doesn't stop them being spiritual”. It seems to me that both economic are important side by side.
I've used to death the card game analogy in conversations of this kind – we can't decide the cards we're dealt, I say, but we can decide how we play them. I'd like to try a new one: I'll call it “the operating range analogy”.
Every mechanism has a design spec which includes an operating range. I am not, by the way, getting into Intelligent Design here ... I don't personally buy the idea of a creator deity and I see all designs, whether natural or human made, as defined by evolutionary environment ... but if your designer is a supreme being then that's perfectly OK; my analogy still holds, either way.
The human ear has an operating range which starts with an incredibly faint sound equivalent to displacement by half the diameter of a hydrogen atom and runs up to an overhead thunder clap. This is its designed operating range. As long as a sound is within that range, we can hear it and accommodate it within our auditory experience. If a sound is below that range, we do not hear it; in the wild, the consequence might be that were eaten by the predator we had not detected. If a sound is too far above the upper thunder clap limit (a nearby bomb, for example) the ear drum is damaged and the ear becomes less effective or even inoperative. Similarly for the eye – it can see by starlight, but not by anything too far below that; it can look briefly at the sun, but is burned blind by more sustained exposure at that level. The same thing is true of artificial devices like microphones and the CCDs in TV cameras – except that the operating range is much narrower.
The operating limits of such devices are not as hard and fast as I've suggested there, of course. As sound gets louder, for instance, both ear and microphone will deliver distorted renditions of it for some time before actually breaking. And there is a much narrower “normal operating range” – a microphone or ear which continually operates at the thunderclap level will last less long than one which is only asked to cope with it occasionally. And finally there is the optimum operating range within which the devise gives its very best results.
It seems to me that human beings have designed, normal and optimum operating ranges.
The lower designed operating limit of human beings is the physiological survival layer of Maslow's pyramid. A human being required to exist permanently on the lower boundary has little opportunity to develop a spiritual dimension. At the opposite extreme, a human being who never has to struggle at all is above the upper design limit, tends to lose initiative, and may not bother to develop much in the way of a spiritual dimension.
Maslow's triangle thus represents the full designed operating range of the human “device”. The normal operating range has to be somewhat narrower – and defining that range, not an actual boundary, is the useful have & have not activity. Only within the designed operating range is spiritual development meaningful; only in a life lived within the normal operating range can it be undistorted; and only in the optimum range apex section (the apex, or self actualisation layer, of the pyramid) does it really get the opportunity to flourish.
Stress in education, I feel, can be addressed by the same analogy. We can, of course, provide advice and guidance on the handling of stress ... but for stress we also have designed and normal operating ranges. Within those ranges we can manage it – but only to a limited extent when close to the extremes. Combat fatigue (I've seen something of its extremes in others, and suffered from trivial doses of it myself) is, in this analogy, the human mind being pushed into the upper distortion zone, beyond its upper design limit ... or, on occasion, further still until it fails. For short periods in the distortion zone the device copes, recuperating and returning to normal operation when brought back into normal operating range; extended exposure, however, causes progressive breakdown. The young woman sobbing in the corridor after her exam results is a similar if less dramatic case.
Combat is, by its nature, extreme and it's difficult to see how it can be so organised as to avoid extreme stress on thoe who bear the brunt of it ... but education should not be.
As I suggested in musing from the museum, I believe that our societies and systems have somewhat lost sight of what “education” really is – and that, I would further suggest, underpins both the stress and funding issues. What, exactly, do we see education as being for? And, alongside that, for whom? There are three obvious candidates for the answer to that second question: the student, the state or society, and the employer.
The US funding system for public education is grounded in the idea that the student is the primary customer. The student – and so the student, or her/his family, pays for it either directly or indirectly. At the pre-degree level, at least, it is an indirect payment: funding comes from the local authority which, in turn, gets the money from the local community though taxation. Jim pointed me to an example in his area, where «Orange County ... seem unwilling to pay for the kind of system Chapel Hill enjoys ... residents of Chapel Hill, being higher on the pay scale, are willing and able to pay for more education.»
In the UK, funding is on the basis that society or the state is the primary education customer. While local authorities actually provide the education system, they do so with money paid out from central government taxation on what is, at root, a basically a capitation system: broadly speaking, if you have x students, you receive y units of funding to educate them with.
While the individual student of course gets benefits from education, I really don't see that in any normal sense that student can be called “the customer”. As a student, the product is foisted on you whether you want it or not, at the age of 4/5/6/7 depending on where you live. You spend all the years of your youth leaping through hoops whose nature, relevance and increasing difficulty are set entirely by others. You have no choice in what is delivered – that is decided by everyone in your world except you, since you only get the vote (and so some notional input) after you have completed the contract. If you fail to leap through every hoop, you are branded a failure and cast aside. In what way does the normal sense of the word “customer” apply to you?
Society as the customer has more going for it as an idea ... but only at second hand. Society, as things stand now, benefits not directly from the educated population but from the commerce which is enabled by an educated workforce. The reason for introduction of universal schooling exactly that: commerce after the industrial revolution increasingly needed a literate workforce. Subsequent developments in universal have been driven by exactly the same imperative.
I've been using the word “education” in the last few paragraphs, but it is actually inappropriate ... the word is really “training” or “instruction”. Where the word educate is derived from a root meaning, as I noted above, “to lead out”, the words train and instruct derive respectively from roots meaning “to drag along” and “to pile up”. Referring not to compulsory education but to degree level, Morph observed that «most 4 year products are best described as "good employee", rarely as "educated citizen"». I'm not entirely sure that even “good employee” is fully justified, but in general he's right. Chris Waller graphically illustrated this with a story of chemistry graduates who, confronted by a tree and asked of what it was made, had difficulty answering – even though the answer is contained in the pre-16 science curriculum completed by every child in the developed world. Society only directly benefits from a citizenry which are educated (ie: able to think widely and independently, applying their knowledge laterally to new and diverse contexts). A trained workforce benefits the employer, and only secondarily the society within which that employer operates.
And having started on words, what do we mean by “society”? Using Jim's example, both Orange County and Chapel Hill are societies. So is the large entity of North Carolina. So is the larger one still of the US. Which of these is the society which benefits? To some degree, all of them; but only to some degree.
Imagine that Orange County takes not of Jim's point, and decides to invest heavily in an education system to match that of Chapel Hill. We have to assume first of all, of course, that it has the financial resources to do so ... but take that as given. Young people in Orange County now proceed through this new education system. Some of them don't make the grade; they fail to leap through those hoops, perhaps even miss the first hoop. Let's keep an eye on one particular student, Mary, who fails to graduate from High school. Others, though, benefit from this new improved system; let's watch Helen, who in the new system gets straight A's at whatever she does, goes on to university and carries off every honour going, is head hunted by a rich employer... Orange County can be proud of what it has done for Helen. But ... Mary will, in all probability, stay in Orange County while Helen will, in all probability, move away. The wealth which is generated by Helen's working life with her rich employer will not, for the most part, benefit the (Orange County) society which invested in her. It may very well not even benefit North Carolina. The only society which will unambiguously benefit from Orange County's investment in Helen will be that defined by the US as a whole. Mary, meanwhile, works hard to fund the investment in a new generation of Helens. The inequality of opportunity cycle is maintained and reinforced.
In many cases, of course, Helen may well move to Chapel Hill ... so the net result of Orange County's educational investment is to subsidise its richer neighbour.
This extends beyond national borders, too. Helen may not stay in the US; she may be tempted by a still richer employer abroad. OK, it's not likely; the usual flow is in the other direction. For the most part, skilled and trained individuals in whom poorer national societies have invested are welcomed or even actively recruited (the US has many companies whose sole activity is scouring the developing world for low cost, high return talent) into richer ones which have not.
So ... the typical trained and qualified 21 year old (however poorly educated, in the true sense) is the product of considerable personal stress and anxiety investment and local financial investment by some mix of family and society. The prime beneficiary is the employer, as a result of which some collateral benefit accrues to the trained and qualified individual and to the larger society of which the local one is part. Industry and commerce are, in this analysis, the true customer; local education boards are simply contractors supplying the customer with raw material. And the “best” (in these restricted terms, which I do not much like) output goes elsewhere, to customers who provide no payback on the local investment. The only difference between US and UK models, in this respect, is that the UK one distributes the burden of investment more widely – in neither case is the investment directly borne by the primary customer.
That sort of thinking is necessary, because it is what makes the world tick; personally, though, I find it abhorrent. one of the friends with whom I have been having these conversations continually probes at my insistence on including the tag “anarcholibertarian” in my self description. One thing which that tag represents is my personal adherence to the idea that what is most important in our “education” systems is the individual student. My duty is to her/him; s/he is my only customer, regardless of who is paying the bills. Society matters to me, yes; but society is the sum total of the individuals of which it is composed. Get the individuals right, and society will follow. Starve the individuals and society sickens. As for the employers, especially the corporate ones: they are more than capable of looking after their own interests. For that reason, I am glad that the true customer doesn't have any direct hold on the funding mechanisms; what little emphasis we still have on true education would soon disappear without the social buffers.
Stanislaw Lem's novel His Master's Voice uses extraterrestrial contact between civilisations to examine the nature and uses of knowledge. The book's narrator says at an early point:
«New chapters opened up ... the first interest ... which ... promises huge profits to come. No doubt. But there are benefits and benefits. A column of ants that encounter in their path a dead philosopher may make good use of him.»
That describes well (and I suspect that Lem may have meant it to) the present operation of our education systems. The vast majority of our students leave our “education systems”, having been distorted and stressed through their formative years, with only the corpse of the philosopher to show for it. The corpse of the philosopher serves corporate needs well. It provides an employee who can use a particular restricted set of tools, and can quickly be further trained to use those tools in accomplishing a wide variety of required tasks. What it does not provide, in most cases, is a citizen with the habit of open ended reasoning linked to a broad vision – that would require the departed mind of the live philosopher.
Another analogy is suggested by desert island fictions such as Robinson Crusoe, the Tom Hanks film Castaway or ABC's television serial Lost, where survivors of a shipwreck or air crash press into use whatever is available for tasks at the very base of Maslow's pyramid. In such circumstances, it is easy to imagine that a hammer would be more useful than an optical microscope; so it would be logical to use the heavy base of the microscope as a hammer. Unfortunately, after a period of such use the microscope would no longer be much use as a microscope – perhaps when immediate survival was secured and other tasks might require it. That is how our we handle the minds of our young. After educating their minds at the primary stage into the most awe inspiringly powerful investigation system on the planet, the secondary phase of the system trains them to think of themselves as single task tools. It is left to chance (usually the influence of a chance acquaintance – parent, friend, neighbour, teacher) for all the glorious general reasoning ability of which they are capable to somehow survive the training.
The corporate machine wants many cogs and only a very few broad minds, so it is happy with the situation. Broad minds can be corporately inconvenient, asking questions instead of just getting on with the job at hand. It has no particular use at all for thinking citizens, though its attitude to them may not always be hostile. They are operating at well below the capacity they could achieve – but corporate structures are pragmatic, not visionary.
Society, however, needs more thinking citizens for the sake of its health. Note that by “society” I mean the body of society, not “the government”: governments are, by definition, corporate structures. The individual, and therefore society, gets poor pickings from the dead body of the philosopher from which the mind has departed unnoticed and unremarked – or from microscopes which have been reduced to hammers. In such circumstances, individuals rarely encounter their optimal operating range – and Jim's spiritual dimension therefore struggles for sustenance. A society in which most individuals are thus conditioned to life short of the peak of the pyramid will, itself, never be more than mediocre. This is a state of affairs which tends to be self maintaining, a state of affairs which is not good for either society or citizen, and a state of affairs within which have nots, however we may define them, will always predominate.
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