duke_aldhein ([info]duke_aldhein) wrote,
@ 2006-01-04 22:24:00
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my education was what I got when I should have been doing my homework
A while ago, I was batting around ideas with another of the younger reporters in the newsroom, slipping from one subject to another through analogies or bad jokes, when a colleague across the desk shook his head and said, "I don't think the way you two do."

It was one of a series of moments that have made me understand for the first time why I.T. is called Information Technology. Information literacy isn't about being able to use Word and Excel or even knowing how to find what you want on Google - it's about a whole new set of ways of working with information.

These ways of working lead to a newly agile approach to reality, at home in a culture that's infused with sampling, mixing, rapping and textspeak as much as surfing. This is more than just a hobby or a subculture, it is a new mode of consciousness and may develop (is already developing) into a new mode of production. (The economic-cultural implications of the non-proprietorial approach to cultural material involved in all this are only beginning to register.)

But there's a gap between those who've grown up thinking like this and many of those who didn't. As Pat Kane argues, this gives a new importance to Illich's argument for the abolition of current structures of education:
A FEW weeks ago, I spent a few afternoons with some fifth and sixth-year kids, whose school is situated in a notoriously troubled area of Glasgow... All of them had broadband at home. All of them regarded computer games like CSI and Sim City as having the same complexity and resonance as novels or movies. All of them were actively involved in digital creativity in one form or another – from making fan websites with up to 60,000 hits, through coding Flash animations for their friends, to arranging music downloads for underground Glaswegian rap artists.

But none of them saw any connection between this intrinsically motivated, rawly enterprising lifestyle – where trade, hacking, self-skilling and peer-to-peer co-operation was the norm – and any part of the curriculum they were receiving at school. And this was a computer studies class... In their own lives, they are drawing down and seeking out information – facilitated by the great god Google – with as much rapidity and comprehensiveness as a research scientist had at their fingertips 10 years ago...

Yet the rhetoric around our schools is mired in stasis. It’s all about “employable skill-sets geared to existing labour markets”, “unruly classroom behaviour transformed by emotional intelligence”. Kids are looking at a curriculum that moves at a porridge-like pace, compared to their own rich, convivial cultures of informed ducking, diving and searching.
Read the rest here.

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[info]xpablo
2006-01-05 12:28 pm UTC (link)
I certainly agree with you and Pat Kane.

For me, the frustration was that during my first year of university and first real taste of the real world, I saw the connection and realised just how off-topic my own education was. The longer I spent there, the angrier I became and the more I did to try and veer the staff and students onto a path which helped them realise the relevance or irrelevance of what they were learning.

For a while now I've been thinking of starting up a pressure group of like-minded thinkers, perhaps called the Anti Education League or something similar. Obviously the name is designed to be inflammatory but there'd be a lot of sense behind it.

By the way, I managed to get myself 'The Tyranny of Health' for xmas, on your recommendation. Haven't read it yet, but will do soon.

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[info]duke_aldhein
2006-01-05 01:55 pm UTC (link)
The strange thing is, elements of an older education - the free-ranging cross-disciplinary side of the old classical curriculum, combined with its understanding that some kinds of information (language learning, for example) just require banging away at rather than being constantly sugar-coated - probably equip you better for this world than the softer or more utilitarian approaches that have driven educational reform. I don't know that I would have grasped the significance of the change of consciousness we're living through if I hadn't had my mind blown by studying Middle English and realising how differently people could experience reality. I guess what I'm saying is that a broad familiarity with the past equips you better for navigating the future than a training in how to be useful to the present. (This would please Hegel.)

But what's most important is motivation, and the last place most people are likely to find that is in a school.

What excites me is that more and more of us are waking up to what is needed. I'm writing this sitting in Access Space, who have a model for community-based learning spaces using recycled technology and free software which they believe will eventually spread to every neighbourhood in the country. From the political side, activists and academics are converging to create autonomous universities. Next month, we're having the first meeting to set up the School of Art and Business that Charlie Davies, founder of Pick Me Up, is starting in London, drawing on the experience of the KaosPilots in Denmark.

It's all happening. Let me know if you're interested in finding out more or getting involved with any of those projects. And I hope 'The Tyranny of Health' lives up to my recommendation!

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[info]xpablo
2006-01-05 08:23 pm UTC (link)
I'm pleased to see that more people have thought about this and are taking it to the next level.

I work in a very commercial environment, where efficiency - or effectiveness - is the mantra. This of course skews my thinking towards business, but the point is that we also eschew the sort of talk Pat mentions in his post - the “employable skill-sets geared to existing labour markets” stuff - because talking like that simply isn't conducive to quick, progressive communication if you're trying to get something done. This makes it all the more annoying when you see schools coming up with this stuff in order to

Naturally then, I'm one of those types who often thinks that university fails by refusing to reflect real life. It's easy to say that tutoring thousands of art history students is a waste of money because less than 1% will use that knowledge (in any capacity) after leaving education.

But it's also true that if all education was purely vocational then people would never have the chance to find out what they'd like to 'do' in life, and we'd be danger of creating a generation of management consultant drones.

Incidentally, how many times have you enjoyed a hobby in your lifetime but as soon as it became homework, it wasn't nearly as interesting?

When you asked me to write an article for Pick Me Up about a month ago, I hope that my lack of response didn't suggest that I wasn't interested in the proposal. I enjoy Pick Me Up and read the email most weeks. However I don't consider myself to be a good writer, nor did I feel that I had the time to commit to trying to make a real go at it. Should have replied at the time, I know.

As for the other stuff such as the meeting to set up the School of Art and Business, I'm definitely interested. More than that - I want to cause some real change. My only limitations are time and competing priorities, but with enough notice I'm in there. Let me know. I'm in London.

When I left university in 2001 I worked freelance for a year. During that time I also worked on a project with two university friends (with whom I'd already created our University Student Enterprise organisation with).

The idea was to create a 'packaged experience' called SENSE (can't remember what the acronym stood for) which could somehow fit into a big lorry, drive to schools all over the country, set itself up in the carpark and deliver a highly interactive afternoon-long learning experience quite unlike kids had ever experienced before. And it's not too far from the sort of thing Pat was talking about.

We approached the Department for Education and Skills (might be called something else now) for the approximate £90k funding it'd need to be built and run for a couple of years; had a few meetings but didn't get very far as really we didn't know the system.

Our final attempt to get it off the ground was to find non-public funding for it, so we went to meet Alec Reed - founder of the chain of Reed employment bureaus and, more importantly, founder of the Academy of Enterprise. Whilst talking to him I noticed in the corner of his office a scale model of a 'School of Enterprise' he was currently building. Being a powerful man he'd managed to get Norman Foster to build it, and it seemed that the ethos was to cover a range of disciplines without resorting to the sort of dull practices we see in every other school - and he was really pushing ahead. I remember being supremely jealous as this was something I'd always wanted to create. Searching around, I think it might have since evolved into this.

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[info]duke_aldhein
2006-01-11 03:17 pm UTC (link)
The theologian Richard H Roberts (in 'Religion, Theology and the Human Sciences') describes managerialism and entrepreneurship as two opposed tendencies in our society. He argues that Thatcherism achieved the opposite of what it promised - leading to a more controlling state, in which the autonomy of skilled professionals (doctors, academics, etc) is replaced by the requirement that they be constantly accountable to a managerial elite who operate in a self-referential jargon (“employable skill-sets geared to existing labour markets”, etc).

One of the conclusions of my book is that activism, at its best, is a special kind of entrepreneurship, more far-sighted in its aims and operating in a critical relationship to society's current values rather than simply seeking to capitalise within them. Most great businesses contain an element of this change-making (as opposed to simply money-making) drive. But if you can develop organisational forms that are not dependent on maximising profit, that alters the range of possibilities.

Thinking of Roberts, it strikes me that someone with the distance of, say, a theologian can provide critical analyses unavailable to those closer to the hubs of power. This relates to the biodiversity argument against utilitarian/vocational/meritocratic education factories - if you educate for a monoculture, society's ability to respond to the unexpected is far more precarious than if you have a (seemingly inefficient) system which provides space for the apparently useless, i.e. those things which can't easily justify themselves within the existing value system, which may nonetheless prove invaluable should that system be thrown into flux.

Glad you're enjoying Pick Me Up. Regarding my previous suggestion for an article, I think the answer would be for us to meet up and I'll interview you about your experiment in living without money, then write it up. What do you think? It's definitely a natural Pick Me Up story.

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studying organizations/organization theory/managment
(Anonymous)
2006-01-11 06:17 pm UTC (link)
There's a book called something like 'A short but really useful guide to studying organizations' by a Cambridge academic. Haven't purchased it as the copy I came across was missing some pages, but worth looking out for. Different.

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