We learn something by doing it. There is no other way.
---John C. Holt
Ay, there's the rub; one learns what one does in life, what it is that one happens to be doing, usually out of sheer necessity rather than choice (most people do, and many people often have little choice in the matter, either because of lack of opportunities or lack of know-how) instead of learning what it is that one could be learning in order to do what it is that one yearns to be doing (self-actualization) or what it is that one "ought to" be doing.
And so it is that one often does and learns what one “must” or whatever society expects of one---the oligarchy in power or “the invisible hand of the market” (or whatever “society” happens to be, or whatever interest it is that "society" happens to serve depending on the place or the times).
And so "life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans."
And so this is how frustrated aptitudes can be the source of emotional distress, the result of conflict between the need for self-expression and the lack of opportunity to fulfill one’s aptitudes or aspirations.
Does it have to be that way?
Is there any need for Mankind as a species to continue on living in a highly controlled and compartmentalized educative class system?
Do such self-perpetuating mechanisms of society still serve the best interest of the said society and of its members.
Isn’t this the age of information? The “knowledge era”?
It is Tryon Edwars, I think, who observed, that, in his opinion, “the great end of education” should be “to discipline rather than to furnish the mind,” “to train it to the use of its own power.” And so, more than one century later, in this new millennium, in the age of information, ubiquitous computing, and augmented reality, shouldn’t everything else one wishes to learn---beyond a general basic education and the ability to examine and process new knowledge---be as easily accessible to all as just so many tools (a chisel or a hammer) to be picked up and used according to one’s needs.
Without having to go so far as a Matrix-like based reality, in which those with access to the right program can download instantly the ability, say, to “know Kung Fu” or to fly an helicopter in 5 seconds top, we live in a time where cyberspace has, at long last, the capacity to decentralize the information distribution process and liberate education from the snake-oil merchants and the gate keepers of the education industry.
No more red tapes. No more outrageous fees or prohibitive tuitions.
Learn what you need to know when you need it: fast! Easily, freely and efficiently.
Sounds like a futuristic ad?
It shouldn't be.
Aaah but the “information age” is also an “information economy,” and in a world where information and knowledge are power, education is to power what royal jelly is to queen bees in a hive: the super-food of a select few.
The queens are grown from pre-selected larva and they develop more fully because they are fed the undiluted royal jelly (a secretion from glands on the heads of young workers), while the other larva on the other hand---the future drones and workers of the hive---are kept in their place and fed more modestly, in keeping with their drone and worker's "calling."
The irony of it is that, for all the status and privileges associated with their position, the queens, really, have no control over the hive: the social structure of a honeybee colony is so complex and fixed that it is very much like a single organism. The individual bees--- queen, drones and workers alike---are ultimately just simply cells of the organism: they cannot survive on their own! Neither can man!---kings and workers alike. The social structure of the current civilization is so complex and fixed that it too is very much like a single organism. An uncomprehending mindless organism, however, and on a self-destructive path, to which---unknowingly---mankind has indentured itself.
But they say that this is the information age, and that with great knowledge comes great power.
And with great power comes...
Great responsibility?
5 comments:
A powerless drone in the hive,
Once fought to keep freedom alive,
But betrayed by his lover,
Controlled by Big Brother,
He now knows 2+2=5.
Learned Helplessness [Ken McLeod]:
"Learned helplessness results from being trained to be locked into a system. The system may be a family, a community, a culture, a tradition, a profession or an institution.
Initially, a system develops for a specific purpose. But as a system evolves, it increasingly tends to organize around beliefs, perspectives, activities and taboos that serve the continuation of the system. Awareness of the original purpose fades and the system starts to function automatically. It calcifies. The beliefs, perspectives, activities and taboos shift in subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) ways, to ensure continuation. And those beliefs, perspectives, activities and taboos are trained into the people that comprise the system.
(...)
Similar conditioning mechanisms operate in most systems... The combination creates a dependence on the system for survival. Gradually, the system is internalized and the person identifies with it -- he sees himself the way the system sees him. His sense of who he is is defined by the system."
Margaret Thatcher’s TINA acronym ("There Is No Alternative") for neoliberalism, promoted today as the only viable mechanism for global trade and investment supposedly for all nations to prosper and develop fairly and equitably, is another such good example.
The underlying assumption is that laissez-faire economies are a good thing, and for many economists who believe in it strongly the ideology almost takes on the form of a theology.
The reality of the matter however, in terms of power dynamic, and from a sociological and environmental perspective, is that “the invisible hand of the market" is expereinced by many around the world as a continuation of those old policies of plunder.
More related stuff here about Learned Helplessness:
Education and Learned Helplessness [Dave Pollard]:
Our education systems prepare us for dependence on employment by large corporations and government organizations. Why? Because this is the most 'manageable' way to run the system, and conveniently keeps us in our place. If the system were to equip us to be independent entrepreneurs, there would be a number of unpleasant consequences for the established wealth and power hierarchy:
- Large employers would have to offer a lot more to attract the top graduates: more money, more freedom, more flexibility.
-The burgeoning ranks of informed and educated entrepreneurs would begin to realize how the economic system is stacked in favour of large corporations (the accommodation of price-fixing, uninnovative, choice-limiting oligopolies, the massive subsidies given almost exclusive to huge multinational corporations, the trade agreements favourable to multinationals over smaller businesses etc.) and would hence demand that that system be changed.
- A vastly larger number of entrepreneurial businesses would network and collaborate to counter the artificially-maintained bargaining advantage of large corporations in their dealings with suppliers, and end the 'Wal-Mart' distortions of the economy.
- More agile, innovative entrepreneurs would threaten the huge profit margins and market dominance of the large corporations, and possibly innovate them out of existence.
- Customers, given a much broader choice of higher-quality, more innovative products from more socially and environmentally responsible entrepreneurs, at competitive prices, would desert the large corporations.
I'm not saying there's a conspiracy here. Education, like any other complex system, evolves and adapts. I don't think anyone systematically 'programmed' education to be this way (there are many alternative education systems out there, but the ones that endure tend to exhibit many of the same characteristics as the 'mainstream' system) -- despite the fact that some early education leaders were quite open about designing and using the system to suppress the population as a whole, and to meet the needs of the corporate sector.
Like any large centralized system, education has become unwieldy, inflexible, and ineffective. It will take any help it can get. It will even accommodate lots of progressive teachers, locking them inside the academic system where they can cause minimal disruption, shrugging off their criticisms of the system that feeds them as 'academic' (i.e. impractical, unrealistic) harangues, and conveniently blaming them for the failure of the system to do more than produce 'consumers' who (to quote Jerry Michalski) are "nothing more than gullets whose only purpose in life is to gulp products and crap cash." Our entire economic system has evolved around certain accepted rules (maximize profit for shareholders at any cost, buy and sell favour, reduce competition and diversity, avoid risk, standardize everything, ignore 'externalities' like pollution and social costs, grow or die) and the education system, as a component of the economic system, inevitably follows those rules.
(...)
Hence -- an endemic state of learned helplessness. Tow the line, kow-tow to the boss, do what you're told and maybe, if you're good and lucky, or well-connected, you may work your way 'up' to a middle management position and inflict learned helplessness on the next generation in your chosen 'profession'. The perfect hierarchical system.
Don't get me wrong -- I don't think the purpose of education should be to learn a trade and nothing more. It should teach all the critical life skills (most of which cannot effectively be learned in a classroom, but that's another issue) -- of which 'making a living' is just one. One that it fails spectacularly to do, by any measure except the inculcation of learned helplessness and the resignation to a life of dependence.
Interesting quotes here and a lot of good points on the problem of education and living a life of dependency as a cog in the existing system of mostly corporate or governmental power structures - though things are of course a bit less simple and less monolithically hierarchical as Dave Pollard makes it seems, obviously, and there are movers and shakers and people of convictions, who have made a difference both in government and in the corporate world, and people, still, who do manage to shake the "establishment", but there is an unmistakably ring of truth about it, something evocative of Henry Thoreau famous quote about “the mass of men” who “lead lives of quiet desperation” or worse, lives of total indifference or oblivion.
I am not so convinced however – though I wish it were so - that “equipping” everyone (or even a majority of people) to be “independent entrepreneurs” is really the universal fix-all panacea Dave Pollard makes it to be. Entrepreneurship is defined as the practice of starting new organizations, particularly new businesses generally in response to identified opportunities, and so, you’ve got to ask yourself: Are more entrepreneurs, really what the world needs? Would new entrepreneurs and more entrepreneurs really change anything to the dynamic of concentration of power in a mercantile or neo-mercantile society, in which profit and “profiteering” (its dark-twin) reign supreme? Isn’t that re-inventing the (square) wheel? Haven’t we been there before (sort of)? Didn’t people like Bill Gate (the founder of the Microsoft Empire) and other like him, precisely, begin as some “entrepreneur” at one point or another? The logic of any “independent contractor,” just like the logic of any corporation, still remains pretty much the logic of the market, ultimately, the logic of a mercantile or neo-mercantile society.
In a way, things haven’t changed that much in the dynamic of power from feudal times. You have the warlords, and their enforcers (depending on the social circle, they might be thugs, soldiers, policemen or mercenaries, or, also, searchers, lawyers, traders, and marketers) and the workforce (the people who grow the food – after all, someone has got to pick those strawberries - and mine the ore, and build castles and houses, and work those factories – and make those inexpensive clothes and consumer goods – depending on the system, they are known as slaves, peons, blue-collar workers, etc.) You have desirable lands and resources, and “opportunities”, and the people who compete for their control. You have people who need to eat and clothe themselves, and feed their children, so many "fiddlers on the roof" trying, you know, to “scratch out a simple, pleasant tune without breaking their neck.”
Travel the world and the seven seas
Everybody's looking for something
Some of them want to use you
Some of them want to get used by you
Some of them want to abuse you
Some of them want to be abused
Economic wars are being waged, and military wars too (that too hasn’t changed much) – they are two sides of the same coin - and warlords ally themselves with, or are taken over by other warlords, or large corporations by other large corporations. Smaller corporations operate in a different league, maybe a more honest one – up to a point - in which, as Dave Pollard pointed out, the rules are different than the game the big guys get to play by, but, ultimately, their drive and the logic of the market they obey, are the same, and “entrepreneurs” are no exception – they live in the same system, and abide by the same logic.
Maybe it's not this economic system, or any economic system, maybe it is human nature, maybe it is the nature of this world: Eat or be eaten. Use. Ingest. Assimilate. Grow. Multiply.
Maybe there is a better way. Mankind hasn’t figured out what it is.
Civilizations have been depending and thriving on the exploitation and development of natural resources and manufactured products, and "services" all of which need labor. Some of that labor can be "volunteered" or “purchased” or "exchanged" for resources or services, a process eventually simplified (and complexified) through the design of currency facilitating the transfer of say goods and services. But it has not always been so - and it is not always so nowadays either - the fact of the matter is that all major civilizations have often resorted - and still resort today - to employing slave labor. And the line between "free" labor and "slave" labor is not always easily clear drawn.
In Ancient Greece, ca. 750 BC, for instance, slaves could be found everywhere (they worked not only as domestic servants, but as factory workers, shopkeepers, mineworkers, farm workers and as ship's handlers - the police force in ancient Athens was made up mainly of slaves.) We are told that there may have been as many, if not more, slaves than free people. Historians find it hard to determine exactly how many slaves there were during these times, because many did not appear any different from the poorer Greek citizens.
Does Civilization require slaves?
Oscar Wilde's famous aphorism comes to mind:
"The fact is, that civilization requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture, and contemplation become almost impossible."
I don't know how much of an intrinsic need for the pursuit of "culture" and "contemplation" really had to do with the process, or not, but in any case History seems to agree:
Between around 1000 BC and 500 BC the Etruscans gained control over most of Italy and developed a classical civilization based on agriculture, with more and more use of slave labour as the state developed. Political power was controlled by the slave-owner aristocracy.
500 BC - The Roman state founded a republic based on slavery and developed into a colonial empire: The vast landholdings of early Rome aristocracy required large numbers of slaves. Initially they were recruited locally (overwhelming debt forced many plebeians to sell themselves as slaves - until the practice was made illegal.) To satisfy its need for slave labour Rome had to subjugate and enslave other people. After all of Italy eventually came under Roman control (through the formation of a federation of subjugated Italian regions), Rome developed into a colonial expansionist power for the sake of obtaining more slaves.
Closer to us, we have the example of the New World, where due to the need for increased labor supplies, the slave trade began during the 1500s. It is estimated that over 9 million Africans were transported to the New World.
And a BBC series, Slavery Today, recently uncovered how in fact slavery continues in different forms in almost every country in the world.
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