79A3

The Economics of education

A while ago, i wrote something about the primacy and normality of children learning outside school, which gave rise to a number of questions.  One which particularly sticks in my mind is the question of how parents are supposed to earn a living while caring for the children.  This is a good question and as it happens one i've spent a long time considering.  What it in fact implies is that the economic system as it stands is connected to the idea of universal schooling, and my answer is as follows.

First of all, plenty of worthwhile work is done without pay and plenty of useless work is paid.  Unpaid work includes parenting, housework and childcare.  Sometimes this work does get paid, for instance there are cleaners, cooks, therapists, childminders, teachers and paid foster parents.  It is also very often unpaid and the person doing it may feel it's a duty or a chore.  There are hidden monetary benefits to society when this work is done for free - the current crisis in the cost of childminding and nurseries for people on below average wages illustrates this clearly.  There is also plenty of useless work which does get paid, but this is not always a bad thing because it may be better to do useless work which isn't positively harmful or parasitic.  The value of that work is that it prevents people from doing something worse, and since it is paid it provides them with an income, which is a good thing.  However, useful work is clearly preferable if it's done well.

The model of paid work which seems to be emphasised in many people's minds is work which is done by adults, outside the home, in the absence of children for an employer with regular hours.  This kind of work is sometimes necessarily like this. For instance, it would be difficult and undesirable to have children with one all the time in an iron foundry, a coalmine or a sewer.  Of all these, work in sanitation has to be the most valuable and undoubtedly should be done by adults without young children around.  However, how much work is really like this?  How many jobs absolutely have to be done in specific workplaces from which one's children need to be excluded?  How many of us do this kind of work?

My model of work is as follows:
Like education, much work is best done outside a specific workplace.  When i undertake home visits, i minimise my overheads but it is somewhat inconvenient to my clients as they are unlikely to receive their remedies immediately, though sometimes necessary.  When i do science workshops, i prefer to do them outside the house, but of course they can be done in the home sometimes if the weather is unsuitable.  Not everyone can work like me, of course, and some people have to attend workplaces.  Such workplaces could be quite a bit more child-friendly than they are.  For example, my daughter has been with me when i've worked in a shop and it did not impede my work or her education.  The reason this doesn't happen is that people lack enough control over their own paid work.

So i would suggest the following:

Paid work should be carried out by the self-employed as much as possible.  This gives people more control over their workplaces and their time and prevents corruption of large organisations to some degree.

Work which must be done in workplaces should be child-friendly to the maximum degree.  This does not mean creches:  they are a last resort, like recycling as opposed to not using resources in the first place.  It means children alongside their parents at work.  There must also be flexible hours.

This is of course not always possible.  Where it isn't, children need to be cared for by family members, friends, neighbours and to a limited degree paid childminders.

This again is not always possible.  Where it isn't, it should be borne in mind that not everyone has children.  I'm not making a distinction between the gender of parents here, but there are people who do not want children, have been persuaded against their better judgement to have children, have simply assumed that children are the next stage in their lives, and there are adults who have not yet had children or whose children are now independent.  If a career break is universally understood to be inevitable if an adult has children, it would make the opportunities for women and men more equal.  No longer would it be the case that a woman is not promoted or employed as a result of being perceived to have potential childcare commitments which a man has not, because men and women in fact have equal responsibilities in this area.

So, take all of that away and the final resort still remains:  schools.  However, in such a world, how many children would there really be there?  These would be the children of parents both of whom were unable to take their children to work with them, who work in circumstances which mean they cannot work from home and who have no informal support network around them.  That would still exist, but how common would it be?

This sounds like utopia and seems unachievable.  This may very well be so.  If it is though, it strongly suggests that our society as it stands is doomed, unsustainable and serves nobody, and we need to ask ourselves why.  On the other hand, perhaps we are too attached to the long-term survival of the species.

7899

 

Education and The Immune System

 

At least three of our body systems involve communication and information as a means of maintaining a healthy relationship with the world.  These are the nervous system, the immune system and the endocrine system.  The nervous and immune systems at least illustrate interesting parallels between state education and healthcare systems.

The nervous system allows someone to adapt, coordinate and record, store and relate information.  Success and survival depend on being able to orient satisfactorily to a constantly changing environment; the brain and spinal cord receive information from the senses, sorts it and directs it to the different channels, resulting in responses favourable to the organism, and, given that we are social animals, ideally to our community too.  Finally, we gain a fund of experience which influence future reactions to environmental changes.

Just as an aside, one of the salient features of this system is that it helps us cope with change, and so optimal learning means optimal flexibility, anticipation and versatility.  I’m also aware of the coldness of the language i’m using here.  In my relationships and practice, i’m not like this, but i’ve chosen to be analytical here in order to make things clear.  Plenty of passion is expressed in connection with these issues, and that’s highly appropriate, but my aim here is to drain that passion and make the same argument without appealing to the emotions.  There’s a strong rational case to be made for the approaches taken to education and health.

A child’s environment should optimise the functions of the nervous system because they are part of human nature in a biological sense.  This is the kind of animal we are.  Like other primates, human behaviour depends more on past experience than that of most other animals.  Less of what we do is instinctive.  Nonetheless we have certain instincts, one of which is the instinct to learn.  One of the problems with empiricism is that a newborn baby seems to have to pull itself up by its own bootstraps intellectually, since it has no innate ideas in that model.  A possible solution to that is that it has a learning instinct, and that seems to be borne out by an adult’s observation of a child.  It’s hard to imagine that a species which depends so much on learning would not to some degree learn autonomously, without conscious intervention from others, though it might also be expected that as social animals, other individuals around us share that learning – we instinctively want to help our companions learn and they want to help us.  Moreover, we have an aptitude for doing so, in-built, which may not always be nurtured but at least manifests itself at some point in our lives.  Introspection strongly suggests that this exists in me and my empathy suggests the same is true of others.  Having said that, we are likely to learn well in a rich and varied environment.  Travel, for instance, broadens the mind.

In order for that environment to be rich and varied, different approaches might be taken, one of which could be to provide a fixed location which is varied and stimulating.  This would not necessarily depend on conscious intervention or planning, but strongly suggests that the more versatile and imaginative those who influence that environment, and the more self-sufficient it is, the more complete and versatile the learning which takes place there will be.

Much has been written about reclaiming the home as where the heart is. and clearly more trust should be placed in parents and the home than the trend seems to be.  I don’t want anything i say to contradict that.  In the meantime, homes and schools can share certain features which may not aid learning.  They can lack a strong connection with their environment.  For instance, a school might have a nature table, which has positive aspects, but for that to happen, items are removed from their surroundings and placed in different circumstances where connections may be unclear or manufactured by others even if valid.  Similarly, schools often have catering facilities and libraries.  While catering is part of the school environment, it tends to stand apart from the life of the pupils and from the likes of home economics, biology, mathematics and the rest of the curriculum while conveying implicit messages about knowledge and food.  Pupils are rarely expected to manage the purchase, pricing, stock control, nutritional balance or preparation of the food presented, but all of those activities are covered in classes at the school without exploiting the resource in their midst, wherewith they come into contact daily.  There is little integration.  Likewise, school libraries are valuable resources whcih are, however, located within school premises rather than the neighbourhood, and the wider neighbourhood usually lacks access to them.  This encourages the impression that learning takes place in a specific location specialised for that purpose, with the corollary that other places are unsuitable.  Moreover, the separation of school libraries from the community is a form of segregation which prevents much informal learning, such as how to cross roads, features of the local area, the changing seasons and the like.  The kind of learning taking place outside these places is more accidental, immediate and relevant and the kind of learning which we primates are wont to acquire, just as we would in the rainforest or on the savannah.

As well as a nervous system, we have immune and endocrine systems.  The immune system is frequently conceptually pruned down to an artificially specific immune response rather than its broader function being recognised in the barriers and flow of the body.  The skin and mucous membranes, as well as firmer and less obvious barriers such as the ethmoid bone, which separates the brain from the nasal cavity, stop microorganisms from being where they would impair the function of the body, and the flow of blood, sweat, tears, urine, mucus and other fluids, all of which we tend to associate with tabus as part of the psychological, nervous-system based immune response, wash away the hazards and the potential hurt, moves them to places where they can be dealt with or dilutes them.  Stagnation within us is a risk, examples being the development of infections in the urinary or gall bladder due to stasis or the likes of blood clots in the veins of stationary limbs, and the breaching of barriers is similarly a hazard, such as the insertion of a urinary catheter, abdominal surgery, grit in the eye or a splinter in a finger.  It’s interesting to speculate whether this more general view of immunity can be applied to the nervous system:  is there wider, systemic learning in the same way as there is wider, systemic immunity?  Nevertheless, there is such a thing as the specific immune response, where the body resists and responds to specific antigens when it detects them.  This response has much in common with learning as it involves long term acquired change as a result of earlier external environmental factors.  The body “remembers” the antigens it encounters.  Just as learning can be inappropriate, such as learned helplessness in depression or a tendency to place the wrong kind of value on conformity, so can the immune response, through hypersensitivity states and autoimmune conditions.  Examples can include asthma, eczema, rheumatoid arthritis and lupus.  These maladaptive responses might be expected to take place where the presentation of information to the system is inappropriate.

Hence there are two similar situations, one involving the nervous system and the other the specific immune response.  Both concern inappropriate encounters with information which fail to integrate well with how that information is presented in a less formal and more widespread situation.

Now, taking this out of the abstract, a parallel emerges between mainstream consensus on health and education when considered in this way, both rather contentious.  With education, there seems to be a presumption that information is best assimilated when taken out of its environment, modified and presented to the child’s central nervous system in an artificial context.  With health, the same situation occurs when antigens are thought to provoke an appropriate immune response when removed from their environment, modified and presented to the specific immune response.  These processes have much in common.  They are both institutional processes of abstraction of information which strike me as inappropriate because they are likely to lead to poor fits between the human being and her environment.

More specifically, excessive hygiene and immunisation, like schooling, can involve the inappropriate presentation of information to the organism.  Excess hygiene is like sensory deprivation or boredom.  The long-term response can be surprisingly maladaptive.  It has unforeseen consequences such as self-defeating attitudes to learning and conditions where the body overreacts to otherwise harmless stimuli such as nuts.

Another system left out of this is the endocrine.  Like immunity and learning, this keeps us healthy inside through the transfer of information, and it too can “learn”.  The question arises of whether there are similarly inappropriate institutional factors which influence the endocrine system.  One might be the over-prescription of steroids.

One final comment.  Although there is much overlap, plenty of people who oppose vaccination send their children to school and plenty of children who don’t go to school have been vaccinated.  Clearly parents have made decisions in both situations which they regard as appropriate and were taken in good faith.  Even so, the parallels are interesting and suggest links between health and education which may be positive or negative.  However, it’s important to acknowledge that the connection exists, and that it may apply elsewhere.  I also wonder if the mutual hostility between the pro- and anti-vaccination camps, which is as big a problem as the issues themselves, is echoed in mutual hostility with respect to education.

788A

 

A Delicate Matter

 

First of all, to avoid annoying a lot of people i’m going to add a whole load of caveats to this, possibly to the extent that most of this entry will end up consisting of them.  Here we go.

I’m aware that people’s main concern is with their own families and that they understand their needs better than we do, “we” being those of us who are not them.  There are lots of different “wes”.  Moreover, we all have limited time and need to do various other things with our lives than sitting in front of anything as two-dimensional as a monitor or an inked sheet of paper.  Origami and paper aircraft, or making paper oneself, are of course completely different concerns.  In fact i have so much sympathy with this view that we dispensed with the television set as a distraction several years ago and it is also for this reason that i only reluctantly upload educational videos aimed at children on YouTube, although of course ones aimed at adults are another matter since we’re all past it and many of us have had our brains scrambled by schools, through no fault of the schools themselves of course.  There are many appropriate ways of learning.

Now for the more annoying bit.  Some of us are committed to autonomous education and many of us to the idea of encouraging independence in children.  It would also be nice if there was an attempt to address bias in subject matter.

Now, a few years ago, i started a home ed wiki with the following quote, often erroneously attributed to Nelson Mandela, on the home page:

“We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

Incidentally, i fully acknowledge the theistic sledgehammer in the middle of the passage which, if i could be bothered, i would attempt to rephrase, but i think most people can look beyond this to a more agnostic or metaphysically realist reading.

I proceeded to produce a series of passages, sheets and the like on various subjects on which i was confident enough to feel i was able to make a positive contribution to education, such as various crafts, classical languages and the rest.  After making quite a few contributions, i became aware that i was the only person doing this.  This is a big problem for a wiki, since it’s supposed to be collaborative, and the bias present on that big Wiki is partly down to particular people not contributing to it.  Consequently, i deleted all of the content, as it was seriously biassed towards my perspective.

And the thing is, yes, people pay lip-service to the above inspirational quote, and may live it elsewhere in their lives, but they don’t seem to do it much online.

This is what i mean:  i often see people ask for links, or sharing links, to educational resources which other people have produced.  There is a place for this, and in some people’s approach to children’s education it can be appropriate, but do we really believe we are so inadequate and ignorant that we have to keep doing this?  We function in everyday life using the skills and knowledge we have learnt through our lives.

I would personally consider it a bad example to my children to rely largely on other people’s educational input because of the surely widely-held attitudes expressed above.  We often personally try to be autonomous, but also have more widely shared beliefs, probably at least explicitly expressed by others’ actions with their children, that we want them to become autonomous themselves.  If we provide resources ourselves, apart from it being intrinsically positive as a form of skill-sharing, there are a number of other positive results.

• We demonstrate to our children that it can be better to do things self-sufficiently than to rely on others for information, which may or may not be accurate.
• We address a bias in subject matter which may exist due to other people whose skills are in other areas contributing when we don’t – this is a major problem on Wikipedia, where for example faux scepticism tends to dominate in a number of areas.
• We demonstrate to the world that we are a competent and positive learning community.

I understand that other messages are also important, such as asking for help when you need it and relying on others being OK, and also that many of us are under-confident in certain areas where there is no practical need for us to be, and i am as guilty as anyone in some of those, for instance poetry, knitting and driving are “beyond me”, with the emphasis on the quotes, but if we are to overcome this we all need to get out there and make our own resources.  We are all experts in living and that’s what we’re trying to help our children to do.  We need to be the threat of a good example to schools.  Maybe if we are, those who are involved with schools will see our stuff and recognise its quality, and the truth that almost all families home educate will become manifest in a broader sense.

7883

 

Bestiaries

 

As a herbalist, i have a fair amount to do with old herbals.  They’re often useful but may need some kind of conceptual translation.  Two related types of book used in mediaeval Europe were bestiaries and lapidaries, of which the latter is by far the most obscure, dealing with stones.  There is a neat division between the three types:  the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms.  Items from each can sometimes be found in the same book.  I perceive herbals as having a directly practical intent:  they tell you how to identify, use, gather, prepare and grow plants.  Lapidaries and bestiaries, however, strike me as fanciful in nature.  They seem not to be intended for practical use.  For instance, bestiaries give no advice on hunting, cooking or medical uses of the animals recorded in them.  However, all three seem to be part of natural history and are based on description, rather than natural philosophy.

Bestiaries generally comprise a series of chapters, each describing an animal, seen as a beast, bird or fish.  Bees are seen as birds and whales as fish, for example.  Each chapter includes an illustration, a description of a striking, usually behavioural, characteristic, and sometimes a sermon-like passage explaining the spiritual significance of the animal.  The pictures are often rather unlike the way we see the animal, and are often of apparently deliberately humorous tone.

The text engages a literary or religious faculty in me more than a scientific one, and i feel my impulse to think of it as intended to describe a situation literally is misplaced.  I get the impression that this categorisation itself is an imposition of my mindset, which is driven to separate art and science in a way which only began after the books were compiled.  I suspect that a partial explanation for this difference is that the producers and audience were more focussed on eternity than the then and there, seeing mundane life as a brief prelude and the history of the world itself as much briefer than we are wont to view it.  Hence the emphasis is on what life lessons can be learnt rather than what could be observed by detached dispassionate observation of the animals concerned, which were often distant in one way or another from the reality of the people concerned with the book.  The animals seem to be there as embellishments or to make the stories memorable, and there are also elements of entertainment and appeal to the emotions about the text and images.  They are strikingly unlike herbals, except that herbals also try to fit their subject matter into an intricate system, which i find works as a mnemonic device and a form of system-oriented thinking in a superior manner to at least elementary botany, ecology and therapeutics.  Herbals seldom venture into fable, though one exception is the mandrake:

 

Though we might separate the animals in bestiaries into mythical and real, things are rather less clear cut.  While many species share the names of those we know today, many of them have very different characteristics.  For instance, bears lick their cubs into shape, lion cubs are born dead and the father breathes life into them three days later – like many other stories, a religious allegory – and there are many apparent confusions, combinations and duplications.  For instance, a number of different apes are described as giving birth to twins, one of which is abandoned and the other of which is fatally smothered by the mother, a tale reminiscent of the one told today about giant pandas, which are said to bear twins and abandon one, but of course a panda is bear-like, not an ape.  Many species are seen as hybrids of others.  Whales, for instance, are both fishes

(aquatic animals in this definition – mammal was seemingly not a familiar notion) and crosses between serpents and turtles.  Others are duplications:  the “monocerus” and the unicorn may be described separately.

Unicorn

Monocerus

The external history of the genre reflects a change in views of and approaches to the world.  Unusually for him, the philosopher Aristotle, who lived in the fourth century BCE,  gave a remarkably accurate account of many animals in his work, based substantially on first-hand observation and the testimony of people who were familiar with them, such as beekeepers, and includes factual details which have only recently been recognised as correct such as the detachable reproductive tentacle of the male octopus.  By the first century of the Christian Era, Pliny the Elder’s Historia Naturalis was a secondary source, not based on his own observations but still quite accurate.  During the following century, an unknown author, possibly Clement of Alexandria, wrote Physiologus, the prototype of future bestiaries.  Tellingly, the title is derived from the fact that many of the entries include a phrase translatable into English as “The naturalist” or Physiologus, “says”, and was not available to the West in the original Greek.  Hence first-hand authority was even more distant.  It is the source of such stories as the one about the lion mentioned above and of the pelican drawing blood from its breast to resurrect its chicks.

Pelican

Physiologus is allegorical in nature, in a manner akin to Aesop’s Fables, and this is probably the key to the tone of the works which were to come after it.  Deviation from literal accuracy increases with later bestiaries.  However, to say that is to look at it from our own perspective.  One thing it seems to signify is that we separate artistic and scientific concerns and the intellectuals of Europe in the Middle Ages did not.

Bringing this forward to today, just as was the case back then, we have separate academic subjects grouped into the humanities, social sciences, arts and sciences, meaning for example that history is not meant to be fictional, geometrical diagrams are not drawn in an abstract expressionist style and scientific papers are not written in verse.  Though this can often help, this is not the only way to do things and when we look at how things are done now, we might benefit from ignoring these categories at least some of the time to stimulate thought, creativity and versatility.  So when i say i would like there to be a new bestiary, i mean that there should be a creative work about animals we believe to be mythical which is emotionally engaging, uses the imagination to combine fantasy and science and raises as many questions as it answers.

787B

 

Language Barriers

 

English has the feature of having two distinctive registers to its vocabulary, whose tones differ in terms of learnedness.  This is also extended in the higher register to at least two further degrees, and of course this is a simplistic way of looking at it.  Although there were certain features before that, most of this division is connected to the Norman invasion of 1066 and the gradual loss of territories on the Continent, leading to the nobility throwing their lot in with this land and their language gradually merging with our speech.  This nobility is reflected today in the illusion of greater intelligence conferred by the use of what might be called “long words”, though some of them are not.

There are a few cases of words taken from Latin and French before the Norman conquest which are notable for lacking “poshness”.  Examples are the Latin “mouse” and “pope” and the French “proud”, which was also transformed in a very English way into the abstract noun “pride”.  Quite a lot of other words are now so ingrained in English that they too have lost their status, such as “very” and “use”.  There are also a number of other words from Scandinavian languages which are often so close to their English counterparts that they have merged or carry a somewhat different though related sense:  they lack a change in register.  These include “drink” and “drench”, “skip" and “shift” and “them” and “’em”.

It’s perfectly common for a language to have more than one register or even for the more technical terms to be from a language closely related to Latin when the language itself isn’t, but there are also many languages which are less open than English in this respect, including German (and Icelandic even more so), Hebrew and Chinese.  Whereas these may have registers, there is little difference in the origin of the words in each and so the meanings can be clearer to more people.

The idea of registers in this context communicates something other than a dictionary definition style of meaning.  It also fulfils the roles of establishing an in-group and an out-group.  Language can put at ease or it can be about asserting superiority for one or more people using a particular register.  It can also be an anti-language, like the use of particular words in youth culture, either for good or ill.

Learning the jargon can be a passport to understanding and a form of shorthand.  Although the words can be longer, they might not be as long as the words needed to explain the meaning otherwise.  There is also a shortcut to learning much technical vocabulary:  learn Greek and Latin and the meaning of many technical terms is uncovered.  This is because, as well as the French/English division in English-speaking countries, Latin and to a lesser extent Greek have dominated intellectual communication in the past in European culture.

Using a higher verbal register can also help convince people that you know what you’re talking about, or even that there is content to what you’re saying when there isn’t.  It can also be used to refer to things which exist but aren’t worth thinking about, or persuade others to think like you think, even when that isn’t in their best interests or in the interests of a larger group.  Examples of such language would include a phrase such as “educational premises”, which assumes that learning is best facilitated in locations dedicated to the purpose.

Beyond this, not all learning is linguistic.  Learning to test a baby for clicky hips, to knit, drive, paint or draw are all substantially non-linguistic.  Significantly, though many practical skills benefit or can be communicated well using language, they often include a substantial practical, “hands-on” element.  These are often the skills which ensure our survival.  For instance, driving is a  hazardous activity and there is a craft to avoiding the dangers inherent in it which appears to be second nature to many motorists.  In a different sense, the ability to knit well seems not to be primarily linguistic to me, who cannot knit, but enables one to make clothes.  Learning to provide the classic three basic needs of food, clothes and shelter, and many things which follow from them, are substantially non-linguistic skills.  Moreover, many linguistic skills can be acquired simply by manipulating symbols without grasping their meaning.

Given all of this, and i know this is a bit of a “splodge” of a blog posting, suggests three areas of learning which might be important.

• If you learn Latin and Greek, it helps you to fake being clever and is a passport to understanding technical vocabulary.  It isn’t just about dead white men, partly because the long chain of dead white men who did use those languages were good at hoarding their learning rather than sharing it.  Access to that information can be gained by learning classical languages, even if the language concerned is in a mother tongue.
• Take care with language use so that we can both say things on our own terms and include others, thereby making sure we have more freedom and “craftiness”.  Spot when others are taking away our words or language to serve narrow-minded or short-sighted needs, which may not be ours or even theirs.
• Ease off on reading and writing so we don’t plonk children in front of a book in the same way they might be plonked in front of a screen.  This has its place and shouldn’t be denigrated, but people need to learn to do things themselves rather than just reading and writing about them.

7875

 

Why i think we’re all doomed and my response to it.

 

OK, frivolous title for a serious subject.  I often assert that i believe we are one of the final generations of the species, and that Homo sapiens will soon become extinct, without explaining why.  Hence this blog post.

In detail, my belief is as follows:  Sometime in the very near future, by which i mean a couple of generations, our species will have become extinct, and that it is unlikely that enough will be done to prevent this.  I’m aware that it’s long been popularly believed that the world is about to end and i’m open to the possibility that i’ve done this.  Moreover, i realise that in a sense, the belief that human beings are about to disappear without trace is an unusual belief for a Christian.  Nonetheless, it is what i believe.

I have several reasons for thinking this is so, and i’m going to present two of them in detail.  I’m not going to mention climate change as one of them because i don’t want to engage with that argument.  Nor will i be talking about the question of overpopulation.  Even so, there is an interesting tangential argument about high population which is relevant.  It’s known as the “Doomsday Argument”:

There are said to have been somewhere near 80 thousand million humans on this planet.  The human population at most times since the Mount Toba eruption during the last ice age has been increasing, and though there are some drops due to the Four Horsemen the general trend is not only upwards but exponentially so:  population is currently doubling about every three decades.  I was born at a time when the world population was less than half its current size and if growth continues in this way, children born in 2042 will be born into a world whose population is about twice as big as now.

If the lifetime of this species (and any predecessors able to conceive of something like the idea of the end of the world) is finite and population increases over most of its history, and if we can consider ourselves to have been born at a random point in that history, the probability that we have been born near the end is higher than at other times simply because there are more people now than ever before.  Therefore, it is more likely than ever before that we are about to become extinct, and with each passing generation the probability increases.  Therefore, there is not only a relatively high risk that we are the last generation, but our children are even more likely to be it, and so on, as long as the population is rising.

Although i thought of this independently, this is quite a well-known argument for imminent human extinction.  An important implication for a parent is that one’s children should be prepared for difficult circumstances to a greater degree than usual.

Another reason is the increasing complexity of the infrastructure.  As technology changes, we become more dependent on a system which involves enough people to have sufficient skills to keep it going, and for there to be sufficient material resources to enable this.  This has in fact been the case for a very long time, but it is also a trend which increases with the rate of technological change.  This also involves increasing risk.  A Specific example is our reliance on distant sources of energy such as power stations and oil and coal deposits, which depend on complex systems to continue functioning.  Another instance is the dependence of telecommunications on a physical infrastructure such as mobile ‘phone networks, cable-based internet and, again, reliable sources of power.  Today, ordinary utilities and the likes of essential drug supplies depend on all of that working well.  The more complex this system becomes, the harder it is to guarantee its maintenance.  That maintenance also depends on a high level of education, and there needs to be a high level of practical skill to keep it going.  If it fails, which is again increasingly likely as time goes by, people will need to be creative, flexible and resourceful.

Other arguments for our extinction in the near future include reduction in biodiversity, the existence of the ability to produce weapons of mass destruction, reliance on scarce physical resources and conversion of those resources into a form which makes them difficult or impossible to recover, the evolution of new pathogens and the appearance of new diseases.  Each one of these reasons may be wrong, but taken together there are so many of them that the probability of at least one of them happening is high.  It also seems that, just as the Doomsday Argument is that probability of human extinction increases with population, a similar argument could be made that the more long-term risks emerge the longer the species survives, meaning that the risk of our extinction rises in any case.

It’s for these reasons that i believe it’s likely that we are about to die out.  I also think that attempts to prevent this, where a risk is apparently identifiable, are not significant:  not enough people are doing enough, and there are unknown risks about which we can clearly do nothing.  Therefore, i think it’s almost certain we will soon die out.

The question is, how to respond to this, and this is where i make two different kinds of response.  One is internal:  i think this is effectively a bereavement and that thinking of it in those terms explains quite a lot of how people behave.  Deep down, many people have a hunch that we haven’t got long to go.  They therefore respond as if they’re grieving, which i’ve possibly over-enthusiastically seen as a five-stage process involving denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.  I would like to reach the stage of acceptance and stay there.  Some suggested manifestations of each stage might be:

Denial:  I would say climate change denial here but i don’t want to annoy anyone.  Therefore, i’m going to give the example of a general unwillingness of people to face the prospect of changing their own approach to how they live in a manner which is beneficial to themselves.  Sorry to be vague.

Anger:  The Occupy movement, demonstrations and non-violent direct action.

Bargaining:  The Transitions movement, which inspired me to write this entry in the first place.

Depression:  I don’t really need to justify this i think.

Acceptance:  This is a stage which is quite unstable, not one which makes one superior but, i hope, one which i’ve reached.  Note that it is beyond depression.  I am not claiming that this is a depressing prospect, simply an inevitable one.

Note also that this doesn’t mean i will forget about the whole project of attempting to alleviate whatever the oncoming disaster is.  I try to act in such a way that if all people acted similarly they would be able to prevent our extinction.

My other response is to ensure that children are able to remain resourceful, inspired and engaged with the world in such a way that they can benefit from any situation the world throws at them.  I am trying to provide opportunities that maximise self-sufficiency and a general rather than a specific level of competence.  This belief is a major motivation for me making the children aware of their choice with respect to their upbringing.  Also, as many children as possible need this flexibility, which is not currently being provided by schools.

Hence this is a big reason, behind it all, to see schools as inadvisable and hazardous to the long-term survival of the species.

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The Fun They Had

Here’s another depiction of children’s education in SF.  Once again, schools have ceased to exist:

http://users.aber.ac.uk/dgc/funtheyhad.html

This is a short-short by Isaac Asimov, written in 1951.  Margie’s mechanical teacher, an educational computer which covers the entire school curriculum, has broken down and she has found a paper book.  She and her friend Tommy are surprised that the text on the pages of the book doesn’t move.

Unlike the previous example, this version of a world which has superceded schooling has replaced it with school at home, which is unpopular with the children and Margie wishes she was still able to go to a physical building where teaching takes place.  Nevertheless, various comments are made which suggest the inefficiencies of schooling as practiced in the 1950s, and possibly until the present day.

“How could a man be as smart as a teacher?”  It’s implied that individual human beings can’t possibly have enough knowledge to teach subjects properly, which is similar to the internet today.  The knowledge of a mechanical teacher is seen, at least by the children, to be superhuman.  This suggests certain things about the nature of education and knowledge, such as the idea that a child’s mind is an empty vessel waiting to be filled with objective knowledge, and that this is the activity of children’s education.

It’s also considered remarkable that all children at the same age are taught the same thing.  Margie says, “But my mother says a teacher has to be adjusted to fit the mind of each boy and girl it teaches and that each kid has to be taught differently."

Education for children is still referred to as “school” and children are generally isolated from each other while education takes place.

This particular picture of future education is more like the stereotype of education otherwise than at school involving social isolation, which however in this case takes place because children are seen as having individual needs which cannot be served simultaneously.  However, children do socialise outside school hours.  Education also seems to take place at home rather than more flexibly, for example in the neighbourhood, the wider community or other “educational” venues such as schools or museums.  Nonetheless, it is still assumed that information technology would make schools obsolete as institutions.  There is also an element of irony because children in 1951 were clearly about as reluctant to attend school as they are today.  The lives of children, however, seem to have gone downhill as a result of the change, since they are able to socialise less.

Again, the assumption is that computer-aided learning replaces the kind of learning which is part of the explicit curriculum, and that other functions of school are subsidiary.  One of these functions, socialising with other children, is fulfilled in different ways and not so well by the system which replaced schools.  This has become a stereotype of “homeschooling”.

Hthe childcare function of school is fulfilled is not explicitly resolved in this story.  Two answers to this are suggested by the time of publication and other Asimov stories, and i would also suggest a third, which may answer the question in this and other stories.

The first answer is the ascribed gender roles of the ‘50s, where it can be presumed that women stay at home and men go to work outside the home.  This is not universal in Asimov’s stories by any means, though it does sometimes happen, for example in ‘Satisfaction Guaranteed’.  In the Robot stories, however, Susan Calvin is clearly a career woman with no interest in children, though it is hinted that she has a nurturing instinct which moves her to care for robots instead.  The robots are a second answer:  Asimov’s robots are safe and care for children elsewhere, such as in ‘Robbie’.  Therefore, we can probably conclude that the childcare function of schools has been superceded as well as their educational function, though in a different way.

The third reason childcare may not be an issue here or in other SF stories where schools have been technologically superceded is the nature of work in such a world.  Either there is such a high level of automation that society is now based on leisure, in this situation perhaps similar to that of the Ancient Greek or Roman slave-owning class, or because working from home is now more feasible.

So again, i would ask the question:  why the discrepancy between futuristic SF depictions of children’s education and those of the real present day?  What functions are schools now performing given that the extent of advance in the educational use of IT is, as before, probably underestimated in these stories? Though an argument could be made for socialisation in this particular story, it doesn’t seem to be childcare in this case, given the wider context.

And again, why is school education still a majority activity?