Tag: future

Building a better future (despite the 1%)

Posted on November 11, 2011 by Doug Belshaw

Occupy Global

When I was in New York recently I didn’t attend the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. Whilst I respect the ideas behind the movement, I’m just not sure it’s achieving anything. The protest inspired by #occupyws in my nearest city of Newcastle is certainly a bit forlorn and is gently ridiculed by the media. What’s far more effective, I think, is to infiltrate and convert the mass media to the cause. Not only does this mean a much wider representation of the ideas behind what’s going on, but (hopefully) retains the purity of the message.

I can’t claim to have read widely on the literature around #occupy and their message that it’s the 1% of the population that are screwing it up for everyone else but this article in the Guardian by George Monbiot certainly includes a few home truths. Here are what I consider to be the highlights (my emphases):

If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire. The claims that the ultra-rich 1% make for themselves – that they are possessed of unique intelligence or creativity or drive – are examples of the self-attribution fallacy. This means crediting yourself with outcomes for which you weren’t responsible. Many of those who are rich today got there because they were able to capture certain jobs. This capture owes less to talent and intelligence than to a combination of the rutheless exploitation of others and accidents of birth, as such jobs are taken disproportionately by people born in certain places and into certain classes.

In their book Snakes in Suits, Paul Babiak and Robert Hare point out that as the old corporate bureaucracies have been replaced by flexible, ever-changing structures, and as team players are deemed less valuable than competitive risk-takers, psychopathic traits are more likely to be selected and rewarded. Reading their work, it seems to me that if you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a poor family, you’re likely to go to prison. If you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a rich family, you’re likely to go to business school.

Chief executives now behave like dukes, extracting from their financial estates sums out of all proportion to the work they do or the value they generate, sums that sometimes exhaust the businesses they parasitise. They are no more deserving of the share of wealth they’ve captured than oil sheikhs.
…
Now they have almost bankrupted us. The wealth creators of neoliberal mythology are some of the most effective wealth destroyers the world has ever seen.

Whilst I agree with most of the ideas behind the above, one thing (perhaps because of space) that Monbiot doesn’t mention is that, financially, we in the west are pretty much all in the top 5% of the world’s richest people. I turn on a tap and water comes out. If I’m cold I turn up the heating. I can send my children to school for free. I don’t worry each day about violence to my family. I live in a democracy.

The trouble with messages such as ‘we are the 99%’ is that there exists huge disparity and diversity even within that figure. It comes across as mass individualistic protesting, with focus and definition provided by grouping around negative slogans rather than positive action. Whilst the 1% should be questioned and challenged, we all need to be doing more to create a fairer, more equitable society. Let’s not get carried away by political reductionism and slogans. We can do better than that. It’s trivially easy to retweet something or join a Facebook group, but what are we (myself included) actually doing over and above this to make this world a better place? I can’t help but think that marching and camping out isn’t enough any more. What (and where) are we building?

Image CC BY-NC Occupy Global

The myth underpinning ’21st Century Skills’ [Future of Education]

Posted on June 8, 2011 by Doug Belshaw

Rainbow over Tokyo at sunset

There’s nothing wrong with discussing concepts such as 21st Century Skills, ‘core competencies for the information age,’ or digital literacies. Well, at least I hope not – I’m 50,000 words into writing a 60,000 thesis on the latter! What is problematic is when such terms become what Richard Rorty terms ‘dead metaphors’: words that used to be understood as a shorthand for a whole barrage of beliefs, opinions and debates, but now only have ap place in rhetoric. Keri Facer explains the problem with that kind of rhetoric:

This myth goes as follows: Rapid technological change in the 21st century will lead to increased competition between individuals and nations; education’s role is to equip individuals and nations for that competition by developing ‘twenty-first century skills’ that will allow them to adapt and reconfigure themselves for this new market. But education and educators are ill-equipped to make those changes, as they have failed to adapt successfully to technological developments over the last 100 years. Educational change, therefore, needs to be directed from outside. This is the myth that pervades much of the thinking about education and its relationship to socio-technical futures. It can be described as a myth not because it is wholly fictional – indeed, there are elements of this story for which there is some evidence and empirical support – but because it comes to act as an unquestioned cultural resource, to function as a dominating narrative that allows educators, policy-makers, parents and designers, without too much reflection, to make decisions and take action in the present. It has underpinned the educational ‘modernization’ agenda across the world for the last two decades. (Keri Facer, Learning Futures)

The fundamental issue is that, whether politicians, teachers, parents or pressure groups, each group of stakeholders in education think that they should be setting the educational agenda. Ironically, the common shared experience of having experienced schooling counts against progress being made, I would suggest.

I’m all for flexibility in the labour market – in my 8 years in it I’m in my 6th job and 5th house – but we need to educate and equip young people to understand that the flexibility should be on their terms.

Image CC BY tallkev

PS If you’re interested in this, check out the #purposedfutured campaign!

Schools as resources for fairness. [Future of Education]

Posted on May 23, 2011 by Doug Belshaw

This post is another in a (probably fairly lengthy) series as a result of me reading Keri Facer’s excellent Learning Futures: Education, Technology and Social Change. It follows my previous post: On the paucity of our collective imagination.

We need to start thinking now about how schools can act as resources for fairness if children bring highly diverse digital, social and pharmacological resources into the classroom. We need to start thinking now about how schools can equip students for democracy when technologies of surveillance are expanding and new networked public spaces are emerging. And we need to start thinking now about how schools can act as resources for building sustainable economic futures when networked globalization promises increased polarization, radical inequality and environmental degradation. (Keri Facer, Learning Futures)

One of the main objections I have to Free Schools is that they allow parents to extract themselves from the conversation about schooling. And they allow this (usually for the benefit of the upper middle-class) at the expense of taxpayers. I’m opposed to (most kinds of) independent schooling as well, but at least in this instance parents have to put their money where their mouth is.

For better or worse, whole lives are defined by experiences between the ages of 4 and 16. The experience of schooling defines most people’s educational experiences – and therefore what goes on within schools cannot be underestimated.

Before reading Keri Facer’s book, I was verging towards the Deschooling movement. I now see how getting rid of schools would be a tragic conclusion to the rampant individualism that defines our age. And it would lead to a more unjust society, not a more egalitarian one:

I want to argue that the potential for socio-technical changes to massively amplify social and economic inequalities in the coming decades is significant. This means that, more than ever, we will need schools that are physical, locally accountable organizations, committed to building viable and sustainable futures for everyone in their communities. (Keri Facer, Learning Futures)

The UK has a wider gap between rich and poor than it did 40 years ago. There are huge gender pay gaps and people living in poverty. In 2011. That’s unacceptable. And it’s no good throwing our hands up in the air at our current education system’s seeming inability to close that gap. Instead, we need to strengthen and re-commit ourselves to schools as places where people abandon their ghettos – be those class-based, religious, or otherwise.

As I mentioned in a reply to a comment on my previous post, we can’t be defined solely in opposition to hegemonic power. We need to pre-empt important questions. One of these, for example, is the inevitability within the next 20 years of so-called ‘smart drugs’ which will allow the enhancement (either temporary or longer-term) of human cognitive abilities. Given high-stakes testing regimes it’s inevitable that those who have the means to provide these to their children will do so in order to gain economic advantages.

We cannot wait for problems to arise and then define ourselves by opposition to them. We need to have pre-emptive conversations. We need to come together.

We need schools.

Image CC BY PatrickSeabird