Fortune Cookie: Weapons of Mass Education

[qaexl]

From the beginning, there was purpose behind forced schooling, purpose which had nothing to do with what parents, kids, or communities wanted. Instead, this grand purpose was forged out of what a highly centralized corporate economy and system of finance bent on internationalizing itself was thought to need; that, and what a strong, centralized

Comments

Rambling

[qaexl]

I have only read the introduction of Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. He chose 1500 as an arbitrary cut-off dateline for his survey. Industrialization created this huge leverage in resource control and production, until the very ideas of Progress and Productiveness have become modern mythic figures.

I'm circling around to those ideas I only had superficial understanding of when I was a teenager -- ideas about the Internet changing the world, that decentralization (and therefore, the overthrow of the previous generation of Authority). At what point can we say that Information-centric (or rather, Information-decentric?) technologies have trumped Industrial-centric technologies. For now, I think Buckminster Fuller is on to something -- that when technological progress becomes small enough to become invisible, it will accelerate faster than humans are capable of keeping up with. (And again, I wonder how many of the Technology Singularity folks have actually studied Fuller

Re: Rambling

[qaexl]

Example. Blogging and internet news has seriously disrupted the current journalist traditions, to the point where graduates with Journalism degrees are using the same words trade unions were using to protect their craft being made obsolete by the industrial machine. You would think that the power was given back to the individual bloggers, that now we are coming back to the older ideals of democracy, where a single individual can make a difference with his voice.

Yet I had worked a contract with a company that has a blogging machine. There were a number of "SEO specialists" hired specifically to write blogs, to increase Google search rankings. The articles were vapid, at best, and on average, nonsense. Yet they worked. The SEO campaign was the only thing keeping the company alive, driving 80% of their revenue to their flagship product.

So who ate who, the Industrial Juggernaut or the Information Ninja?

-Q

Re: Rambling

[thewronghands]

Many of the vapid blogs get highly linked because of keywords and such, but that's not really the same as having heft. Cross-linkage is a part of a solid reputation in a reputation economy, but is itself insufficient. So they may get some product sales, but I'm not sure that's the same as enduring market dominance over time or an actual powerful reputation.

Re: Rambling

[qaexl]

So I guess the question is this: if people were to affect change and do not have access to the levers of Industrial Power, do they have access to post-Industrial powers instead? How would one identify them?

If a person wanted to make changes to the education system today, for example, would we play by the new rules? I think so. I think the secret is to see what can't be seen, because that is where and how information technology trumps industrial organizations.

More thoughts on this later.

-Q

[qaexl]

"The Behavioral Science Teacher Education Project [U.S. Office of Education Contract Number OEC-0-9-320424-4042 (B10)] identified the future as one "in which a small elite" will control all important matters, one where participatory democracy will largely disappear. Children are made to see, through school experiences, that their classmates are so cruel and irresponsible, so inadequate to the task of self-discipline, and so ignorant they need to be controlled and regulated for society’s good. Under such a logical regime, school terror can only be regarded as good advertising. It is sobering to think of mass schooling as a vast demonstration project of human inadequacy, but that is at least one of its functions."

-Q

[qaexl]

"The strongest meshes of the school net are invisible. Constant bidding for a stranger’s attention creates a chemistry producing the common characteristics of modern schoolchildren: whining, dishonesty, malice, treachery, cruelty. Unceasing competition for official favor in the dramatic fish bowl of a classroom delivers cowardly children, little people sunk in chronic boredom, little people with no apparent purpose for being alive. The full significance of the classroom as a dramatic environment, as primarily a dramatic environment, has never been properly acknowledged or examined."

[qaexl]

I got into an argument about Death Note the other day. My rhetorical chops sucked, so I didn't convince them of anything. However, I did find some interesting things.

I've always despised the anime Death NoteThe main character is a villain, not even an anti-hero, yet he is hero-worshiped by many. In the anime and manga, the character receives a supernatural book that allows him to kill anyone, merely by writing their names in there. He can also add conditions to kill them in specific ways. The character chose to use this book to kill off a number of hardened criminals which the Japanese justice system were unable to execute

[qaexl]

Counter-counter: there are many manga and anime about school bullying in Japanese schools. While manga are not representative of Japanese culture, I think it opens a window into that idea pervasive in Asian cultures: the nail that sticks out gets hammered. In that way, this meme shares its roots with ... "Unceasing competition for official favor in the dramatic fish bowl of a classroom delivers cowardly children, little people sunk in chronic boredom, little people with no apparent purpose for being alive."

-Q

[thewronghands]

Also, there's the question of what makes a hero... does he do anything to receive the book? That sounds rather (I haven't seen the anime) like pure opportunity rather than any particular strength of character, excellence in the arete sense, or other heroic characteristic. While I won't argue that opportunity, found or made, is one characteristic of a hero, by itself it seems rather lacking.

[qaexl]

I just remembered Steven Covey saying in Seven Habits how, self-help books after 1960s were written on improving personality rather than character.

I think books on character development are still out there, hidden among the screaming biomass.

-Q

[qaexl]

(... because I wouldn't have read Covey's book without a personal recommendation from a mentor. It makes me think of paranoid delusions, such as the spirit and mission of the Masons having left Masonry still lives on. Or maybe recruiting for the elites. But why would America still be considered the land of opportunity? Ah, because those traditions are still alive outside America, and once in, these immigrants can exploit the masses).

-Q

[qaexl]

One of my martial arts teacher linked a GQ article that more or less describes why he hates Ayn Rand's two seminal books. It puts an interesting spin in context of this book.

-Q