Education: what it is and what it could be

Thinking about the information we process in our school years, we have to admit that the major part of what we learned then, especially during the high school years, is inevitably lost. We may still draw on this knowledge during some quiz games, but otherwise we are not concerned. I find it amazing that our children (and we ourselves when we were children) spend substantial part of their lifetime on getting knowledge they will find useless when they are adults. I have discussed this situation recently, and here are some of my claims:

1. The purpose of school (secondary) education is to prepare an individual for an adult life, by providing him/ her a certain range of basic skills and knowledge (that will allow to survive in the modern world). The purpose of higher (tertiary) education is to prepare an individual for independent intellectual life, teaching him/ her foundations of the specific professional field and the 'ways of thinking'.

2. Both the secondary and the tertiary education commonly fail to achieve their purposes - although tertiary education could be more successful. Since the secondary education is universal, its problems concern everyone, so I will focus on them.

3. One of the main problems is that generally teachers do not understand what and how they actually teach. Schooling programs are subject-based, they provide formal (codified) knowledge divided by spheres of physics, chemistry, biology, languages etc. Approaches to education have been very conservative in many countries, keeping the same principles as were used in 19th century.

4. The key individual skill that can be acquired in school is search and primary processing of information (classification, referencing, action by template/algorithm). As Internet becomes more and more accessible, this skill becomes more and more demanded (while search engines can provide specific knowledge in 30 seconds). It is more important to provide methods of knowledge organization than specific information on subject.

5. It is assumed that these skills are naturally grown by repeated subject-oriented tasks. Thus, the key objective of the educational system should emerge as its by-product.

6. In other words, the main purpose of the modern secondary education could be to help individuals to learn how to learn. (Of course I do not deny other important aspects of educational system - socializing, ideological etc.) The skill of 'learning to learn' would allow to build a flexible yet robust system of specific knowledge and skills.

7. Modern psychology is well aware of methods and techniques that could allow to optimize schooling programs for this purpose. There is vast amount of efficient psychotechniques that could be mastered by children (memory improvement, out-of-box thinking, TRIZ, etc.) Most likely, structure of schooling programs has to become process-(or project-)oriented rather than subject-oriented. Skills of information processing need to be developed as an explicit discipline.

8. Implementation of these techniques in school can have positive impact on specific learning, and on early self-actualization of children. Implemented on the nation-wide scale, it can also become a national competitive advantage, making national labour force more adaptive, more mobile and faster-learning.

Human trajectories and evolutionary ethics

Claude Levi-Strauss is well-known to say (apologies if someone has a better translation) that the 21st century will be an century of human sciences or it won't be there at all. Most social scientists would agree that human trajectories are driven by shared value systems and wide-spread value hierarchies. And the notion of value, which can be most generally described as a measure of importance (to human agent), inevitably leads to existential questions, the meaning of individual and collective existence - and the notions of ethics and moral that evolved throughout human evolution.

Values confine a range of possible actions and at the same time they enable some actions by pointing to their availability ('do this, not that'). Values are behind any application of technology - depending on individual preferences, a knife can become a tool of carpenter, an instrument of a healer, or a device of a murderer. As anthropologists and sociologists were able to demonstrate the relativity of value systems, different value systems (or ethical systems) can be judged for their evolutionary adequacy, the ultimate purpose of human survival. The match between technological capabilities and proper social structures is required.

One of the major focuses of the group on human trajectories, therefore, could be not in the technology that enables us to do something - but also about our social nature and nurture. Something that could be called 'evolutionary ethics', which could cover the following agenda:

- what values are suitable that promote effective use, and not abuse, of new technologies?
- what values are suitable to prevent, not to resolve, resource shortage crisis?
- what values are suitable to limit destructive conflicts within and between societies?
- what values are suitable for peaceful and cooperative space exploration?
- can there be 'common-being' values that need to override ethnic- and culture-specific values in the course of human migration for the humanity to develop more efficiently?

Obviously, many of the old ethical systems were very much suitable when the humanity was small and divided. Now that it is large and uniting, some of these ethical systems become threatening - and threats of bacteriological, chemical, nuclear etc. attacks can be seen as their mere consequences.

By saying 'evolutionary' I address not only the qualities of our organisms that evolved in the course of gene- / organism-level evolution.

In their new paper submited to Science, E.WIlson and D.Wilson maintain that biological evolution occurs on multiple levels - that is, not only on the level of individual organisms and their kin very close to them genetically, but on larger groups of the species representatives. I believe their argument is very plausible, and thus group selection can play important role in evolution. For we humans have evolved as social animals for hundreds of thousands of years, we should expect to find traits that are suitable for ourselves as members of social groups. Inherited proto-structures of the language that present in our brain (as Chomsky suggests) could be one example of such traits.

However, there are also lengthy discussions that, though effects of biological evolution can be minor, effects of cultural evolution can be far more important. I believe that the theory of cultural transmition, to which James referred, is built within this paradigm of generalized Darwinism - and there are theories of evolutionary economics, evolutionary theory of technological development, evolutionary sociology, evolutionary linguistics, and so forth. They are Darwinian in a sense that they maintain the same basic framework as evolutionary biology - that change is a result of variation, selection, and retention. These theories emphasize path dependence effects, i.e. importance of unique evolutionary trajectories that evolving entities trace.

Thus, first, value systems are derived from our inherited traits which bear both qualities suitable for individual survival AND survival of the group. Second, these inherited traits are significantly modified in ontogenesis through socialization - and what we learn as members of society is a product of several thousand years of cultural evolution that also occurred on the level of organizations and societies. Therefore, existing ethical/ moral systems and behavioral strategies driven by them can be expected to be suitable for the group survival.

However, I believe the primary challenge is that our rate of technological development in the past fifty years was much faster than the pace of cultural/social development. Due to improvements in transportation and communication, the world has become global. Due to creation of weapons of mass destruction, it has become very fragile. It has taken hundreds of years of painful revolutions and war conflicts to raise modern nations. It may take same hundreds of years to raise a global society.

The discussions of evolutionary ethics, to my mind, can contribute to the possible development of this level of evolutionary processes - human species as a large single group. Global ethics does not have to deny varieties, but it should 'override' those culture-specific 'human strategies' that breed conflict. On the other hand, global ethics could mould the ways in which we use the global technological infrastructure.

Hormones

Do you know one thing that is scary? Our dependency on hormones.

The most simple stories of 'the last time': when you ate, when you slept, when you had sex. These simple stories shape our consciousness, like fingers of the sculptor blunging the clay. They lead our thoughts and force our emotions.

Hormones are behind our love and our hate. Our admiration and our indifference. Hormones are chemistry that moves the mind.

Hormones are greetings to our nervous system from our body. Hormones are the reminder that pure spirit in empyreans confronts with the plexus of bones, muscles, pituitaries, cartilages, adipose tissues, skin and hair. You think you are a master of your own feelings, that you are able to call them and tame them - but the moment comes, and everything happens and it turns that some hormone was not produced in your body, and you don't look at someone like the night before.

You know, this is truly scary. You think this bliss, this love, this sharing will be there forever.

And then - hush - someone unscrewed the light bulb.

Emptyness, darkness, and distant cries.

Thunderstorm over Mosow

Dot and Line

You forget, because you're so busy going from a to z, that there's 24 letters in between

Enchanting path - no resolution, no final, no exit.
My consciousness unfolded before me like a fractal, ever closed in itself and ever repeating itself.
This is a knowledge that cuts, a knowledge that makes throw like a baby - that there is no escape from within yourself.

How can I, how could I open my skull box and show it to everyone? How could I spread over horizons, crushing my brain over the sky, how can I unite with you, remove these thick walls and be together, be as one with you, with everyone?

No. Escape. From. Within. Yourself.

Consciousness produces games. Games that extend and melt into eternity.

Enlightment turns to be a capability to stop games. Enlightment comes as a short moment when games (talk is just a sort of this game) are stopped.
Short moment of balance - just a second - on the edge of the way, and then comes slipping into any - first - available game.

What is there in the end? - I asked the wise man. I like the path - he replied.

But blast it, these are just two parts of the same bloody story - you can walk a trail, or you can walk it towards your goal, - and nothing changes, still you walk the path, and it ends, and the new one begins. One likes dots, other one likes lines that connect them.

Tell me wise man - this damn arrow of Zenon, does it move or does it rest?

The transfer

For a long time in my life I gave great weight to texts. The written / published word overpasses the limits of space and time, it brings back the dead, it makes closer the living you would never see. The word allows to universalize exeprience, to transplant it from one head into another. The word unites the human world, giving it the common pool of meaning and understanding.

Thus, the word gives a new dimension of existence.

Yet, the longer it goes, the clearer it is to me that the real understanding is outside the borders of conversation and text. The key ability by which knowledge is produced (and not simply reproduced) can never be carried on paper (or into a text file). The description is a projection that loses something very important, perhaps the very essence of things.

All the people I learnt from - especially those I learn from now - though they teach by words, but the learning goes between these words, in inflexions and obertones, in micro-gestures, in their ways to keep their bodies, to look at their interlocutors etc etc. I saw this - and I realized why so many clever and talented persons can have so much disdain for texts as a means of interpersonal communication. Why they value conversation and any other way to stay face to face / side by side. In nonverbal communication they try to devour the most important - and never spoken - messages.

This specific relationship between a tutor and student is expressed in the tradition of Karma Kagyu Buddhism: you can have a lot of practice, but your true advance is only possible when a teacher gives you some new knowledge in specially prepared circumstances - this is called 'the transfer'. Many unique scientific schools, e.g. the school of Russian physicists, is greatly due to such a transfer from English physicist, from Rutherford to Kapitsa and Landau, and Rutherford's tradition goes back to Newton and Bacon, and from them to medieval naturalists.

Well, Michael Polanyi wrote a book on this, The Tacit Dimension, already in 1966. One may say there is nothing new.

But here is what confuses me. Anyone participating in this transfer assembles the experience of hundred generations. And this chain can break at any link - just because the transfer of tacit knowledge requires lengthy interaction, teaching and apprenticeship. Knowledge that is inseparably connected with the body, personalized knowledge - is at the same time most vulnerable. One can get it only by going inside the tradition, but the tradition is dependent on specific carriers and is linked with these carriers indissolubly - thus important and valuable traditions can cease.

The question that vexes me is: do we have an opportunity to extend knowledge codification? To devour messages least submitting to description? How can we do that? Do we need to create a new glossary? Do we need to introduce new line of descriptions, like in musical score, to describe emotional states, positions of the body, etc.? Or do we need to use technical means - e.g. video recording? (and do we need to create video-discourses instead of texts, to rebuild the standards of communication following new technical opportunities?) How - and by what means - can we preserve the uniqueness that we can learn from?

Internet Divides

Recently I spoke with two renowned academicians - and I heard them saying:
Internet is a rubbish dump, people throw there about anything, without any structure or order. If there were any order - like one has in a warehouse - one could easily get what one needs, not what one is provided. Yet it happens that one is looking for a scientific article and runs into a pornosite.

Internet, they claimed, had just slipped. It was allowed to develop on its own, following the principle of 'let thousand flowers bloom', only there were millions of flowers. As a result, internet lacks structure, internet lacks unity, etc. etc. Introducing organization would require someone to develop methodology, thesaurus, rules, standards of classification etc. - something that can hardly be developed by average intellects.

I heard these smart and worthy people talking - and I thought about the great division between them and the reality swiftly building around them.
These people still treat internet as if it is only a means of communication - yet networks already live their own life, organizing members according to their needs.
These people think that they can structure a growing polyp - yet the major virtue of this polyp is that it has no structure, and so it can adsorb novelty, casting its tenticles anywhere one can imagine.
These people think a variety is a fluctuation, deviation from the only appropriate point of view - yet it is an unceasing morphogenesis, emergence of new forms and types.
These people think that internet is a library - and it already has the essence of Life itself.

It seems that inside the digital divide - the separation of humanity by the level of access to telecommunications - there goes another line of division. It goes through an ability to accept oneself as a part of a global web, through one's ability and willingness to participate in labile fuzzy community structures, ephemeral unions breaking and reestablishing again in a blink. In other words, it goes through our ability to accept self-organization instead of organization, convention instead of prescription, opportunity instead of norm.

In the end, 'inside' this line there are people that are able to cope with the challenge of soul and spirit relativity. People that work with values and meanings as instruments, people that create rules of communications and not simply obeying rules introduced by someone. Inside this line there is Web 2.0 ideology, where blogs, Wiki and shared documents form the major format of interaction. Where a phrase is less important than a dialoge.

Those 'inside' this line would agree that it is counterproductive to regulate internet. And it more productive to fall into its soft embrace, to dive into them deeply, and to do whatever you like. The great power of self-organization will decide.

And 'outside' there are these people who need catalogue and thesaurus, organization and organizer. They still will stay there, they will demand what they think is right - those (billions of ) people that do not even have access to the internet whatsoever. But the life has already changed, it changes every day, and its most quick and qualitative changes are due to those inside this novelty, inside the arising singularity, united by creation of the new world.

Meaning and observer

in response to claims that meaning can be defined as an objective phenomenon (by looking into simple structures such as basic organisms or chemical reactions):

I wonder how do we get around the problem of observer. The meaning of interaction between elements of a basic living system (or even a complex chemical system) exists only for us humans. We could identify behavioural regularities and constraints, and thus create a causal link between them. But many alternative descriptions come possible. We could look at the living system in Cartesian manner, claiming that simple mechanical laws underlie what is called a 'meaningful behaviour': living organisms could be but automata conditioned to move in the presence of acid. Or, we can say there is an
animating spirit that assigns meaning to the substance of acid as much as does to the action of an organism: could meaning be 'dissolved' in acid and 'absorbed' by organism placed into acid? Or, we can say that an organism extracts meaningful information from its interaction with the acid. Different frames of the observer fill in the observed situation with
different meanings, yet the ultimate essence of meaning still seems to escape - and this allows for multiple descriptions.

What I claim is that meanings are intrinsic to the observer (I believe Maturana and Varela held the same p.o.v.), and they are revealed in the observation, yet cannot be homomorphically transormed into descriptions of observation, that use language invariant to all observers (e.g. mathematical formulas). If meanings are intrinsic, observers could only describe these observations to themselves, but heterogeneity of observer qualities would retain them from adequate descriptions to others. Maybe I am wrong though.

Social control

Anyone struggling 'for' or 'against' (drugs, terror, healthier life, better society...) is recommended to read Technology and Social Control by Gary Marx:
http://web.mit.edu/gtmarx/www/techandsocial.html

All the proposed methods are listed, and pros/cons given for each of them.

Ivan Illich

Illich: http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-illic.htm

If Foucault tests traditional limitations of the sociaty and demonstrates relativity of norm and pathology (in terms of social construct), Illich goes way beyond that. In fact, he shows that social institutions distort 'pictures of reality', substituting the desired by the similar by the name, but the contrary by the essence. Medicalization serves not the improvement but the destruction of health(iatrogenesis - illnesses created by physicians, either as a consequence of malpractice or as the way illness is defined); schooling serves not the learning, but the destruction of critical and learning capabilities; national security system does not increase the social security but rather creates additional threats.

Works of Illich are so constructive and non-compromising in critique, that he is praised neither by left-wingers nor by right-wingers. He stands there as a lone thinker. But anyone trying to describe functions and malfunctions of social institutions has to resolve questions he has posed.

Living on the Edge

what divides reality from illusion
thin film of the soap bubble
razor blade
fractal
non-integer-numbered state
between the grid of 2 and 3
the dimension of 2,365879896281217...

it is naive to think you can slip as a snail over the blade
most likely you will be cut in two

Deep Inside

WHO DOESN'T SLEEP WHEN YOU DO?
WHO IS THAT SILENT WITNESS OF ALL YOUR CONDITIONS?
WHO IS HE THAT WATCHES FROM BEHIND YOUR BACK?

von Foerster wrote(inspired by Spencer-Brown's Laws of the Form): when psyche operates with itself, a recurtion function emerges: our self-description has to be included into description pf ourselves: O:S->S
endlessly unceasing reflection leads us to the kingdom of mirrors
the demented infinity of psychic life

but there is a hope that Brower's
theorem could be applied to this case, and then the system should have a set of steady ponts S*: S*=O(S*)
or - part of the obersver is his 'eigenstates'
Nirvana as eigenvalue

Meaning as the nonmeasurable

as I looked through the recent discussion of the FIS society, it stroke my mind that the meaning could be something that avoids being measured. It is the same problem that we have with science itself: the more we try to describe world in rigid terms, the more of the real world slips through these terms. Since we humans as cognitive subjects have both verbal and non-verbal cognition, rational and irrational cognitive dimension, we only capture part of the picture. New narratives are created, but meaning of original narratives, or objects from which they originate, is never fully explained.
Is this a methodological cul-de-sac?

No illusion

Can we see ourselves and others
As if through the Naked God's Eye?