Over the past few months, I’ve been exposed to the
Australian Technical and Further Education (TAFE) system. In a class-based, caste-inspired social engineering
experiment, Australia took Adam Smith’s division
of labor principle to the extreme insuring that the erudite universities
preserve their fraternity of elitism and broad irrelevance (Australia ranks
last on the OECD’s measure of industrial engagement with universities – behind Mexico!)
while the “working class” are afforded sufficient skills to serve as grist for
the industrial mill. In 1946, Sir Eric
Ashby callously observed:
“Here is the criterion
for determining what subject or parts of a subject should be taught at a university.
If the subject lends itself to disinterested thinking; if generalisation can be
extracted from it; if it can be advanced by research; if in brief, it breeds
ideas in the mind, then the subject is appropriate for a university. If, on the
other hand, the subject borrows all its principles from an older study (as
journalism does from literature, or salesmanship from psychology, or massage
from anatomy and physiology) and does not lead to generalisation, then the
subject is not a proper one for a university. Let it be taught somewhere by all
means. It is important that there should be opportunities for training in it.
But it is a technique, not an exercise for maintaining intellectual health; and
the place for technique is a technical college.”
“If it breeds ideas in the mind”! As though a plumber may not be as likely to
encounter a notion of genius as an ivory tower ensconced academic! Really?
And the Committee on Australian Universities in 1957 warned of the risk
of any technical institution daring to venture into the realm of the Academy as
they would present a risk to the “urgent national need” for skilled and
semi-skilled labor. In 1899, the State of Victoria was the home of
the first inquiry of the Fink Commission (named for Theodore Fink) which sought
to improve the quality of the mechanical and technical training efforts of the 19th
century. In what was to overhaul both
primary and secondary education (as well as reify the divide between university
and vocational tertiary education), the turn of the century brought with it the
“development” imperative to insure that sufficient tradesmen were available to
meet the requirements of the industrial and mining mandates of the
country. In short, with the exception of
the University elite, education is a means to a “gainful” employment for the
industrial, social, or economic mandate determined by…, well, no one is really
quite sure. At no point is the
individual considered relevant in setting the purpose for their industry
– they are just expected to rent their labor to whatever industry the
establishment deems relevant.
I am fundamentally concerned with the absence of a
meaningful critique of the theoretical underpinnings of the Adam Smith and
Marxian argument which merely recites the dogma of labor vs. elite. From the fourth century BC forward, the
notion of division of labor has been rooted in the meeting of sufficiency at a
caloric level (consumption to combustion / extinction). Ibn Khaldun would be appropriately referenced
in his work Muqaddimah in which he
discussed the communal requirement for division of labor. Arguing that division of labor allows for the
needs of a community to be met more efficiently if tasks are divided than if
individuals have sole responsibility for all necessities, Khaldun anticipated
the rise of the industrial model in the 14th century. Focusing on Smith and Marx orthodoxy (not to
mention Alexis de Tocqueville, Immanuel Kant and others) leads to the
reification of the linear notion of production as a means to consumption and
extinction without addressing the underlying moral constructs surrounding:
- A. Replenishment of matter and energy rather than the extractive / extinction utility;
- B. Consideration of who sets the priority for what is manufactured and to what end;
- C. Purposeful despotism when labor is allocated against priorities set by hierarchy into which choice labor allocation has no correlation to real or perceived need; and,
- D. Notions of equivalence to those things that do not serve a consensus “need” but rather are seen as standards of “development” or artifacts of “status”.
When one is building a ship or a road, technical precision
is the difference between fit-for-service and structural failure. When one is dressing a wound, changing a
bed-pan, welding a steel frame, designing a house – some standard of care is
essential. And I’ve been engrossed in
reading what is required to meet the technical education standards for these
and hundreds of other careers. At the same
time, I’ve been examining the University end of town. The profligate elitism that permeates the
dichotomy between tertiary education in Australia borders on the comical. I’ve made the very recent mistake of reading
doctoral dissertations from several of Australia’s leading universities and
what I find amazing is the degree to which they are largely over-weight
literature review and underweight substantive contribution to advancing the
state-of-the-art. Ironically, Australian
universities measure their academic relevance in large part on the number of
times their work is cited paying no attention to whether their work is
being celebrated or impugned. All
publicity is good – apparently.
In short, neither end of the social engineering experiment
is serving the public good or global relevance.
But the failure is one that transcends the current social
discourse. The root concern is that
there is no clear vision – no organizing principle – around which the industry
of education can rally. Complacency fueled
by the illusion of over two decades of economic growth without a recession has
led to a generation of politicians and civil servants who merely recite their
mantras about jobs, innovation, and growth, without a single clue as to what
any of these mean in a global market context.
Australia will be spending over $120 billion dollars on defense over the
budgeted future without a clear doctrine justifying what it’s actually
defending and against whom these defenses are aligned. Australia will be building infrastructure for
growth but cannot articulate what purpose this growth will serve. And nowhere in the dialogue is any
recognition that Australia – a net consumer of other people’s ideas, services,
and programs – could invert that dynamic and become the world’s leader in the
unleashing of innovation from across the globe.
What does this
mean? First we must examine the core
capabilities of the fully functioning education ecosystem. As the abject failure of pundits and analysts
have shown in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, if you measure consensus
assumptions, your conclusions are entirely wrong. In 2006 and 2007, I correctly described the
conditions and the timing of the Global Financial Crisis in 2008[1]. Was I forecasting an outcome using predictive
analytics? No. I was merely observing irrefutable documented
behaviour in an occult industry and critiquing the system level convergence
that was certain. From mass pandemics
(the Asian bird flu) to resource shocks to social paroxysm (the Egyptian
multi-coups), the “trained” and the “expert” are left agape when linear
regression behaviour is punctuated by disequilibrium events. Regrettably, education’s obsession with the
scientific method have taught regression but have assiduously ignored its
dominant fallacy – that we know the variables that matter and
we recognize
that which is significant. Elementary
statistics teach us that interrogatory inquiry presupposes:
- 1. Known variables;
- 2. Known scale in which these variables operate;
- 3. And Measurement Error.
Interestingly, the
same discipline teaches us the error of untested assumptions about normalcy,
kurtosis, skewness, and orthogonality.
However, the modern education system and the scientific method upon
which it is built fails to account for these in every instance diminishing the
efficacy of social and technical interventions.
We are not as much facing a 4th Industrial Revolution[2] as
we are a Scientific Renaissance.
And while the
exceptional “successes” of modernity – from Bill Gates to Mohammed Yunnus to
Eleanor Ostrom – have changed the scale, scope and impact of incumbent modes of
human interaction, they have not fundamentally ushered in new modes of
thinking, examining and engaging a world in a regenerative and productive
way. At the margins, Hunter Lovins and
others have pointed to an opaque future in which biomimicry opens new design
and engineering consideration. This is
an important harbinger of humanity’s future.
But for global citizenship to be possible with as many at 10 billion
inhabitants (or more) on the Earth, integral isomorphism will be
required.
What is Integral
Isomorphism? Ironically, it’s quite
simple. It’s the way the world and the
cosmos works. From intergalactic
conductive matter, to light and magnetism, to photosynthesis to mitochondrial
respiration within our cells, observable principles are evident in
unconstrained fractals and these principles underpin the animating impulses of
relativity, thermodynamics and quantum mechanics. Unconcerned with linear duality, integral
isomorphism engages persistent, generative, infinitely orthogonal dynamics of
activation, transmission and perpetuation where systems are regenerative at
every level. In other words, to be a
productive citizen in the 21st century, a person has to expand their
sensory ability, entertain divergent contextual perspectives, synthesize and
integrate multiple perspectives and narratives with tolerance, see the costs
and benefits of all actions to all actors within the ecosystem, select
appropriate tools to form reproducible experiences, and optimally engage rather
than consume the environment in which we live.
For education to be relevant in the 21st
century, it must be emancipated from the linear industrial construct of
creating rent-based industrial employment and social pacification and liberated
to enable citizens to productively engage in valuable pursuits at the individual
and collective level. This is not an indictment of industry – it is the
recognition that as industry is already in the throes of transformation, so too
must education transform.
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Thank you for your comment. I look forward to considering this in the expanding dialogue. Dave