Education: A Resistance to Change

Following up on the research paper I posted, there are a number of interesting observations I can make from the more distant perspective I have now.

One of these observations is that the resistance to change regarding education is profound, and has implications for future efforts to reform our larger culture.

The public's response to educational scare stories like 'omg the Chinese are beating us in math' is to have more memorization of facts, more high-stakes testing, and more carrot-and-stick incentives for teachers and students. This approach is similar to our culture's response to other problems: to keep adding more complexity to the system, figuring that somehow 'more of the same' will fix it.

Crime is high? More cops and more prisons will solve the problem!

Kids are using drugs? Scare them straight, and make the consequences of getting caught really high. That will get them to stop using (illegal, non-Pfizer-approved) drugs!

When people challenge these paradigms, the reaction is to retrench and build the pyramid higher. Sophisticated propaganda models like "our schools are great!" react to outside threats and work to humiliate, marginalize and/or destroy competing propaganda models.

When these propaganda models start to weaken, another model is ready to take its place:

We're running low on cheap oil? Well, let's open up more areas to drilling! And we'd better make sure to station more troops around the oil wells in the middle east. This has worked great since 1950 ... what could go wrong!?

(when this model starts to fail, we get ...)

OK, so there's actually some sort of limit on how much cheap oil is actually in the ground? No problem! Hybrid electric cars will solve everything. We'll just shift seamlessly from oil to electricity.

It's very difficult to create fundamental change in a system that is so adept at repairing holes in the dike. Public propaganda models are very sophisticated these days, are are very well-funded by established interests that profit from their continuation.

The systems are robust, but there are real people involved at level. How about appealing to the actors involved in maintaining the failing systems?

From the previous article:

"Holt argued for a radical change in the way schools were organized, but found that asking teachers to do things that were "so obviously beyond their power" was counterproductive. Instead, he asked teachers to make small changes in the classroom through a process of trial and error -- and to continue practices that proved effective. This effort, too, failed. The teachers he spoke to were too fearful to seek out their own answers, relying on the expertise of professionals above their own personal judgment."

Established systems also have sophisticated methods of filtering its membership. Teachers have to attend (at a minimum) 4 years of college, and 3 years of low status non-tenured teaching. Half of all people who make it through 16 years of schooling to become teachers do not make it through this three year trial period. This is a very effective method of assuring that teachers who would disrupt the status quo don't become professional teachers; and that even the few that get through are moderated by having to conform to peer expectations for at least their first 3 years (prior to receiving tenure).

This type of filtering is very common in bureaucratic organizations, and makes appealing to the regular people involved in a bureaucracy difficult. Not only have they been selected for their ability to conform to organizational expectations, their livelyhood is also dependent on the status quo.

This creates a very powerful paradigm, one that filters incoming information and prevents bureaucrats from seeing many of the worst abuses of their organization.

There is significant resistance to change in a large organization like a school district -- so how does one create change, then?

I'll follow up on this thought later this week.

When Deprived of Propaganda ...

A followup on a previous post, I'm not sure how long it will take the right-wing propaganda model on climate change to shift. It seems pretty robust.

Anyone who believes in climate change is a fool, and a tool of the global elite:

"The people who believe the fictional UN story of man-made-global-warming also believe that people are kidnapped by space aliens and injected with non-existant material, or that the Egyptian peramids were built by ancient space aliens, or that the movie Star Wars is a documentary...or they are just servile puppets of the world's elite billionairs."

Climate change is a method of enriching scientists and government workers:

"(I)t is the Mother of all eco-hoaxes. It is perfect for politicians. It is very expensive to study and they can control the funding of studies. The scientists in the field (as well as "environmental journalists") have a vested, pecuniary interest in keeping the myth alive...and funded. The politicians gain power and control. The financial industry stands to make a killing by inventing a commodity out of a naturally occurring trace gas critical to life on Earth."

(Of course, there's no mention of the much much larger amounts of money being made by extractive industries that contribute to climate change).

If a crack appears in that armor, well ... you know ... we can't do anything about it anyways. So why bother?:

"I submit that even minimizing man's impact on the planet is all but useless. For one thing, it is a useless endeavour. China, India, Russia, flat out don't care. Meanwhile their populations are increasing and their "carbon footprint" (what a useless term) grows exponentially ever minute."

And if that all fails, well ... there's always geoengineering:

"(T)he most promising avenue is to invest $9 billion in accelerated research on so-called marine cloud whitening technology. The idea is to create vast fleets of robot ships to pump seawater droplets into the clouds above the oceans to make them reflect more sunlight back into space." Source

It seems like there's about 3 failure points already built into this propaganda model. Breaking through propaganda this powerful will probably take a generational shift.

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Source for most quotes: http://comments.americanthinker.com/read/42323/432787.html

(I didn't want to provide a direct link, but I do need to offer an attribution)

Why Nothing Works

Curt and Ran have both been exploring the same theme, which is why our civilization seems incapable of getting even the simple things right.

Though we may seem particularly incompetent in preparing for resource depletion, Americans aren't all that different from other cultures. Where we differ is that we've been shaped and molded for longer any other society in an environment in which maladaptive traits have been rewarded. As a culture, we haven't really had our teeth kicked in since the 1860s. We've lived in a nation of material goods excess within the living memory of everyone under the age of 75, where the American Dream meant things were just going to keep getting better and better. There's really been no one to take us aside and perform an intervention: "America, dude, you're fat and out of shape ... you're gonna have a heart attack if you keep this up."

Ran identified propaganda (public relations) as a major source of our stupidity, but I'd argue that it runs deeper than that. Modern propaganda techniques are adapted to work on broken or compliant people; they don't work very well on content and self-willed adults.

I'd argue that education is more fundamental to explaining why things are as screwed up as they are today, as children educated in modern schools are taught to be receptive to modern propaganda techniques. (This thought will be picked up in later posts).

It takes a generation for major changes to work their way into a society, as the children educated under the new system come of age. These children are more accepting of new moralities and values ... and they lack the memory of verdant forests, the quiet joy of lazy afternoons of fishing and skipping stones across the lake, and the ability to find contentment in simple tasks and trades.

What will happen to these people when reality begins smacking them in the face? Well, I expect that it will look something like this:

Section quoted from John Talyor Gatto:

"When they come of age, they are certain they must know something because their degrees and licenses say they do. They remain so convinced until an unexpectedly brutal divorce, a corporate downsizing in midlife, or panic attacks of meaninglessness upset the precarious balance of their incomplete humanity, their stillborn adult lives. Alan Bullock, the English historian, said Evil was a state of incompetence. If true, our school adventure has filled the twentieth century with evil.

Ellul puts it this way:

The individual has no chance to exercise his judgment either on principal questions or on their implication; this leads to the atrophy of a faculty not comfortably exercised under [the best of] conditions...Once personal judgment and critical faculties have disappeared or have atrophied, they will not simply reappear when propaganda is suppressed...years of intellectual and spiritual education would be needed to restore such faculties. The propagandee, if deprived of one propaganda, will immediately adopt another, this will spare him the agony of finding himself vis a vis some event without a ready-made opinion."