This blog is a partner to my other blog
TonyWardEdu. Both are related to my website:
www.TonyWardEdu.com where there are more than 100- downloadable PDFs on issues such as
- Critical Theory
- Critical Pedagogy
- Critical; Education Theory
- Popular Education
- Cultural Studies
- Marxist Humanism
- Anti-Capitalism
- Anti-Colonialism
- Anti-Imperialism
Depending on the content I will be posting in either of the blogs. This particular one will deal more specifically with issues of Pedagogy. The notion of pedagogy has two meanings:
- On the one hand it refers to the kinds of teaching/learning practices that take place in the classroom.
- On the other hand it has a broader meaning that refers to the kinds of learning experiences that are available and that take place in the wider social environment.
The term Critical Pedagogy refers to the kinds of learning experiences that link the learner critically to the social, political and economic forces that shape his or her learning, raising awareness of the relations of econoomic and political power that influence what is and can be taught. Critical Pedagogy has as its primary aim a process of conscientization the purpose of which is to bring about social change in pursuit of greater equity and justice. It has its roots in Marxist philosophy and is based largely upon the works and writings of the late Brazilian educator Paulo Freire.
For a beginning, here's a piece that I wrote some time ago:
EDUCATION, SOCIAL CONTROL AND EXTRINSIC EVALUATION
Introduction.
For the last sixty years since the end of World War II, the theory and practice of Education has been increasingly penetrated by a form of technical rationality manifest by ideologies of performativity underpinned by theories of Behaviourism, which seek to found the process of learning on a reward system operated by the State, but grounded in the needs, aspirations and demands of the military/industrial complex. With the advance of global capitalism, this penetration of the education system has colonized almost the entire planet, and almost all cultures. It has become the normative benchmark of teaching and learning quality, and, apart from small and isolated pockets of resistance (popular culture, critical pedagogy, co-operative learning, student-centered learning etc.) has achieved almost total hegemony.
At the same time, the world has edged ever closer to environmental and economic meltdown. We stand at a critical moment of history, in which the very future of the planet and its future generations hangs in the balance. It is my contention, argued here, that these two phenomena are intimately related, and that indeed our current system of education is one of the primary contributors to our present predicament, linked as it is to systems of competition and exploitation. Following on from this, I will argue that the impending catastrophe can be averted through nothing less than a complete transformation of the education process, the abandonment of its competitive ethic and its extrinsic reward systems.
I begin with an analysis of the principles inherent in behaviourism theories, and follow this with an analysis of the concept of work, showing how the two are linked and how both are connected to normative systems of education. Following this, I present alternative or competing concepts of both work and education, demonstrating in the process how they hold out hope for a way of transforming our relations with each other and with the physical environment.
Extrinsic Rewards in Work: Product Orientation
The Behaviourist model of human activity requires that the reward or reinforcer and the operant or class of behaviours elicited by them are by definition extrinsic to each other. Under the theory of behaviourism, an action or behaviour cannot be self-reinforcing. What has led to its selection must be some other reward than the behaviour itself. In behaviorist terms, it is very difficult to measure the influence of intrinsic reinforcement to the conditioned task or behaviour involved.
On the other hand, it is perfectly possible to measure the degree to which a wage level reinforces work behaviour of someone for whom the wage is the reinforcement, all other wage levels and possible reinforcers being held constant. One simply has to decrease the wage to see at which point the reinforcer will cease to reinforce - the point at which the worker will stop work. It is this measurability of extrinsic reinforcers which makes them so amenable to scientific analysis, and also so generalisable to alternative behavioural settings like industrialised production. Not surprisingly, behaviourist theories have had a reciprocally wide ranging impact throughout the economic world, in attempts to generate higher productivity as well as increased consumption.
While Skinnerian behaviourism purports to be a value-neutral scientific model, the development of a reward system based on extrinsicity has its costs at the experiential level, however. Studying the role of competition in society and its psychological effect upon its participants, social psychologist Alfie Kohn has discovered that one of the most significant effects of competitive behaviour is that it results in the satisfaction acquired from any task being relocated outside of the task concerned. In other words, that task satisfaction becomes extrinsic to the task. This all has a direct implication upon the ways in which we experience our relationship to work and to the social relations which surround it having a very important influence, for instance, upon the ways in which we experience the issue and process of creativity both personally and generically.
Intrinsic Rewards in Work: Process Orientation
Any process of creation, as for example, the writing of a PhD dissertation, involves, the pulling together and making sense of one's life experiences, the sense of presenting a truly personal perspective, the sense of adventure at being on the edge of important theoretical discoveries, the sense of satisfaction at synthesizing previously distant or oppositional perspectives into a new and meaningful wholes, the joy of discovering previous theoreticians with whom one feels a sense of solidarity, and so on - these all form an important reason for the continuation of the work, particularly in the face of the long hours, limitations placed upon personal lives and relationships, and the enormous amount of time involved and so on. All of these intrinsic reasons and rewards for the arduous task of completing a Dissertation count for nothing, if one is doing it for an extrinsic reward such as an anticipated increase in pay. In these circumstances, a different kind of document is produced, dealing with different issues in different ways.
Alfie Kohn found in his research into competition that extrinsic reward systems generally equate with what people consider to be "work", while intrinsic rewards correspond to the individual's experience of "play". He found evidence to suggest that extrinsic rewards actually diminish the quality of work, and are associated with the development of rigid personalities and product orientation. I believe it is like this with all creative endeavours. Arthur Koestler reinforces this perception in his epic analytical work The Act of Creation, which celebrates the value and importance of curiosity to the creative act. In comparing these two views, I believe that it is partly the extrinsicity of the reward system of "work" which largely contributes to its alienating character - that is, its isolation from the spiritual and characterological development of the individual.
Normative Conceptions of Work
The model of "economic man" - homo-economicus - promoted by modern economists and legitimated by behaviourists, has helped to shape conceptions of work and consumption which present us with a bleak picture of task enjoyment. Work is here stripped of its joy and its dignity. It becomes, in the economist's own terms a disutility. This is an important distinction to make, because it blankets work with the kind of meaning which may be at variance with the meaning people assign to it themselves in their daily lives, and the ones which give meaning back to their own lives, in a meanigful task creatively well done. This is because the actual way which people value work is excluded from the normative economic-behaviour equation, since it may involve reinforcers which are intrinsic and which therefore cannot be measured.
One of the more important internal contradictions of economic theory is the claim by economists that their theories are independent of particular cultural practices, that they are instead, universal and invariant. Value neutrality implies the exclusion of any moral responsibility or importance. The claim that behaviourism or abstract economic theories are morally-neutral, that they are simply mechanisms which can be used for either good or evil purposes ignores the reality of its own effect in the lives of real people.
Such claims ignore the profoundly colonising aspects of Western economic theory which have turned countless pre-industrialised and economically self-sufficient peoples into unemployed welfare recipients by inculcating a "need" for industrialised commodities. They take no account, for instance, of the experiences of indigenous peoples in remote regions of the globe like Sarawak in Malaysia which are characterised by vast areas of deforested desolation, strip-logged of their native hardwood rain forests, but populated by occasional shabby villages occupied by dishevelled children clustered around colour TVs, watching American soap operas. Such examples speak to the continuing colonisation and destruction of whole cultures with alien and potentially catastrophic notions of "work".
A Marxist Conception of Work: Work as Self-Creation
If we ascribe to rational economic behaviour a meaning which is more inclusive than that which is generally accepted - that acknowledges a reflexive moral responsibility, then it takes on a meaning much more general viz. the production of daily life, rather than the exchange of commodities. This definition, coincidentally, is the one much favoured by Marx:
"Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man, of his own accord starts, regulates and controls the material re-actions between himself and nature. He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature's productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway. We presuppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour process we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but also realises a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will."
For Marx, therefore, labour seen as the production of commodities, as the precursor to consumption of commodities is labour devalued and alienated. Labour, in its most creative and humanly important form - in the production of a creative self which values itself and which by extension values all other creative selves - this labour is not the labour of the economist's economic man alone, but of the whole person, of the creative and engaged person. Such a person by definition is related to the social collectivity in a very different way from that which we see in a society of economic producers and consumers. It is a society in which the moral imperative is still in operation, in which the creative worker asks herself in the process of production how the world ought to be, and work, in this context, becomes the process of shaping that world.
Work, Education and Economic Rationality
The Behaviourist view of human activity is really driven by the economic view of work and social life which derives directly from the social relations of capitalist production, and has become a self-fulfilling prophesy. But the range of rationalist economic thought has spread beyond the factory and the laboratory. Many of Skinner's experiments in the 1960s were with "teaching machines", through which it was hoped to established programmed learning systems which would reduce the needed number of teachers and would allow students to learn subjects from machines programmed to deliver appropriate rewards for "right" answers. These have now been superseded by computers.
All of this indicates that the educational environment has itself been invaded by the ideology of economic rationalism, and indeed several researchers have made this suggestion. Michael Apple, for instance, has shown how the educational textbook has now been developed into a knowledge system in which the teacher is stripped of any human or personal response to the children under his or her care, and required only to follow the programmed responses set out in the texts. This raises serious questions about whether these forms of pedagogy are appropriate forms of learning. We must begin to question at a deeper level, what the purpose of education is, and what it might otherwise be.
There are two important reasons for being concerned about the issue of work as a disutility from an educational point of view. The first is that if the purpose of education is to train people for work so defined, then it will imply one particular form of learning and teaching in which children are trained to value and respond to extrinsic as opposed to intrinsic reward systems. The second reason is that, in both of its teaching and learning capacities, schooling can be seen as a form of work, and can therefore be structured to correspond to extrinsic, rather than intrinsic reward systems.
Adam Smith himself never saw his economic theories extending beyond the labour market, but I believe that rational economic thought has become so invasive and so pervasive that it has increasingly shaped all our social relations and our perceptions to the extent that it becomes difficult to see why it might not be appropriate for whole areas of human experience and life. Our thoughts and experiences have become colonised, in other words, by the economic rationality of capitalism. In the last twenty years of Thatcherism and Reaganism, with the adoption, extension and promulgation of the economic theories of Milton Friedman by the New Right as a form of ideology backed by the massive power of corporate capital, no corner of life has escaped, and even the university, the traditionally sacrosanct enclave of contemplative meditation and critical social thought, previously granted at least theoretical detachment or immunity from political or ideological interference in the name of the common good, has been transformed.
Given all of these trends, it therefore becomes important to gain some critical distance from the processes to which education has been subjected. We need to be able to assure ourselves that what has been lost to this process is less valuable than that which has been gained, and to whom, ultimately the surplus value accrues. Since the source of all of these transformations has been the conception of work as it has developed since the time of Adam Smith, one way to begin any critical analysis is to challenge the normative conception of work itself - to see, perhaps if there are other ways of conceiving of labour than as a commodified disutility. In particular, we need to question the very conception of work as that which one does for extrinsic reward rather than for its intrinsic value, because this concept has colonized all of our conceptions of what teaching and learning are like and might be like. This can be seen most clearly in the use of education in the historical colonisation of indigenous peoples, where intrinsic values within education were of fundamental concern.
The Importance of Education as an Instrument of Colonisation and Alienation
Of particular interest is the crucial importance given by the colonising culture, to the transformation of the environment of learning of the colonised. Throughout the colonised world, schooling was the leading component of the assimilationist strategy, and continues to be so today. In New Zealand, for instance, this process of assimilation happened for the Maori just as it did for most colonized cultures. Until the late 1950s, Maori students were systematically beaten for speaking their own tongue while at school, and of course, their Maori-speaking parents struggled to ensure the safety and well-being of their children by discouraging them from speaking Maori at home, and insisting upon English being spoken there as well. But the ethic of punishment had a more insidious influence upon the awareness of native peoples. The very possibility of punishment as a social reality presupposes the existence of an extrinsic system of judgement, which, of course, the overarching and introduced normativity of the Nation (the State) is designed to provide. Coupled with the imposition of a systematic educative authority, the ethic of punishment consolidated the total destruction of indigenous cultures.
It matters not that this system moves towards punishment or reward, because its most important salient feature is its extrinsicity, locating the responsibility for one's sense of identity exterior to the person. What counts is that authority, and value is placed beyond the reach of one's personal autonomy. It also implicitly cements into place a respect for the locus of judgment, in other words, a respect for extrinsic authority which translates into a respect for the coloniser and which corresponds to the normative social values of the dominant culture itself, therefore advancing the process of assimilation into the existing social hierarchy.
The State system of education was crucial to this process. In New Zealand, for instance, Linda Smith, a prominent Maori critical education theorist has spoken of how European schools were consciously distributed throughout the population to hasten the assimilation of the Maori:
"There is no doubt that the initial overt purpose of the schooling that was provided for Maori people was to assist in the assimilation of Maori society. The dealings of the native land court and the economic activities it fostered sought to destroy the more visible aspects of Maori life, such as the ownership of lands, the power of the chiefs and the physical well-being of people who attended the court sittings. Although its rulings and other effects of land legislation struck deep into Maori society, it met and conducted its business in centers away from the day to day activities of most Maori communities....Schools, however, were placed in the heart of Maori communities like Trojan horses. Their task was to destroy the less visible aspects of Maori life: beliefs, value systems and the spiritual bonds that connected people to each other and to their environment. They were to be replaced by new sets of values, attitudes and behaviours. These were not quite the same ones being taught to Pakeha children, for Maori children also needed to be educated into their place in society based on class stratification and exploitation."
Martin Carnoy convincingly links the use of increasingly compulsory State education as a pacification and assimilation device with its instrumental use in the expansion of the colonial capitalist economy of the European nations, citing the historical examples of Brazil and Peru. Like Smith, he notes the significant part played in this process by the inculcation of a respect for extrinsic authority. The use of Eurocentric schooling (with its own subtle ways of inculcating the internalisation of social control) continues to operate down to the present albeit in subdued form in Western education. Listen to the experience of sociologist Jules Henry whose experiences of Lakota children in primary school tell a profound story, of those who are shamed into silence by the competitive individualism of their Anglo peers:
“Boris (a Lakota) had trouble reducing 12/16 to the lowest terms, and could only get as far as 6/8. The teacher asked him quietly if that was as far as he could reduce it. She suggested he “think”. Much heaving up and down and waving of hands by the other students, all frantic to correct him. Boris pretty unhappy, probably mentally paralysed. The teacher quiet, patient, ignores the others and concentrates with look and voice on Boris. After a minute or two, she turns to the class and says, “Well, who can tell Boris what the number is?” A forest of hands appears, and the teacher calls Peggy. Peggy says that four may be divided into the numerator and the denominator... Boris’ failure made it possible for Peggy to succeed; his misery is the occasion for her rejoicing. It is a standard condition of the contemporary American elementary school. To a Zuni, Hopi or D(L)Lakota Indian, Peggy’s performance would seem cruel beyond belief, for competition, the wringing out of success from somebody's failure, is a form of torture foreign to those non-competitive cultures. Looked at from Boris’ point of view, the nightmare at the blackboard was, perhaps, a lesson in controlling himself so that he would not fly shrieking from the room under enormous public pressure. Such experiences force every man reared in our culture, over and over again, night in and night out, even at the pinnacle of success, to dream not of success, but of failure. At school, the external nightmare is internalized for life. Boris was not learning arithmetic only; he was learning the essential nightmare also. To be successful in our culture, one must learn to dream of failure.”
Here we witness in embryonic form the entire panoply of the social relations of production. Boris must accept the authority of the teacher as extrinsic. She tell him to "think", as though thinking were something he does not know how to do. She has the authority, in other words, to prescribe the manner of his thinking. She is, after all, the teacher. She has the power to turn the attention of the whole class elsewhere. Or not. She waits a few minutes, imposing her own temporality on his own, but doing so in an environment of shame in which time will never be his own again. We see the implicit hierarchy in this as well as explicitly in the emerging differentiation between the "bright" children with their hands waving, and the unfortunate and lowly Boris. There is also the intense individualism, inscribed and reinforced by and upon a pervasive ethos of humiliation brewed in the context of no-win public competition and shame.
Hand in hand with punishment (and competition) we see by extension of this control-internalisation the development of an increased tendency to conformity, to remaining silent, not wanting to "stand out from the crowd". Few citizens, I am sure, remember a point in their lives when they said to themselves, "I don't agree with having to sell my labour for less than I need to really advance my personal economic circumstances or for what I feel I'm really worth, but I guess I'd better do it because that's what's expected of me", because by then, the preconditioned circumstances of acceptance were largely forgotten historical events. They occurred, most probably, in circumstances such as these experienced by Boris.
They happened in one's primary and secondary stages of socialisation, in the home and/or in school, and they occurred not in the form of a rational analysis of the ethos of the labour market, but in the barely-remembered painful acceptance of deep structural principles upon which capitalism depends for its own existence, and which are programmed into social life as normativities, so that their inculcation occurs more or less unproblematically at the surface level of awareness. The ethic of competition is one of these principles, and along with the inculcation of extrinsic authority and an acceptance of hierarchy, and a belief in an individualised self, all calculated to create a sense of conformity to a social norm or an overarching State authority, it represents one of the four cornerstones of the social relations of production by which capitalism reproduces itself. The system of education is the place where each generation is conditioned to accept these social relations and to learn the process and the state of alienation to which they are related as normalised social reality
Buddhist Economics: An Alternative Theory of Work
This brings us to the nub of the issue about work and about intrinsic value. Viewing economic life as a programme of exchange rather than as the production of life shifts the focus of attention away from the actual events and experiences which go to make up a life of productive toil onto the value which commodities can acquire through exchange. In this process, the everyday experience of productive life disappears, and work loses whatever intrinsic value it might have had for the people who labour. This is what we mean when we say that work, under capitalist economic theory, becomes a disutility.
Within this framework, it acquires only the meaning it can derive from increasing the opportunity to consume, through the sale of labour at the highest price for the least amount of toil, to acquire an increased amount of leisure to enjoy the commodities which can be acquired through this cyclical process. In this process, hundreds of millions of people spend one third of their lives in jobs which they despise but which they tolerate for the extrinsic reinforcement of the paycheck or the annual holiday. It is perhaps why life expectancy after retirement is so low - because people have spent the best part of their productive lives in extrinsically-valued unproductive activity, and when that activity ceases, there is nothing of intrinsic value left to replace it.
Perhaps the most graphic example of the difference between these two different conceptions of economic life is to be found in the late E. F. Schumacher's book Small is Beautiful. There, he compares Western economic principles with what he terms "Buddhist Economics", or economics that might pertain to someone familiar with the admonition to strive for "Right Livelihood" which is one of the precepts of the Buddha's Eightfold Path to enlightenment. The contrast is itself enlightening. Schumacher asks the reader to imagine a different form of economic theory - one based upon Buddhist precepts, and then poses the question about whether such an economic system is compatible with capitalism, and whether those Buddhist countries which are rushing to embrace and integrate the capitalist ethic into their national cultures are admitting instead a Trojan horse which will bring about the total transformation and ultimate destruction of their traditions and beliefs as the earlier example of Sarawak seems to indicate.
Schumacher notes first that it is universally accepted that the universal source of wealth is labour. From the Western economic point of view, labour is seen as another commodity in the production process, whose value from the employer's point of view, would be ideal were it reduced to a zero cost of production. From the worker's viewpoint, the opposite is the case. The worker would like to have as much pay for as little work as possible. Consequently, the elimination of work is in a very real sense, the ideal of both parties, and work, as a consequence assumes the status of a commodity without intrinsic value. For both, labour stands as a disutility.
From a Buddhist point of view, on the other hand, labour has three intrinsic values. It gives the worker an opportunity to develop his or her faculties. It allows the worker to transcend egocentredness by working with others towards a common goal, and to provide material goods needed for a spiritual existence. From the Buddhist point of view, therefore, the meaningless organisation of work is a violation of the eightfold path, indicating a greater concern for material things than for people, an appalling lack of compassion and a debasement of the experience of living.
The pursuit of leisure through the elimination of work, which is the goal of the worker, on the other hand, fails to recognise that they are intrinsically related and that one cannot separate them without destroying the value of both. In this context, mechanisation can be seen in two different ways - as the enhancement of human skill, and as the initiation of mechanical slavery. Within the Buddhist cosmology, removing the essentially creative element from work and replacing it with mechanical production to achieve greater output is to deny to the worker the opportunity to participate in creating and purifying his or her own character, since character is formed primarily through work. (The parallel with Marx is not inconsequential).
According to this theory, work properly appreciated, nourishes the spirit and character in the same way that food nourishes the body, and indeed, the act and discipline of working - of focussing the attention and controlling the movement of the body towards a desired end similarly establishes an awareness which is integral to a reciprocal spiritual, mental and physical awareness. Unemployment from a Buddhist perspective is therefore a calamitous event in a person's life, and by extension, the sine qua non of a Buddhist economics would be full employment for all of those desiring to work. It will be immediately obvious that this theory conflicts at a fundamental level with anything other than the most abstract formulation of free market economics, which requires a substantial pool of unemployed in order to create a demand for jobs so as to keep the cost of labour to a minimum.
Similarly, a central precept of Buddhism is a detachment from the craving for material wealth - not, one hastens to add, from the enjoyment of material objects per se. From this point of view, and in contradistinction to the capitalist ethic, the person who consumes least is more enlightened than the one who craves pleasure through continued possession. In this sense, consumerism, from a Buddhist perspective, is excessively irrational:
"The ownership and consumption of goods is a means to an end, and Buddhist economics is the systematic study about how to attain given ends with the minimum means."
This contrasts completely with capitalism, where consumption is the sole end of all economic activity, of which land, labour and capital are the means. Clearly, an economic system which attempts to optimise (or even minimise) consumption rather than to maximise it has a very different relationship to the world of material resources. All of this takes place in the context of an increasing potential for global violence in a world of diminishing resources, where uneven distribution is the cause of untold human suffering.
We know that Western capitalist consumption is rapidly devouring both the renewable and non-renewable resources of the poor countries themselves, and that our affluence (contrary to the win-win mythology of free-marketeers) is a direct cause of their poverty. We saw earlier how these disparities are global, and how they potentially threaten all life on the planet.
None of these contradictions would surprise a Buddhist economist, since they are a direct result of a lack of awareness to pursue a "right livelihood" in the practice of one's professional conduct as an economist (or an architect or a lawyer). Buddhism, with its emphasis upon simplicity, utility and non-violence stands in dignified comparison with the voracity of consumer capitalism. Taking this into account, it follows that a Buddhist economic theory would privilege self-sufficiency and local trading over remote importation of commodities. The satisfaction of needs by recourse to distant markets is, from a Buddhist point of view, a mark of failure, whereas from a capitalist point of view it is one of the prime indicators of economic growth and therefore of economic success.
From a Buddhist point of view, which recognises the intrinsic value of all sentient beings such a policy is an act of barbarism which separates human beings from their inherent relationship to and dependency upon their natural world. Hence, to use non-renewable resources unwisely is, for the Buddhist, akin to spending one's capital, and a society which based its whole way of life, as the developed countries do, upon the consumption of non-renewable resources would be perpetrating an act of unimaginable violence. Schumacher closes his comparison by suggesting that such a course of action can in the end only be a temporary measure and that with absolute certainty we can predict an increase in social, cultural and material instability - in the ultimate collapse of the whole economic system founded upon such waste, exploitation and lack of wisdom. He might have added:
"The last cause of all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses as compared to the tendency of capitalist production to develop the productive forces in such a way that only the absolute power of consumption of the entire society would be their limit."
Schumacher's predictions, made in the 1970, scorned in the 1980s may prove yet to be prescient. George Soros, the Hungarian multi-billionaire noted in a recent article on the world economy:
"Although I have made a fortune in the financial markets. I now fear that... the spread of market values into all areas of life is endangering our open and democratic society. The main enemy of the open society, I believe, is no longer the communist, but the capitalist society."
Capitalist economic theory, as the saying goes, appears to know the price of everything and the value of nothing. This is because value is not reducible to a generalised factor in an economic equation. It is personal, and it is moral. The Buddhist values the Eightfold path not because it is cheaper than Christianity, but because it embodies values which give meaning to the totality of life, and creates a model of the universe which make a moral sense. It is precisely the moral which is pushed aside by economic rationality of the kind which has colonised Western thought and beliefs, and I believe that it is time to retrieve what Henry Giroux has called a "radical provisional morality". This is particularly the case in education where curricula and pedagogy have increasingly been shaped towards an amoral view of life.
A Parallel Buddhist Conception of Education
Schumakcher's Buddhist economics, poses a very different model of the universe than that which forms the basis of modern economic rationality. It not only views the role of work differently, but by extension, such a view also has quite different implications in the field of education. Any system of education which had as its primary goal to fit the student for the jobs available in the outside world in a capitalist economy would structure its curriculum and pedagogies to condition students to accept and value extrinsic reward systems. Against this, the Buddhist educational philosophy would prize inner reflection upon the meaning of every act and every theory not only in terms of immediate effect and immediate context, but in terms of its impact upon all sentient beings, those past, those alive today and those yet to be born.
Along with this, a Buddhist education would impress upon the student the importance of inner experience as a source of value, connecting one's actions as a social being to the community at large. In this context, the Buddhist student would strive to attain that ego-less state of service to the community which is the mark of all spiritual disciplines. In other words, a Buddhist education would have an important moral component, and the morality of actions would be woven into the content and organisation of curricular materials. Programmes would not only be assessed in terms of their immediate economic viability, but against a global economy in which exploitation.
In addition, a Buddhist education would stress the importance of comparing, in an egoless way, one's actual behaviour against one's espoused values. While Buddhism itself recognises and embraces contradiction, it places great emphasis upon self-reflection, non-judgmentalism and forgiveness. This does not mean that Buddhists never modify their behaviours. They do so constantly based upon a self-less reflection upon the consistency between their means and ends, between their journey and their destination. This corresponds to the third, fourth and sixth precepts of the Eightfold Path, ie. complete (truthful) speech and complete action, coupled with complete application.
This is why, as they suggest, "a journey of a thousand miles begins with one step" - and is embodied in its entirety by that and every step - "being there" as it were. The integration of means and ends represents, for the Buddhist the inescapable basis of wisdom and ultimate enlightenment. From a Buddhist point of view, if the ultimate purpose of education is enlightenment then reflective contemplation on the process of learning itself must form a significant part of its reality.
The use of abstract theories and semantics would, for the Buddhist educator, be valued only to the extent that they allowed for the more effective reduction in concrete suffering. Indeed, every aspect of a Buddhist education would be evaluated in terms of how it contributed to either the increase or reduction of human suffering.
This is not to say that an acceptance of suffering as a manifestation of a clinging to ego-centred permanence is not an important aspect of Buddhism, but that in the context of human compassion, the reduction or elimination of suffering for others is the expression of a properly selfless love and therefore an important step on the road to enlightenment. As the Buddhist text Visudhimagga says:
"Suffering alone exists, none who suffer;
The deed is there, but no doer thereof;
Nirvana is, but no one seeking it;
The path there is, but none who travel it.
In a Buddhist education, projects would be valued for their contribution to the common well-being, the conservation of natural resources, the opportunities they create for the other members of the community to participate in the valuable work of creating the world and in thereby purifying their own characters. Buddhist education would not value isolated work, because this would fail to address the social relationships which give life its meaning and would encourage the illusion of individual selfhood. Nor would it be competitive, but would instead be infused with an ethic of cooperation and mutual support, since competition is based upon the mistaken belief in a personal (ie. ego-centred) creativity.
In contrast to this, modern education fails to acknowledge the essential interconnectedness of all things, values ego-centred consciousness, encourages and rewards competition, and inhibits the development of inner reflective awareness and judgement.
From a Buddhist point of view, it is therefore not surprising that western ideologies have brought the world to the edge of economic and social chaos, because every aspect of the system, including the training of the young, encourages the abandonment of a moral reflection, the increased performativity of production and the acceptance of external evaluation and authority as a basis of personal and social advancement.
What this comparison highlights is not so much the need for a new (Buddhist) form of educational practice, since even in de-colonised Buddhist countries like Thailand, education does not follow these precepts but has itself been largely transformed to align with Western capitalist models. What is highlighted is the actual effectiveness of the western model of education, under conditions of capitalism to operate as an instrument of ongoing colonisation, and in so doing to both reflect and further the needs of production. We see from these two examples, the extent to which the ethic of capitalism has invaded the conception of knowledge and of learning, of life and of spirituality. In other words, education works to create a social world in which the extension and expansion of capitalism as a mode of production becomes easier. It does this by creating identities - or, as postmodernists would say, subjectivities - which are receptive to the inherent rationality of capitalism.
But these subjectivities, do not just "appear", fully realised. Thus emerge over time as the result of an ongoing structuring of experience which is itself a consequence of capitalist production. In other words, the continual structural reorganisation of the world, under capitalism involves processes, limitations, opportunities, influences, expectations, prohibitions and endorsements which are seductive of a particular view of reality and of the self in the midst of that reality, which shapes human relationships with others in ways which support and extend capitalism's expansion into further fields of human experience. The system of social reproduction under capitalism therefore takes on the appearance of a self-reproducing system, continually producing the subjectivities which it needs to consume for its further expansion and production.
The Need for Resistance: The Importance of Equity
This contrasting picture of Buddhist work and education points clearly not only to the difference between two different forms of symbolic universe, the one materialist and the other spiritual, but to an implicit deficiency in the former. It is important to realise that the Buddhist economics and education suggested by Schumacher is not only spiritual, but has real consequences in the material world. The imminent depletion of non-renewable and necessary resources in the context of nuclear arsenals should alert us to the potential which still exists for global tragedy, despite the demise of the Soviet Union. In addition, the continued and increasing degradation of the environment, the proliferating exploitation and oppression of the majority of the world's population through both military and economic means suggests that the problem is current and not only anticipated. To these actual and potential tragedies, the design professions, for the most part, turn a blind eye, preferring to align themselves with the dominant cultural ethos and the ongoing accumulation of disproportionate wealth.
It is not difficult, faced with such a gloomy picture, to conclude that indeed, social, cultural, political and economic resistance to these forces is impossible - that the life we have, poor as it is, unequal as it is, exploitative as it is, oppressive as it is and inhumane, as it is, is the best we can expect. The mythologised picture is different, of course. Here we see a world of ever-increasing and extending prosperity and consumption, better cars, better TVs, more and better electronic gizmos. The illusion of capitalism, it that wealth is created out of nothing, that prosperity on one side can be had without poverty on the other, that we can all be well-off, and nobody anywhere will have to pay. That is the myth. The reality is that somewhere someone pays.
The "trickle-down" theory of free-market capitalism is designed to contest the notion of economic exploitation of worker by proprietor. But it is a non-verifiable proposition, precisely by virtue of its abstractness - no mention is made of how this "trickle" might be measured, or if it is in fact the result of free market economies or of resistance to them. At the national level we have already noted Domhoff's refutations of this "trickle down" principle which is basic to the theories of Bentham, Mills, Adam Smith, and more recently Milton Freidman.
The difficulty is that arguments such as these can themselves be refuted by simply discounting the indices against which they are measured, and by putting forward in their graphic and heart-rending place apparently neutral and scientific hieroglyphics which, as Jane Kelsey has pointed out, purport to prove that we are all getting richer by the day, and that all we have to do is continue along the path we have already begun.
In all of this, it becomes clear that prosperity in one sphere must be paid for by poverty in another, and this is particularly true in an environment of finite and disappearing resources. If even the Brandt Report, can suggest that continued survival depends upon sustainability, increased equity and co-operation, then indeed it is time to take the matter seriously. But whereas the Brandt Report only suggests "more of the same" (inaugurated, as it was by the World Bank!) we must in fact consider real alternatives, and these alternatives must be achievable without recourse to the appalling prospect of military confrontation.
Design Education as a Counter-Hegemony
It is not possible to easily transform capitalism without also and perhaps even first transforming those elements of social life which give it sustenance - by transforming the relations of production. This project may be addressed in all of the domains in which the relations of production under capitalism are currently formed - that is, in creating space, in articulating different conceptions of life, and in the creation of new subjectivities. In two of these areas - the creation of space, and in the creation of subjectivities, architectural education is very well placed to be effective.
In the first place, through architectural education it is possible to develop a transformative educational practice which moves to realise the principles of democracy not as an empty signifier, but as a real and present engagement with public life.
In the second instance, architects, once they understand the ideological nature of their work are more able to develop critical design practices and social roles which are conducive to the creation of community, to the expansion of public life and to an advocacy for the oppressed.
Before I can map out what an education for such a practice might be like, however, it is important to understand what forms or patterns of social life may be involved. I believe that much can be learned from those cultures which predated capitalism and which have been colonised by it to a greater or a lesser extent. The example of Buddhism reinforces this belief. What I am proposing is not that we develop models in slavish imitation of cultures that have been themselves integrated into capitalism or even these that have remained almost intact - archaic remnants of a past age. I am proposing that certain social, cultural and political forms of these pre-colonial cultures have something to teach us upon which it might be possible to build not a conception of a future society, but an understanding of the processes of sophisticated social and cultural interaction and collective decision-making about which they knew so much and we know so little. These pre-colonial cultures were for the most part tribal; their forms of governance were based upon principles of direct democracy; they were mostly egalitarian, and they developed sophisticated forms of political and material structures which served to disperse power throughout the collective rather than to consolidate it into the hands of a small minority. Their child-rearing practices have much to teach us, as do their conception of knowledge, of learning, of power, of subjectivity and of creativity.
The Reproduction the Social Relation of Hierarchy
School is where these principles are absorbed into the excruciating marrow of experience. We learn to conform to a normative acceptance of the capitalist principles of hierarchy, competition and external authority in school, if not first at home. Hierarchy is implicit in the school system, defining itself as an inaccessibility to power, to decision-making about one's own life choices. The inaccessibility of this power is evident and implicit from the first moment of the educational experience, as my own earlier brief account demonstrates. First of all, school is away from home - from significant and supportive others. It is peopled by strangers to whom one is abandoned.
This abandonment marks, in itself, the first awareness of an overarching and unstoppable hierarchy of power to which even one's previously all-powerful parents must bow. The compounding awareness of this power, is experienced as a personal sense of powerlessness and helplessness, which, being involuntary, and at the same time exclusory (all help is removed) signifies immediately an imposition which is not isolated but systematic. This imposition is seen not only as personal and local, but as general and universal, including even the welcoming teachers as well as one's abandoning parents. In this way, the abstract, remote power of the State over one's entire known reality is the implicit message which the child has no alternative but to accept.
In place of the known social reality of the home, is inserted a new reality, through which the "natural" hierarchy of the family is replaced by the abstract hierarchy of the educational system. It is one of the functions of hierarchy to separate and organise the space of authority into different spheres of power. The first division occurs with extrinsicity. One is convinced that the Other (the BIG Other) knows better for one than one's self. The next division is a stratification which occurs when this experience becomes the norm, ie. when everyone in the system obeys an exteriorised authority. Carnoy suggests that this has been the case since the style of education changed with the changing demands of capitalist production brought about through increasing industrialisation through the late 1800s. He notes, for instance, a shift in emphasis from a pedagogy stressing direct obedience to external authority to one which stressed obedience to abstract authority through internal controls:
"The... educators wanted to reform the schools so that children would be taught to internalise external authority and become individuals who would follow rules because of society's reward for doing so, rather than the fear of being punished."
As Durkheim, Weber and others have noted, these stratified divisions within the social hierarchy correspond directly to the stratification of the labour force into different categories. The division between intellectual and manual labour is but one case in point. These categories are arranged in an ascending order of control, each level within the order having direct power and responsibility over those immediately "below", but each deferring power to the level above. All of this is understood, and forms an unquestioned part of everyday life. The continued existence of hierarchy requires, of course, the continuing compliance and acceptance of the principle of hierarchy of all of the participants within the social collective. One who withdraws this compliance is ejected from the hierarchy in question. The ultimate rejection from the larger social collective is, of course, incarceration or banishment.
In school the spatialisation of hierarchy takes several forms. There is the distinction drawn not only between teachers and students, but also between these and custodial staff etc. This is augmented by the spatial segregation by age, with older children (7th formers) having greater freedom than younger children, and establishing the normative belief that not only are the older children "more grown up" than the younger children, but that the crucial element in their maturity is the number of years of education they have behind them, thereby implicitly reinforcing the authority of the system which is requiring obedience in the present on the promise of some future reward of increased freedom. This displacement of reward into the future from some productive action in the present of course fits completely the needs of production which will be so necessary "later on" in the workforce, where one will toil for anticipated rather than intrinsic rewards.
Hierarchy and Alienation
The compliance of individuals within any given hierarchy is maintained through a process of what I will call strata-insulation - or an inaccessibility of power. What this means is that not only are different levels of the hierarchy constructed, but they are effectively isolated from each other by each other. This is to say that social hierarchies have built into them as a function of their continued existence a separation of the different levels within the order, and that these levels are themselves the elements of separation. This means that the need for external restraint within the structure is eliminated and that any necessary constraint is provided by the structure of the hierarchy itself. In this situation there is little alternative but to "obey orders" because the one who orders the giving of orders is beyond personal reach or challenge. The worker on the shop floor does not have direct access to the owner, but only to the shop-floor manager who him/herself only has access to the general manager and so on.
In situations where the collective is very large, ultimate authority may be diffused in a Board of Directors, or more generally yet, within the body of shareholders. What this means is that each level of the hierarchy is disconnected and isolated from the next-but-one level up and/or the chain of command, which itself is similarly insulated and so on. Effectively, (and as we discover again in any personal experience of bureaucracy) this makes any attempt to alter the operation or the structure of any hierarchy extremely difficult and frustrating, which is one of the main reasons why hierarchic institutions are slow to change. The experience engendered by this isolation is one that reinforces the notion of power itself as an inaccessible abstraction, in the process also reinforcing the tendency to surrender to this inaccessibility as an objectivated reality, rather than as a social construct which one might otherwise transform.
In the industrial and commercial sphere it also makes for a distinct lack of efficiency in production and communication, which is why many Western businesses have turned to more horizontal decision-making frameworks as exemplified by the Japanese. It is also why there has been a proliferation of business consultancies providing workshop experiences in management strategies which are less hierarchical and more democratic within the workplace. Yet for all of their apparent egalitarianism, these processes leave untouched the ultimate decision-making power which governs the collective - in marxist terms, that power which attaches to the ownership of the means of production.
In the last instance, the power to decide to continue with such democratising programmes does not rest equally with all of the participants, but with the owners alone, who are free, at any time to bring the process of "democritisation to a halt. Furthermore, the tendency towards more "team" approach in business flows not from a desire to ensure the well-being of the workers, but in the interests of maintaining a "competitive edge" in the marketplace.
- It is interesting to draw an analogy here between behaviourism and semiotics, in which the signifier and the signified become equally divourced, and, of course with postmodern architecture since the early 1970s which in eschewing the modernist precept of functionalism, split off the iconic or signifying aspects of design from its functional requirements - the development of an applied meaning in design.
- Kohn, A., No Contest - A Case Against Competition, Houghton Mifflin, 1986.
- Koestler, A., The Act of Creation, MacMillan, New York, 1964; See also the ethnological study of creative people by Brewster Ghiselin in: Ghiselin, B., The Creative Process, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1952.
- I take it as not coincidental that economic-man is almost invariably portrayed in the texts as a male.
- Schwartz, B., The Battle for Human Nature: Science, Morality and Modern Life, W. W. Norton Co., London, 1986. p. 173.
- This example was related to me personally by a close friend just recently returned from Malaysia. The export timber industry of Sarawak is worth NZ$6 billion a year, mostly to large offshore multi-nationals. Native land tenure means that the traditional forest communities must either remain in abject poverty after logging or move with hundreds of thousands of their compatriots into the squatter settlements in the burgeoning cities. This issue has also been investigated by Radio New Zealand. See, for instance: Radio New Zealand "Country Saturday" Report, Sat., 22nd Feb 1997.
- Schwartz, B., op. cit., 1986, p. 171.
- Marx, K., Capital, International Publishers, New York, 1967, Vol. 1, Part III, Chapter VII Sec. 1, pp. 177-8.
- Skinner, B. F., "Teaching Machines", Scientific American, November, 1961;
- Apple, M. W., Teachers and Texts, Routledge and Kegan Paul , New York, 1988.
- Smith, L. T., "Seeing Through the Magic: Maori Strategies of Resistance", Delta 37, 1986. A similar process of systematic cultural eradication took place in Australia where a whole "stolen generation" of aboriginal and Torres Straight Island children were literally kidnapped from their homes by State inspectors and carried off to remote school settings - often losing complete lifetime contact with their families and tribes. For a graphic description of these instances of kidnapings and forced schoolings (not to mention beatings) in the U.S.A., see: Crow Dog, M., and Erdoes, R., Lakota Woman, Harper Collins, New York, 1990.
- Carnoy, M., Education as Cultural Imperialism, David McKay Co., New York, 1974, esp. pp. 156-232.
- Henry, J., Culture Against Man, Vintage, New York, 1963, pp. 295-6.
- Schumacher, E. F., Small is Beautiful, Abacus Books, 1974, pp. 44-62.
- ibid., p. 48.
- Marx, K., Capital, Vol. III, Moscow, 1954, p. 260. Cited in McLellan, D. (ed) The Thought of Karl Marx, MacMillan, London, 1980, p. 98.
- Soros, G., "The Capitalist Threat", in: Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 279, No. 2, February 1997, pp. 45-70.
- Giroux, H. A., op. cit., 1988 (A), p. 40.
- Cited: Watts, A., op. cit., 1957, p. 51.
- Watts, A., The Meaning of Happiness, Harper and Row, New York, 1940, pp. 150-151. See also: Watts, A., Psychotherapy East and West, Pantheon Books, 1961.
- Cited: Watts, A., op. cit., 1957, p. 56
- Carnoy, M., op. cit., 1974, p. 241.
- Senge, P. M., et al., op. cit., 1994.
