Defensive Diversification
This isn't a new concept. Financial planners use it to describe a strategy aimed at minimising the risk of loss when investing. It entails buying into several areas chosen to offset each other. Here's a simplified example. Let's say a large war is about to erupt. Then some stocks ('war' stocks like orange juice, oil, pork bellies, steel, plastics) will go up, while some ('peace' stocks like air travel, holiday chalets) will go down. You buy into both so that losses in one will be offset by gains in the other category, should peace (or war) fail to materialise.
However, I propose the thesis that defensive diversification also applies to education systems. It is of course, already a strategy in biology (genetic diversification) but it is not used consciously there (except by eugenicists, who are all a bit warped, in my opinion).
In education, a major problem really is one of, "What should be taught?" in response to, "What will society need?" It is a predictive problem, made increasingly harder by the rate at which things change in the world around us, and made increasingly chaotic by globalisation (in all its many forms). At the rate things change, by the time students graduate, specific skills may have become redundant. Yet, because of the investment a government or institution has put into them, such redundant skills will still be taught.
Then again, who's to say what is redundant — or more exactly, what will become redundant?
Defensive diversification takes care of that. If any skill and every skill retains skilled practitioners or (at the very least) knowledgeable theoreticians, then that skill always remains available to a society, regardless of how useful it is.
There's one catch. In this age, economics and politics may intervene to almost completely eliminate something perceived to have little or no value (for example, teaching of grammar in secondary schools). Before you know it, most of the skilled practitioners are dead and so are their students. And hardly anyone is left to teach it when it becomes obvious that languages need grammars in order to use their best features. Diversification doesn't help when the stock is not to be had.
The faster (or more chaotic, or more random) the defensive diversification process — i.e. the more creative and extensive it is in its diversity — the more useful it is in making sure that skills are retained in some form. That is why semi-closed semi-centralised societies wake up in the new millennium covered in cold sweat, as the imminent future sounds clanging alarms throughout the world. Or maybe, the immanent future sounds changing alarms. Either way, it will be exciting. And there's more to come.
However, I propose the thesis that defensive diversification also applies to education systems. It is of course, already a strategy in biology (genetic diversification) but it is not used consciously there (except by eugenicists, who are all a bit warped, in my opinion).
In education, a major problem really is one of, "What should be taught?" in response to, "What will society need?" It is a predictive problem, made increasingly harder by the rate at which things change in the world around us, and made increasingly chaotic by globalisation (in all its many forms). At the rate things change, by the time students graduate, specific skills may have become redundant. Yet, because of the investment a government or institution has put into them, such redundant skills will still be taught.
Then again, who's to say what is redundant — or more exactly, what will become redundant?
Defensive diversification takes care of that. If any skill and every skill retains skilled practitioners or (at the very least) knowledgeable theoreticians, then that skill always remains available to a society, regardless of how useful it is.
There's one catch. In this age, economics and politics may intervene to almost completely eliminate something perceived to have little or no value (for example, teaching of grammar in secondary schools). Before you know it, most of the skilled practitioners are dead and so are their students. And hardly anyone is left to teach it when it becomes obvious that languages need grammars in order to use their best features. Diversification doesn't help when the stock is not to be had.
The faster (or more chaotic, or more random) the defensive diversification process — i.e. the more creative and extensive it is in its diversity — the more useful it is in making sure that skills are retained in some form. That is why semi-closed semi-centralised societies wake up in the new millennium covered in cold sweat, as the imminent future sounds clanging alarms throughout the world. Or maybe, the immanent future sounds changing alarms. Either way, it will be exciting. And there's more to come.
etched with acid at 4:53:00 pm
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