Subcompetence and Splinter Cultures
The last few days have been days in which I've managed to catch up with old friends as well as young friends. I've also managed to make ends meet by sitting around at the local Starbucks and dispensing advice for a fee. This has not been easy, since I am normally pretty serious about the advice I dispense, and I try my best to give useful material.
But in between sessions of advice-dispensing and consequent fee-taking, I found myself musing on two tangentially related themes. Subcompetence is one; the Dicksonian idea of 'splinter cultures' is the other.
Subcompetence is an interesting word; it is related to both 'competition' and 'competence' through the common Latin origin competere, which means 'to strive together (towards a common goal)'. When one says a person is 'competent', we mean that his faculties are coherently focussed when he undertakes a specific task. Nowadays, it also implies that he is able to carry out that task, whatever it is. The odd thing of course is that modern competition is far from a common striving; perhaps it is antagonistic striving towards the same prize, which only one competitor can win.
But what is subcompetence? It is the state of being just about unable to complete or excel in one's chosen task, or the task one has been given. I was thinking about it because there are a whole bunch of people out there who have seemingly been dragooned into teaching a subject that none of them is fit to teach (as far as the evidence seems to show). They all come from one discipline, in which it is possible to believe they are competent, and inflict themselves (or are inflicted) upon innocent students who find that they have not learnt very much from the experience.
How do I know this? I know this because whenever I ask the students why they don't seem to have learnt the right stuff, they keep referring to the same people. And these people all have at least one thing in common.
It put me in mind of the Splinter Cultures first described by Gordon Dickson in his Childe Cycle, beginning with 'The Tactics of Mistake'. In that sequence, humanity forms highly specialised cultures which farm out their skills with varying degrees of success. Since specialists are paid so much more than general 'baseline' humans, the market drives ever more specialised culturalisation. Eventually, the cycle shows that this results in peculiar dysfunctions, as the specialists prove incapable of holistic synthesis (or anything remotely similar).
When faced with a subject like 'Theory of Knowledge', which by its nature requires the ability to roam back and forth comfortably across the world of all the disciplines and areas of knowledge, people with a highly specialised training tend to fail. They can only see things from their specialist perspective, which makes their ability to educate others somewhat lacking.
The whole thing leads to one thought. If you claim you are going to try to provide (or worse, that you DO provide) an holistic education, you cannot afford to dispense with a) skilled generalists, b) structures that bring specialists together in common endeavours of cross-disciplinary learning. If you make such an error, you might possibly still claim multidisciplinarity, but you certainly will not be able to provide an interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary education. And once you go there, there is no way you can even claim an holistic perspective or pretensions to providing an holistic education.
But in between sessions of advice-dispensing and consequent fee-taking, I found myself musing on two tangentially related themes. Subcompetence is one; the Dicksonian idea of 'splinter cultures' is the other.
Subcompetence is an interesting word; it is related to both 'competition' and 'competence' through the common Latin origin competere, which means 'to strive together (towards a common goal)'. When one says a person is 'competent', we mean that his faculties are coherently focussed when he undertakes a specific task. Nowadays, it also implies that he is able to carry out that task, whatever it is. The odd thing of course is that modern competition is far from a common striving; perhaps it is antagonistic striving towards the same prize, which only one competitor can win.
But what is subcompetence? It is the state of being just about unable to complete or excel in one's chosen task, or the task one has been given. I was thinking about it because there are a whole bunch of people out there who have seemingly been dragooned into teaching a subject that none of them is fit to teach (as far as the evidence seems to show). They all come from one discipline, in which it is possible to believe they are competent, and inflict themselves (or are inflicted) upon innocent students who find that they have not learnt very much from the experience.
How do I know this? I know this because whenever I ask the students why they don't seem to have learnt the right stuff, they keep referring to the same people. And these people all have at least one thing in common.
It put me in mind of the Splinter Cultures first described by Gordon Dickson in his Childe Cycle, beginning with 'The Tactics of Mistake'. In that sequence, humanity forms highly specialised cultures which farm out their skills with varying degrees of success. Since specialists are paid so much more than general 'baseline' humans, the market drives ever more specialised culturalisation. Eventually, the cycle shows that this results in peculiar dysfunctions, as the specialists prove incapable of holistic synthesis (or anything remotely similar).
When faced with a subject like 'Theory of Knowledge', which by its nature requires the ability to roam back and forth comfortably across the world of all the disciplines and areas of knowledge, people with a highly specialised training tend to fail. They can only see things from their specialist perspective, which makes their ability to educate others somewhat lacking.
The whole thing leads to one thought. If you claim you are going to try to provide (or worse, that you DO provide) an holistic education, you cannot afford to dispense with a) skilled generalists, b) structures that bring specialists together in common endeavours of cross-disciplinary learning. If you make such an error, you might possibly still claim multidisciplinarity, but you certainly will not be able to provide an interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary education. And once you go there, there is no way you can even claim an holistic perspective or pretensions to providing an holistic education.
Labels: Culture, Education, Excellence, Holism, Teaching
etched with acid at 6:48:00 pm
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