Educational Values
On a warm August morning in 1963, 144 years after the Gambler, the Gnome pronounced these fateful words: "I have always regarded the pursuit of knowledge as the noblest and the most rewarding activity of mankind... If I were asked what is the most important single criterion by which to judge the prospects of any underdeveloped country, I would have no hesitation in saying that it is its attitude towards education." He said this in the context of a talk entitled 'Industrial Growth and Political Stability'.
The problem of course is that defining development is the difficult part. The Gnome grappled with it all his life; he said early on that you would need to look at it sociologically, psychologically, culturally, economically, historically — and you would still be like the blind men and the elephant. In fact, he said, you would be reduced to the maxim of, "I'll know it when I see it."
The issue is perhaps more clearly delineated as one of what kind of development you are looking for. The Gnome's world was primarily an economic one, although in his writings you can sense the frustration he had in realising that his beloved economic precepts were inadequate. In fact, he once said (firmly tongue in cheek) on the eve of a trip to the Annual Conference of the World Bank and IMF that he had to abstain from saying certain things because a) it would not be prudent for a small state to cause unnecessary offence to the great, and b) one should not go to the College of Cardinals reeking of heresy.
He always believed that education was the root of success. The problem was that it was inexorably linked in his mind to economic success, as well as cultural depth and political stability. He linked it to many other things, but the one thing that comes across was that he believed his people to be economically rational, perhaps to the exclusion of other things.
To this day, this is still the problem. Even those who lament the dearth of non-economic values in the national discourse are trammelled by the fact that Atlantis was a state born out of entrepreneurial migration and entrepot trade. The measure of man in modern Atlantis is his effectiveness as some sort of economic factor — how effective, how influential, how good a leader, how able to defend what has been raised.
The great thing about the Gnome, on closer reading, is that he was indeed decidedly heretical in his economic insights. He believed that state control was a good thing in parallel with a free market. That sounds odd, but in the 1960s, when he first said it, it sounded perilously like crypto-Marxism to some in the West. But the Gnome was really an avowed pragmatic socialist, if anything else. His was the world of Weber as well as Marx, of Adam Smith but only as far as an appropriate scale for the exercise of the invisible hand. He believed that the invisible world was all well and good, but it went with a visible glove, at the very least.
All that has crept into the metrics by which we measure local education. It is all very numerical, and if not, it is quantitatively qualitative. We have awards for things like 'Character Development', and schools list these awards — the more awards for qualitative development, the better. It is all very disturbing to those who look at the system from outside.
People, however, deserve the education they desire. For all the bitching, people here love the reliability of the system in the sense of its replicable behaviour, schedules, and concepts. They might dispute the validity, but seldom the utility. And that is probably how the Gnome would have wanted it.
The problem of course is that defining development is the difficult part. The Gnome grappled with it all his life; he said early on that you would need to look at it sociologically, psychologically, culturally, economically, historically — and you would still be like the blind men and the elephant. In fact, he said, you would be reduced to the maxim of, "I'll know it when I see it."
The issue is perhaps more clearly delineated as one of what kind of development you are looking for. The Gnome's world was primarily an economic one, although in his writings you can sense the frustration he had in realising that his beloved economic precepts were inadequate. In fact, he once said (firmly tongue in cheek) on the eve of a trip to the Annual Conference of the World Bank and IMF that he had to abstain from saying certain things because a) it would not be prudent for a small state to cause unnecessary offence to the great, and b) one should not go to the College of Cardinals reeking of heresy.
He always believed that education was the root of success. The problem was that it was inexorably linked in his mind to economic success, as well as cultural depth and political stability. He linked it to many other things, but the one thing that comes across was that he believed his people to be economically rational, perhaps to the exclusion of other things.
To this day, this is still the problem. Even those who lament the dearth of non-economic values in the national discourse are trammelled by the fact that Atlantis was a state born out of entrepreneurial migration and entrepot trade. The measure of man in modern Atlantis is his effectiveness as some sort of economic factor — how effective, how influential, how good a leader, how able to defend what has been raised.
The great thing about the Gnome, on closer reading, is that he was indeed decidedly heretical in his economic insights. He believed that state control was a good thing in parallel with a free market. That sounds odd, but in the 1960s, when he first said it, it sounded perilously like crypto-Marxism to some in the West. But the Gnome was really an avowed pragmatic socialist, if anything else. His was the world of Weber as well as Marx, of Adam Smith but only as far as an appropriate scale for the exercise of the invisible hand. He believed that the invisible world was all well and good, but it went with a visible glove, at the very least.
All that has crept into the metrics by which we measure local education. It is all very numerical, and if not, it is quantitatively qualitative. We have awards for things like 'Character Development', and schools list these awards — the more awards for qualitative development, the better. It is all very disturbing to those who look at the system from outside.
People, however, deserve the education they desire. For all the bitching, people here love the reliability of the system in the sense of its replicable behaviour, schedules, and concepts. They might dispute the validity, but seldom the utility. And that is probably how the Gnome would have wanted it.
Labels: Economics, Education, Philosophy
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