The Paradox of Elite Education on a Small Island (Part II)
Let us take the same island, all five million souls. Think about what an elite is: it is that group of individual people who are 'the best', the aristocracy (how ever defined) of the population.
The problem is that if you want to control everything that is useful to an artificially sustained environment, you need a lot of controllers. That's because in a natural environment with natural buffers, a lot of natural feedback loops exist. Couple that with the problem of having a small environment (and hence less buffer space and room for error) and you have to have a lot of 'elite' in various grades.
That is why an education programme designed to develop the gifted elite of the island must be extended from the top 0.1% to the top 0.5% to the top 1% and so on to the top 5-10%. This is the only way to cast your net wide enough to pull in the necessary 'elite'. Of course, now that your 'elite' are taken from the top 10% of population, they are only 'elite' in a very (ahem) broad sense.
Think about it; if you are graduating 50,000 secondary school students a year (aged 16 or so) — or to make your net smaller, say 35,000 high school/junior college students a year — your elite will be drawn from somewhere between 3,500 and 5,000 promising young people every year. In 40 years (say from 1969 to 2009), allowing for different populations and programmes and rates of loss each year, you must have extracted at least 50,000 people (1% of present population) to be the elite of the nation.
The true elite number about 250 (0.5% of that 1%, or the top 0.005%). But at this point, they are fairly homogeneous, having been selected more or less by the same set of filters and criteria and encouraged to stay in the same social circles (and bond, and get married, and be fruitful and multiply). It is the tip of the pyramid, so to speak. It is a very narrow tip, almost a tipping point.
And you know what? Everyone in that group receives (broadly speaking) the same briefings. They all believe the same things and will say (or not say) the same things. They also believe that they are broad-minded enough to not say (or not not say) the same things, because they are all the same kind of people.
In some ways, this is a refutation of the idea that education broadens the mind. In fact, it is possible that by having elite education on a small island, you are actually neutralizing the effects that education is supposed to produce.
Outsourcing doesn't help, because the 'elitely educated' go to the same overseas institutions for further polishing. They all smirk the same way, if you catch them on video. It is a bit like watching an Asian post-colonial version of the British government, but with an overlay of pseudo-Confucian superiority.
How do I know all this? It's by watching too many of them, people that I know, go down the same road. Some, to their credit, are able to remain unshackled. Most bind themselves in contracts of the mind as powerful as the one that dragged Faustus to his doom. And as their minds contract, so too does the future reality of a small island.
The problem is that if you want to control everything that is useful to an artificially sustained environment, you need a lot of controllers. That's because in a natural environment with natural buffers, a lot of natural feedback loops exist. Couple that with the problem of having a small environment (and hence less buffer space and room for error) and you have to have a lot of 'elite' in various grades.
That is why an education programme designed to develop the gifted elite of the island must be extended from the top 0.1% to the top 0.5% to the top 1% and so on to the top 5-10%. This is the only way to cast your net wide enough to pull in the necessary 'elite'. Of course, now that your 'elite' are taken from the top 10% of population, they are only 'elite' in a very (ahem) broad sense.
Think about it; if you are graduating 50,000 secondary school students a year (aged 16 or so) — or to make your net smaller, say 35,000 high school/junior college students a year — your elite will be drawn from somewhere between 3,500 and 5,000 promising young people every year. In 40 years (say from 1969 to 2009), allowing for different populations and programmes and rates of loss each year, you must have extracted at least 50,000 people (1% of present population) to be the elite of the nation.
The true elite number about 250 (0.5% of that 1%, or the top 0.005%). But at this point, they are fairly homogeneous, having been selected more or less by the same set of filters and criteria and encouraged to stay in the same social circles (and bond, and get married, and be fruitful and multiply). It is the tip of the pyramid, so to speak. It is a very narrow tip, almost a tipping point.
And you know what? Everyone in that group receives (broadly speaking) the same briefings. They all believe the same things and will say (or not say) the same things. They also believe that they are broad-minded enough to not say (or not not say) the same things, because they are all the same kind of people.
In some ways, this is a refutation of the idea that education broadens the mind. In fact, it is possible that by having elite education on a small island, you are actually neutralizing the effects that education is supposed to produce.
Outsourcing doesn't help, because the 'elitely educated' go to the same overseas institutions for further polishing. They all smirk the same way, if you catch them on video. It is a bit like watching an Asian post-colonial version of the British government, but with an overlay of pseudo-Confucian superiority.
How do I know all this? It's by watching too many of them, people that I know, go down the same road. Some, to their credit, are able to remain unshackled. Most bind themselves in contracts of the mind as powerful as the one that dragged Faustus to his doom. And as their minds contract, so too does the future reality of a small island.
Labels: Education, Groupthink, Ideas
etched with acid at 10:24:00 am
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