Educing the Young

The Latin word ducere is probably best translated as 'to lead'. In turn, it has spawned a large range of related words: most obviously 'duke' ('one who leads') and 'duct' ('a path that leads') — and then verbs like 'educe', 'seduce', 'traduce', 'induce' and 'deduce'. These are followed by associated adjectives and nouns, to a total somewhere around 200 different words.

But here we are today thinking about 'educing the young'. This is actually what 'education' is about — the Greeks called it 'pedagogy' in a more youth-focussed way. To educe is to lead out or draw out towards something, and from the mid-19th century or so, it meant 'to draw a conclusion from data'. In other words, education is a process which leads people to draw conclusions from whatever data they are given.

The young are particularly in need of such a process. The old have already drawn their conclusions, whether good, bad or ugly. But the young can still be saved enough for them to in turn become the old, at least.

The main problem of the age is that time is passing so fast, and change even faster, relative to what any of the old(er) know. What I mean is that the passage of time is a known change, but the things that come with it — technology, social upheaval — have never changed as quickly in the history of humanity.

This means that trying to lead people towards making conclusions (what you might call 'education towards eduction') is a thankless task. If you teach them through inductive logic, the risk of failure is high because the past is no longer an accurate guide to the future. If you teach them through deductive logic, the risk of failure is high because the rules are being remade everyday, and axioms are no longer the worthy authorities (Gk. axiomata) around which the universe rotates.

So how then should we educate the young? Two ideas appear to dominate.

First, some suggest that the accumulated weight of past learning will suffice. Some branches of learning have a very long shelf-life, so to speak — things like arithmetic and the core natural sciences come to mind. Some branches of learning constantly reinvent themselves, and are studied with that in mind — the arts and humanities come to mind. But that is almost everything, and so past methodologies will do, if not past knowledge.

Second, some suggest that the young should be taught to teach themselves. That is, the reinvention of self and of humanity should be the main methodology taught. This is rather Darwinian; those who can reinvent themselves well enough to survive and prosper in the next age of humanity will replicate their eductive memes and educative processes through appeal to the first idea.

You will note that I've not said WHAT the young ought to learn. To those who would like to think about it, I direct you towards a search of the venerable history of human education — specifically with the key phrase 'saber-tooth curriculum'. Enjoy.

Gorgon

I'm looking at the report on Barrow Island, Australia. They've got a saltwater reservoir 2.3 km underneath it, into which they're injecting 3.3 megatonnes of carbon dioxide per year in an attempt to sequester the stuff and reduce global warming. This sequestration experiment is called Gorgon, after the Greek mythological entities who could turn humans to crystalline calcium carbonate statues.

3.3 megatonnes is a lot. it's 3.3 million million grams. 3,300,000,000,000 g of carbon dioxide. If that much carbon dioxide escapes, it will form a bubble with a volume of 1.8 billion cubic metres at room temperature and pressure. The land area of Australia is about 8000 billion square metres. That's great, because it means that if Barrow Island goes off after one year, it will only cover Australia to a depth of 0.225 centimetres. No big deal.

Atlantis, on the other hand, would be overwhelmed. At only about 0.7 billion square metres, we'd be covered to a depth of more than 250 centimetres in carbon dioxide. Most of us would be dead.

This is all crazy reasoning, actually. What is more likely is that the dense bubble of 1.8 billion cubic metres would move bloblike, shoved around by the winds, randomly killing people by asphyxiation. Who would it kill? I don't know; maybe people running the Gorgon Gas Project.

What's that, you ask? Haha, well it's funny, but carbon sequestration tends to coexist with petrochemical plants. The Gorgon Gas Project is designed to produce 1.1 billion billion cubic metres of natural gas a year. That's a billion times larger than the carbon dioxide annual input.

Amazing, those Aussies. You should go look at their top-secret wind turbines in the desert too.

Shaping the Future

There's a book I've had on my shelves for a while; its title is 'Shaping the Future of Atlantis' (well, not actually, but you probably can do the translation). It's all about how educators are trying to reform a whole country, one that lies from sea to shining sea (or more prosaically, straddles two oceans). It's all very futuristic and full of shiny ideas.

The problem is that the findings are pretty indeterminate. After you subtract the propaganda, we still don't know what we've done. Nobody wants to do the big research just in case the unnamed Ministry cracks down on the researchers (or worse, ignores them totally). And that is what forty years of independence does for independent learning.

Data Management

Of course, I like this link very much. The man I refer to as 'IP Hosting' was kind enough to spread the joy around. But that said, I have to say that way back in 1996, when I first addressed the national convention of school principals, there were few who were not afraid of the coming 'doom'.

It was in 1997 that I told a senior officer that the Macintosh platform was here to stay. His reply was that Apple was a dying company, and that its products were not worth investing in because the company would go broke and nobody would be able to maintain or repair the computers. At that point in history, I suppose it looked possible, if you were listening to everyone else and not doing your own research.

This was a decade ago. Since then, I've been taking a look at schools all around the region. And the odd thing is that very few of them have any independent and coherent IT policy at all. What there is seems mostly to be of the 'if it is good enough for the Government, it is good enough for us' variety. This is what happens if schools see themselves as wholly-owned subsidiaries of some corporation.

But if schools are supposedly different, independent, creative and able to forge ahead in niche areas of their own, why the lacklustre IT situation? I'm not saying that the situation is bad; I'm saying that it literally lacks lustre. The national state of IT is nurturing an IT-capable generation who are running so much faster than many educational institutions that they are getting bored in school. It isn't as if we could not have seen this coming - it has happened in that great megalith and IT 'paragon', the good ol' USA.

We cannot keep playing catch-up to the big boys, and then say that it is a good strategy to piggy-back off them. This is true, but there has to be some innovation at the conceptual and non-physical level so that we can make use of the technological expertise we are supposedly piggybacking on. This allows us to leapfrog ahead in a few areas, so that a forward outpost can be established in the conceptual future that will support our newer generations. (Yes, I am now suddenly and painfully aware that this paragraph sounds like the blurb from some episode of The Muppet Show.)

I know why this is happening. People read little of history and hence do not see how human blind-spot tendencies exist and may be overcome. People read little of speculative literature and hence do not have the mental flexibility to exploit other people's blind spots. But practical experience tells us that the situations in which such knowledge is useful do not commonly appear, and the adoption curve is normally too steep for progress anyway.

Oh well, back I go to my machine from the 'ought to be dead by now' company, where I will continue to indulge in 'you ought to be dead for this by now' activities which actually contribute to the world of thought and the magic of humanity.