Mass Education

After watching the effects of multiple generations of teacher activity in the small but densely populated Petri dish of Atlantis, I can safely make some oracular pronouncements about mass education.

1. The education of the masses reaches a minimum level of competence for 90% of the population and then stalls. Of this 90%, the lower 50% will be below the mean and hence seen as 'poorly educated'. The remaining upper 40% will fight to be seen as educated.

2. The top 10% is the limit for 'good education'. The reason is simple. As the world gets more complex, you need more educational resources to teach people enough to get along. Don't be deluded by what people seem to know—the old 'wow, kids these days know a lot of stuff' fallacy—rather, see what they do with it to change the world for the better.

3. Which leads to the next point: as the world becomes more complex, it is harder to make a clear change for the better that will affect the same proportion of the world. It will be even harder to determine if a putative change for the better is indeed a change for the better, and if so, what the cause of it was.

4. What seems to work better is not education but removal of poverty and penury. And yet again, that too has its limits—the nature of humanity is to always want to be competitive with the top 10%. Some will say that the more educated you are, the more well-off you'll be. Highly doubtful. There's a general correlation, often related to the way society (from a Marxist paradigm) values education as a way of either a) maintaining a class divide, or b) allowing people to breach the class divide.

5. The way education maintains a class divide is through labels and certifications. Some will have them, some won't. The way education allows breaches of such divisions is that most people have some chance, no matter how small, to earn such labels and certifications. But again, mass education can also be seen as a system that fosters the value (sometimes artificial and even misleading) of such things.

6. The best implementations of mass education are thus those that realise these problems and do a few things— a) set simple goals and force people to work hard and miserably to achieve them, which makes these things valuable yet attainable; b) review goals periodically and rigorously so that people don't fall too far behind a true education (i.e. world-functional) level; c) make use of turnkey systems so that even the worst teacher can deliver some crude and useful education; d) place faith in students to survive a robust delivery and teachers to provide at least some delivery; e) allow cynicism to temper the idealism so that people treat the system realistically.

Atlantean education works. It must work because it produces people able to pass every test and yet complain about everything. It produces passionate idiots and erudite genii. It is firmly normed, and normally firm. It is widely criticised and even bastinadoed (figuratively speaking) by some, but praised and emulated by others. It's a very mean system.

Autarky, Illusion Of

People fall increasingly under the illusion of autarky as information becomes more readily available. These days, anyone with access to a search engine thinks he's an expert. And these beglamoured folk then spread the cloud of unknowing further and farther.

This is why in the past you could accept 'mechanical failure' as a reason for a tragic accident but now many are pundits on the topic of how mechanical failure need never happen. And those who aren't pundits are pundit-echoers. And if not, they are pundits on how mechanical failure is an erosion of civil liberties, or on how the state is covering it up, or on how shocking it is that we aren't shown the proton-emission tomographic scans of the failed parts under discussion.

Not that many could interpret the latter even if they existed. It is all an illusion, this informational autarky. Almost nobody is informationally self-sufficient. There is still a role for the expert, or the well-educated generalist, or the amateurs who have taken time to know their stuff.

But the public sphere, the so-called marketplace of ideas, the whole 'civil society' construct? These are now polluted by people who have no ideas to market, who think the public sphere is a constraining box, who have no concept of civility (let alone civitas), or who think society lives to serve individuals rather than serves to keep individuals alive.

It is as the Good Book says; men have become lovers of themselves more than anything else. Professing wisdom, they have become fools.

Anarchy

In my few decades in this world, I have seen a few kinds of would-be Anarchs, some less tiresome, some more. Here are some of them.

1. The simplest kind is the kind that covers its ears and yells loudly that it doesn't care and you can't change its mind. It is self-defeating sort, since it thinks to elude the rule of law by imposing an even sterner law on itself. So be it, then.

2. Another kind claims to be anti-establishment and pro-people. This political animal dresses in the robes of vendetta and the mask of anonymity; unfortunately, it overuses the former and abuses the latter. It really wants to bully or coerce, but retain moral high ground by presuming that individuals do indeed want to form anonymous mobs to take down social institutions, and that they will be led by such an animal.

3. A true anarch, such as Thanos the Mad, courts destruction of all things. This is the only philosophically self-consistent view. However, it is (to me) far better that this is combined with 1 above, in which case I will remain but the anarch will self-destruct, thus achieving mutually satisfying goals.

I first encountered Alexander Pope's Dunciad when I was very small; I think I was about ten years old at the time, maybe older. My aunt had lots of her old literature texts lying around, and I used to hide in her house and read when I thought I had nothing better to do after school. Almost forty years later, I recall these lines and find them an apt description of one perspective on our modern world:

See skulking Truth to her old cavern fled,
Mountains of Casuistry heaped o'er her head!
Philosophy, that leaned on Heaven before,
Shrinks to her second cause, and is no more.
Physic of Metaphysic begs defence,
And Metaphysic calls for aid on Sense!
See Mystery to Mathematics fly!
In vain! they gaze, turn giddy, rave, and die.
Religion blushing veils her sacred fires,
And unawares Morality expires.
Nor public Flame, nor private , dares to shine;
Nor human Spark is left, nor Glimpse divine !
Lo! thy dread Empire, Chaos! is restored;
Light dies before thy uncreating word:
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;
And universal Darkness buries All.

Law is a good thing. It is a facile (cheap, shallow, easy) argument to say that all law is repressive or oppressive. In a sense, it is, since it limits action (actual, potential, desired or desirable) by threat. But so too does awareness of the natural sciences. You know that ingesting chromic acid will kill you, that gravity and time are not your friends. This doesn't make you attempt to undermine them.

Yes, I admit that's an extreme position; after all, human law is not like nature. Well, humans do make laws for the governance of larger groups. A good body of law allows for law to be changed reasonably, whether this is onerous or not (there are arguments that seek to establish how onerous this should be — too easy and we get frivolity, too hard and we get draconism). Humans always get to where they're going, for good or bad, but there should be some degree of predictability. It gives a sense of security and mental well-being to know that you can carry on without the fabric of reality warping unpredictably around you.

So I am all for civil disobedience, but against uncivil and personal attacks. I am for the rule of law, but as a living thing with the bare minimum of stone pylons, tablets and other unyielding principles (or principalities and powers). I am not an anarchist, but I am not an overarchist. And there we leave it.

The Long Day Wanes

Where to begin, now? There is a happy man who sits in the pale golden light of the IKEA lamp, looking back with satisfaction on six months' work. So perhaps we begin with the present moment, or that range of self-knowledge which masquerades as time.

I live in Atlantis, a city of millions, with runnels and swards of water and grass and life woven throughout its wonderful fabric. Some Atlanteans, in particular the rich or the culturista-liberalist, profess disgust at the degree of government control, sanctimony, antimony, antinomy, economy — it is as if their inability to bend reality to their tastes makes Atlantis a dump.

It is not. It tries very hard not to be. Just the other day, I realised that potable water costs one and a fifth Atlantean thalers per tonne. That is a thousand litres of water, four thousand glasses. Each glass an Atlantean drinks will cost him only three-hundredths of a cent — up to a limit of forty tonnes a month. And this, in what the fashionable call a concrete wasteland of economic soullessness.

And so, I am happy. I am happy that only the rich can have multiple cars, and that it costs the earth if you want to be a heavy consumer. For all I need is books, and that to the tune of not more than 500 Atlantean thalers a month. Knowledge begets knowledge; I earn that much by weaving new knowledge out of old and feeding it to the hungry. Indeed, I earn enough even to pay for my water, and my food.

My current estimate is that in Atlantis, it is possible to get by on ten thalers a day. The question then becomes, "How much work does one need to earn that much?" The answer is: very little. A more important question is: "How much does one need to do to earn enough for a home AND ten thalers a day?" A tiny leasehold of two rooms over 99 years will set you back the enormous sum of 76,000 thalers, or 16,000 if you are poor and qualify for grants. That is about two thalers a day, or perhaps as little as forty cents.

I would therefore try to earn at least fifty thalers a day, were I young again. Heck, why not throw in everything else modern life might consider necessary (the internet, distractions from life which are referred to as 'having a life', and suchlike) — the sum might rise to two hundred thalers a day.

Do you know how much work will earn you that much? Surprisingly, selling coffee will do that for you. There are many avenues for the unskilled to earn that much. What people won't say is that they don't want to tell others about that because such jobs are limited — too many baristas and each barista will earn less.

The entire shebang is run by the Gnome's successor. Atlantis is not poor. It is only the half-rich who tell the half-poor how terrible their (either side's) lot in life is. In the end, 60% of the population remain sufficiently clear of mind to keep the priests of the Thunderer in business. The cult of the Hammer is rising though; people think that perhaps lightning proceeds better from a Hammer than a Bolt.

They are of course mistaken. Lightning is the cause of thunder, and thunder is a sound similar to the echo of a hammer. Nothing rules the lightning, but it does tend to pass through the highest point in the forest. Only the hardiest spire can control the flash of doom.

And here I sit, drinking pale gold wine in a pale gold room. I think that the main problem of all problems is that there are people wealthy enough to waste time trolling and surfing the Net, who have the gall to complain that they are too poor. I laugh sadly, and think about the goldenly unbearable lightning-ness of being.

Limited Toolkit

"When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." This quotation is normally used by liberals to decry a conservative tendency towards monolinear thinking.

However, political and social liberals like myself tend to have an equivalent (or perhaps hypervalent) tendency that may be worse: "When all you have is a toolbox, everything looks like a tool."

Which is to say, we tend to see every effort by an authority-holding entity to be one aimed at curtailing liberties. In that, we make ourselves libertarians, not liberals. True liberals should be in most (if not all) cases prepared to critique and criticise everything - including their own assumptions about power, the state, truth, expression, and other such constructs.

Sometimes, the majority of people do want simple things - not to be bombarded with advertisements, not to have faux news inflicted on them. Is that censorship? If the state speaks for the people who created it or who elected the governing moiety of that state, do they have a right to rein in special interests on behalf of those people? Is this tyranny by majority (an oxymoron for those who know their history)?

Ah, questions, questions. But remember: the toolbox must have tools in it, and the more, the better. I'd rather not have only a set of really big power tools at the expense of my jewellers' screwdrivers and other diverse and mismatched tools.

Measuring 'Progress'

There's all kinds of waffling all the time about social and economic progress.

I think it's easier to just consider two likely factors, based on empirical observation. Societies and economies that are said to have progressed relative to others are those with a higher information flux density or energy flux density.

For those less enamoured of technical-sounding terms, 'flux density' is a measure of the rate at which something flows through a cross-sectional area. So a high information flux density implies that a lot of information is flowing through a specific cross-section. The more 'units' (how ever measured) of information or energy flow through an average cross-section of the society being evaluated, the more 'socioeconomically progressive' it can be said to be.

Whether this is a valid formulation or not is still debatable. However, it's an interesting place to start — my personal thesis that socioeconomic progress can be measured by information and/or energy flux density, or some combination thereof.

Why would such measures be valid?

Well, if information is being transferred from node to node (that is, meaning is successfully conveyed — a la communication theory — from one place to another), then teaching and learning, and other social tools, are implied. The higher the density, the more likely it is that it is for some purpose; it is unlikely that a lot of information is being routed from point A to point B for no reason at all (except, perhaps, for back-up and other 'modern' purposes). If large amounts of energy (of any kind) are being transferred from point A to point B, it is also unlikely that it is being used for no reason at all (except, perhaps, for aesthetic purposes such as decorative lighting).

Although there will certainly be exceptions, the chance of social complexity, diversity of thought, and diversity of purposeful action being present should increase with the increase in these flux densities. In order to make this more robust, I'd propose that successful 'flow' should be measured in terms of what was sent at the transmitting end and what was used at the recipient end. So if someone sends me an email and it is routed to my junk folder and deleted, that doesn't count, since no information transfer in a practical sense has occurred.

Let's see how it goes...

Thirteen Theses

Somewhere else in the proximate blogosphere, thirteen points were raised about education in Atlantis.

For ease of reference, I list them below in modified form (italics) and add some comments. You can always refer to the original post for the unmodified form.

1. Examinations should exist primarily to test progress/knowledge and should not be used to impart value/rank.

That's a matter of opinion, really — and the kind of society that sees a need for examinations and is deploying them. In practice, passing any examination affirms 'progress/knowledge', thus raising the perceived value of the individual and hence imparting value/rank.

2. Our current system of exams plus streaming creates elitism, stratifies society and demoralises/devalues much of our human capital.

This is true of any human process that validates progress (how ever defined), except to the degree in which human capital is demoralised/devalued (another social construct).

3. Since only 1% of those who leave primary school do not progress to secondary school, we do not need a Primary School Leaving Examination for promotion purposes (we may still need it to fill places, but that is a different barrier to be broken). We can look at through-train programmes to Sec 2 / Grade 8 (for 14 year olds) or something.

At which point, you'd deploy another examination? If the assumption is that we still need promotions and still need to measure progress (implicit in thesestatements), then it's only a matter of shuffling the standardised tests around. I don't think this particular statement adds much to the discussion.

4. Teacher 'key performance indicators' (KPIs) should not be weighted significantly towards the exam results of their students.

One major school of thought has it that the success of a teacher is measured by student outcomes. It's the most reasonable school, in general. The key point here is that certainly we don't have to use standardised exam results as the only indicator of teacher performance, and the debate should be on what else to use, in that case.

Indeed, if KPIs are not significantly weighted towards student results at all, then there aren't any meaningful AND useful criteria by which to judge teacher performance. For example, a great teacher is often considered so by the quality of her/his students' lives later on, and their concomitant attribution of their quality of life and deeds to what that teacher taught them. But that often results only in long-delayed (or even posthumous) recognition of teacher performance.

The opposite problem is selecting KPIs that are too short-term. This tends to lead not to performance (i.e. a cohesive, coherent and concerted exhibition of professional skill) but to performativity (teaching to the test in order to extract bonuses etc).

5. We need to lower the stakes of major examinations by relaxing cut-off points for schools.

The thing about this is that the cut-off points for schools are a matter of market forces. That is, if 350 students apply for 120 places, the 120 with the 'best' (how ever determined) results get in. To relax cut-off points normally entails deliberate loosening of criteria and may lead to accusations of lack of consistency — because progressive loosening means that different people would be able to justify the entry of different students on different grounds. You could also apply random or semi-random selection or just use centralised planning approaches. Otherwise, the main point is that schools and ministries don't set cut-off points — the 'market' does; the more people want to apply to a school, the higher the cut-off tends to get.

6. Change philosophies about the value of non-academically inclined students.

Well, first you'd have do define 'non-academically inclined'. You might also want to consider changing the values of society, the values of the students, etc. And lastly, consider how 'non-academically inclined' students might not want to think about philosophy at all.

7. Since all schools are good schools, we should pro-actively begin to dismantle the concept and influence of “elite” schools, starting by bringing the SAP, GEP and IB (note: various Atlantean elite programmes — Speech Alternative Plan, Greatly Exaggerated Plan, Intentional Baccalaureate) programmes (or elements thereof) into all schools (or a very significant portion of schools).

Background first. Yes, but some schools are good for other reasons. Especially those predating such programmes. They were therefore historically chosen to host such programmes.

The thing these programmes have in common is that they cost extra to run, which is why there are so few of them. They are sometimes culturally supported only in some kinds of schools (schools for the culturally well-defined, schools for the weird and peculiar, etc). And they aren't for everybody, so why deploy them everywhere?

8. There are alternative ways to fill posts in secondary schools.

Yes, there are. See point 5 above. We need to ask whether these alternative ways are acceptable to society. Otherwise, change society and/or admit you are trying to assert a perspective that society deems impractical. Good debate to have, though.

9. Restructure education so that the wealthy make only marginal/high risk gains from investing heavily in education.

Betrays a lack of historical perspective, or perhaps just an inexact formulation. In Atlantis, and many other parts of the world, the roots of mass education lie in the long-term vision of the wealthy who saw investing heavily in education as a route to great gain for society as a whole.

At present, let's consider what happens if the wealthy make NO (or insignificant) gain from investing heavily in education. Economic theory tells us that they will stop investing in education and invest elsewhere. Then you might get really uneducated and very rich young people out there, or you might end up with a society that sees no value in education relative to other pursuits, or any combination of similar deflationary possibilities with respect to the value of education.

And how would you restructure it anyway?

10. Fix teacher workloads, drastically increase supply of allied teaching professionals.

This is a great point, if by 'fix' we mean something concrete to reduce teacher workload to the point where it no longer compromises their professional duties. However, if by 'drastically increase supply' we mean pouring lots of money into recruiting teacher aides who would otherwise be running other essential parts of society, I would be rather concerned. Society needs allied teaching professionals like assistant teachers, administrators, special-needs educators, educational researchers, some kinds of counsellors, etc. But augmenting the supply shouldn't mean undermining the workforce in another key area.

11. Allow technical education to lead to degrees, or diplomas.

On the surface of it, excellent. But these routes already exist in Atlantis, so a bit of a non-point.

12. Skilled craftsmen and artists should have a separate basic qualification before moving on to tertiary.

This assumes that skilled craftsmen and artists NEED (presumably) paper qualifications at all. In many cases, the apprenticeship model and other models leave the creative production of the craftsman/artist as the only qualification needed. And why would they want to move on to tertiary education if they are already skilled? I hesitate to call this point wrong or irrelevant. It's just confusing.

13. Lower the cost of national university education further.

Well, see point 9 above. Also, consider the fact that Atlantean education is already very heavily subsidized. It's a matter of degree then, and whoever promotes this point must be set to propound a specific lowering. How much lower? And how justified?

Reproduction Fail?

A recent paper by Goodman, Koupil and Lawson, Low fertility increases descendant socioeconomic position but reduces long-term fitness in a modern post-industrial society, in the 2012 Proceedings of the Royal Society (Biological Sciences), has basically affirmed the position many people are in denial about — that is, that the richer people get, the less they want to reproduce.

Why is this so? Well, this strategy essentially produces a limited pool of offspring, all with huge amounts of per capita resources in both human and economic capital. It makes them socioeconomically very competitive. The downside is that the species as a whole becomes less biologically competitive.

But this is not a new problem. Humans have been using technology to avoid the problems of simple biological competition for ages. We can compete with large predators (in fact, we've eliminated many of them or reduced them to zoological exhibits) by using weapons that vastly increase our sensory and attack range. We can compete with the environment by using engineering of all kinds. And we can mobilise energy quantitatively more effectively (although not more efficiently) than most other species. A smart human with high resource levels will out-compete a less-smart, less-resourced human — which is why you see dropping birthrates once a society gets freer access to technology.

In a city-state, where there are few natural threats, the main threat is socioeconomic, no matter what people moan and groan about. It thus makes perfect sense to see a drop in fertility levels in the vast majority of cities and city-states unless they have a large hinterland that is not urbanised.

However, there is always a bump in the implementation of such a strategy. This normally comes in the form of people moaning and groaning about low fertility as if they lived in an agricultural, low population density, high resource density environment. Ridiculous. We're not bacteria in a particularly rich chicken broth.

Impurities (Part 4)

So... what to do when Atlantis is overwhelmed by the flood, the waves of migrating water? Well, I am reminded of the great A E Housman's Epitaph for an Army of Mercenaries:

These, in the day when heaven was falling,
The hour when earth's foundations fled,
Followed their mercenary calling,
And took their wages, and are dead.

Their shoulders held the sky suspended;
They stood, and earth's foundations stay;
What God abandoned, these defended,
And saved the sum of things for pay.

You see, quite often the ones who need defending are not the ones doing the defending. The ones who are living in a land of good roads and schools and many trees, they are the ones who wish it could all be so much better. And when others make it better by doing the jobs that you would prefer to pay others to do, they are 'mercenaries'.

But some mercenaries settle down in the land to which they were contracted. They fall in love. They go native. They form a special bond to the country which may be stronger than that of those born there.

Impurities, the cry goes up. Impure! Impure!

But who is pure in a world of shifting populations and allegiances? All of us are immigrants or emigrants. Some of us hide it well, or have it hidden for us well in the snarls of time and culture.

To remove the 'impurities' from the land might be the same thing as removing the carbon from the steel, or the nails from the timber. Just a few small 'impurities' taken out... and suddenly, nothing is saved.

Mein...

Hitler would have said 'Kampf' and meant it in a completely different way. I'm a researcher in the sociological 'sciences' and I have a problem, if not a struggle. The thing is that education, now globalizing like everything else these days, has got to think about what to do with itself.

As many people have commented, 'education' is from Latin educaré — a 'drawing out' or 'drawing forth' of something. That is why it's important to think about what rabbits you are planning to pull out of what hats. Stalin is reputed to have said, "Education is like a weapon; its effects depend on who holds it and at whom it is aimed."

Well, in that case, we need to think seriously about what to teach and how to educate — that is, what rabbits are to be pulled forth and how. How is the world to survive and make good the potential of billions? One kind of eschatology would say that it won't matter in 'the end' — but even that kind must admit that from now to the end, we owe it to the educable to educate them or at least offer them a good chance of a good education.

But what is a good education in this age? Is it different from that in any other age? And what do we educate ABOUT?

An example: in the sciences, we sometimes take for granted that objectivity levels the playing field for all subjects — if a subjective viewpoint cannot be dominant, then all of us are equal; therefore, teach more science and convert the humanities and aesthetics through postmodern strippery.

I don't subscribe to this at all. Science is supposedly neutral, but it comes easier to those reading a dominant corpus in a dominant language. Like money, it is a neutral tool. But like money, it also heavily favours the possessors, holders and users of such tools; it 'privileges' them, to use a popular discourse-perverted term — it makes them privy to secrets and powers and 'specials' which nobody else has.

So you can have a financial priesthood and a technological priesthood, and inequality will grow. But the other arguments all lead to inequality as well, it appears. Perhaps one should just adopt a Sam Harris style 'major in empathy and common sense without religious irrationality and you'll be fine' approach.

It looks good. But again, 'empathy' would require trying to think in the black cave of ignorance and 'irrational' belief and intuition without actually being in there. All scientists are human. They admit to leading irrational lives, but they try to rationalize them in a way that... makes them happy. And having the power to do so, they are good at effective trying sometimes.

But still, it doesn't answer the question of what to teach and how to teach it. It's not that I don't already have many answers. I have to question all the answers if we're going to do anything useful with the trillions of silver pieces yet to be spent on an education-hungry world.

Sign-field

It must be a sign of our times, one of the many markers in the graveyard of modernity, that when I asked a student, "What's round and has a period of 28 days?" I got an interesting answer. She replied with the name of a famous talk-show host who has made an industry out of the very round initial of her first name. Ho ho.

Complaining about Systems of Education (Redux)

Some days ago, I posted this. It was a basic analysis of why systems of mass education always lead to mass complaints. John Gatto calls such systems 'weapons of mass instruction'.

The point is not that such systems are bad, but that even if the system is good, the components that execute it can't all be good — and the larger the system the more likely that critical components will be bad or go bad. That's because no matter how selective you make the choosing and accumulation of teachers, principals, and experts, the curse of the normal distribution will always win.

There just aren't enough good components for a good system of mass instruction to work well. In any school, the percentage of good teachers hovers around 5% at most. Really good teachers, that is. Even if you started out with 10% good teachers, or 20%, regression towards a normal distribution would begin to occur without a perceptive, dynamic leader who managed to escape his own egocentricity and keep the teachers from the normal regression.

This is another reason why one should appraise the system first, and then its effects. Most systems actually would work reasonably well without the problem of bad teachers, stakeholders who see things in terms of economic criteria, indifferent boards of management, and parents who suffer the same '10% maximum' problem in an educational context.

The best thing for any system's fair appraisal is for its goals to be set out in full and then its performance checked as objectively as possible against these goals. Such appraisal works better without pointless statements like 'we need better teachers' (yes, but you won't get them), 'we must prepare students for the world of work' (yes, but only working life really teaches this), 'grades are inflated' (or 'grades are unimportant' or anything else about grades — all pointless without a good research base, which is lacking), or 'my kids get less of a life than I used to have' (do they think so too, or are you doing it to them?).

In particular, the curse in high-density, high-competitivity urban locations is that parents (the clients of the system) compete too much. It becomes a game of snakes and ladders (or any number of MMORPGs which I can't mention here) where children are virtual proxies for personal gladiatorial contests. There is no way to avoid this, because it is human nature — the only way out is not to have anything to do with the system in the first place.

But remember — the system is only as bad as the society that allows it. If you can change it for something clearly better, do so. Else stop complaining that it doesn't work. I sincerely wish you all the best, if you can indeed make positive change happen.

Competition Curve

Look at it, the beautiful idea of the normal curve. For that is what it is, it is a mathematical construct which smiles at us like a lazy anaconda and tells us, "This, this is normal, this is what things should be. BURP."

And the curious thing about this normal curve is that it is flattish at both ends and it flattens out in the middle, but there are two spots at which the degree of curvature is very high. One of them is when the tail end, ignored, reviled and despised, attempts to climb up to 'normality'. The other is when the middle, bulging with half-digested ideation, attempts to squeeze its way into the thin head of the engorged snake.

The problem is not with the former. There is so much more space in the middle that we can accommodate people drifting towards the middle. But here lies mediocrity, and while those below the middle wouldn't mind entering this zone, those in the middle are aching to get out of it.

They will push up and on, they will strive to be the best, they will seek a better age. And therein lies the rub: it takes proportionately far less resources to get the under-average into the average than the average into the excellent. It is extremely painful, in fact.

And that is why the complaints about how tough any system is will not come from the bottom, but from somewhere just below the neck.

Education and the Elite

Someone just told me, "The goal of education is not to create an elite, but to provide people with the knowledge necessary for them to then help improve society."

This is an excellent topic for an essay. It should be set for an exam question or something — just tack on the word, "Discuss."

I would say that most people would want to believe that the goal of education is not to create an elite. Some of those people might genuinely believe this to be true. As for the knowledge necessary for them to then help to improve society, that's moot — what -is- the knowledge necessary to help improve society?

Clearly, some knowledge (for example, that which helps us understand society, how it works and what makes people's lives better) is likely to be helpful. Of course, the Marxist-type philosopher would argue that universities think that whatever makes a society value a university-style education more is the kind of knowledge that should be propagated. That's partially true, as we shall see.

The thing is that we all know that humans come in a bell-curve for most things. When babies are born, they pretty quickly prove to be differentiable for genetic reasons along many dimensions of capability and potential. Some will be taller, some will be shorter, and little short of drastic re-engineering with chemicals and nasty interventions will change that.

It is the same with displayed intelligence — everyone has intelligence if they have a brain, but without cradle-to-grave (or at least, birth-to-early-adolescence) environmental optimisation, a bell curve is obtained long before the usual university-going age.

This means that those likely to benefit from going to high school (say the top 80% of any cohort, to be generous) will now certainly have diverged from those less likely. The most divergent will be able to benefit most from going to college, and then to higher education. Eventually, divergence will string out the bell-curve even more, and the 'high end' will have become an elite.

There are two interesting counter-arguments.

One is that people can do better without going to university. True. Those are outliers. They are even more of an elite, being able to treat the world as a university, than those who do go to university. If we set the criterion at 'could not have made it into any university or benefited from one, but did better than anybody who could', this elite becomes even more elite. I don't think you can find anyone like that.

One is that universities are like hospitals or parks. They are public goods, since they are supposed to make people better (more useful etc) members of society. So everyone should be allowed to enter universities. Well, that's like saying everyone should be allowed to enter hospitals and make use of hospital services whether they can benefit from hospital services or not. We instinctively differentiate between hospitals and parks because parks are cheaper to maintain per square foot, if you include things like power consumption, water, staffing, insurance and (oh yes) medical services. So we can indeed make universities like parks if we make them less staffed, less powered, less service-providing.

So yes, I think that education has the largely unintended (but sometimes fully intended) goal of creating an elite. It's just that most of the educated have been educated not to think of it that way. Which is... odd.

Systemic or Societal?

Last night I was having one of those interesting Facebook intercommentarial episodes — things that aren't quite conversations or discussions but approximate them through roughly alternating comments on a post. The Thunderer's get was protagonist, so I suppose in a sense I was antagonist, although not in the modern sense.

The underlying issue was whether a certain system was crazy or not. Personally, I always go for etymology before thinking about significance. The word 'crazy' means 'fragmented', and it is in this sense that things are 'cracked', 'flawed' or otherwise 'broken'. It implies a lack of consistency at the very least and a lack of coherence or integrity at more subtle levels. Clearly, a system can be crazy.

But the overall issue seemed to be whether crazy people had made a crazy system or whether a crazy system had made crazy people. And here I paused to think.

The real conflict was that, in the kinds of systems we were discussing, people were integral components. If the people were nuts, the system (no matter how designed) would behave sub-optimally. But this, in the long term, is true of any system — it slides into increasing entropy. The Thunderer's get averred (perhaps with some sarcasm) that it was easy to say this, since the Second Law said as much.

My point was that empirically, systems collapse not in the very long heat-death-of-the-universe sense but in the much shorter span of generations. If a generation is 30 years, evolving systems like the American experiment in constitutional democracy have only lasted less than 10 generations. The first of my ancestors to leave eastern Eurasia and move to south-eastern Eurasia did so around that time; he lived from 1751 to 1801. The local mercantile/political experiment of my forefathers is thus an experiment just as old and I have empirical knowledge of it.

In the much smaller system of my clan, we have diversified pretty broadly (although not as much as the American system, with vastly greater numbers of inputs and functions). But I am absolutely certain that none of us hews closely to the attitude of our patriarch. If he had drafted a constitution, it might have slowed the entropy and diversification; if we had spent more time planning (as if we'd been a corporate institution) we might have kept the focus narrower. But neither of these possibilities is easy to evaluate.

The Thunderer's get also pointed out that certain systems obviously produced better (more rational, more useful etc) results than others. This is certainly true. But it is also about as useful as the finding that all systems fail because it is also a truism. No two systems can be alike, or they would not be two systems; they'd be one. If they were not alike, their outputs would be different either in terms of process or product, and hence different in impact on their implementors, environments and users.

Of course, in a purely mathematical system, this might not be true; you can indeed produce the same result by different process, and if a machine does it, there is little or no impact on human users. But that particular qualification — human — is the nub of the issue.

In any system, the tendency to entropy is greatest in the most complex element. The higher the level of development, the greater the distance from the baseline and the harder it is to sustain. This can be empirically and experimentally verified. In most of the systems under discussion, humans are involved, and they are the most complex elements of these systems.

This then was the process by which I reached the following point of contention: I said that all systems tend towards the mediocre and the Thunderer's get disagreed, citing the fact that some systems were better than others. I think that both of us were true in a very trivial sense (see above) but that taken together, these two truths give a higher truth: no matter how hard you strive to make something better, it will one day, in the not-so-distant future, be made less good by humans.

The challenge therefore is to overdesign systems so that humans can't mess them up. And of course, the more you overdesign a system, the more potential for entropy you create and the more effort you spend. You are taking away resources from somewhere else to do that work. You are fighting the inevitable, perhaps in a very laudable way, but mediocrity lurks nearby, always at your shoulder. It is the dark twin.

It is right to resist mediocrity. But this can only be done by changing the system every now and then. The other challenge is to know when to expend that effort and suffer that pain.

In all, one should conclude that the main point of human striving, systemically speaking, is to expend effort in setting up systems that resist entropy to some continuing and useful end. Society, on the other hand, cannot be that end in itself. So what is?

Momentary

Today Sir Wolff sat with me. He had been put in mind of an old rhyme:

One for the money
Two for the show
Three to get ready
And four to go!

This was in connection with several events, all held a few hours ago, at which Sir Wolff's former Lords Inquisitorial of the Magisterium had been spread thinly throughout — trapped in gold laurels, or with gold ingots, or dealing with the gold of youth, and so forth.

I asked him, "Wolff, were you always inclined to be so irreverent of your superiors?"

He chuckled. "No, rather say that I was never more reverent than usual of the banal or mundane; the quotidian, secular or ephemeral. What is there to revere especially of those who breathe the air we breathe and use the same conveniences that we do? I respected their rank, and avoided their authority."

I tsked at him. "Avoidance of authority shows some disrespect, surely."

Soberly, he replied, "But this was sometimes the only way to serve the higher calling and the grand endeavour. At the end of my days, I often felt nothing more than a mercenary."

And that was our cue for the wine and cheese.

Out of the Box

I was thinking about Stockholm syndrome and how it applies to many human dominance/control situations. The syndrome takes its name from an episode of bank robbery and hostage-taking in which the hostages ended up having more positive feelings towards their captors than to their rescuers. In established firms with a strong and authoritarian leadership echelon, and in some political entities (ditto), those who are employees of the former and members of the latter may find themselves locked into such a psychological response.

Whether this is true or not, it's probably a natural human tendency to like boxes and being in them, because humans are always happy to be able to delimit territory and determine boundaries. Humans will also test those limits and push those termini, but that seems mainly for the purpose of finding out what and where they are.

To think out of the box is not merely to puncture a membrane and look out, but to jump over the top into a place which is no longer bounded. When we are told not to conform to the pattern of the world, it is an out-of-the-box directive — and one extremely difficult to obey. That's because we're so used to being in the box, and so used to being relatively happy by being boxed up or boxed in.

I've found, myself, that doing work when out of the box is very much harder than doing work when in the box. In the box, you know what you can do and what you must do, so you don't have to spend extra energy pushing your personal limits and finding stuff to do on your own initiative. You don't have to attempt anything you aren't told to do. It's a great recipe for getting fat and predictable.

More insidious, perhaps, are the majority of the 'think out of the box' sessions that box owners sometimes hold. These enable box-dwellers to climb around on outside on the surface of the box, thus gaining relative freedom and not much else. Since these box-dwellers can't fly away, the surface of the box holds them almost as much as if they were inside it.

That's not to say that 'think out of the box' sessions are useless. Where box-owners have empowered their box-dwellers, genuine escapes and feats of imaginative and creative prowess can be performed by those who can jump, fly, tunnel, and otherwise transcend the surly bonds of boxdom.

Right now, I have just realised that having left one box, I spent quite a bit of time setting up my own box. Now I have to think my way out of this very nice, very safe, very comfortable box — if I want to do something more with my life. The question is: how do I do that, and why should I?

Sigh. Back to the box for now. At least it's my own box.

The Red Dot's Race

When I was young, I read genuinely profound books — books like Alice in Wonderland and Winnie-the-Pooh. My father managed to get omnibus editions, so that Alice came with Through the Looking-Glass and Winnie-the-Pooh came with The House at Pooh Corner.

Those books were educational. They taught me a lot about how to look at the world ambivalently and ambiguously enough, so that it could be seen more clearly and understood more comprehensively. At that time, I had no idea I was learning about such things.

But let me tell you how I felt when Atlantis, small city-state in a blue ocean turning redder by the day, was described as "a little red dot". I felt the instinctive deep-reality truth of that epithet. And I remembered, all at once, the Red Queen's race from Through the Looking-Glass.

For the little red dot is manifestly engaged in a Red Queen's race, and that is the nature of its existence. To indulge in anything else would be an existential threat.

The more you read, and the more you learn about the local system, the more you realise the alternatives are Pooh Corner and the Looking-Glass world. And it is genuinely hard to decide which is the better, if you think hard about it.

Authoritativeness is not Authoritarianism

Wolff has been in Atlantis for nigh-on forty years. It always puzzles him why people think of Atlantis as if it were mainland Eurasia, that hotbed of scurvy Staleninomarxism, uptight Natsocifascitis, and other natural ills of political man. He looks at Atlantis as the natural heir of Rome (without the legions), Byzantium (without the richness), and Venice (without the charm). It is no Londinium, nor is it Novo Eboracum, but what it is is a drastically small island, about one and a half times the size of Andorra but a lot less beautiful.

Atlantis is an authoritative state. It speaks firmly. It believes in firm principles. It just hasn't had a couple of centuries (or more) to work out how its conflicting principles should interact, unlike some much larger confederacies and conspiracies. It is therefore disparaged for not being libertarian (a philosophy, which Wolff claims, requires less than 200 people per square kilometre in order to really work).

Wolff is quite amazed, actually, that Atlantis works at all. It has the dark brothers of Sind and the brown brothers of Cathay and the pale brothers of Hyborea and perfidious Albion all in one place. It has gallant knights of the Wyvern, studious monks of the Torch, and pasty scholars of the Gryphon. It has great food, although people will tell you that there are other places with far better (which is always true, no matter where you live), and awful rats. It floods about once or twice a year on average (legends say once in fifty years, but obviously they are wrong).

But he is happy that he doesn't have to execute purveyors of the poppy or occultists of the opiates himself — the state will do it for him. He is happy he doesn't have to draw arms against rapists and gangsters, villains (not villeins, that's different) and vigilantes. He can live in relative peace because the state acts with authority.

Yes, it sometimes exceeds its authority. He notes that the people are ill-represented, but he also realises that the better the representation, the more taxes you pay for that honour. He notes that the high priests receive a large tithe. He is happy that they do not take more and pretend that they aren't. He feels that he is comfortable, and that most people here are not because their ancestors were driven by the urge to be better off than their fellow men.

He is somewhere in the middle. He chats with his friends; some serve the State and are not villains, a rare combination in some other places. He drinks kava with them; the kava comes in many varieties. He eats of the fried oyster omelette, and of the rice-sheets in dark sauce, and of the porridge of the sea. He is happy.

He suspects that moving the population to somewhere like Novosibirsk or Pyongyang might be a healthily educational experience. But he knows better than to bother. Atlanteans will learn in time that there have been other islands in other times, not all of them physically so. It is better, he feels to understand the basis of authority and try to steer it gently along the rightful path, than to think that it is all evil.

It is odd, he feels, that the rationalists and scientists want to make the world ordered and tidy, but not their own society. He suspects hypocrisy. But he is willing to live and let live.

The Other Invisible Hand

Everyone knows about Adam Smith's 'invisible hand', one of the seminal metaphors in economics. To be more exact, it is the idea that the forces of competition, self-interest, and supply/demand will work together to produce the most efficient allocation of resources. This is the basis of the 'free market'.

But if that is the right hand of human social impulses, the left hand is Robert Michels' hand of the bureaucratic impulse, the idea that keeping things tightly controlled is a good thing. This is the basis of the 'market square', the framework in which and through which the 'free market' is forced to operate.

John Taylor Gatto, in his book Weapons of Mass Instruction, mentions what sounds awfully like the other invisible hand in the context of education. He says:

...men and women who staff institutional schooling are very like those in other complex institutions — if they exercise significant free will they will become outlaws who must be sanctioned, and things which improve performance are hardly more welcome than things which impair it. Deviations from a steady state jeopardize the 'system mission'... innovation was powerfully resisted; independent practitioners were sanctioned — ostracized if they persisted

This sounds so much like the old place. Essentially, teaching the way I did was considered 'bad teaching'. Ironically, when I did the boring stuff, I was praised for it. When I did the interesting stuff, a few enlightened people in distant powerful places thought it was good, but the immediate hierarchy squirmed. And because I was one of the 'interesting people' (of which there were really quite a few; I wasn't the only one), whenever something suspicious happened, I was immediately on the shortlist of people to blame.

I realise now that essentially old men running bureaucracies always want to hold on to power. It is a deep-seated impulse which is perfectly natural, since to lose their grip (or to appear to) is to admit uselessness and impotence. Sometimes it is also for very good reasons; these people perceive that they are the best persons for the job and cannot imagine anyone would be as good at being them. In that sense, they are right — nobody is so alike them that replacement would be exact.

Robert Michels said that the key function of bureaucracies is never their publicly-stated primary mission, but the protection and maintenance of the bureaucracy itself. In that light, it is quite obvious why most innovation is a sham, a shoving around of things designed to look like advancement and progress, but masking the truth.

In an educational context, this truth is that students are not smarter than before, not wiser, not more capable; they are just as good as ever, except that schools take credit for their work and subtly persuade them that without school, they would not be as successful. Instead of empowering them and setting them free, as schools claim, they are actually applying invisible shackles with an invisible hand, so that the majority of students never grow up to become the insurrectionists that society really needs for true progress.

One of those shackles is called 'debt to society', which over the last few decades has overtaken the perfectly legitimate debt to parents. In this era, parents often feel incompetent to educate their own children, a feeling enhanced and intensified by constantly changing syllabi which in some cases teach less than those parents learnt when they were in school. That is why students can imagine that their debt to society is greater than their debt to parents; society provides schools that provide grades and certificates and jobs based on those, and money beside.

When Smith's invisible hand meets Michels' invisible hand, students are flattened in between and become two-dimensional. The combination of 'free market' and 'controlling framework' leads to dominance by those capable of brachiating through the social jungle, the monkeys best able to follow monkey rules. Those who would change those rules or make their own rules are few because many think they would fail.

Yet even supposedly conservative texts like the Bible say things like, "Do not be conformed to the system of the world." The Biblical Jesus paid tribute to the Law, but he said that the fulfillment of the Law was beyond the Law itself. He was the independent insurrectionist of his time: the Sabbath was made for Man, and not Man for the Sabbath — the Laws were made because of the hardness of men's hearts. But it is Man who is more important than Law.

We who live in the framework should be aware of both invisible hands. It is Michels' bureaucratic hand that is more pernicious, more deadly. It preserves a population pyramid in which craftsmanship is denied a proper place, and administrative power is king. I suspect that if even 10% of the teachers of the nation were to aim beyond the framework, at least 50% of their students would be lifted beyond the limits of their current horizons.

=====

Note: I think the major difference between Smith's hand and Michels' hand is that Smith thought the invisible economic hand was a good thing in general, whereas Michels thought the invisible bureaucratic hand was an evil thing.