The Case for Radical Reorganisation of Education

Harsh economic necessity and the need to live within our means is the fundamental cause of the crisis in Higher Education. But beneath the economics and ideology of public services, there is a deeper crisis which I think concerns the fundamental difficulty in coordinating education. Education is too expensive, and continues to be expensive because the methods we have for coordinating it seem ineffective.

I think the first problem we have to face is one of 'variety management': one teacher, many students; one course, many teachers; one nation, many institutions; and so on... Coordinating many teachers, all of whom have different approaches to dealing with their students can get terribly bureaucratic, and as a result, expensive: the costs associated which processes which have nothing to do with the experience the students receive start to explode. Where are the intervention points to optimise the system?

Teachers managing the variety of their learners in different ways is potentially the root of the problem. The variety management that teachers engage in is multi-level: production of resources, design of activities, classroom management, design of assignments, student feedback, etc. Not all of this variety management has an equal effect in terms of benefit to the student.

Choosing the types of activity that are engaged in and coordinating those activities at the highest level does not necessarily need to be performed by the teacher. Indeed, in organising teachers by subjects and modules, a small part of this coordination is currently taken away from them. But ultimately, they tend to individually end up reinventing everything from scratch in the name of “academic freedom”

This is a problem of reductionism. Knowledge has got compartmentalised into boxes, and those boxes are used to coordinate education, but the content of the boxes is open to interpretation – particularly in a post-modernist environment. Basically, nobody any longer understands the fundamental coordinating principle. So they make it up as they go along, guided not by knowledge, but academic procedure: the achievement of learning outcomes and assessment criteria. These are the real inheritors of the knowledge-coordination mechanism.

Universities are about knowledge. I agree with Newman when he says that the purpose of a university is to teach Universal Knowledge. It is important to appreciate that this is not an appeal to theology. Newman makes this quite clear: 

“If its object were scientific and philosophical discovery, I do not see why a University should have students; if religious training, I do not see how it can the seat of literature and science.” 

I think I might add to what Newman says and remark that teaching Universal knowledge is about maintaining it, which is identical to maintaining civil society. At a time when Universities are seen as ‘knowledge creators’ (whatever that means!) or ‘innovation factories’ (equally meaningless), Newman’s point is easy to lose.

The central point which relates to the teaching activities of a university is “what is the relationship between knowledge and learning activity?”. In the language of learning outcomes, this is addressed by saying that activity has an outcome which is knowledge. Really? Where exactly is this ‘outcome’??

If activity produces anything observable then it is communication not knowledge. As the medium of knowledge, communication is a good thing, but it is not to be confused (as it usually is) with knowledge. Knowledge, on the other hand, certainly is expressed through certain communications: some of them more powerful than others. When someone professes “This is what I KNOW” what occurs is a rich, authentic and powerful human performance. Such communications occur in a context of other communications, and those communications will have played a role in establishing the conditions for this moment of truth.

This is the nature of activity in establishing patterns of communication which can contribute to the conditions for apprehending knowledge. Activities were once face-to-face conversations in a social setting – often occurring around the coordinating device of the curriculum. Now they are more typically complex skilled performances with online tools. Those tools are reproducible and ubiquitous. That means the activities people engage in with them are also potentially ubiquitous. Because of this, there is no need for teachers to continually reinvent activities or resources or even to individually manage their coordination. What teachers have to do is to nurture the communications that occur in activity contexts: by revealing their knowledge and their desire to help others through feedback to their learners (if they have no desire to reveal their knowledge, or certainly no desire to help others, then clearly they should not be teaching!)

The variety management that teachers are required to perform relates to the personal and personalised feedback of knowledge. There is no direct need for them to deal with the other aspects of variety management. Most of that can be centralised: the provision of tools, the identification of scenarios, the coordination of activity, the coordination of assessment points. Teachers need to make sure those activities work by stimulating communication and feeding back with regard to assessments.

Emancipation is the art of prolonging a beautiful life

One of the longest-running debates within Critical Realism concerns the role of absence. In "Dialectic: the Pulse of Freedom" Bhaskar introduced a new 'turn' in Critical Realism, introducing 'Dialectical Critical Realism' which contextualised original critical realism within a dialectical process which, Bhaskar argues, was driven by determinate (i.e. concrete and identifiable) absence.

Dialectic is a very hard book, and much discussion has surrounded the topic, much of it sceptical. I count myself among the sceptics. The real problem is to be able to point to anything 'real' about absence without drawing on rather crass examples (the absence of rains leading to famine, for example; the absence of a treaty leading to genocide, etc). This is in contrast to original critical realism, which pointed to the real phenomena in the world and in asking how scientific knowledge about them might be possible, posited mechanisms as an explanation. Bhaskar's argument is that mechanisms are stratified and tensed in history, and that processes operate within those time structures driven by the absences at any particular time point: the injustice that persists, the things that can't be explained, and so on. That may be fair enough, but he then goes on to say that absences are real, in the same way that mechanisms are real, which for many is a step too far. Then it gets complicated: are absences the drivers of mechanisms, or mechanisms the drivers of absences? Are absences in the mind or 'out there'? Bhaskar (I think) is saying the latter.

I've been thinking about all this in the context of music. Withholding the root of a chord is a common musical technique for prolonging musical expression: Wagner's Prelude to Tristan and Isolde is the classic example, but 16th century polyphony is similar. Absenting the root suspends expectation, withholds a resolution or finality, creates more tension, gives direction, moves towards something, raises expectations. Because of the absence, the music keeps driving forwards. But if we think like this, the issue is neither absence nor mechanism, but prolongation: another word for viability.

We can go a bit further here. Because a distributed cognition approach to music would then start to identify absence within the mechanisms of regulation between individual viability and the world 'out there'. In this sense, absence may well be 'out there'. Moreover, it being 'out there' is a fundamental component to the viability of each of us. One might almost say that we rely on there being real absences in the world: without them, we wouldn't exist. 

However, this is then to privilege mechanisms over absence. The mechanism detects the absence. But what drives the mechanism? Answer: absence! This seems very paradoxical! Is there progress?

That of course is a leading question (quite literally!). Bhaskar's view on dialectic is that there is an emancipatory force in the world driven by absence ("the pulse of freedom"). It is the role of philosophy to identify and unpick determinate absences, and that this is an emancipatory project. I find the latent utopianism here hard to stomach. Absence may well be real, but it is wrapped up in processes of prolongation and viability. If there is emancipation to be had, I think it lies in the possibility of an individuals finding a way through the absences of the world which harmonise with their own viability.

Like the art of prolonging a beautiful piece of music, emancipation is the art of prolonging a beautiful life.

Ibn Khaldun and Educational Economy

Ibn Khaldun was a remarkable 15th century social theorist and early economist whose ideas foreshadow those of Durkheim, Marx, Bourdieu and Giddens. His work was based on a close examination of desert societies in the 15th century, highlighting the processes of development of rich and poor. Khaldun has been on my mind following my return from Ras Al Khaimah. His concept of Asabiyyah describes the emergent processes of social transformation following invasion by nomadic groups, and the gradual assimilation of the dominant 'culture'.

Whilst there are don't appear to be any immediate parallels between a medieval context of frequent invasion and decay of civilisations, the processes Khaldun describes have modern counterparts in terms of social capital and social networks. But what I am part of (and practically every other UK and US university at the moment) is some sort of incursion (although of course, welcomed!) into Arab culture with a European model of education. How might Khaldun see this?

Education is welcomed into the culture as a way of diversifying an economy: as a service industry, education is big business. Students for foreign universities are spread between the native populations and migrant workers (or offspring from them). There are more native students for more prestigious universities, whereas for less prestigious institutions, there are more migrants. There are often significant differences in political power between migrant workers and natives: but the power imbalances can often serve as a motivator which drives individuals towards increased capability and education. Foreign educational institutions similarly find themselves as migrant institutions with fewer rights to property and disadvantaged legal status.

Bearing in mind the contrast between these different social groups, the distinctions that Khaldun draws on to highlight the relationship between urban civilisation (kingdoms) and Bedouin civilisation (nomadic) may be a useful starting point. One of the principal questions is to examine the viability of this situation, and the viability of 'nomadic' educational businesses. Political imbalance and injustice acts to adjust the distribution of risks in society, and the anxiety that results focuses on education to manage it. The principle political inequalities are often not inequalities of wealth, but of risk. This suggests a more general point that increasing wealth in a super-rich country does not bring increasing political power or more even distribution of risk.

In a society of unequal risk distribution, education is attractive because only education and the capability that can arise from it can give increased flexibility in response to managing risk. Increases in capital in terms of property are less possible (housing, for example, is only available for rent): what counts is the increase in social capital - particularly the ability to influence the ruling power; this depends on property relations to ideas and skills.

However, there's a catch here. Good education depends on good teaching. If teachers do not have sufficient educational capital to maintain their own wellbeing and flexibility in an unequal society, they will not be happy: and it's rare for an unhappy teacher teach well. The status of migrant teachers is the same as for other migrant workers. In this way, what appears as education might not be able to deliver in terms of the increase in personal and social capital. I suspect this is the case for most educational incursions in unequal societies, however prestigious.

This is not insoluble. It requires a rethink as to how education might be organised. The fundamental issue is to treat the doctor at the same time as the patient. To do this, I think that learning activities, particularly those involving overseas contacts (from more equal societies) can work magic. Activity constrains communications; but it does so to enable them. Global coordination of activity is now possible.  It means organising education around tools and scenarios rather than curricula. With this, a viable future for nomadic educational  incursions
might be a possibility.

Critical Realism, the Sciences and the Arts

Critical Realism, the philosophy of Roy Bhaskar, Margaret Archer and a number of acolytes is a philosophical critique of the nature of causation. It is grounded in a re-examination of scientific knowledge and asks the question "given that we have scientific knowledge of the world, what must the world be like?" In responding to this, it argues that Hume's theory of causation (that scientists construct causes in the light of reproducible experiment) is wrong. Bhaskar is not the only person to say this: his supervisor, Rom Harre said much the same thing in his "Causal Powers". Bhaskar argues that the Humean mistake has had knock-on effects on the social sciences, where social science has tried to compensate for the lack of reproducible experiments (with statistics, probabilities, textual analysis, etc) so as to similarly facilitate a process of 'constructing causes' in an attempt to make defensible claims about the social world. A variety of social science methodologies do this - for example, the Grounded Theory of Glaser and Strauss.

I think Bhaskar's argument here is pretty solid, and it has led to some practical innovations like Pawson and Tilley's Realistic Evaluation, which I find far more sensible than most of the available social science methods. But my concern recently has been with the arts, not science. How does Bhaskar's argument transfer to the arts?

Where scientists concern themselves with cause, I think artists concern themselves with form. Form and Cause are related - at least for Aristotle, and I think both are related to knowledge. Artistic knowledge is different from scientific knowledge: but Shakespeare will still leave us astounded at insights into human nature and life that the most penetrating scientists barely touch.

Bhaskar's argument for scientists is that they do not construct causes, they discover them. Similarly, I think artists do not construct forms, they discover them. Picasso's famous comment "I do not seek, I find" would bear this out I think. But in much contemporary art (and particularly music) there is a tendency to focus on abstract phenomena and discover forms: mathematical series, formulae, concepts. I wonder if this is the analogue of the 'reproducible experiment' in the sciences. Are artists drawn to these things because the possibility of discovering universal form is questioned? It is as if the discovery of abstract form is used as a way of making artistically defensible claims about the world. This seems to me to be a methodological (or technical) error.

The question for the arts is "What is the form discovered by art delimited by?" Those artists who focus on abstract forms consider that the abstraction is the delimitation. I think the delimitation is always the world, and the challenge for artists is to find a way of discovering the form of our world today. This is a related enterprise to social science, for understanding the causes of our world is inextricably entwined with understanding its form.

My only reservation with this position is that artistic technique is always a delimitation of sorts: artists work by restricting themselves. But this restriction serves to control the form that they deal with and their own agency in manipulating it. That is technique: a necessary attenuation. But the challenge is to ensure that technique serves the discovery of form, rather than merely reveal itself.

Axelrod, Cultural Diffusion and Rationality

There's something fascinating about Axelrod's model of cultural diffusion - particularly if you select the 'bubble mode' in the applet below (which I stuck into the Wookie widget server). It has a particularly realistic biological quality which I've always missed in most cellular automata models. However, there are still a great many questions where I think Luhmann and Beer's thinking might provide some deeper insights.


Some of Axelrod's most significant work stems from his examination of the Prisoner's Dilemma. He famously challenged a number of computer scientists to come up with algorithms which could deal with the repeated prisoners' dilemma. He identified that ultimately, cooperative 'altruistic' strategies seemed to be more effective in the long term, and that an evolved approach might lead to these sorts of strategies. Whilst I find this fascinating, I'm tempted to remark that a strategy isn't 'forgiving' or 'altruistic'; people are. And what goes on in people is rather more than the calculation of next moves in the prisoners dilemma. Tooth ache or an annoying twitch is more likely to sway things one way or another.

The fundamental issue relates to the locus of rationality. If a strategy is rational then it's locus is in someone's head, and that head causes the strategy to be rational because the head processes the available data and produces a logical conclusion. However, rationality may not be quite like this. With a distributed cognition approach, rationality (or what we think rationality is) exists in communications. The extent to which communications can be successfully made, we can deem these to be rational. In this sense, it is not whether someone wins or loses the prisoner's dilemma, but whether the move that a person makes can be deemed 'within the game'. Attributing mental causes to that rationality is inevitably an act of conjecture.

If rationality is simply about making successful communications (communications which are understood), then the question is not about the causes of rational behaviour, but about the causes of communication. With regard to communication, and thinking about Luhmann, I think there is a secondary mechanism at work which relates to sensuality, and this works hand-in-hand with communication processes. When we consider the full complexity of this, rational strategies for the prisoners' dilemma (altruistic, greedy, etc) seem a bit shallow.

The cultural diffusion model has, I think, gone down a similar path to identifying mental causes for strategy. The boundaries in the model reflect degrees of cultural affinity. But cultural affinity depends on the extent to which people can have conversations, and that depends on their ability to make communications at a number of levels. Are cultural boundaries in the world or are they in people? I think this is where we need Positioning Theory!

Agent-based modelling and Waves of Personal Regulation

I presented an agent-based model of communication the other week at the CAL11 conference in Manchester. The construction of agents in this model is one where each agent has three levels of personal regulation which relate to three types of communicative act that they can make: Exhortation, Disruption and Coercion. The communications that an individual makes are probabilistically related to their individual state at any point in time (whether their regulation is focused on Disruption, Coercion or Exhortation). This is a simple choice determined by the relative values of their communication.

To run the model, select the number of starting people (the first slider which says 'starting-...'), and click setup, then click go. You can change the transparency of communication by altering the comms-r slider. When people are red, they are unhappy! You can add individual people by clicking 'add person'. Clicking 'disrupt-every...' is interesting. You can click and drag people from one part of the screen to another (this is like building teams). And obviously you can slow it down.


Internal regulation is affected by the communications they receive from others, and there is a need (in order to remain happy and viable) to make communications which will result in communications which will continue the maintenance of wellbeing. Thus agents 'position' themselves with one another.

In my model at present, each regulating mechanism is basically a type of 'random walk' where, on perceiving new communications, the regulation of each individual at each level is adjusted by various 'deltas' (values which are added or taken away from the current value). Each adjustment to each regulating level has a consequent effect on other regulating levels, and furthermore on future communication.

In my presentation, I demonstrated how this setup could demonstrate some 'critical incidents' in the university e-learning strategy, like the use of champions to stimulate new practice, or the increase in transparency of communication to stimulated richer activity and greater cohesion amongst staff, or the effects of large-scale disruptions like changing the platform. But I think the reaction of individual agents is at the moment too 'quick' to adjust to new circumstances.

This is why I am asking whether my agents could instead have regulating systems which were based on waves rather than random walks. This might introduce new elements of unpredictability into their behaviour, and would also introduce some degree of latency in their responses, but I think all of these things are real: we have to wait for colleagues to 'come round' to new ways of thinking. In such cases, something is going on inside them... is it that they have to wait for cyclic (harmonic) functions to reach particular points before they feel able to change?

Another way of thinking this through is to think that each communication we make has a 'resonance' - past echoes in the environment have some bearing on what happens in the present. Echoes may decay according to harmonic rules... Sugata Mitra wrote a paper where a similar idea of playing with time with cellular automata produced some fascinating results... (see http://www.complex-systems.com/pdf/16-3-1.pdf)

Connecting things up

A number of seemingly disparate topics have come up in my blog in recent weeks. I feel it's worth trying to fit things together, particularly in the light of my current project work and deeper thinking about education. The topic are:
1. Sensuality and communication

I feel that feelings are not sufficiently appreciated in our understanding of communication and learning. Dealing with this means...

2. A cybernetic understanding of emotion and the relationship to communication

thinking through the implications of (1) means that an alternative model of communication needs to be proposed. I have attempted this by associating Luhmann's theory with Beer's Viable System Model (see particularly http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.com/2011/02/luhmann-beer-and-emotion-machine.html) and Harre's Positioning Theory

3.  Understanding what the relationship between sensuality and communication means for educational technology

There are a number of aspects to this. In my post on new media (http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.com/2011/04/positioning-and-new-media.html), I suggest that new technology provides new forms of utterance and that these can serve a purpose in boot-strapping more conventional linguistic communications.

 4. Understanding the relationship between Risk and emotion and its economic consequences

I've posted a lot about Ulrich Beck, and I'm broadly sympathetic to the idea of the Risk Society. Risk is perceived as anxiety, and it can be managed in a variety of ways. Beck's analysis indicates that individuals chose to manage it by 'trading' risks and that this drives our economy (where we produce little else other than risk). However, there are other ways of managing risk which have to do with individual capability and well-being.

 5. Capability, knowledge and education

Capability requires knowledge, and education is a means to knowledge. Education is also heavily laden with Risk, and the trade between anxieties of modern life and the promises of increased learning with large sums of money has dominated the recent transformation of higher education in the UK

 6. Illichian anxieties, human dignity and experience

Illich's thought is grounded in Catholic thinking about human dignity and I'm generally sympathetic to this. However, Illich's polemic seems to fall of deaf ears; the world is embarked on a course which in his view would lead to catastrophe. He may be right, but I suspect we'll somehow keep it together. We will learn to live with our anxieties. I think Illich tends to apportion blame to 'the system', and this is misdirected. The issue is with individuals, and it lies primarily in individuals who are not happy, and in their inauthentic and unhappy existence continue the pathologies he identifies. Rather than cast blame on 'the system', I would prefer to come to a deeper understanding of human experience, and how anxiety and risk affects it. Deeper knowledge can be transformative (so back to (1))

7. Knowledge and new ways to organise education

Illichian arguments around deschooling carry a distrust of the teacher and a dislike of the power relations associated with them. I think the word 'teacher' is misapplied because we are unable to make the distinction between a Jesus or a Marx (i.e. great teachers) and a typical insecure and inauthentic employee of the school system. Deeper knowledge and new distinctions about the experience of teaching and what teaching does to society can be transformative. The issue relates to knowledge and its performance in communication with others. Knowledge traditionally has been categorised by subjects; but equally, knowledge performances might be describable through engaging with tools. It is here that I become particularly interested in Scenarios.

8. Tools, knowledge and civil society

I think knowledge and civil society are inseparable. Knowledge has to be maintained and this is the prime purpose of universities. When knowledge is degraded (usually through the perversion of institutions) so civil society is degraded. In the 21st century knowledge rests in individuals who perform it in conjunction with remarkably powerful technologies. These technologies entail risk, and the management of risk is a key element in the knowledge that an individual has and in knowledge that they need to pass on. Paraphrasing Beck, the challenge of the 21st century is not "how can I eat?" but "how can I cope with my anxiety?"

 9. Employment, Underemployment, Capability and the Economy

The management of capability to "deal with anxiety" relies partly on "useful unemployment". Unlike Illich's conception of this (where he imagined people building their own houses, for example), I think useful unemployment is not necessarily related to producing goods for the community (a la 'big society') but rather on maintaining inner balance and well-being. In essence this means that individuals must balance employment or underemployment with useful non-employment activity that ensures that they 'maintain readiness'. Drawing on my points (1) and (2), I think communication lies at the heart of this activity. The world of tomorrow and the threats it brings will demand high levels of flexibility, and consequently high levels of well-being to provide that flexibility, as we will have to organise ourselves rapidly to deal with events that occur. My feeling is that this is the closest to what Illich might mean by 'conviviality': living together without killing one another.