As I'm turning my attention towards the topic of "work" (and turning away from "education"), I'm concerned that the technological changes in work that are unfolding are going to serve the interests of what Michael Sandel calls the "credentialed class" and further exacerbate inequality. This at a time when, for even those getting their degree certificates, work is going to get harder to find since we are seeing the automation of what were graduate entry-level jobs. That means it won't really be credentials that count, but privilege, yet we'll pretend that it is credentials in the interests of the education industry.
Sandel's attack on the ideology of meritocracy is well-placed. He's said it in various forums over the last year or so, and co-authored a book with Thomas Picketty (Equality: What It Means and Why It Matters : Piketty, Thomas, Sandel, Michael J.: Amazon.co.uk: Books). But as he himself acknowledges, he's not saying anything new: it is basically the same argument that Michael Young put forwards in his book that coined the term "meritocracy" in the 1950s ("The Rise of the Meritocracy"). What's new in Sandel is that he's able to flesh-out the pathology that Young predicted with the concrete evidence from populism: his talk about the history of how we've got here is really worth listening to:
It's the twists of irony in this story which make it so compelling: the denigration of big government by Thatcher and Reagan in favour of the invisible hand of the market (this was from Hayek - I wonder if he would change his mind if he saw what became of his ideas!); then, after the failure of those right-wing governments, the emergence of soft-left politicians like Blair and Clinton, who saw nothing wrong with the markets, but argued that to "make it" you had to get educated. So there was a massive increase in Higher Education, which is where I and many others, found work.
Thanks at least for that... but it might have been a mistake societally. The sting in the meritocratic tail was, as Sandel says, an implication that if you were struggling to get on, it was "your fault". From there stemmed a deep discontent among those who couldn't get on, who would eventually turn to undemocratic demagogues who gave voice to their discontent, but whose agenda served only the interests of themselves, merely using the discontent as a vehicle for propelling their own rise to power.
As Adam Curtis has eloquently expressed in his masterly recent "Shifty" (see 1. Shifty: The Land of Make Believe Adam Curtis 2025), the story is one of governments and technocrats unleashing technological forces which eventually spin out of their control. The interesting thing with the Trumps and Starmers (and Putins, Xis and Orbans) is that this is really out of control of everybody, and nobody knows what to do about it. Unfortunately under those conditions, war is the button humans tend to reach for.
The story from Thatcher to Blair to Trump is a story of using technology to make uncomplicated human systems unnecessarily complicated, and ultimately chaotic. This is always the danger with technology: it tends to increase complexity. I did a presentation on cybernetics and public health last week, and I had a clip from John Seddon who gave a talk a few months ago for the Mike Jackson Annual Lecture in Hull. In his Michael Caine style, Seddon said:
"I hear it so many times people talk about service organisations as complex systems. They are not. They are unnecessarily complicated systems. They're man-made. Man can't make a complex system, but they sure can make an unnecessarily complicated system"
With AI, this is going to get worse. Not because of any inherent malevolence in the technology itself (intrinsically, it is a remarkable scientific discovery), but because of our inability to really think about what we are doing, why we are doing it, and who we are doing it for. It ought to be education's job to think about these things, but instead, education focuses on its own inherited operational complexity, while seeing the pathological growth of techno-operational complexity everywhere else as a business opportunity for selling more "education".
The inspiration for thinking more holistically about this may come from indigenous communities. The role of knowledge in these communities is not as something which is acquired under special institutional conditions, but something which is woven into the fabric of community life. The community has a good working model of itself which is enacted in daily living. It is a very different way of thinking about knowledge - and there is an excellent exhibition in Manchester's Whitworth Gallery about it at the moment in the work of the Peruvian artist Santiago Yahuarcani - Santiago Yahuarcani: The Beginning of Knowledge | Whitworth Art Gallery. (I think there are modern equivalents to this indigenous approach to knowledge - maybe it's not that different from the way Nelson organised his fleet!)
I would like to think that when Sandel appeals for "dignity at work" and Seddon appeals for "system knowledge", and awareness of 'failure demand' which puts huge strain on organisations, they are talking about the same thing. They may not see it like this. Seddon might say of Sandel that he only talks about dignity and preaching to the credentialed not to be condescending, whereas Seddon would say the actual work of all workers in the organisation is to study their work, their demands, to challenge assumptions, and increase the self-knowledge of the organisation. That is work for everyone, and it is the job of management/organisation to coordinate it.
I think the route to Sandel's "dignity at work" is the path Seddon charts. If we took that path with AI, for example, we would not be eyeing up ways in which AI can make our existing operations more efficient. We would be asking how AI can allow us to perceive aspects of our work which we couldn't see before. That would be to use it as a scientific instrument, not a new pair of roller skates - an instrument of knowledge, not a accelerant of current operations.
Then the thought about education itself: what if we taught people how to do this? Then education's value would no longer need to lie in a certificate, but in the actual tangible benefits that the "work of thinking" performs on all organisations.
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