NOTES ON EDUCATION
Report for the Fuschl Meeting
by Charles François,
francoischg@fibertel.com.ar
1. What do we mean
by education?
For me education is about:
a) create new
individuals well integrated with
themselves: biologically,
psychologically, mentally,
socially
b) shape well
integrated societies, where individuals
cooperate
harmoniously in every social endeavor
2. What is the role
of education in a changing world?
a) In a stable world (as it was generally in
the past) the
role of education
was to reproduce society as it was
b) In a changing world is to enable people to
acquire
adaptedness,i.e.
the capacity to re-adapt as many times
as needed to as
many situations as can arise
3. What do we mean
by adaptation, learning?
a) Learning is acquiring information to be able to create
reference
frameworks to make them significant, to become
able to modify
these reference frameworks when needed
(be creative)
b) Adaptation is a limited capacity to adapt
to some
changes provide
we possess the adequate variety to do
so. I would think
that adaptedness, as formerly defined
is more important
4. Is adaptation the
one and only purpose of education?
It was, in the stable societies of the
past (see 2a)
But in changing societies, it should
become subservient
to adaptedness
(see 2b), itself supported by creativity.
In some case, adaptation can be a negative
factor, as
when we choose,
or are forced to adapt to unsatisfactory
situations
5. How can an education system guide influence societal
evolution?
a) In a negative way when it is merely
specific and
limited
training to use human beings for a
purpose
established by
other human beings (for ex. training
a human being
to become a good and efficient slave)
b) In a positive way when its effects are
to enhance
-adaptiveness (see 2b)
-creativity
-cooperative behavior
and generally
everything that furthers the goals
stated in 1.
Education for a change of mind
- Society is
undoubtedly going to change significatively during
the 21st. Century
- This changes are
practically unpredictable
- So we are reduced
to the basic feature: change!
- Change can be
adaptive or inventive
- Those who won't be able to understand, evaluate and manage
change will be
downgraded and possibly enslaved or even
destroyed by it
- So we should
educate for:
-understanding
change
-evaluating its
meaning as
positive
or negative or neutral,
in
accordance with defined criteria
-seeking ways to
forecast and
organize
change
Some conditions for the design of educational systems
1. Participants stakeholders: A set as complete
as possible
of stakeholders
should be invited to participate to the
design
conversation.
They should be invited to explain in a
totally free way:
a) their
diagnostic of the presently unsatisfactory state
of matters
b) the set of
necessities that each of them considers as
essential in
the design of a new system
A synthesis of the views of all the
stakeholders should
be attempted. Contradictions and oppositions should be
extensively
explored. Nobody should be repressed in the
expression of
her/his views
2. My global diagnostic as a stakeholder
a)Education is
widely confused with the mere transmission
of knowledge
Transmission of knowledge is itself
widely confused
with the mere
transmission of information, or even
worse, of raw
data
b)The biological,
psychological and mental needs of the
individual are
ill-attended,or even not attended at all
c)The satisfactory
integration of individuals in society
is a practically
ignored necessity
d)Most
stakeholders and observers perceive this situation
in a very
confused and fuzzy way.
They do not know what should be done,
and, in many
do not even care
3. The basic needs to be covered
a)Knowledge: Students
at any level should not merely
receive data and
information. They should be provided
with a method for constructing interpretive
reference
frames. Moreover, their creativity should be
protected
and enhanced in
order to enable them to produce, when
needed new,
wider and more adequate frames of reference
b)Behavior:
Students at any level should be provided with
models leading
to the understanding of the nature and
needs of
physiological, ecological, psychological and
social systems.
This would start by their understanding
(growing with
age) of
themselves and their natural, human and
artificial
environment. They should be provided
with
an adequate
understanding of their own behavior's
nature and
consequences at every level.
Obstacles and blocks toward these aims, should be
discovered and
removed as efficiently as possible,
by collaboration
of all the stakeholders.
Post Fuschl Paper
Some preconditions for efficient co-participative
design.
a)
Conceptualization through consensus (J. Warfield)
b) The need for
reference frames and the ways to construct
and reconstruct them
(including the danger of cultural and
psychological
biases, Maruyama)
c) The problem of
the unwilling stakeholders
In a recent paper published in
"Technological forecasting and social change" nr.50, 1995, the known
American futurologist Joseph Coates writes: "If one considers, for
example, the FORTUNE 500
companies that have gone belly-up, or the government projects that have failed,
or third-sector opportunities or enterprises that have misfired, all share a
common characteristic. The people at the
top held a set of assumptions about the future that were unsound largely
because they were unexamined. They were
unexamined because they could rarely be challenged. Top dogs rarely welcome challenge.
"Another orthodox approach to a new
situation is to plan and operate on the basis of ideology. Ideologues have the curious capability of
knowing the answers before they even understand the problem. Whether it is an element of a relentless war
on communism in Vietnam, Afghanistan or Cuba, or whether is it the problem of
dealing with young teenager pregnancy, the ideologues tend to dominate the
loudspeakers with their pre-fab solutions, which stand somewhere along the
spectrum of useless to wasteful, to destructive. A telling example of this on a grand scale is
Robert MacNamara's Mea Culpa on the
"Even when physical research is
concerned, the major question rarely asked is, "Precisely what assumptions
underlie this position?" After all,
scientists and engineers have no special vaccine to protect them from
self-serving conclusions, ideology, or tunnel vision"
And finally: "The rejection of
information is so extremely common as to be nearly universal. For many in
authority, information is the enemy. It
is toxic. It is poison for plans and
programs".
The whole paper should also be obliged
lecture for anybody wanting to change anything, anywhere, anytime
.
The same point has also been made by J.
Warfield, who scrutinized in detail the individual collective mental and psychological causes of what he
calls "underconceptualization" and the disastrous results that this
attitude frequently
produces.
This is very important for all of us when we
engage in co-participative design. We
should become definitely aware that this technique cannot by itself, for more
sensible and honest it may be as such, produce sound design for anything
practical if the participants do not start by "switching on their
lantern" in order to try to understand as best as possible the situation
they face.
___________
Such stock taking is by no means an easy
task.
I will try to describe hereafter the most
serious pitfalls as I understand them.
1. Cultural blockages to perception
For anyone who ever journeyed out of
her/his country, it becomes swiftly obvious that members of other cultures do
profess beliefs, opinions and understandings quite different from one's
own. This leads them to attitudes and
behaviors that many times seem strange, shocking or absurd to us...
As absurd or
shocking, or strange as our own, as viewed by those "toads of another pond" (In
spanish:"sapos de otro pozo")
I use to call this phenomenon
"cultural declination" in analogy with the "magnetic
declination" which places the magnetic pole in a different location than
the geographic one.
This "cultural declination" is
in itself a complex phenomenon, which has been extensively studied through his
concept of "mindscapes" by Magoroh Maruyama.("Communication
and Cognition")
This author found that any culture tends
to become dominated by one of four different specific psychological types:
homogenist-hierarchical; heterogenist-individualist; heterogenist-pattern
maintaining and heterogenist-pattern generating.
According to Maruyama:
-these types present "epistemological
characteristics manifested in many seemingly unrelated aspects of daily life
such as social interactions, spatial composition of elements in one's living
room or office, garden design, decision process, management principles, ethics,
choice of science theories, hypothesis-making and many other aspects" (Maruyama
-in each culture the four types are
present, but one tends to be majoritarian and to give a well defined
orientation to that culture
-the
minority members must find a way to cope.
They can do this for example by unconsciously suffering; by camouflage,
by finding a protected niche in society; by becoming a rebel, a reformer or
trouble-maker; by dropping out or emigrate.
Maruyama does not clain that his taxonomy
is absolutely rigorous, nor that an individual cannot
have some characteristics which are not true to his/her main type.
This is not however of definitory
importance for us. Maruyama's ideas
offered me a new tool to evaluate my own reactions, viewpoints, attitudes and ways
of deciding and acting. They also gave
me valuable insights into the psychology of other persons.
Shortly, the main point is to relativize
one own's ways and try to better understand other's ways, as individuals as
well as members of another culture.
Personally, having lived long time in
three different continents: Europe (25 years) Central Africa (15 years) and S.
America (33 years), I duly appreciate Maruyama's point and am inclined to apply
his views to myself and my transculturation problems as well as to the
observation and evaluation of other people's attitudes. I find however that
many individuals seem to be totally or near totally inconsciously trapped into
a quite narrow circle of habits and behavior and I find it sometimes very
difficult to create a language understandable to them and still true to my own
assumed attitudes and ways.
As a result, I sometimes remain silent,
but unsatisfied
2. Semantic traps
Somehow related to psychological and
cultural types, we also should become aware of the uses of language. Generally speaking, our semantic habits are
very sloppy, and, worse still, we are not conscious of this fact.
Korzybski exposed and explained the fallacies
resulting from abusive identification.
("Science & Sanity" Inst.for Gen. Semantics,
Through his "structural
differential" he made transparent the double process of abstraction and
labelling.
We currently, but unwittingly use a scaled
process of abstraction. Even the first,
appearently obvious, and supposedly transparent level of abstraction is by no
means totally objective and innocent. The
way we describe to ourselves what we call an "object" depends on
numerous physiological and neuronal factors which condition our perception:
Nothing can ever be described in a complete way. Any description results of a selection within
that, in itself limited, span of perceived
characteristics. For example, we cannot
normally use infrared or ultraviolet radiations in our description.
This situation becomes worse and worse
when we climb the ladder of abstraction.
When we arrive to the level at which we speak or think of very abstract
terms (let us say "life", "democracy", "spirit",
etc.) we can easily become fooled by our own personal ignorance, biases,
ideology, illusions and the like. As
stated by Korzybski: "The map is not the territory". Our problem is that nearly everybody's
psycho-physiological reactions are thus conditioned that,even knowing intellectually that "the map is
not the territory" most people acts as if it were and try to act upon
reality as if it were a mere map.
As to the sloppy use of language, it
becomes a very serious difficulty for communication. Any language produces an enormous quantity of
labels at different levels of abstraction.
Each of these labels-let us say f.ex. "disease",
or "freedom" -represents for each of us our interpretation of what
"disease" or "freedom" are (in relation to our personal
"mindscape"-Maruyama).
If our individual interpretation differs
from person to person, we are in deep trouble because we believe that we are
speaking about the same thing or concept, but we really are not,and a kind of
Some, who understand this effect, use it
as a powerful tool for propaganda. Good example are what is meant in different places by
"equality" or "socialism".
Both these problems with the abstraction
process and with labelling doubtless have been and still remain, among the
worse baneful social poisons of this century.
3. Hidden reality: What can we do about it?
What we call "reality" is thus a
mere reflection of that "something out there", and generally a not
very complete nor true one.
We are most of the time unwary victioms of
what J. Warfield has named "underconceptualization".
I won't reproduce here the whole of
Warfield's reconstruction. Everyone
should read his work about the nature of complexity, the problems of
"Clanthink" & "Groupthink", the uses of
"Spreadthink" of "Nominal Group Technique",
"Structural thinking", "Generic design", etc.
Moreover, Banathy
himself, in an appendix "A" to one of his communication to the Fuschl
members, shows how Group Techniques and Interpretative
Structural Modelling can be used "for generating and evaluating
ideas" and as an aid for Design.
Of course, we practise, consciously or not,
part of this methodology in our Conversations.
And of course, we should think all this over and over everytime we are
going to participate to some Conversations.
There are moreover other lines that can be
used.
a) Reference frames
I had an opportunity to discuss this point
with our friends in Fuschl and I tried to make clearer the process of reference
frames construction through some drawings, hereby adjoined.
1. The individual process of construction of
reference
frames
2. The construction of consensual reference
frames
3. The way the unexpectede breaks reference
frames and how
to reform them
4. Training for reference frames construction
Only the best possible quality of
consensual and updated reference frames warrants the high quality of
Co-participative Design
b) Matrixes for creating reference frames
After a refreshing look on my Fuschl
drawings, I came to reflect on them in the following way: "This is all very well! But how do we
establish the links between data to reach the information level and, how do we
link unconnected informations to create the knowledge level?"
It dawned to me that the best way to
discover interconnections is to construct matrixes and to study the contents of
the intersections.
A good opportunity to construct such a type of matrixes
was offered to me by the National University of Tucumán, Argentina, which asked
me to organize an Interfaculties Seminar on Human Ecology.
Human Ecology must of course be considered
within the wider reference frame of Global Ecology. The construction of such a reference frame
can be envisionned in different ways (I will develop this line in the near
future). However, to make a start, I
constructed the General Matrix reproduced in my project (Annexed p. 1)
The possible contents of such a matrix are
of course limitless.
As it is, it can at least be used as a
very general reference frame for the discussion of some more characteristic
situations. As shown in page 2, more specific
matrixes can be constructed in order to create reference frames for the study
of more specific situations (2a). This
process can be further refined to obtain still more precise and specific
reference frames (2b).
All these reference frames are established
in order to study the interrelations of human groups at various levels with
these characterized environmental situations (B). Here it becomes necessary to introduce time
variations, a subject that I will still need to consider specifically and which is related
to my Fuschl fig.3 "The way the unexpected breaks reference frames and how
to reform them".
Much work remains to be done here. I am deeply grateful to my friends of the Societal
Evolution Group in Fuschl, because they gave me the "kick" which led
me to better understand these aspects of communication.
Once we have obtained good reference frames
by consensus, we really can start co-participative design.
At that moment, our remaining issue is the
problem of the unwilling stakeholders, for which I must confess my hitherto
perplexity (see specific note).
Awareness and Social Systems
My views on the subject result of
numerous first hand experiences, on which I have been able during the last 40
years to apply my growing cybernetic and systemic understanding of the workings
of complex systems.
I found myself enmeshed - quite against
my will - since my very early youth in a succession of disastrous economic,
social and political upheavels and mega-messes:
- the great
depression in
- the troubled
facist prewar years in
- the war years
in
- the
decolonization of
Lumumba and Mobutu personally quite well)
- the left wing
terrorism and right wing civil and military
repression in
I could never find in any treatise on Sociology
(specially the 20th. Century works) any practical aid to
confront all these disasters, nor even good post-facts explanations.
Many sociologists seem to live in the abstract world of nowhere
("Erehwon"!), or are only interested in justifying some ideological
view, or merely in micro-situations of very limited scope. Fortunately, this
seems now to be changing, somewhat (not yet enough, in my opinion).
So, life made me a skeptical and
practical person, even if I am mentally prone to abstraction. Both features
seem to me absolutely necessary for any conceptual effort, at least when
oriented toward some concrete aims.
In the long run, I developped my own
views on the evolution of societies, from what I could observe and get informed
during the last 60 years, living in, or visiting more than 30 countries in Europe, Africa and
South America.
Hereafter goes a
short synthesis. This synthesis is closely related to the 1998 Fuschl meeting
where I proposed the construction of a general historical typology of human
communities, with a list of characteristics specific to each one. This was done
by the 1998 participants in the form of a matrix (See Fuschl Report 1998,
edited by M. Beneder & G. Chroust, of IFSR, p.14-17)
In short, the four principal historical
types of human communities are:
- Traditional communities: Strongly
knitted, strongly
normated, very
conservative, quite static and stable
for long time. Cannot be repaired after breakdown.
- Substitutive communities: Based on a
more or less
irrational
ideology as substitute for the shattered
traditional normative system. Generally unstable,
repressive and historically short-lived
- Learning communities: Smaller
communities based on the
need to adapt
and readapt frequently (for ex. in
economic and administrative
organizations). Jumps from
one state to
another: no real permanent learning, nor
evolution.
Addicted to short-term goals and tinkering.
- Evolutive learning communities:
Permanent adaptability
(not merely
adaptative discontinuous jumps). Permanent
co-active learning. Emergence of new forms of social
life. This last
type does not yet exist. It was
proposed and
described mainly by Alex and Kathia
Laszlo and should be actually a suitable
goal for the
future. No other
alternative was considered. (In my
opinion some are possible, and generally quite
unpalatable: I
could describe some)
My own general understanding of recent mankind
evolution is presently as follows (as described in a lecture in Spanish on
social evolution at the Argentine Society for Anthropological Medicine)
- Scientific and technical progress was
the factor that
destabilized traditional
communities in the whole world and led to those violent economical, social and
political crises during the 20th. Century (I have detailed explanations for
this)
- The main aspect is the explosive
expansion of energy consumption whose destabilizing effects find a neat explanation
in Prigogine's thermodynamics of systems wildly fluctuating far from
equilibrium. This leads either to the emergence of a higher level of complexity
and organization, or to the violent destruction (explosion) of a system unable
to control, absorb or dissipate ever expanding positive feedbacks. For other
interesting insights in a more philosophical vein, see Kenneth Bausch's paper
on Habermas and Luhmann in Syst. Research and Behav. Science, V.14, Nr.5.
- One facet of this process - still in
full progress - has been the world-wide alphabetization movement. This leads to
the following successive historical stages:
a) in older
nearly static agrarian societies, ignorant common people are locally controlled
by small "elite" groups, who possess the monopoly of knowledge and
power.
b) in
industrializing societies, concentration and use, again by small minorities, of
great masses of people with minimal instruction*, used as "bettered"
near-slaves in societies recently activated by the growing use of energy.
c) Emergence of groups of newly
instructed* people who start to think autonomously, but still at a low level of
understanding. This results in revolutionary
ideologies produced and fanned by charismatic but generally quite crudely
ignorant self-proclamed leaders. This process leads to substitutive communities
and generalized violent social and political national and international
conflicts.
d) Emergence of groups of people who
become really able to acquire a deeper critical but also adaptive and constructive
understanding of social and political life.
This process is -
painfully - on the march in technologically advanced societies and corresponds
to learning societies of both types.
Stage a) still subsists in vast regions
of Asia, Africa and
In Western Europe and
The explosive expansion of Internet now
allows potentially anybody to have a voice. This could possibly generate a new
type of mass movements, but anyhow conversation tends to replace crude
messianism and could very well lead to a better "awareness" -
nesessarily through a better understanding - and permanent adaptability in A.
and K Laszlo "Evolutive learning communities".
*Note:
"Instruction" (scientific and technical) is not
"Education". "Education" is the acquisition of an "art
of living" as a person physically, psychologically and mentally
responsible for her/himself and as a positive actor in a society.
"Education" remains for now an awful blindspot in our societies,
which are oriented toward technical proficiency and economic success in a
nearly exclusive way.
But, who knows. The present psychological
dereliction of so many people, which could possibly lead to wholesale nihilism
or a new fanatical and intolerant spasm of fake religiosity, could also lead to
reflexive self-education. As written recently by a lady-columnist in
"Newsweek", "Socratic is better then rote".