DR FOX & LIMINAL SPACES FOR LEARNING
On grown-ups
“In most cultures around the world, so-called ‘grown-ups’ are usually quite immature relative to the full spectrum of human capacities and potentials that are latent inside them.”
“Many grown-ups are actually emotionally young, having been infantilized by consumer culture and traditional religion or alienated from their own creative powers by dull and meaningless jobs.”
On the education system
“Education today cannot be primarily about achieving a functional fit between new generations and the existing social system, because the existing system is in a state of flux.”
“A few wealthy organizations are drastically and unilaterally impacting the shape of schooling, displaying without disguise the interests and power of capital in shaping human development.”
“When social systems are in periods of rapid transformation the role of schools becomes contradictory. They teach knowledge that is no longer relevant, socialize individuals into roles that no longer exist, and provide the mindsets needed to continue ways of life that are rapidly disappearing.”
“Those preoccupied with ‘fixing’ the existing system of schools do not stop to ask questions about what schools are for, who they serve, and what kind of civilization they perpetuate.”
On teaching
“Schooling still largely consists of teachers filling passive students with information and then asking them to recite it back.”
“We appear to have been so amazed by our unprecedented levels of access to information that we have forgotten how to ask questions about the quality of information.”
On measurement
“A measurement crisis occurs when society loses touch with reality because it has institutionalized a systematically distorted measurement infrastructure.”
“Measurement infrastructures are difficult structures to change once they have been in place for a time.”
“Path dependence… once a complex system is far enough along a particular path it becomes cheaper and easier to just stay on that path.”
“Humanity must find a way beyond measures of total abstraction.”
“Measurement practices enact realities. They serve as lenses and function to represent aspects of the world in ways that garner consensus, thus profoundly shaping individual and cultural perceptions of reality.”
“Measurement is intrinsically related to power. Those who have the power to create and institutionalize measures and standards control society.”
“Measurement induces reflection. We see ourselves through our measures and standards.”
“There is a historical correlation between the availability of bathroom scales and incidents of anorexia, beginning with their widespread introduction into homes in the 1950s.”
“To measure something is to show it exists, and to think you see it clearly. This can be empowering or dangerously misleading.”
“Measures determine what counts as research and science.”
“To make a new measure is to catalyze an expansion of what can be known, as well as what ‘counts’ as known from a social systems perspective.”
“We are over-measured, super-standardized, and caught in a web of complex self-shaping infrastructures — all this right at the moment when we are least sure of what the shape of our humanity ought to be.”
“Simplistic summary statistics are totally inadequate for the task of understanding dynamic systems.”
On ‘educational’ technologies
“Today it is mostly market dynamics that determine what educational technologies are available, and there is no oversight or quality control in the educational technologies industries, which are rapidly growing nonetheless.”
“Educational technologies should be bringing people together away from screens — not isolating individuals alone in front of screens.”
“Adults largely use the internet to engage advertisment-laden streaming content and social media.”
“The internet does not facilitate the kind of transparent freedom of expression that is suitable for healthy socialization and learning. Rather social media-based forms of communication involve a basic funneling and distorting of expression and discourse, which become wrapped in surveillance by advertisers and government agencies and then packaged to induce narcissism and addiction.”
On our humanity
“Our species is playing out an identity crisis on the world stage, and for the first time we are collectively facing the fact we do not know what it means to be human.”
“Pathological narcissism is a sign of a weak ego structure — of a personality not convinced of its true uniqueness.”
“Narcissism involves compensating for doubts about one’s unique worth by emphasizing separateness and specialness, and thus setting up comparisons in which others are seen as less special.”
“The cure for the narcissism that plagues our culture is, in fact, a deepening of considerations about uniqueness.”
On a new vision of education
Here Zachary offers 13 pathways. I’ll just share one small sample.
“A truly ideal and just educational system would be freed from all subservience to economic considerations and entirely dedicated to the furtherance of human potential.”
There’s more to be found in Artem’s summary. And, of course, yet more still to be found in Education in a Time Between Worlds.
Thou shalt not rob epiphany
Here’s a question—from Zak—I posited to the room, after a short exposÃĐ of the nature of money and the guiding logic of our economy (which is consuming the very substrate we depend upon for Life).
“Without money as the dominant metric governing society, what alternative hierarchies of value might emerge?”
I offered this as something for the gathered school principals and education leaders to contemplate and sense-into together.
Then, during the fabled ‘Q&A’, someone asked me to suggest what some of the solutions might be. I only had a few minutes remaining, and thus opted to side-step the invitation.
I have a sense, of course. But to offer any singular ‘answer’ would have collapsed the generative ambiguity and possibility-space that had been cultivated. It would render all the brimming potentiality of what I had stirred up into a singular response that rational minds could too-readily dismiss. If I had offered twoalternative suggestions, it would have created a weird binary dynamic. Folks would weigh-up the merit of both ideas, sure. But it wouldn’t be an expansive frame. Offering three wildly different suggestions might have been useful and generative, as it would evoke a sense of the underlying relationality amidst them all. Because, with much of these things, it’s more about the relations between notions (not the notions themselves).
Alas, I only had a few minutes. And so I did the deft and frustrating thing of not answering the question directly. Surreptitious obliquity, we might call it.
And to quote from one of my all-time favourite grandpa characters, Dave Snowden:
“Working obliquely also means less public commitment to solving a particular problem and more time to watch for unintended consequences. It also gives more space for solutions to emerge rather than be manufactured or imposed.”
The final moments of a keynote really play into the peak-end ‘rule’, in that they are incredibly influential in how an experience is remembered. This is where many motivational speakers will ‘close the loop’ of a story they opened, ending the presentation with some sort of inspired emotional resonance, cue standing ovation. My style is more one of keeping the questions alive. This means no neat pithy aphorisms or linear 3-step plans. Instead: space for solutions to emerge rather than being imposed.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed, as Wendell Berry writes.
These times call for subversive leadership.
Live thy questions.
Of course I recommend you buy and read the book proper. And yet it is a book that requires a depth of attention that is seemingly so rare these days. Ergo, allow me the liberty to share a few direct quotes from Dr. Zachary Stein.
A small sample selection of thoughtful provocations, skewed to my bias towards meaningful (wide-boundary) progress (as distinct from the narrow delusions of progress that are easier to measure).
