EDUCATION
As if our lives depended on it
R. Graham Oliver
© R. Graham Oliver, 2018
 The prologue is a preliminary opening up of the educational problematic. The full scale of our issues aren’t visible in this small beginning. Because we are so unused to thinking very deeply about education and the ethical enormity of shaping people, particularly without their consent, my intention is that the vision and awareness of the educational problematic will grow as we progress through the book. But here is a beginning. So many of us have lost the meaning of education. The purpose of education needs to be recovered. When we speak of a “love of learning”, we need to know what there is to love. |
Prologue: The Yahoo and the Frog
Gulliver had long been dead when our story begins, and the Yahoos were no more than fantastic figures of satire for the well-read people of the Western world. A young Yahoo was scrabbling and scrambling for food among the leaf mould of the forest floor, when he managed to snatch up a frog. As he was about to stuff the frog into his mouth, it made a noise that gave him pause.
It would be tedious to describe the primitive language of the Yahoos. It was mainly gestures, grunts and squeals, and it was laborious and clumsy, even to convey the very basic ideas that Yahoos usually have. It is enough to say that the frog’s cry sounded like a warning, and as it continued to squeal and burp and wriggle it legs, it slowly dawned on our Yahoo that he had caught a talking frog, and that it was trying to strike a bargain. Let me go, and I will grant you a wish.
This is, of course, a very old kind of story, so widely spread among cultures and in places, that it is, for us, a universal human experience. The only puzzle here is how someone as dim as a Yahoo could understand what was being offered, let alone come up with a wish more interesting than lots more frogs that are easy to catch or, even more simply, a full belly.
The frog ran through as many possibilities similar to these as she could think of, since it didn’t seem wise to wait for a Yahoo to come up with an idea. It was aggravating and nerve-wracking for the frog, because the Yahoo was very still, and long plunged in whatever to a Yahoo counts as serious thought (something that doesn’t usually take very long at all, since Yahoos mostly live on impulse).
What the Yahoo came up with took the last of the frog’s breath away, and left her gasping. She was so taken aback that she temporarily forgot her own safety (which was, of course, closely tied to granting almost any wish the Yahoo might come up with, and quickly).
The Yahoo wanted to be able to learn extremely well; indeed to have a love of learning, and to spend much of his time engaged in it.
It took the Yahoo quite a while to express this, however, which nearly asphyxiated the frog, and it might lead us to wonder how it was possible for this Yahoo to come up with such an idea. Perhaps it was a significant moment in Yahoo evolution — a result of millennia of hopeful and diverse breeding in a forest fraught with danger and possibility, or perhaps it had spent too much time too near that rather mysterious swamp. But of course this proposal of the Yahoos was itself fraught with danger. The danger that such an outcome of evolution might well lead to the extinction of this particular branch of the family tree in a forest so unfavourable to it, for reasons that the frog seemed keen to point out.
Are you aware of the dangers of what you are proposing, asked the frog. It is easy to think of some of the best things that humans sometimes achieve, and to think of all the advantages learning might bring — the arts and sciences which learning has brought them, the creature comforts and civilities, the ability to criticize and appraise means and ends against consequences, and above all the ability to reflect on the meaning of life and channel it into a desirable direction. But have you really thought about what it takes for all of these things to work out well?
The ability to learn, just in and of itself, is a very dangerous potential to possess. The ability to learn doesn’t guarantee truth or goodness. At the beginning, people don’t know much because they haven’t learned much, and they are vulnerable to learning harmful or valueless things. Only those who have been fortunate enough for their learning to fair well over a number of years can hope to judge their learning and its sources effectively. It is always too easy to learn, instead, the same dumb things that the less fortunate around you have always learned. It is just as possible to learn to despise good learning, for example, as it is to acquire it. You can learn to fear, just as easily as you can learn to be joyful, and a life of fear is a life of misery.
You see, in order to get some of the well-known benefits of learning, you will need to be among others, and to become conscious of your self and them. If this is to be done wisely you will need good teachers and models for your thought and behaviour. If you don’t succeed in this, you can be manipulated and used by others; indeed, you might have your confidence so crushed that whatever other advantages you might have had in life, such as strength or speed, may be rendered useless, or simply become the tools of others. In your relationships with others, you will automatically open yourself up to envy and jealousy, or vanity and arrogance. You will run the risk of having your very worth dependent on the views of other, hardly admirable people.
You will also open yourself up to self-deception. Some self-deception is inevitable, of course, but more can be learned, and this learning may disable rather than enhance your chances of enjoying worthwhile things. It can blind you to your own prejudices and ignorance, or to real motives you may have for deceiving and taking advantage of others. In fact learning, itself, without the benefit of sound educational judgement, could lead you to downright evil.
Nor should you assume that everything worth learning is going to be nice, or fun, or entertaining. Often people learn self-deception because they fear what they might find if they pursue learning properly. Good learning will probably involve learning the limits and dangerous potentials of your bodily powers, which your desires, inflamed by your developing imagination, might outreach. You will surely learn the disgusting and shameful things that people and Yahoos do, and you might even learn to do them. You may learn what is involved in knowing another person really well, and also the limitations on ever understanding them, and this might induce a sense of loneliness. You may learn how a better world could be possible, but discover yourself impotent to do much about it. You may learn about the fragility of the Yahoo body, and its vulnerability to injury and disease, and the inevitability of its death.
Have you thought about the consequences for your relationships with other Yahoos of the special powers you will acquire? They won’t understand what you can do differently, but they will at least fear it, because they fear anything that is strange and different. In human terms, people have been put to death for this. Do you want a partner? Is it likely that someone will want a partner who is widely feared, or who is an outcast?
This long explanation was a danger to the frog, since it only served to postpone the possibility of escape. The Yahoo’s eyes had glazed over very early in the frog’s speech, and, of course it took much longer than it takes to tell you here, because she had to say it all through grunts and burps and squeals, with much wriggling of the legs. Nevertheless the Yahoo had taken the opportunity to think again as deeply as it could, even if it took at least this long to think of anything much at all.
When the frog had finished, the Yahoo simply repeated its request, and the frog realized that its efforts had been wasted, because all of these issues and ideas had been far too much for the Yahoo to follow, let alone think about. Which goes to show that there isn’t any point in trying to explain anything complicated to a Yahoo, even to an above average one.
I could go on to tell of how it all turned out for the Yahoo — of the excitement of discovery, the reassurance and pride of mastery, the stupidity learned, the arrogance and prejudice. He used the knowledge he gained to trick other Yahoo, and he had learned how to lie. Eventually, they drove him out, and he slowly travelled the forest and the shore alone. Well, not entirely alone, since despite what the frog had said, he did find a partner. She treated him like a god.
Slowly he came to spend less and less time with her, though, because her grunts and squeals were particularly frivolous and unintelligent, and she couldn’t see the point of learning to cook. Lonely, he felt the pain of alienation keenly, and as he became aware of the limits of his situation, he felt emotional distress and depression, because the only bookstore on the island was closing down, and he couldn’t afford the costs of broadband. Even when he had come to accept these limitations, he began to realize the importance of the question of what it was all for; a question that he had first felt should only apply to the other Yahoos, even though they were too thick to ask it. Existential angst.
But our interest isn’t in the fate of the Yahoo. With variations, we are all well familiar with people whose education has been botched. No, we need to pay more attention to the warnings of the frog.
But those warnings appeared to contain their own solution. She referred to the development of the arts and sciences, for example, and to the development of creature comforts. These things were surely achieved through education. Education isn’t just any learning. It is learning we control to some worthwhile purpose. If the Yahoo had a good school system available, then he probably wouldn’t be in that mess.
Right. But we shouldn’t assume that the frog had finished what was on her mind. You’ve got to remember that she was getting anxious that all this talk was making her own situation more dangerous, and that her leg was getting tired. Given the right opportunity, she might have said that humankind have been controlling learning with good intentions since they first appeared on earth, and that, taken in their own contexts, there may well have been times when it even seemed to work out pretty well, particularly when societies were stable for long periods, and you learned nearly all that you needed to know from your mum and dad.
But by the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries, schooling had become universal and compulsory, and the understanding of how to control learning was really well developed. It is important to note that the better we get at controlling learning, the more harm we are capable of doing, as well as the more good. More of the effort in controlling learning had gone into manipulating populations and creating goods and services and markets for them than ever went into anything that could be worthy of the name of “education” at all, and it wasn’t as if anyone paid any real attention to what education should mean, or would have to mean. They had given some attention to that once, but not much. Now they gave nothing at all. Judged in terms of the good that could have been achieved, “educational” practice was downright awful. No, it was worse than just poor practice — it did more harm than good. It would be a very dubious thing to offer to the Yahoo in the hope that it would really make him any better off .
The frog spent lots of time these days just hanging up to her bulging eyeballs in a particularly gooey part of the swamp. It wasn’t just that she was keen now to avoid the leaf-mould of the forest floor because of the bad experience she had with the Yahoo. This swamp had some very special properties. It was mostly primal ooze. You never knew what would come out of primal ooze. How do you think that she was capable of learning Yahoo, or granting wishes? But her experience with the Yahoo had led her to the conclusion that these technical accomplishments weren’t really enough. She was bothered, now, by what she thought of as “the Yahoo problem”. It wasn’t just that she hadn’t been able to convince the Yahoo to make a better wish – she had come to the conclusion that she didn’t really know the answer herself. Knowing languages, being able to grant wishes, being a nerd or a geek – these things weren’t the answers to living well either, and that, it seemed, was all she had really settled for. So far. But what was the answer to living well, then? Whatever it was, it was also somehow a matter of learning too. Apparently.
And learning had to be controlled in some way. It required some sort of wisdom – and that had to be learned as well. “Love of learning” wasn’t just an empty idea, it was downright dangerous without that wisdom. It was just as much a recipe for slavery, misery, madness and self-destruction as it was for empowerment or enlightenment or fulfillment or self-realization. Whatever they are.
The frog didn’t know who to ask for the answers to this fundamental dilemma, and from the look of what humans had been doing with their schools – and where all that was heading these days – she didn’t think any answers that could come from them would be particularly helpful. They had turned their backs on the question. Virtually disqualified themselves.
She sank into the ooze, closed her eyes for a moment, and just let it sort of flow through her. Get in the flow. Get in the flow. Then she floated to the surface again, opened her eyes and blinked. Perhaps the answer lay in the ooze. Perhaps there was more to primal ooze than just the possibilities of technical skill.
The answer, of course, must lie in understanding education itself, taking the idea seriously, working it out and using it yourself to find your own path. Perhaps you had to find some way of figuring out for yourself what knowledge was of most worth, building and using your own compass. Perhaps if the Yahoo had got this – maybe as the first of two wishes – he would have had some chance of steering his own way through all that learning that he wanted to love, with some hope of keeping it all under control, of seeing the wood for the trees as it were, of doing himself justice.
The frog hummed to herself a little. Sniffed a little primal ooze. Sipped a little. But how do you really do that? Despite her fear at the time, she had actually cared about the Yahoo, and what would become of him. Yes, the problem was about everyone – she cared about all of them. But she mattered too. How could she ever do a good job of making something of herself if she didn’t know what learning truly mattered, and didn’t know how to manage it for herself? How would she ever be able truly to mind her own proper business – the business of her own life, and how best to live it? Would it even be her own life if she couldn’t?
Gup!
Ribbit!
Burp!
