Power Systems (14 page)

 

A lot of what is called the new media, Facebook and Twitter, plus what are called handheld devices, iPads and tablets and the like, are creating greater social atomization and isolation. I've had the experience of being in a restaurant and everyone is looking down at their iPhone, sending messages and checking e-mail. What impact might this have on society?

 

I'm really not part of this culture at all, so I'm just observing it from outside, and not with very much intensity or understanding. But my impression is that the people participating in it, the young people participating in it have a feeling of intimacy and interaction. But I have to say, it reminds me of a close friend of mine as a kid who had a little booklet in which he wrote the names of all his friends. He used to boast that he had two hundred friends, which meant he had no friends, because you don't have two hundred friends. And I suspect that it's similar to that. If you have a whole bunch of friends on Facebook or whatever, it almost has to be pretty superficial. If that's your outlet to the world, there's something really missing in your life.

In fact, one of the significant aspects of the Occupy movements, maybe their most significant aspect, is the way they're overcoming that by creating real communities of people who interact, who have associations and bonds and help each other, support each other, really talk to each other freely, something which is very much missing in the whole society. You have it in bits and pieces, of course. But there has been, I think, a conscious effort to atomize the society for a long time, to break people up, to break down what are called secondary associations in the sociological literature: groups that interact and construct spaces in which people can formulate ideas, test them, begin to understand human relations and learn what it means to cooperate with each other. Unions were one of the major examples of this, and that's part of the reason for their generally very progressive impact on society. And, of course, they've been a major target of attack, I think partially for that reason.

The whole concept of social solidarity is considered very threatening by concentrated power. That's true in any system, and is very striking in ours.

Although the social media are undoubtedly invaluable for organizing and keeping some connections alive, I think they contribute to atomization. That's my superficial impression from outside.

 

Let's talk about education in a capitalist society. You've taught for many years. One of your strongest influences was the educator John Dewey, whom you've described as “one of the relics of the Enlightenment classical liberal tradition.”
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One of the real achievements of the United States is that it pioneered mass public education, not just elite education for the few and maybe some vocational training, if anything, for the many. The opening of land-grant colleges and general schools in the nineteenth century was a very significant development. But if you look back, the reasons for this were complex. Actually, one of them was discussed by Ralph Waldo Emerson. He was struck by the fact that business elites—he didn't use that term—were interested in public education. He speculated that the reason was that “you must educate them to keep them from our throats.”
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In other words, the mass of the population is getting more rights, and unless they're properly educated, they may come after us.

There's a corollary to this. If you have a free education that engenders creativity and independence, the way of looking at the world that we were talking about before, people are going to come for your throat because they won't want to be governed. So yes, let's have a mass education system, but of a particular kind, one that inculcates obedience, subordination, acceptance of authority, acceptance of doctrine. One that doesn't raise too many questions. Deweyite education was quite counter to this. It was libertarian education.

The conflicts about what education ought to be go right back through the early Enlightenment. There are two striking images that I think capture the essence of the conflict. One view is that education should be like pouring water into a bucket. As we all know from our own experiences, the brain is a pretty leaky bucket, so you can study for an exam on some topic in a course you're not interested in, learn enough to pass the exam, and a week later you've forgotten what the course was. The water has leaked out. But this approach to education does train you to be obedient and follow orders, even meaningless orders. The other type of education was described by one of the great founders of the modern higher education system, Wilhelm von Humboldt, a leading figure and founder of classical liberalism. He said education should be like laying out a string that the student follows in his own way.
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In other words, giving a general structure in which the learner—whether it's a child or an adult—will explore the world in their own creative, individual, independent fashion. Developing, not only acquiring knowledge. Learning how to learn.

That's the model you do find in a good scientific university. So if you're at MIT, a physics course is not a matter of pouring water into a bucket. This was described nicely by one of the great modern physicists, Victor Weisskopf, who died some years ago. When students would ask him what his course would cover, he would say, “It doesn't matter what we cover. It matters what you discover.” In other words, if you can learn how to discover, then it doesn't matter what the subject matter is. You will use that talent elsewhere. That's essentially Humboldt's conception of education.

I should say that I learned about this not from books but from experience. I was in a Deweyite experimental school. That was the way things worked. It seemed very natural. I only read about it later.

The battle over education has been going on for quite some time now. The 1960s were a major period of agitation, activism, exploration, and they had a major civilizing effect on the society: civil rights, women's rights, a whole range of things. But for elites, it was a dangerous time because it had too much of a civilizing effect on the society. People were questioning authority, wanting to know answers, not just accepting everything that was handed down. There was an “excess of democracy.”
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Looking for answers—that's frightening. There was an immediate backlash in the 1970s, and we're still living with the results. All of this is well documented. Two of the striking documents, which I think are very much worth reading, from opposite ends of the spectrum, are, on the Right, the Powell memorandum and, on what's called the Left, the Trilateral Commission report.

Lewis Powell was a corporate lobbyist for the tobacco industry who was very close to Nixon, who later appointed him to the Supreme Court. In 1971, he wrote a memorandum to the Chamber of Commerce, the main business lobby.
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It was supposed to be secret but it leaked. It's quite interesting reading, not only for the content but also because of the style, which is pretty typical of business literature and of totalitarian culture in general. It reads a little like NSC-68.
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The whole society is crumbling, everything is being lost. The universities are being taken over by followers of Herbert Marcuse. The media and the government have been taken over by the Left. Ralph Nader is destroying the private economy, and so on. Businessmen are the most persecuted element in the society, but we don't have to accept it, Powell said. We don't have to let these crazy people destroy everything. We have the wealth. We're the trustees of the universities. We're the people who own the media. We don't have to let all this happen. We can get together and use our power to force things in the direction that we want—of course he used nice terms such as democracy and freedom.

It is such a grotesque caricature, you have to wonder what lunacy could allow people to think like this. But it's normal. Like a three-year-old who doesn't get his way, if you think you ought to own everything and you've lost anything, everything is gone. That's very much the attitude of those who are accustomed to power and believe they have a right to power.

At the other end of the spectrum, you have the Trilateral Commission report,
The Crisis of Democracy
, written by liberal internationalists, Carter administration liberals, basically. They were concerned about what they called the failure of the “institutions which have played the major role in the indoctrination of the young.”
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The young are not being properly indoctrinated by the schools, the churches. We can see that from the pressures for too much democracy. And we have to do something about it. It's not very different from Powell's memorandum. It's a little more nuanced, but it's essentially the same idea.

Too much freedom, too much democracy, not enough indoctrination—how do you deal with that? In the educational system, you move toward more control, more indoctrination, cutting back on the dangerous experiments with freedom and independence. That's what we've seen. These shifts correspond to the period when corporatization of the universities began to take place, with a sharp rise in managerial structures and a “bottom line” approach to education, and also when tuitions start to rise. The tuition problem has become so huge that it's on the front pages now. Student debt is on the scale of credit-card debt and by now it probably exceeds it.
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Students are burdened by huge debts. The laws have been changed so there's no way out—no bankruptcy, no escape.
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So you're trapped for life. That's quite a technique of indoctrination and control.

There's no economic basis for rising tuition costs. In the 1950s, our society was much poorer, but education was essentially free. The GI bill, was, of course, selective—it was for whites, not blacks, mostly men, not women—but it did offer free education to a huge part of the population that never would have gotten to college otherwise.
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More broadly, tuition was very low by current standards. It was a great help to the economy, incidentally. The 1950s and the 1960s were the decades of the greatest economic growth in history, and the newly educated population was a significant part of that story.

Now we're a much richer society than we were in the 1950s. Productivity has increased a lot. There's way more wealth. So it's ludicrous to think that education can't be funded. The same conclusion can be drawn by looking at other countries. Take, say, Mexico. It's a poor country. It has quite a decent higher education system. The quality is high. Teacher salaries are low by our standards, but the system is quite respectable. And it's free. Actually, the government did try some years ago to add a small tuition, but there was a national student strike and the government backed down.
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So education in this poor country is still free. The same is true in rich countries such as Germany and Finland, which has the best education system in the world by many measures.
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Education in these countries is free—or virtually free. If you look at the percentage of our gross domestic product that would be required to provide free higher education, it's very slight. So it's very hard to argue that there are any fundamental economic reasons for rising tuition costs. But it does have the effect of control and indoctrination.

Look at K-to-12 education, kindergarten through high school. Policies like No Child Left Behind under Bush and Race to the Top under Obama, despite what they may claim, basically require schools to teach to the test. They control teachers and make sure that they don't move in independent directions, a step toward imposing a business model, as in the colleges. Anyone who has any experience with the K-to-12 system knows how this works. Students are required to conform, to memorize to pass the next test. And there are punitive measures to keep teachers in line. If the students don't get a high-enough grade on the test—which could mean they're too creative and independent—then the teacher is in trouble. So they are forced to conform to this system.

Meanwhile, the basic problems with the educational system are never addressed. It's just way underfunded. Class sizes are too large. Diane Ravitch, formerly a conservative education critic who is now very critical of the current system and very knowledgeable, recently did some comparative work on the Finnish educational system, which gets all the best records in the world. She showed that one of the major differences is that teachers are respected in Finland.
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Teaching is considered a respected profession. Good people go into the field. They put energy and initiative into their work. They're given a good deal of freedom to experiment, explore, let students search on their own.

In
Science
, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Bruce Alberts, a biochemist, had a series of editorials on science education.
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What he points out is quite interesting. He says science education is increasingly being designed with the effect of killing any interest in science. If you are in college, maybe you have to memorize a bunch of enzymes or something. If you are in elementary school, you memorize the periodic table. When you study the discovery of DNA, you're just taught what scientists already discovered. You memorize the fact that DNA is a double helix. Science is being taught in a way that kills any joy in science, gives you no sense of what discovery is. It's the opposite of Weisskopf's view that it matters what you discover, not what you cover.

Alberts gives some nice examples of alternatives that do work. In one kindergarten class, each kid was given a dish with a mixture of pebbles, shells, and seeds, and asked, “How do we know if something is a seed?”
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So the class began with what they called a “scientific conference.” The kids got together and discussed the various ways in which you might be able to figure out what a seed is. The kids were guided by the teacher, so if things went off in some wrong direction, the teacher could step in. But it's essentially laying down the string. Here's your task. Figure it out. Over time, they did figure it out. They ran some experiments, tried out new ideas, interacted. At the end of this particular program each kid was given a magnifying glass. They cut open the seeds and discovered what the embryo is that gives the seed its energy and differentiates it from a pebble. Those kids learned something. Not only did they learn something about seeds, which doesn't matter that much, they learned what it is to discover something, why it's fun and exciting, why you should try it somewhere else, why you should be puzzled and inquire.