A Deeper Look - Issue #1 | Jan 11 2021
Pluralism, Education and the Humanities
This week we look at the relationship between thinking and learning, UNESCO’s report on Education for Future Survival, the impact of COVID-19 on public private partnerships, and social classifications in the age of COVID-19.
We end with a look at Michael Sandel’s new book: Tyranny of Merit: Whats Become of the Common Good?
Education
Learning Without Thinking [Jacob Browning - Noema Magazine]
Browning explores the history of learning, the distinctions between learning and thinking, and their implications for how we understand the work of artificial intelligence. He explains that we have grown up in a world in which we assume the process of thinking comes before we learn. This however is an assumption that less anthropocentric minded thinkers have come to question. What looks like thinking may just be just be a matter of us making associated connections - an act that on the outside appears to be “thinking.”
We should be clear that much human learning has itself been, and still is, mindless. The history of human tools and technologies — from the prehistoric hammer to the current search for effective medicines — reveals that conscious deliberation plays a much less prominent role than trial and error.
For Browning this realisation is liberating as it opens up the world to new possibilities for how we think about what intelligence means, and what it means to learn.
Our peculiar mental capacities could only arise in a line from the brains, physical bodies and sense-modalities of primates. Constraining machines to retrace our steps — or the steps of any other organism — would squander AI’s true potential: leaping to strange new regions and exploiting dimensions of intelligence unavailable to other beings.
Learning to Become with the World: Education for Future Survival [UNESCO]
The report published by UNESCO offers seven principles that could and should guide global education by the year 2050:
The Relationship between Education and Humanism: “We have critically reassessed and reconfigured the relationship between education and humanism. We now retain the best aspect of education’s previous humanist mission – to promote justice – but extend it beyond an exclusively human or social framework.”
Ecological Consciousness: “We have fully acknowledged that humans are embedded within ecosystems and that we are ecological, not just social, beings. We have dissolved the boundaries between the ‘natural’ and ‘social’ sciences, and all curricula and pedagogies are now firmly grounded in an ecological consciousness.”
More than Human: “We have stopped using education as a vehicle for promulgating human exceptionalism. We are teaching that agency is relational, collectively distributed, and more-than-human.”
Collective Relationships: “We have discarded education’s human development/al frameworks. Instead of championing individualism, we now foster collective dispositions and convivial, reparative human and more-than-human relations.”
In-The-World: “We have recognized that we live and learn in a world. Our pedagogies no longer position the world ‘out-there’ as the object we are learning about. Learning to become with the world is a situated practice and a more-than-human pedagogical collaboration.”
Cosmopolitan: “We have re-tasked education with a cosmopolitical remit. This has moved it far beyond the universalist and anthropocentric claims of humanist, humanitarian, and human rights perspectives.”
Ethics of Collective Recuperation: “The goal of education for future survival has led us to prioritise an ethics of collective recuperation on this damaged Earth.”
Democracy and Pluralism
Public Private Partnerships (PPP) During COVID-19: Time to Ask Some Questions [Neven Ahmed - PIRO Blogs]
The article highlights the increasing reliance of governments around the world on the private sector. In many cases these partnerships have proven reliable as the private sector can often fill much needed gaps in expertise, technology, and services. Yet what is often obscured are the power-relationships, accountability and ethics that govern the “inner workings” of the partnerships themselves.
"Public-private partnerships is a policy buzzword that is used as a self-explanatory relationship, when in fact at times it hides more than it reveals. It uses the ideas of “partnership” and “collaboration” as positive attributes. While that might be true, when public welfare, evolution of technologies, funds and privacy are involved, the decisions made within these partnerships have severe societal implications.”
In today’s world where information, data and technology plays an increasingly dominant role in these partnerships- the blurred lines between the public and private sector require further scrutiny. This raises a number of questions and tensions:
To what extent does the tension between profit and public good require a re-thinking of the contexts in which this information is provided and how it is used?
How does one reconcile the tensions of efficiency and democratic values transparency and openness that characterise these partnerships? Increased external and internal transparency may be one solution:
External transparency is the visibility of the partnerships to the outside world, such as the media or the general public. However, for a successful public-private partnership, we also need internal transparency between the two partners.
A Digital Underclass? Marion Fourcade on Social Stratification in the Age of COVID [Marion Fourcade & Joanne Lipmann - Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton University]
Fourcade makes two specific observations regarding COVID-19’s challenges to democracy:
Increasing isolation and physical distancing will make the expression of democracy increasingly difficult precisely at a moment when it is needed the most.
Increasing state-powers in the face of crisis management have overshadowed the rights of freedom of speech and expression.
Her observations on data collection and technology are also critical. Data collection, she argues, is intimately linked with processes of social categorization - whether this be your credit score or Uber rating. The impacts of this aggregation and stratification can percolate through all social aspects of life, and in the end these classifications end up "re-embedding very traditional forms of inequality, partly because whatever data is collected about people is itself shaped by social forces, like patterns of gender difference or institutional racism." The rapidity of our reliance on big technology, also hold uncertain implications for the future the consequences of which we have yet to bear.
"And if we know anything about technological change, it is that there’s a lot of path dependency. Once you choose a system, you’re likely to get stuck. There’s a high chance that it’s going to reproduce itself."
As the world transitions to working from home, Fourcade warns that we must be aware as to how this itself is reflective of certain inequalities and privileges. For those who can work form home, there are those who cannot, it will require some to re-organize their domestic workspaces or access infrastructure - it will fundamentally alter both our modes of existence and work.
FK's Take: With the advent of technology we slide further apart from the consequences of our actions. As this distance grows, our empathy dissipates and the idea of a common humanity begins to disappear. We cease to think in the collective and our bubble becomes the individual. The very technology that proclaims to connect us, paradoxically leaves us further and further apart.
Read of The Week:
I came across Michael Sandel’s Tyranny of Merit after reading this review in the Guardian. The book offers a searing take on the ethic of meritocracy as we have come to understand it today. In it Sandel offers a look at meritocracy’s dark and often overshadowed underbelly, its moral and religious heritage, and its links to the forces of globalisation, capitalism, and populism, to issues of access and education and to ideas of success and achievement. An essential read for anyone invested in leadership, education, law, and ethics.
Meritocratic hubris reflects the tendency of winners to inhale too deeply of their success, to forget the luck and fortune that helped them on their way. It is the smug conviction of those who land on top that they deserve their fate, and that those on the bottom deserve theirs, too. This attitude is the moral companion of technocratic politics. A lively sense of the contingency of our late conduces to a certain humility; “There, but for the grace of God, or the accident of fortune, go I.” But a perfect meritocracy banishes all sense of gift or grace. it diminishes our capacity to see ourselves as sharing a common fate. It leaves little room for the solidarity that can arise when we reflect on the contingency of our talents and fortunes. This is what makes merit a kind of tyranny or unjust rule. - Michael Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit
Until next week, thank you for reading.
FK