A Deeper Look - Issue #6 | Feb 14 2021
Pomegranates, Railways, Ed-Tech and the Humanities
Hello Friends
Over the last few days there has been small debate brewing in our household about the best way to dissect a pomegranate.
My father and brother are of the opinion that it is best to cut open the pomegranate in half, and then bash the open half over an empty bowl with a blunt instrument (which in our case has been a wooden spoon) so that the seeds, now jolted loose are left to fall into an awaiting bowl. In my humble opinion not only is this method unbearably noisy and uncouth, but it does a disservice to the pomegranate.
My mother and I are inclined to believe that the pomegranate is to be peeled much as it is enjoyed - slowly, with sincerity, and with one’s full attention. It is to be carefully cut open and quartered. the seeds pried loose individually from their honeycomb like structures and placed into a bowl. Yes - this is time consuming but I suspect the pomegranate was created with this in mind, its seeds purposefully placed in their holdings so as to encourage the use of ones fingers. And after all this slow and methodical work of picking the individual seeds free - I must admit that the fruit tastes just a bit sweeter. I suspect one’s preferred method may be a reflection of how one views life? Is life about the product or the process? About a quest for efficiency or enjoyment? Then again, it also may reflect nothing - and just be a preferred way of cutting a pomegranate.
Moving on from pomegranates… today we look at 1) a journal article on education and technology, and 2) a news article that provoked a deep dive into the China-Kenya relationship.
Students and Society in the 2020s Three Future ‘Histories’ of Education and Technology
This week I came across an article published in Learning, Media and Technology that presented three hypothetical accounts of the future if the current trends in technology and education are set to continue. The article illustrates three scenarios:
Scenario #1 paints a picture of a world in which Silicon Valley and the world of education are fully enmeshed, and where the “optimisation” of education and its processes are the main goal.
The concerns regarding the infiltration of Silicon Valley and big tech into the world’s public and private education systems concerns are not new ones. In 2019 The New Yorker published an article examining the complicated relationship between America’s public schools and Silicon Valley. The article cited that skeptics of this relationship “warn that underneath the language of “student-centered” pedagogy is a tech-intensive model that undermines communal values, accelerates privatisation, and turns public schools into big-data siphons.” Taking this to its extreme, the journal article paints a picture of the future in which:
“affective computing and AI techniques would enhance learning by their ability to sense, interpret and interact with student’s feelings, moods and emotions (McStay 2018). Satisfied and fully immersed learners, capable of using the newest technologies, would be an asset to innovation in the workplace, and spur economic efficiency and GDP growth. Technology-enhanced assessment tools would improve formative, summative and predictive test procedures. Learning management systems (LMS) would make school management, administration, teaching and learning more efficient.”
In a world of constant self-cultivation, students and individuals grow pre-occupied with self-improvement and self-optimisation. Corporations slowly begin to influence the values, norms and systems in the field of education. Student and educational data is owned by corporations and commercial entities which sell and rent this information out to the highest bidder. Power is concentrated in the hands of a few, and democracy falls by the wayside:
“The societal process of smoothing continued, fuelled by the aesthetics of the predictable, responsive, pleasurable interfaces of everyday life. At the same time, the ‘post-democratic’ move, in which technology companies began to make significant educational decisions without the purview of public, democratic contestation (Stalder 2015), continued to gain strength throughout the 2020s…”
The scenario ends with “former Google educational data scientist, Stephania Seerobbe, appointed the EU Commissioner of Education in 2029.”
Scenario #2: The second scenario plays out the entrepreneurial trajectory and mindset we see in society today. In this scenario the rise of the solopreneur and digital nomad give rise to a world in which in which the act of “doing” has taken precedence over the act of “learning.” In this world institutions of formal education such as universities are seen as less and less relevant. By contrast:
“The key to success and freedom was running an online business which was scalable and automatable. The individual was seen as the solution to any problem. World travelling families promoted autonomy, personal needs and unschooling…”
The authors attribute this world to the development of an individual oriented mindset and attitude one in prizes personal freedom and autonomy, autonomy, which values flexible working hours, healthy lifestyle, and focus on family. Success is defined increasingly in financial terms and:
“Overall, by the end of the 2020s the expansion of now classic commercial platform technologies had promoted and supported individual entrepreneurial thinking as a means to become free. ‘I choose freedom’, the slogan of DNX (‘Digital Nomad’) community members and speakers at #dnxfestival in Lisbon in 2018, became the motto of the decade. The key competencies of understanding how data analytics and the underlying algorithms of commercial technologies could be used for one’s own business strategies, led solopreneurs to reject formal education and evade nation-state economic politics.”
Scenario 3: The third scenario is highly optimistic and paints a picture of a future in which socio-economic inequalities, and the environmental crisis are treated as urgent global priorities. This prompts educators, policymakers and governments to rise to the challenge of re-thinking the global education system: 1) data privacy is now considered to be a priority item; 2) companies realise the error of their ways and begin to take the issue of data privacy seriously; 3) review systems for classroom tools are put in place and are worked on by all partners; 4) there is a mass-movement to open-source software in the educational system; 5) there is a shift in the priorities of ed-tech companies and privacy remains in the hand of the user; 6) there is an emphasis on data and “algorithmic literacy.” There is also a shift in the values and ethics of the wider community and society and by the end of 2020:
"Care and solidarity, participatory research and development, had become the guiding norms and values in public institutions. Open to all based on transparent processes and criteria, raising the level of data literacy amongst learners, institutions nourished a valuable diversity of epistemic cultures, embraced generation conflicts and empowered learners to raise critical questions. The goal became to shape society collaboratively embracing the strife and conflict that this process requires.”
The China-Kenya Relationship: Unpacking Chinese Intentions in East Africa
I was interested to see an article on the BBC website on a new highway being built through Nairobi. The article describes how the 27 km long Nairobi Expressway is causing a major traffic headache for Nairobi’s commuters and residents. This however is not what caught my attention - what did was that the highway is being constructed by the China Road and Bridge Corporation (CRBC) a Chinese firm and will be operated under a public-private partnership.
This highway offers a chance to look a little more closely at China’s activity in the region.
The CRBC is a subsidiary of Chinese Communications Construction Company (CCCC) a state owned construction and contracting company which has carried out some of China’s largest infrastructure projects as part of its Belt and Road Initiative. This is also not the first major infrastructure project in Kenya China has initiated, an earlier project was the Mombasa-Nairobi Standard Gauge Railway that links the strategically important port of Mombasa on the coast, to Kenya’s capital Nairobi. The railway has also had its fair share of controversy, in 2020 Reuters reported that Kenya had taken a loan to build the 3.2 billion dollar railway. In late 2019, Reuters also reported that Kenya’s government had begun forcing businessmen and importers to use the railway at an added cost, a not so subtle way of ensuring the terms of the contract between the two countries are fulfilled: “the contract between China’s Exim Bank, the Kenya Ports Authority (KPA) and Kenya Railways requires KPA to provide 1 million tonnes of cargo to the railway per year, rising to 6 million by 2024.”
Still unknown though, are the exact terms of the contract between China and Kenya. It is no secret that China’s use of debt diplomacy both in Africa and elsewhere has been subject to widespread criticism. This argument however also has its skeptics, a report by Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies explains:
We found that China has restructured or refinanced approximately US$15 billion of debt in Africa between 2000 and 2019. We found no “asset seizures” and despite contract clauses requiring arbitration, no evidence of the use of courts to enforce payments, or application of penalty interest rates. Although Chinese lenders have applied Paris Club terms to some rescheduling, on the borrower’s request, Chinese lenders prefer to address restructuring quietly, on a bilateral basis, tailoring programs to each situation. Yet the lack of transparency fuels suspicion about Chinese intentions.
What is certain is the amount of external Kenyan debt China holds, in January of 2021, Bloomberg reported that “21% of Kenya’s external debt at the end of June 2020, compared with the World Bank’s 25%. What then explains China’s interest in Kenya? In my opinion this could be the result of a number of factors:
China has a growing economy that needs and requires a supply of constant resources and raw materials.
China’s presence in Kenya can also be interpreted as an attempt to fill the gap in Africa left by the United States during the Trump administration - a gap also being filled by a noticeable Russian presence on the continent
Access to the East African coast also provides China with another means to assert its influence in the Indian Ocean. An influence that has preoccupied and caused India some anxiety. This Chinese presence bordering the Indian Ocean has been referred to as the String of Peals - an article by Brookings explains:
Indian naval strategists and geopolitical thinkers worry about China’s increasingly assertive posture and growing military ties with the countries that border the Indian Ocean. The phrase often heard in India is “the string of pearls,” referring to facilities in Myanmar, Sri Lanka and Pakistan [the port of Gwadar] where the Chinese military is developing regular access.
Read of the Week:
This week’s recommended read is a short but informative one - Martha Nussbaum’s Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities.
“Today we maintain that we like democracy and self governance, and we also think that we like freedom of speech, respect for difference and understanding of others. We give these values lip service, but we think far too little about what we need to do in order to transmit them to the next generation and ensure their survival. Distracted by the pursuit of wealth, we increasingly ask our schools to turn out useful little profit-makers rather than thoughtful citizens. Under pressure to cut costs we prune away just those parts of the educational endeavour that are crucial to preserving a healthy society. What will we have, if these trends continue? Nations of technically trained people who do not know how to criticise authority, useful profit-makers with obtuse imaginations. As Tagore observed, a suicide of the soul.” - Nussbaum
Thank you for reading, until next week…
FK
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