I just finished reading two interesting pieces - one by Sam Lisles called Education Paradigm and the other by Matthew Reisz called Hits and Misses. Both deal with crucial questions about what is “scholarship” and “education”, albeit from quite different angles, and what reciprocal effects exist between society and the education system.

Reisz’s piece concentrates on the changing role of the library, the incoming Google generation and changes in scholarship. As he notes,

The problem can be phrased in many ways and focus on practicalities (do we still need libraries?) or large philosophical puzzles (can we still learn from history?). But at its heart are a number of questions about the values and learning styles of the coming generation of students. Is there a genuine culture of instant gratification, accompanied by a lack of interest in (and certainly a lack of piety towards) the past in general and the scholarship of the past in particular? Does a world of blogging mean that everybody’s views are assumed to be equally worth hearing, and how does that translate into attitudes towards authority and expertise?

Reisz raises several crucial points which I would like to pull out. First is the question of time perception, and how this will impact society. For the past 100 years or so, our socio-economic system has encouraged us towards having a limited time horizon. In part, this stems from changes in communications technology which “warp” our perceptions of time and space (cf. Harold Innis’ The Bias of Communications) and have a similar warping effect on social perceptions. Another source of the move towards a short time horizon has been our system of production which is too efficient and requires that we replace our commodities constantly. It is not enough that we have a car, we must have the latest car - a variant on the status game. “New” = “Better”; an equation that has shown up in some academic disciplines that love to commit intellectual parricide.

But a short time horizon has some subtle effects that are often missed. In particular, short time horizons that deal with “new” situations” require facile thought; there isn’t time for an in-depth analysis. But facile thought is a pattern of thinking that opens people up to non-reflexive ways of thinking and of taking the thoughts produced by others “on faith”, which brings us to Reitsz’ second point, social attitudes towards authority and expertise.

Max Weber argued that there were three types of authority: “rational-legal” (or bureaucratic), “charismatic” and “traditional” authority (Stewart Clegg translates the last as “Domination”, but the German original is closer to “blood right”). While I have some disagreements with Weber, his schema provides a useful starting point for analysis. Reitsz appears to be concerned that authority and expertise will be “flattened” as a result of the Net 2.0+ media. Personally, this is not really a concern of mine. What I am more concerned with is the likelihood that we are switching from a rational-legal form of authority towards a charismatic form of authority. Or, to put it in other terms, away from the authority of science (in the Popperian sense) and towards the authority of “theology” in the ideological sense of that term.

This concern was brought home to me in a recent article by Brian McKenna in Counterpunch entitled What Would Smedley Butler Do? In one place in the article, McKenna notes that

When I went to graduate school, in anthropology, in the early 1980s at Temple University, the emphasis was on Marxist anthropology and social revolution. My mentor, Peter Rigby, was fond of saying, “Men make revolutions. Anthropologists are men. Therefore anthropologists make revolutions.” Rigby was a brilliant Cambridge educated Africanist who studied and advocated for the Maasai. On his curriculum were Antonio Gramsci, Rosa Luxemburg, Stanley Diamond, Kathleen Gough, Laura Nader, Bernard Mugabane, Levi Strauss and Samir Amin.

What struck me most about this was the use of the syllogism - “Men make revolutions. Anthropologists are men. Therefore anthropologists make revolutions.” At first blush, this appears to be of the familiar Barabara form, usually exemplified via

Men die
Socrates is a man
Therefore Socrates will die.

But, in reality, Rigby’s syllogism is closer to what Bateson called the Syllogism of Grass (see here and here).

Grass dies
Men die
Therefore Men are Grass

Why is this syllogism important? Put simply, the Syllogism of Grass is one of the main syllogisms used by religions and magic the world over (it is the basis of the “Principle of Similarity”). It’s use by religions is, for me, key here since religions are based on a routinization of charismatic authority. The same syllogism used by McKenna is used by al Qeada to justify many of their positions. This is a religious syllogism, what Bateson called “syllogisms of metaphor”, rather than a scientific or logical syllogism. It is interesting to note that McKenna follows his use of it with a proper career path (advocacy) and a list of “Saints”, in effect saying that these authors are acceptable to the faith espoused in his syllogism.

Why is this important, and what does it have to do with a discussion of training and education? Simple - education or, at least, higher education (i.e. university) used to be about science, logic and reflexive thought. In the realm of thinking, “training” was for faith. McKenna provides a rather graphic example of the importation of faith-based training into the realm of education.

Let us return, for the nonce, to the distinctions between training and education - the major topic of Sam’s paper. At it’s core, Sam talks about the debate inside universities over the relative justifications of a university education. He notes, quite rightly in my experience, that many people attend university because they know that they need a degree to get a [good] job. If we follow this expectation through, then a university degree is all about training a person to work in their society, and the debate is over what specific skills they should be trained in. This has certain implications worth pulling apart.

First, training is all about teaching people to use a skill that is based on a well understood and mapped out transformative process. It doesn’t really matter what the particular process is - it could be statistical analysis or it could be learning to make a reed basket. Training relies on the teaching of appliable skills, it is all about the application of current systems of knowledge.

Education, on the other hand, used to deal not only with that which was know (the subject of training) but, also, that which was not known and how we discover it. This is where the idea of research as a sine qua non of the university came from. Sam refers to this as “theory”, but I would quibble with that preferring, instead, to term it the application of epistemology. What we are both referring to is the extension of knowledge systems rather than the application of knowledge systems.

This extension of knowledge systems is, to my mind, the central raison d’etre of science as opposed to the maintenance of knowledge systems which is the province of “religion” (loosely construed and using the Geertzian definition of religion as “(1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.”).

Following Malinowski’s argument in Magic, Science and Religion, I would argue that both science and religion (again, in the Geertzian sense) operate in the realm of “theory” and each has their handmaiden - “engineering” (loosely construed) and “magic” (also loosely construed) respectively - who operate in the world of application. Both science and religion also operate in the university (often under aliases) and in the process of “education”, and it is sometimes difficult to tell them apart. Science threatens our neat conceptualizations of our selves; it is a via negative that says “reality is not…”. Religion in its many guises, may threaten individual conceptualizations of reality, but it is, at its core, a via positiva that says “Reality is…”. The only guard against the excesses, and limits, of both is what we now call “reflexivity”; a fancy, and “new” way of saying “know thyself”.