We don’t need a lot more quick fixes. We need a shift in the paradigm.
IAIN MCGILCHRIST (2009/2018, p. XXI)
∵
Education is the way societies sustain themselves. It has both a maintenance and a progressive function. I have argued, persuasively I hope, that education is a major site of both maintenance and renewal. We need to choose what we maintain: will it be privilege, oppression, exploitation, the patriarchy? Or will we develop the pathways for renewal and sustainability? Whose interests will be served by this powerful force labelled ‘education’?
The grand narrative of Western history is always under revision, but the trend has gained increasing momentum in the last few years, and it is happening across many disciplines. Poskett (2022), in his global history of science, decentred Europe and dispelled the myth that science began with the Enlightenment. Frankopan (2015, 2018) decentred Europe in a revision of accepted economic and political history that focused on the Euro-Asian axis of The Silk Roads. Armstrong (2014) revised the history of religion and showed that contrary to the widespread assumption of religions provoking violence, they have in fact been a source of opposition to violence. The historian Mac Sweeney (2023) offered ‘a new history of an old idea’ and dispelled the myth of a Europe descended from, and being the sole heirs of, Greco-Roman literature and philosophy. In the field of social psychology and several related disciplines, Henrich (2020) argued that Westerners have become psychologically distinct – WEIRD – in their world that is Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic, which is not necessarily a negative mindset. These authors and others have pointed to the need for a different mindset at this point in world history. Graeber and Wengrow (2022) have offered a substantially revised view of human society, throwing doubt on many of our assumptions about human social evolution and the way societies have arranged gender relations, distributed power, and engaged with their environment. Most of the authors who have offered large-scale revisions of history have struck a note of urgency.
An author whose work is particularly pertinent to education and to which I have only recently come, in 2023, is Iain McGilchrist. McGilchrist has become a phenomenon since he published The Master and His Emissary in 2009. In the Preface to the 2018 expanded edition, he wrote, ‘It seems to me that we face very grave crises indeed, and that, if we are to survive, we need not just a few new measures, but a complete change of heart and mind’ (p. XXV). His hypothesis, which he has now expanded into a two-volume work called The Matter with Things (2023), is that the different hemispheres of the brain both have important functions that are quite different, and they need to function independently. However, despite the many ‘inhibitors’ that inhibit information flow and cooperation between the hemispheres, they must eventually come together to produce an accurate picture of the world. That is, their different takes on the world must be integrated.
There is substantial evidence that the common understanding of the differences between the hemispheres of the brain is mostly clichéd, reductive, and inaccurate. One of McGilchrist’s challenges was getting that previous understanding out the way in order to develop his hypotheses that although the left hemisphere is less insightful, it has come to dominate the Western mindset. His work is thoroughly grounded in empirical neurological evidence (he is a psychiatrist), but in order to relate the concept of education as gift to the qualities of the two hemispheres of the brain, they are discussed below as he described them in the Preface to the 2018 edition of The Master and His Emissary.
If had been aware of McGilchrist’s work earlier, I may have written quite a bit of this book rather differently. It certainly would have been liberally spiced with his insights. As it is, I have the eerie feeling of having written about how the perspectives of the left hemisphere of the brain are played out in current education, thus corroborating McGilchrist’s work without knowing about it. His thesis of left-brain dominance leading us into an abyss is a description of the destructive power of a marketized, monetized, technologized, soul-destroying education industry that, in the misguided pursuit of efficiency, is disfiguring and even destroying lives. It has become a self-reinforcing cycle that is feeding the larger disasters of attacks on free speech, intolerance of difference, and destruction of nature. It is not difficult – a telling point in itself – to map characteristics of the left hemisphere of the brain onto aspects of contemporary education that I have described in the preceding chapters.
The fable that inspired the title of McGilchrist’s (2009/2018) The Master and His Emissary (discussed in Chapter 5) summarizes the thesis. The world of the Master grows to the extent that he must appoint an Emissary to manage
Putting McGilchrist’s thesis in the context of education, it is a world in which learning can be reduced to measurable chunks of testable performance, a world of ‘education warfare’ in which technology facilitates cheating, and technology is used to detect cheating in an ever-increasing and profitable spiral, to the delight of technology corporations. A world in which universities establish campuses in far-off lands (which of course require administrative technologies) to ensure revenue streams (a sort-of synonym for ‘students’) to pay for the technology.
Another feature of the left hemisphere is that its view is easier to articulate than the view of the right hemisphere. Matters must be made explicit. However, according to McGilchrist (2009/2018), ‘the attempt to make the implicit explicit radically alters its nature …. The left hemisphere relies on concatenations of serial propositions and the literal aspects of language to make meaning explicit’ (p. XXIII). To the left-brain educator, the challenge and solution is obvious: we need to be able to measure what the student has ‘got’ and hence we have explicit, measurable LO s and the accompanying paraphernalia of quizzes and take-aways available in easy-to-read PowerPoint slides that explicitly state the ‘key moments’.
McGilchrist (2009/2018) noted a further aspect of left-brain dominance that has arisen since the Industrial Revolution, but particularly in the last 50 years:
All the available sources of intuitive life – the natural world, cultural tradition, the body, religion and art – have been so conceptualised, devitalised, and ‘deconstructed’ (‘ironised’) by self-consciousness, explicitness
and the systems of theories used to analyse them, that their power to help see intuitively beyond the hermetic world that the left hemisphere has set up has been largely drained from them. (p. XXIII)
Again, putting McGilchrist’s insights into an education context, the enthusiasm for MOOC s has made the challenge very clear – they could make a great deal of knowledge accessible to many people, but only knowledge of a particular kind.
Sometimes the profundity of what is at stake can be grasped via what seems to be somewhat trivial. When the business school in which I worked was seeking AACSB accreditation,1 we were asked to remove all personal material, especially cartoons lambasting bureaucratic idiocy, from our doors in preparation for the visit of the assessors. Accreditation, it was made clear, required bland conformity to the ethos of North American business. There was no room for the expression of personal, individual, nuanced, localized, ironic, critical views.
McGilchrist (2009/2018) pointed to a general social implication:
Management and its systems … have become more highly valued than the hands-on task the management exists to serve, with the odd effect that the higher your rise in your craft, skill or profession, the more you will be removed from its performance in order to manage it. (p. XXIII)
I am old enough to remember Deans and Vice-Chancellors being elected for only limited terms. They were ‘Masters’ of their subject who temporarily took up the role of ‘Emissary’ and then returned to the educational task. It was a way of dealing with this point from McGilchrist (2009/2018):
Built into the relationship between the hemispheres is that they have a different take on everything – including their own relationship … the right hemisphere tends to ground experience; the left hemisphere then works on it to clarify, ‘unpack’ and generally render the implicit explicit; and the right hemisphere finally reintegrates what the left hemisphere has produced with its own understanding, the explicit once more receding, to produce a new, now enriched whole. (p. XXIV)
He noted that the left-hemisphere world has been externalized, and ‘nature has been replaced for many by an unyielding, inert, confrontational environment of non-living surfaces, straight lines and concrete masses and largely generic shapes, which are largely experienced as alienating’ (pp. XXIII–XXIV). Sometimes the resonance between purpose, values, and architecture can be
Education can be part of a reinforcing cycle, for better or for worse, as well as a means to contest that cycle. The question is to identify what is valued and what must be challenged. According to McGilchrist (2009/2018), the problem here is that:
a culture that exemplifies the qualities of the left hemispheres’ world attracts to itself, in positions of influence and authority, those whose natural outlook is similar. People with certain autistic traits will be attracted to, and be deemed especially suitable for, employment in the areas of science, technology and administration which have, during the last hundred years, been immensely influential in shaping the world we live in, and are if anything even more important today. (p. XXIV)
As one who has taught in business schools in four different countries, from first-year students to MBA level, I doubt I will ever see a graduate profile that boasts of graduates who can be certifiable narcissistic psychopaths. But I do know how right McGilchrist is.2
I pointed out in concluding the previous chapter that I have traversed different areas of human inquiry: the personal and sociological, the anthropological, creativity and folklore, and finally gender. In the book as a whole I have pursued an idea of education resting on individual personal relationships, a kind of education that serves to expand the capacity of a person to relate to the world in a coherent constructive way. There is a collective aspect to it, so, a sociological perspective can be appropriately joined by an anthropological one. It seems that in both our individual and social worlds, we come to understand that we are not machines, and the world is not a machine, not even a well-functioning one with replaceable parts. It is an evolving organism and we do not know what creates it. For most of the world, explaining the ground of reality has been expressed in religious terms, or in terms of something impossible to make explicit and prove, but which we call sacred. We talk of the spirit. In education, we would associate this with having a vocation as an educator, and a learner feeling inspired. It goes by many names, and not surprisingly, it is also often noted that it cannot be named and that if you think you have ‘got it’, then what have got is not ‘it’. The prohibitions on naming ‘that which must not be named’ are not simply arbitrary rules but are, in fact, sound psychology.
As stated at the outset of this exploration of education, my starting point was as a White, male South African educator grappling with history and identity, now living in Aotearoa New Zealand. I can still identify as South African. I am not nostalgic, but I recognize that what can be observed in one country can often be observed in others. Identity is rarely singular and can sometimes be amusingly convoluted. For example, in the last decade, the number of South African shops in Aotearoa New Zealand has increased. One such shop run by Afrikaners brands itself with the South Africa flag and ‘LOCAL IS LEKKER’, ‘lekker’ being Afrikaans for ‘nice’ or ‘good’. Where is their ‘local’? Are they (we) neo-colonials or refugees? How do individuals come to terms with their upbringing, and how does a society regenerate and sustain itself? It is an especially pressing question for individuals and societies marked by oppression through class, race, or gender, as well as migration, whether chosen or forced. In other words, for a large part of the world. And it usually not amusing. In late 2023 in Aotearoa New Zealand’s commercial capital, Auckland, a councillor complained about posters in communal areas that promoted ‘decolonisation’ actions, such as the use of te reo Māori (one of Aotearoa’s official languages) and developing an understanding of Te Tiriti o Waitangi (Treaty of Waitangi) (Niall, 2023). The councillor’s preference was to keep areas such as staff kitchens ‘politically neutral’ with ‘no signs for anyone’. There is a lot happening here: the fear of difference; the claim that one’s own sensibility is neutral; that evidence of ‘the Other’ is an intrusion. Can education counteract cancel culture?
There are few countries that are not reporting a crisis in education. However, the specific trajectory of the South African case is instructive. There, the transition to democracy in the 1990s was accompanied by dreams of an egalitarian and equitable society with improved educational opportunities for hitherto-excluded South Africans. It is useful (and sobering) to look at one specific society that had a moment of liberation – the dream – that was betrayed. In 2017, the South African Mamphela Ramphele wrote about the struggle to change her society, saying, ‘The monumental failure to transform our educational system is one of the biggest betrayals of our democracy’ (p. 69). She was in a good position to offer analyses: she was not afraid to look at her own political failure and she could draw on her experience of being an activist, a medical
Jonathan Jansen, a world-renowned South African educator, recently published Corrupted: A Study of Chronic Dysfunction in South African Universities (2023). He, like Ramphele, was well-placed to offer an analysis. In 1991 he edited Knowledge and Power in South Africa: Critical Perspectives Across the Disciplines, and when I was finalizing this book, he was Distinguished Professor in Education at Stellenbosch University, President of the Academy of Science of South Africa, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has also been a university Vice-Chancellor, and at one point, he was a caretaker administrator for a university that had been rendered non-functional because of the corruption of its Vice-Chancellor. While Jansen described many egregious instances of rank corruption, his focus was systemic and often micro. According to his analysis, corruption caused dysfunction, and dysfunction provided the opportunity for corruption to arise. Dysfunction could be explained by two intertwined factors. One was the lack of institutional capacity – the expert ability to lead, manage, and administer universities. The other was a lack of institutional integrity, which should rest on the guiding academic values that would buffer universities against instability. He concluded that a solution to corruption must involve wholesale ethical renewal.
I would like to add to the analyses of Ramphele and be more explicit about what Jansen (2023) implied in ‘everything revolves around the academic project’. Jansen insisted that the university was an academic institution; it was not a business. He held that the academic project or purpose was education and research that was free of undue business or government influence. In the context of South African universities, he pointed out that protecting the institution against corruption (‘keeping the vultures at bay’) had started taking centre stage and the academic project had dropped off the agenda. I would say the point is applicable worldwide. The more that a university council focuses on projects to make the university function as a successful corporation, the less it can focus on education and research. More subtly, it can start to transform
When the value of scholarship is measured by such indices as Impact Factor (IF), which is based on citation indices, we must acknowledge that we have moved far from the inherent value of the original scholarship. We are firmly in the realm of a market supported by sophisticated algorithms that have no educational, scholarly, or scientific value. We even have the situation of the government of the Pacific Union announcing that it will start to tax academic scientists according to their IF points (Jacobs, 2009). There is a trend emerging ‘where scientists are expected to raise a substantial proportion – eventually the entirety – of their salary from competitive research grants’. In this way, scientists become ‘self-employed managers of small business’. According to Jacobs, it is no longer possible to resist the market forces that have turned science into a business, and the IF is now ‘a commercial indicator in many ways on a par with the Global Dow Jones Index … a self-inflating and, to a large extent, arbitrary number’.
We may even consider the way gaming metrics, through which ‘publish or perish’ is now merging with ‘impact or perish’, are creating a new ecology of academic misconduct (Biagioli & Lipmann, 2020, p. 1). Fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism have always existed in academic work, and it is hard to distinguish questionable practices from misconduct – but what is new and enabled by market forces and new technologies is the way the publication process can be manipulated. This goes beyond the specific claims that might be made in any single piece of research. In the Introduction of their 2020 book Gaming the Metrics: Misconduct and Manipulation in Academic Research, Biagioli and Lipmann suggested that we might have to rethink ‘our current “misconduct paradigm”’, and they distinguished ‘epistemic crimes’ from bureaucratic crimes’ (p. 3). They held that the meaning of evaluation and publication has changed, and even the notion of impact has shifted: the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) did not indicate the current value of a published article but was a prediction of value, ‘a rather crude tool to price futures’ (p. 6), and it valued an article ‘in a currency that allows for exchange’ (p. 7). Thus, the JIF was ‘about creating the conditions of possibility for a market [original emphasis]’ (p. 7). The book provided examples of the way the term ‘fake is no longer what it used
On October 7, 2023 I received the following invitation: ‘A proposal for collaboration as fellow researches [sic]’. I was probably one of thousands who received it:
Dear Damian
I trust this message finds you in good health. My name is Shaghayegh Nosrati, and I represent a group of researchers based at the University of Tehran, specializing in social science. Recently, I had the pleasure of reading a few of your articles in the field of our shared research interests.
As fellow researchers, we are trying to improve the visibility of our research studies by mutually citing one another’s articles. And we want to offer you the same opportunity. Right now, we have a number of articles ready to be published, and we find some of your articles related enough for us to cite them.
Alternatively, we can offer you a sum of $100 to $300 US dollars for 2 to 6 citations of our articles if you have works close to publication in acceptable academic journals. Please let us know if you are interested in cooperating with us. We appreciate that you dedicated your precious time to reading our email and we are looking forward to receiving a response from you.
Warm Regards,
Shaghayegh Nosrati
University of Tehran
As noted earlier, citations are the basis of the IF system. IF serves as a basis for the ranking of individuals, which in turn is a source of rankings for universities and institutions.
We all know that a scientific finding’s true value to humanity can only be judged by history. Instead, the most influential scientists of that time simply colluded in the IF system, much in the same way as ordinary home-owners indulge in property speculation, even while complaining bitterly about the way it rules and sometimes ruins their lives.
Educators are now faced with more than just loss of institutional value. Andersson and Anechiarico (2019) pointed out that once institutions like justice, education, and defence are corrupted, they become ‘devious, dangerous, and, in some cases deadly’ (p. 1). They called the ordinary, everyday corruption of bribery ‘exchange corruption’ and said that this rotted governance from the bottom up, to the point where ‘government’ became synonymous with ‘corruption’ and ‘the expectation of fairness and neutral justice morphs into cynicism’ (p. 2). Another kind of corruption was governance corruption, which not only included bad and abusive official behaviour but also explicitly and intentionally excluded ‘individuals or groups from taking part in decisions that critically
We argue that far too often anti-corruption campaigns focus on rooting out exchange corruption while neglecting governance corruption that is far more damaging. A narrow focus tilts the measures adopted to fight corruption towards laws, regulations, and sanctions of individual transgression and away from measures based on shaping and regulating the institutional structures and organization dynamics that determines ethical behaviour. (p. 4)
The corruption of governments, institutions, municipalities, and utilities starts with the corruption of the ideal they are required to serve. In the face of public sector corruption, it is tempting to appreciate the contributions of the private sector and NGO s, sometimes funded by corporations. As I made clear in Chapter 3, faith in the private sector contributing to the common good is not always warranted. Corruption knows no bounds and the private/corporate sector and NGO s are all susceptible, and of course this is true all over the world. My point, however, is that unreserved trust in the private sector would not only be misplaced but would also be a fundamental error of analysis. It is not the sector or body providing the education that requires scrutiny, but the kind of education that is being provided. The important issue is to have debate that works towards a workable and acceptable idea of what education is for. That will always be a battle. This is as it should be. The moment any sector or special interests are granted the rights of definition, the common good is at risk. Perhaps Milton Friedman, one of the foremost proponents of neoliberalism who famously said ‘the business of business is business’, was right, and the idea of the corporation has become corrupted by Corporate Social Responsibility.3 What is needed, besides clear law and enforcement, is moral and ethical clarity over what money can’t buy and therefore, where in societies corporations should or should not be allowed to conduct their business.
What the educational philosopher Áine Mahon (2021, p. 1) said of the university can be said about all education. It is a promise, marked by darkness and light to be sure, and ‘staked on a very delicate trust’, but ‘a humane, humble and hopeful project’ with unique potential. I will not succour the Nike man of action’s need for quick, down-to-earth, practical solutions, and I do not provide
Notes
Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (formerly The American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business). There are now many accreditation bodies and predictably enough, accreditation itself has become a global business.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackmccullough/2019/12/09/the-psychopathic-ceo/?sh=209767a3791e; https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/08/the-science-behind-why-so-many-successful-millionaires-are-psychopaths-and-why-it-doesnt-have-to-be-a-bad-thing.html; https://fortune.com/2021/06/06/corporate-psychopaths-business-leadership-csr/
We will never get away from the appeal of reductive sloganeering: ‘The purpose’ of a ‘profit-seeking enterprise’ is ‘to serve the interests of shareholders’ is just not slick enough. As Ndebele, the South African writer and three-times Vice-Chancellor pointed out in his collection of essays (1991), slogans are a way of hollowing out thinking.
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