The obedient learning society LO28959

From: AM de Lange (amdelange@postino.up.ac.za)
Date: 08/06/02


Replying to LO28955 --

Dear Organlearners,

Terri Deems < Tadeems@aol.com > writes:

>I've come to know this as "received knowing" (Belenky
>et al), where people become so used to simply having
>information given to them that they become unskilled in
>creating knowledge and meaning for themselves.

Greetings dear Terri,

Thank you very much for bringing up this angle -- information which
displaces self-created knowledge. I myself had been so preoccupied by a
society not ruling itself, but ruled by a secret organisation or by a
purpose detrimental to creativity that i did not saw and explored this
connection which you so brilliantly exposed.

>I see it as an unintended consequence of a society that
>values efficiency above all else -- it is, afterall, more
>"efficient" (if we define that in terms of speed) to simply
>give information to learners rather than to draw out
>knowledge via active and experiential approaches that
>challenge one's thinking skills.

I can understand it. Several years ago i wrote an essay for our LO-
dialogue so that we can explore the relationship between efficiency and
emergence. It boils down to the following -- the more the input of a
system matches its output, i.e the more the efficiency, the less free
energy is available to sustain emergences. For example, think about a
woman employee about to give birth -- the emergence of a new, infant
human. A few weeks before birth and a couple of months afterwards this
woman is far from an efficient worker.

No emergent learning is needed for memorising and reproduction information
precisely.

>The problem, then, is not simply within the individuals
>(whom we tend to view as being somehow deficient
>-- fix the person, then!), but within the larger systems
>they live within.

Yes. In this case it points to a society which has become infatuated with
its existing information as sufficient for directing all its actions --
the information driven society. Information in itself has as little
creativity as that which is used to present the information (ink on paper
or pixels on a screen)

>.....These people have spent 2 decades within a system
>that by-and-large has never encouraged them to explore
>learning and knowledge for themselves, nor to take the
>time to consider what constitutes "quality" in their work.
>...... many people have trouble thinking for themselves.
>This is particularly frightening when I remind myself that
>these adults are also voters!

This is the result of having reduced our schools into sausage factories.
Bulk meat goes in (with much more cereal and some soya), get minced, mixed
with cheap spices and then packed in gut so that regular sausages can come
out. What is easier for charlatans, opportunistic politicians or fortune
makers to deal with than such a bunch of sausages! Throw them in a pan,
fry them and eat them.

>Typically, our life systems as they are present at least
>in the US do not support adult development -- rather,
>they serve to restrict and distort our development
>(miseducative). That's a generalization, of course, but
>one I find more dominant than not.

Terri, i think that this already begins in schools! Pupils are brainwashed
by information mongers that acquiring information is a temporary phase
which leads to a better life afterwards. They are not taught that learning
is an endless activity which improves living continually. Should we want
to correct this, we will have to begin with those who are responsible for
what is instructed in schools and how it is done. This is the "identity"
of sureness. But we also have to bear in mind, as you have pointed out,
that they do what society at large expects them to do. This is the
"context" of sureness. So we will have to begin with ourselves, becoming
more sure what needs to be done.

But as AM pointed out, people from an obedient society has lost their
ability to create. Furthermore, sureness has no function other than in
creativity and its higher emergences . To break out of this vicious circle
of a lack of sureness and too little creativity, we need what a thinker
(Van Wyk Louw) in our own country long ago described as "loyal
resistance". The "resistance" means that those who know cannot let the
system keep on doing what it has been doing for so long. Their knowledge
has to culminate in action. The "loyal" means that they must not undermine
the authentic values which the system once had and ought to have again.

>In Iowa, I see many organization leaders who, for
>example, describe attempts at cultivating a more
>participatory workplace, only to be frustrated by
>people who won't participate. The leaders fail to see
>that this is a developmental challenge, one that can be
>worked through by the system if done properly.

It is the same here in South Africa. Unfortunately, it is the leaders
themselves who are responsible for the failure and thus frustration. They
try to correct the problem with yet another sausage factory recipe -- the
kind of thinking which led to the very problem. What they need is to shift
their paradigm from an information driven society to another paradigm
which places information in perspective. I am tempted to say that the new
paradigm should be knowledge driven society.

But this paradigm does not take liveness ("becoming-being") sufficiently
into consideration. Knowledge does have liveness within it since it is the
capacity to act. But from without it is the result ("being") of the act of
learning ("becoming") as the process leading to it. This brings us to an
alternative paradigm, namely the Learning Organisation.

>In some places, I even see them attempt to correct this
>deficit by giving people more training programs in which
>they can somehow "learn" to participate by being told
>what how to do it -- right back into that received knowing
>cycle.

It makes me think that any attempt to get a LO by the sausage factory
recipe is doomed to failure.

>It also doesn't help when we have too many within our
>school systems (and outside it) who tell growing minds
>that the primary purpose for a good education is to get
>a good job. In Iowa, we even had a former governor
>who, while in office, made several public statements
>concerning how the purpose of education was to "train"
>young people for tomorrow's workplace. Like it never
>occurred to him that the purpose of education was to
>prepare people to participate fully in their society.

The same is happening here in South Africa. The last ten years of our new
inclusive democracy there had been an intensive drive to get rid of all
intellectual accomplishments during the years of apartheid as if apartheid
gave them an irreversible stigma making them unsuitable for the future of
South Africa. Thus there is an intense drive to organise education the
American way. But sadly, this "training for a job" rather than "education
for citizenship" goes further back into the last twenty years of
apartheid. As economical sanctions led locally to increasing unemployment
and greater efficiency measures to stay productive, the focus shifted from
"citizinship" to getting hold of a "good paying job".

>If we really want to be creating learning organizations
>-- for workers, for students, for any organization -- we
>have to discourage received knowing (that obedient
>learning society) and become willing to hold the many
>tensions created through a more active rather than passive
>approach to learning. For many, that will demand a change
>in our assumptions about the human at work (finally, move
>away from that classical, Newtonian mindset). Perhaps
>even let go of our belief that "experts" can solve our
>problems.

Terri, I agree with you. But please allow me the following apologetic
verbalage, not because of what you have written, but because of what an
information driven society does to authentic history.

I wonder whether it is so much the Newtonian mindset as the Laplacian
mindset. Newton formulated his laws of mechanics as well as law of
gravitation and showed how they can be used to predict the trajectories of
celestail bodies. This was one of the greatest intellectual
accomplishments ever. Laplace was the one who speculated that the
information concerning celestial bodies should apply exactly the same to
atomic particles. His mathematical expertise allowed him to present that
information so brilliantly that it blinded other scientists almost two
hundred years to the simple fact that a massive celestial body and a
submicroscopic atom are just not the same thing. Speak of an obedient
scientific society! Fortunately, Max Planck had an enquiring rather than
an obedient mind so that eventually quantum mechanics emerged.

As for the belief that "experts" can solve our problems, I have to step
into the breach of authentic scientists who walk with both their science
legs (careful observation and evolution in insight). They never boasted
that they can solve all problems, nor did they guarantee to solve even a
particular problem.They just put their mind to those problems which they
thought to be important to solve and allowed their mind to change as the
solution would require. When they found a solution, often with astounding
creativity, they suffered the "tyranny of the experts" just as much as we
do -- Copernicus, Keppler, Galileo, Bruno, yes even Newton, Leibniz,
........ (a list longer than my arm) ought to convince us. Those who
canonise information and then subdue personal knowledge to it have been
operating since time immemoriable. Authentic scientists only have brought
them clearer into the light of knowing.

Information mongering is just as old as prostitution or pornography. It is
up to us whether we will become obedient to it or not.

>"There is a principle which is a bar against all information,
>which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail
>to keep [a person] in everlasting ignorance--that principle
>is contempt prior to investigation." (H. Spencer)

Let it so be!

With care and best wishes

-- 

At de Lange <amdelange@postino.up.ac.za> Snailmail: A M de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre Faculty of Science - University of Pretoria Pretoria 0001 - Rep of South Africa

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