School's Out

There are many people who believe that any social, cultural or political structure which has remained in its present form long enough to attain ‘sacred cow’ status is almost certainly due for overhaul. Many of the proponents of pot theory (see below) have taken great pleasure in applying it to such structures.

So it is in the early 21st Century that various challenges are arising to the orthodoxy of universal education for children and the further orthodoxy of what precisely that education is expected to achieve.

The title of this post comes from a pamphlet written by Jan Huysmans of the University of Amsterdam. The pamphlet was actually called School’s Out Forever, somewhat bizarrely mirroring the Alice Cooper song of the same title from the 1970s.

I say ‘somewhat bizarrely’ because the pamphlet makes a very serious argument, quoting extensively from John Stuart Mill and other champions of liberty, that all formal education should be abolished. His argument was that compulsory education was a gross infringement of the personal liberties of children and counterproductive in the modern age. He argued instead that the government would be responsible for ensuring that educational programming was shown on television during the day and that combined libraries and education centres would be open to people of all ages for additional support.

Huysmans is a colourful character and admitted subsequently that he didn’t envisage these changes coming about, nor did he even think they were entirely workable, but he wanted to start a wide-ranging discussion about the purpose of education and to look at what it achieved. He also quite rightly pointed out that for a significant proportion of the school population, the achievement of education was little more than crowd control.

These arguments have been taken up by many others, but perhaps the one we should consider is Eileen Kempson who was working on her book The Idea of a School at the same time Huysmans was writing his pamphlet.

Kempson’s book was based on her experiences of running The Silver Mountain School which she established in her native Colorado after teaching in both the private and public education sectors on the East Coast of the US.

Her experience suggested that formal education was of benefit to very few people and thwarted many more. Children with problems suffered either academically or socially (or both) from day one. Children who were bright but not academic were made to feel like failures, soon lost faith, and were never allowed the opportunity to explore learning experiences that might have suited them and prepared them for life after school. The most able children were often bored and were once again expected to confine their intellectual development to very tightly prescribed studies.

At first, she too toyed with the idea of abolishing education. She quickly saw that the single biggest problem, even more than a populace that was illiterate and innumerate, was one of providing childcare for children who would no longer have anywhere to go during the day.

Her first criteria, then, when setting up The Silver Mountain School was to make its day match the working day. The second was that children had to be literate and numerate by the age of eleven (this might seem late, but in Continental Europe, formal education often doesn’t begin until seven, yet children surpass their American and British counterparts in literacy and numeracy within a year or two). Beyond that, the aim was to allow the children as much freedom as possible to explore their own interests. Controversially, though Huysmans would approve, this even included watching TV all day if they so desired.

It’s impossible to judge the success of The Silver Mountain School by normal standards because not all children are expected to pass a given academic benchmark. It’s perhaps also difficult to judge it because the parents choosing to send their children there are generally from the higher socio-economic groups. Having said that, it’s record in terms of very high employment and college admission rates among former students, and very low rates of criminality, suggest it’s doing something right. It’s not surprising that a relatively high percentage of former students go on to set up their own businesses. What’s most dramatic is a survey of four hundred former students, in which not one said they hadn’t enjoyed their time at Silver Mountain, and in which only two students thought they might have received a better education elsewhere.

This raises a lot of questions about education. How much is it simply about childcare? How much is it about providing a skilled workforce (something the current education system is failing to achieve in most of the Western World)? Should education be more about socialization (again, for many people, the current education experience is socially tortuous and does nothing to prepare them for adult society)? Governments pay lip service to such questions but don’t seem much interested in the fundamentals – it’s reassuring then that communities and individuals like Eileen Kempson are exploring the answers for them.

(coming next - disengagement theory)

The Black Flower

The Black Flower is unique among the concepts listed here in that is has no verifiable sources. It is a policy initiative which is rumoured to have been created by the CIA and further rumoured to be now commonplace among western intelligence agencies. The Black Flower is designed primarily to counteract the greater transparency which has resulted from the growth of the world wide web.

So why am I including a concept which might well be nothing more than the delusional creation of conspiracy theorists? Well, because The Black Flower is indeed an interesting concept, one which, even if it isn’t in use now, will surely be used at some point or in some form in the coming years.

The thinking is as follows. The power of governments in the past has been heavily dependent upon the restriction of information. If a government or, more specifically, a government agency such as the CIA, wanted to carry out operations without public interference, the relevant information could simply be withheld from the media and the population beyond. The emergence of the world wide web naturally threatened this status quo and suddenly it was almost impossible to control the flow of information.

As a result, The Black Flower was developed as a project which would search for anything indicating a leak and then swamp the web with spurious material on a similar theme. The truth would still be in plain sight, but rendered useless to anyone who lacked the specific knowledge to separate it from the white noise created by the intelligence agencies.

The theory of The Black Flower came into its own with 9/11. One conspiracy website, The Zero Commission, now defunct, went as far as to suggest that many of the conspiracy theories surrounding the 9/11 attacks had been part of the Black Flower operation, using a wall of chatter to cover up inconsistencies in the official accounts.

To give a fictional account of how that would work, let’s imagine shortly after the attacks, stories emerge pointing to the possibility that the WTC had been rigged with explosives. There could be a rational explanation for this – perhaps after the first attack on the WTC (the truck bomb) the authorities concluded that the buildings should be rigged to allow controlled demolition rather than a devastating “topple” in the event of another attack. On the morning itself, someone is forced to come to the devastating conclusion that the buildings have to be brought down rather than risk them toppling and taking out a swathe of Manhattan. Naturally, that hugely difficult decision cannot be made public, but rumours start circulating quickly that there were a series of controlled explosions. It’s vital these stories are quashed, but the easiest way to do that is to surround them with white noise. Operation Black Flower swings into action, releasing stories on the net about the planes having no logos, about missiles, about the complete absence of a plane at the Pentagon, and soon enough the public has lost the original inconsistency in a sea of delusional fantasies.

Of course, it’s impossible to say how close The Black Flower comes to real operational policy, let alone whether there is a project going by that name. But what can be said categorically is that the web is already being used as an instrument of warfare (not least by Al Qaeda) and the western intelligence agencies will need to consider a Black Flower strategy at some point in the future, even if they aren’t using it now, because intelligence work is all about the control of information and the web weakens the levers of control.

And finally, it’s worth pointing out that some conspiracy theorists claim our inability to verify the existence of The Black Flower is in fact proof of the project’s greatest success so far – but then they would say that, wouldn’t they?

(coming next - school's out)

Demographic Optimization

Demographic Optimization is a rather dry term to describe an intriguing area of social and economic policy which is already important in some developed countries and is set to become even more so.

The phrase was coined by Stanford academic, Rainer Weiss, to sum up a range of policies for tackling the problem of falling birth rates and ageing populations. This, of course, is an issue which is already current in Japan, set to become important in Europe and eventually in the USA (where the demographic continues to be skewed by immigration).

The problems of this demographic shift come in several guises. Older people generally require greater levels of care and there are fewer people to provide that care. There are also fewer people in the working-age population to support them, and greater longevity also has an impact on pension and insurance schemes which were not designed for the lengthy retirements currently being enjoyed. There is also a smaller proportion of the population who are productive and who are available to carry out essential jobs.

For Weiss, the solution is demographic optimization, or put rather more simply, making the most of the demographic you have. So, for example, Weiss suggested that less academic children should be allowed to leave high school at fourteen to engage in a mixture of work and skills-based education. At the other end of the spectrum he suggested that retirement should be more flexible and that there should be tax incentives to encourage the elderly to work. He also argued that increasing the number of elderly people in work, even part-time or voluntary work, would also maintain a healthier population and therefore reduce the burden of health and social care – he admitted though, that the latter point was conjecture rather than evidence-based.

At the same time, Weiss argued that governments and industry should be seeking to enhance non-human productivity (approachable language is clearly not Weiss’s strong suit) – in other words, as many of life’s mundane tasks as possible should be mechanized.

Interestingly, Weiss also condemns the simple-mindedness of those who suggest that greater immigration is the solution to the demographic malaise in the developed economies. As he has said, ‘This is a short-term and blinkered approach to a long-term problem. And remember, migrant workers get old, also.’

What he doesn’t say, but that perhaps needs saying, is that the developing economies of the world will all eventually face the same problem, and that barring miracles of medical science, a demographic skewed towards the aged will become the norm. To that extent, the countries which will thrive in the next century or two will be those that tackle the underlying structure of the problem rather than those that simply try to use migration as a solution.

(coming next - the black flower)