GYANOPROBHA

A TEACHER'S HOPE

As a teacher and a human being, I struggle to be hopeful about the future. But I am close to giving up. I am beginning to think this insistence that teachers need to be hopeful is also a red herring. Teachers need to be truthful above all, but I find it difficult to be hopeful and truthful at the same time. 

And here’s what I have noticed about myself: I have lost the capacity to be surprised by anything in politics any more. Each change appears to be for the worse, in absolutely predictable or explicable ways. What does surprise me is the occasional good news: the growing sense that there is a crisis (accompanied by the bad news that no one has any faith in any solutions any more). Ordinary people – as I discovered on a trip home to an India still recovering from the terrorist attacks in Mumbai – are still surprisingly capable of responding with compassion and empathy, although a disconcertingly large proportion of them still continue to wish for death and destruction on Pakistan, Muslims, Christians, tribals, dalits...and anyone who dissents from their dominant self-image of a resurgent, powerful India. 

Post-communism and post-modernism have left us unable to deal with a post-capitalist wreckage and construct something worthwhile from it, except in small groups. The World Social Forum has lost its way, if it was ever on the way to anything at all. It’s passé to say that there is no left left any more. But do right and left matter any more? Liberal democracy, feeling itself threatened by a terror that it has itself helped create, has quite simply now become the new fascism..."O Liberty! What crimes are committed in thy name!" cried Madame Roland as she passed a statue of liberty on the way to the guillotine during the Jacobin terror. That's an exclamation that has rung like a death knell around the world since the end of the 20th century. 

We are facing a catastrophe as a species, and the most urgent task for us humans is to find a way to survive. I am not quite sure whether we would be good for the earth if we do, but that’s another argument. I am trying to move towards constructing an inventory of ideas that can help us as a species to survive the coming catastrophe. The new test for ideas or ways of living could be: does this help our survival as a species or does it doom us to collapse? For some ideas, the choice seems clear. But for others, how can we be certain in advance? The Green Revolution was once touted as an idea that would prevent hunger for all who suffered from it; now some suspect it may have made hunger worse for some while assuaging it in others. Education - in the sense of schooling - is beginning to look like another idea whose time has gone, except for those, fewer in number every year, for whom it remains a passport to upward social mobility. 

I think the only sensible thing left to do is to prepare – culturally, cognitively, emotionally, materially – for the great cull of the human species that the world is likely to see in the 21st century and the next. Gather together traces of lost knowledge and ways of being and doing that may help us weather the oncoming tragedy, devise creative ways of surviving when we are hit by catastrophe, create repositories of wisdom from whatever we still have access to, pass them on to our children. Education (not schooling) now takes on a more urgent purpose than ever before: the survival of the human species, and the preservation of the impulses that helped us survive and flourish. The question is whether these impulses can be separated neatly from those that propel us towards self-destruction. 

Teaching needs to be de-professionalized, so that every one can be a teacher and learner at the same time. The usual modes of education, which served us well to teach us silence in the face of suffering and obedience to the needs of power, need to be firmly abandoned. Schools as we know them now will either die off into irrelevance or be radically re-structured. But don’t expect our leaders or our existing institutions to lead us in this, because they are part of the problem. 

IN MEMORY OF HOWARD ZINN

Howard Zinn's recent death reminded me what an inspiration as a teacher and an intellectual he has been to me. 

A former student of mine reminded me today that I had sent her this passage at a time when she was struggling to find some balance between optimism and realism. I found in it a source of strength in my own struggles to avoid giving in to cynicism and find a reason to go on teaching future adults.

"To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory."

RETURN FROM THE FIVE MONTH HIATUS

So...why the long silence?

Well, two main reasons (apart from sheer fatigue and laziness).

Let's start with my hesitation to cast a public light, however dim, on Binayak and his family while they recovered from their two-year ordeal. After the initial flurry of interviews on the mainstream TV channels and newspapers, Binayak and his wife Ilina went into hospital at CMC Vellore, attended by their older daughter Pranhita. The check-ups there revealed that Binayak himself indeed had a heart condition, as was diagnosed while he was in prison, but was not in any imminent danger if he took care of his health. The real shocker was the detection of cancer in Ilina, his wife of thirty six years, whose health had been worsening through the two-year ordeal. Since then, she has had a couple of operations, including one to remove the cancerous organ, and has been undergoing chemotherapy for the last few months. Fortunately, the prognosis is said to be good, since the cancer was detected early.

Throughout these months, Binayak has occasionally made public statements on various occasions to draw attention to the need for abjuring violence on both sides of the conflict between the state and the Maoists, and expressing his abhorrence of both Maoist as well as state violence. Predictably, in the context of recently announced security operations to deal with the maoist menace, he, along with other intellectuals with a similar message, is drawing the wrathful ire of various media commentators for maintaining a "moral equivalence" between the "cancer" and its painful "chemotherapy", or for being a secret admirer of the maoists. I hope to write more about these arguments in subsequent posts.

The other reason for the silence has been that there has been too much to write about, but too little time in which to write it. Various professional and personal commitments have left me little time to write as frequently as I would have wished. My computer contains a folder full of comments that I had started on but had to abandon, mostly in the area of politics, but also in education. So let me summarize some of the issues that I would have liked to write about if I had the time.

In the realm of politics, I have observed with a mixture of unease and schadenfreude, and even some faint hope, the collapse of the BJP. It doesn't take a genius to see that on economic matters, there isn't a great deal of difference between the Congress and the BJP. Both are wedded to a development model that is friendly to large corporate business and the "people-like-us" middle (or PLUM) class (blogging, twittering, English-speaking, web 2.0 friendly, with regular jobs paying a decent five-figure monthly income or more - yes, I mean people like me) at the expense of the poor and the destitute who make up about half the population of the country. So it's not surprising that they see eye to eye on the need for responding violently to the resistance to their shared development model among the people on whom development is to be forced. (Maoism/naxalism is irrelevant to this, because the violent suppression of popular resistance to the corporate version of development pre-dates even "maoism 1.0" of the 1967-77 era).

I suspect that the main appeal of the Congress for PLUMmers and "Bleeding Heart Liberals" (a term of abuse from the right for people like me with my views on secularism and tolerance) is a cultural one: I find the shrill and violent majoritarian victimology of the BJP and its so-called "parivar" utterly abhorrent.  If the BJP had defined its Hindu identity even partly in terms of a concern for the rights of the poor, the malnourished and the powerless, and looked for common ground with people of other religious communities, I might have looked for some common ground with them. Note that there is no strong positive reason to prefer the Congress, they simply come off better by comparison to the odious BJP. The problem with the Congress, moreoever, is that it has yet to shed its image as a party that is opportunistic and cosmetic in its commitment to secularism - recall November 1984, and its failure to deal firmly with the criminals in the rising rightwing BJP in the late eightiesand early nineties. Its espousal of the Muslims often appeals to the most retrograde sections of the Muslim leadership, and shows little substantial progress in dealing with genuine grievances of Muslims (which in most cases are similar to the grievances of other oppressed sections of the people).

Internationally, the conditions of life for more and more ordinary people in India, Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan and Israel/Palestine, Congo, Darfur, Somalia, Ingushetia...I could add half a dozen more countries...have gone steadily from dire to catastrophic. The prospects of economic and political recovery in the US, where a cabal of "banksters" (a richly evocative neologism) appears to have enriched itself at the expense of the taxpayers by taking over the treasury and the central bank, seems more illusory than ever. The US is also the country that now spends more on weapons and war than all other countries in the world collectively. Which leads me to ask: why are so many people paralyzed into apathy and inaction, or consumed by manufactured hatred, or driven to such suicidal extremes of  humiliation and despair that they blow themselves up in marketplaces, railway stations and offices? What kind of world can today's young people look forward to as adults?

Such questions have also compelled me to engage once again with what it means to be a teacher when the whole world seems to be headed towards disaster in a few decades.  Has there been a time before within the memory of generations still living when hope for the future seemed as illusory as it does now? Most students whom I teach, as well as many of my colleagues, seem to believe that the world should simply be accepted as it is. For most of them, the function of education is to train the next generation for success in the world as it exists, not to clutter their minds with ideas of how to change that world. I remind them that if past generations had accepted the world they found as it was then, the girls among them might not be in school, nor might all people have the right to vote equally. I remind them that if they don't change their world for the better, others will, and in directions that my students may not always seek. Yet already this sounds too simplistic and unconvincing. Recent history as well as current events also tell me that the most significant attempts to change the world for the better amounted to attempts at re-engineering societies to a design conceived by an elite and self-aggrandizing caucus of intellectuals, politicians and business people, and have usually ended in tragedy or farce, but always in horrendous human suffering.

Looking around me now, I wonder what we should tell the generation we are educating. What should we educate them to be and do? And why should they believe us when we tell them not to lie, cheat and steal, and to deal honestly with people, and be compassionate to those who happen to be suffering? Why should they believe us especially when the message from business leaders, politicians and celebrities of various kinds seems to value "success" or "victory" at any price, when almost anything can be justified in the name of the freedom of the market, or of the national interest, or of power, privilege or personal gain? 

Part of a reassuring answer is that each generation has always worried about the next in similar ways, yet we have not only survived, but many individuals seem to have managed to do so with their individual moral compasses more or less intact. And this is true not just of individuals, but also occasionally when individuals have acted collectively. Binayak's release on bail is an example of this, but also a reminder that our systems of justice are not working for many others.  Another part of the answer is to note that the ongoing wars and conflicts have merely confirmed - more plangently than ever - the need to be truthful and compassionate and honest, and to treat claims of victory and success in these conflicts with the greatest suspicion. What I believe we should educate our students for is to add to the cacophony of voices for change, to help create new models for human flourishing and the affirmation of life, to seek to build peace, conviviality and justice. However many the faults of the United Nations, and whatever the arguments about the means to achieve them, its Millenium Development Goals and Universal Declaration of Human Rights remain almost universally agreed concrete expressions of these aims, and can constitute the driving force for an entire educational curriculum. The increasing rapidity of change, and the dire necessity of confronting it, makes such a curriculum a matter of survival, not some imaginary luxury.

Despite the "encircling gloom" with which I struggle, I find occasional gleams of light, life and laughter. The birth of our granddaughter in January this year has given me many occasions to re-live the pleasures of watching a young life grow in consciousness and awareness, but differently now, in ways too numerous to mention, than when we first became parents. The delights of playing with her and making her acquaintance have also sharpened the inevitable poignancy of separation, though mitigated somewhat by our attempts at conversation on Skype. Also unlike when our own sons were growing up, I am much more troubled now about their future, and so also about the future of our granddaughter. But was it not ever thus?

In a house which becomes a home,
one hands down and another takes up
the heritage of mind and heart,
laughter and tears, musings and deeds.
Love, like a carefully loaded ship,
crosses the gulf between the generations.
Therefore, we do not neglect the ceremonies
of our passage: when we wed, when we die,
and when we are blessed with a child;
When we depart and when we return;
When we plant and when we harvest.
Let us bring up our children. It is not
the place of some official to hand to them
their heritage.
If others impart to our children our knowledge
and ideals, they will lose all of us that is
wordless and full of wonder.
Let us build memories in our children,
lest they drag out joyless lives,
lest they allow treasures to be lost because
they have not been given the keys.
We live, not by things, but by the meanings
of things. It is needful to transmit the passwords
from generation to generation.

(Antoine de St. Exupery)

THE DEATH OF ORTHODOX ECONOMICS AND THE VALUE OF KNOWLEDGE

In my less charitable moments, I’ve often said that economics must be the only discipline where the practitioners believe that if there is a divergence between theory and the real world, it’s the real world that should be changed to conform to the theory rather than the other way around.

Well, here is a timely confession from Professor Willem Buiter, an eminent practitioner, that bears this out. In a blog posting unelegantly titled The Unfortunate Uselessness of Most State of the Art Academic Monetary Economics, he launches into the attack with all the subtlety of a flying brick:

The Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England I was privileged to be a ‘founder’ external member of during the years 1997-2000 contained, like its successor vintages of external and executive members, quite a strong representation of academic economists and other professional economists with serious technical training and backgrounds. This turned out to be a severe handicap when the central bank had to switch gears and change from being an inflation-targeting central bank under conditions of orderly financial markets to a financial stability-oriented central bank under conditions of widespread market illiquidity and funding illiquidity.  Indeed, the typical graduate macroeconomics and monetary economics training received at Anglo-American universities during the past 30 years or so, may have set back by decades serious investigations of aggregate economic behaviour and economic policy-relevant understanding.  It was a privately and socially costly waste of time and other resources.

Most mainstream macroeconomic theoretical innovations since the 1970s ... have turned out to be self-referential, inward-looking distractions at best.  Research tended to be motivated by the internal logic, intellectual sunk capital and esthetic puzzles of established research programmes  rather than by a powerful desire to understand how the economy works - let alone how the economy works during times of stress and financial instability.  So the economics profession was caught unprepared when the crisis struck.

Skip the technical parts if you don’t understand them, you’ll still benefit from the overall message. But do read the comments, which represent a wide range of responses, many quite interesting in their own right. Though most praise or support the writer, there are a few comments that take issue with the good professor. One of them quotes a joke that captures the insight with which I began this post: “An economist is someone who, having heard that something works in practice, then ripostes “Ah! But does it work in theory?””. Another – rather miffed by the attacks on Anglo-American orthodoxy, accuses him of hypocrisy:

What has Herr Buiter ever contributed, academic-wise, to a literature that can help us understand the current predicament? How have Professor Buiter's theories helped us forecast the recent disaster? His hypocrisy is revolting (check out his lecture notes for students and you'll see the sort of crap he was teaching).

To some extent all disciplines suffer from a tendency towards orthodoxy - a gradual blindness of vision and intellectual arteriosclerosis. But in the case of economics, the arrogance of power that has accompanied this blindness and unwillingness to change has ensured that it will take something of the scale of the current financial catastrophe to unseat the theory – and perhaps not even then. The only protection against this is to be humble enough to accept constructive criticisms, and the listen to serious dissenting voices.

I wonder what economics departments are thinking of teaching students, now that the emperor’s nakedness is so gobsmackingly obvious to the crowds. I keep encouraging my students bent on studying economics at university to take other social sciences (psychology, sociology or social anthropology) or a humanities (history, philosophy or literature) course to accompany their studies in economics. Dismayingly, I find that it is rare for even the brightest to seek connections between the different disciplines that they study, unless (as in the case of mathematics, perhaps) they have to. Touchingly (or perhaps cynically), they think that the same lucrative career paths are going to be open to them as they were before for economics graduates. My guess is that the hold of the orthodox economics on public life has been so pervasive that the deflation of the discipline is going to take a while. Meanwhile, prepare for a prolonged period of misery and economic distress as economists figure out that their discipline, while it may be passably good at explaining the past, is useless in dealing with the future.

This is in fact the message being purveyed by the iconoclastic Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who seems to have made it his vocation to take the pants off the economic profession. It's hard to dismiss a man who speaks several languages, has written three books, managed a hedge fund, is comfortable with using skills of mathematical modelling and philosophical argument, and, to top it all, seems to have reduced his opponents (academic economists) to incoherence or silence. The dissatisfaction with orthodox economics itself seems to be developing into an orthodoxy, but the recent catastrophe in macroeconomic management seems to have imparted  particular pungency to Taleb's message. His message is that economics has a terrible record of predicting the future, because most economic events happen in what he calls 'extremistan' (as opposed to 'mediocristan'), where single and often unprecedented events can often have catastrophic consequences. The standard practice of estimating probabilities of future events on the basis of past events is almost never a good idea in extremistan. It is therefore a good idea (says Taleb) to be an "empirical sceptic", not to rely too much on generalizations, but on trial and error based on experience and empirical evidence, and finally, not to take risks with possibilities whose outcomes are likely to be random and unpredictable. All this of course has he effect of dethroning economics from its self-appointed pre-eminence as the physics of the social sciences. 

All these controversies, and the circumstances that have given rise to them, have imparted a fresh impetus to the need to ask old questions: what is worth knowing, what is worth teaching. yet by some strange and tragic irony, it is those disciplines where one can ask the old questions that are being called upon to justify themselves, precisely when the so-called "practical" sciences of economics have failed spectacularly to yield urgent answers to questions from the real world.

THE TROUBLE WITH IVY LEAGUES

By a curious coincidence, three articles have appeared in quick succession in different electronic journals with roughly the same worries about the education that the American (or for that matter, the transnational) elite get at Ivy League universities. The basic thrust of all three articles is that the “best and brightest” that these elite universities produce haven’t turned out to be as good for the country or for the world as one might expect from allegedly ‘smart’ people. Their graduates have a strong sense of entitlement to privilege, lack humility, and have little capacity to relate to people outside their own limited social circle. When compared against the claims for "smartness" and for "being at the cutting edge" that are often made for their alma maters, the graduates of these institutions have turned out to be spectacularly inept, if they are to be judged by the consequences of their actions while in their powerful and lucrative careers.

This is not because of lack of resources or opportunities in their education, nor because of the poor quality of their professors. It is because these universities prepare their students to conform to a system of power and privilege in which the students expect to build their careers, and in which a certain kind of calculative "smartness" is valued far more than the capacity for the patient and scholarly pursuit of the truth, or the ability to connect intellectually, emotionally, morally and spiritually with the complexity of the world as it exists.

The result is that admission into these institutions becomes a matter of competitive frenzy, as one of the authors, Dereseiewicz, notes. The admissions into the top universities are regarded as a wonderful accomplishment on the part of the student, and a reflection of the excellence of the high school. This is so even when the student's admission was achieved not through academic merit, but mainly through the ability of the student's family to pay between 50-60 thousand US dollars a year for the benefits of being in one of these institutions. The education that the high school offers becomes devalued to nothing compared to the benefits of attending SAT and TOEFL exam prep schools. Despite the fact that the school's teachers are prepared to advise their students and help them with their college application essays, the students themselves often prefer to hire expensive college essay 'consultants' who are rumoured to often write the students' essays for them. It is necessary to preserve as an illusion applicable to all students what is in fact true of only a minority - that it is the student's ability, hard work potential for academic success at university that has been decisive in the acceptance offered to the student by the university.

Chris Hedges complains that the US economy has been turned into a train wreck because of the incompetence and arrogance of the privileged and smart graduates of these universities. Where I disagree with him is where he lays the blame for America’s woes squarely on their shoulders.

Hedges assumes that if the universities had been working the way they claim to on their websites and mission statements, the economy, and the country as a whole, would have been in a far better shape. In my view, the US education system described by Hedges and Deresiewicz (whom Hedges quotes extensively) - like education systems in many other countries  - is working exactly as the elites wish it to function. With few exceptions, the universities – with their commitments to disciplinary turf wars and boundary policing, and their dependence on corporate donations and huge endowments invested in the stock markets – are the last places where one should look for bold and innovative risk-taking, the questioning of tradition and established practice, and the creation of dialogues across disciplines. This is not just true of universities in the US alone. But what is noticeable in the US to a far greater degree than elsewhere is the ability of their faculty to move smoothly between financial or corporate careers, government, think tanks and media, in many cases without necessarily abandoning their academic ties and memberships of networks. Universities there, and to some extent elsewhere too, consequently tend to become cathected into the power structures that they work with. The pursuit of truth does not die off entirely, but becomes secondary to the pursuit of power and the maintenance of ideological loyalty through the constant search for lucrative research funding. Interdisciplinary innovation is something that is encouraged, if at all, only for researchers or professors who are either at or past the peak of their careers, which they made by working within the straight and narrow confines of their disciplines. Of course, it may not be hard to point to exceptions to these observations, but they will be exceptions, not general trends.

In short, by and large, the rule is:

Abandon fresh thought, new ideas,
All ye who enter here,
Especially if you wish to make
A powerful career.

So why is it so surprising that the graduates of these august institutions should expect to continue earning their bonuses even while they run the system into the ground? The liberalism or radicalism of such a system can only be confined within tacit boundaries, just as they are in the mainstream media. These boundaries are not clearly sign-posted, and one is apt to trip upon them as one explores the outer reaches of one’s zone of free thinking. The mystery for me is why Chris Hedges expects a radical or even a progressive or liberal education to become systemic in a society that is increasingly managed for the benefit of the very wealthy.

 


 

 



 

KEN ROBINSON ON EDUCATION, CREATIVITY AND THE POWER OF THE IMAGINATION

Thanks to Edutopia, here is Ken Robinson again. So much of his ideas resonate with mine, that I couldn't resist putting this up.

Do schools today kill creativity? (TEDTalks, Ken Robinson)

Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining (and profoundly moving) case for creating an education system that nurtures creativity, rather than undermining it. Robinson is author of "Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative", and a leading expert on innovation and human resources. (Recorded February 2006 in Monterey, CA. Duration: 20:03) - More TEDTalks at http://www.ted.com

I am amazed at how much of what I have been saying to my students and colleagues is affirmed by what Ken Robinson says (so much more amusingly than I ever could). For instance, the idea that before they go to something called school, children are born learners unafraid of making mistakes. Once they are in school, they are stigmatized for mistakes - something without which no learning can possibly occur. In other words, schools train kids away from their innate potential creativity, because historically they were intended to instill the discipline the disciplines required for factory or bureaucratic work. Ken Robinson also makes the point that schools all over the world are actually training children to become university professors - something we all recognize the truth of the moment we hear it, although we rarely hear it put this sharply. The man is a visionary, but I hope he is taken seriously.

The only reservation I have is the title of the talk as it appears on Google Video. Schools have generally ALWAYS killed creativity. In fact that’s the central message of Robinson’s talk, urging us to consider how it can be nurtured instead.

WHERE IS TURKEY HEADED WITH ITS EDUCATION SYSTEM?

Turkey’s responses to globalization, especially in the context of the harmonization discussions with the EU, have been uneven. In the fields of finance, business and commerce, certain aspects of culture such as sports and entertainment and tourism, they have moved with far greater speed than they have in the field of education. In this field, they seem to be especially ill-prepared to face the fact that by 2010, Turkish high school diplomas have to comply with the Lisbon convention so that all member countries of the EU can recognize each other’s school diplomas for the purpose of university entrance. Yet even within the EU, there is not much uniformity regarding educational standards and philosophies. This actually provides Turkey with an opportunity to learn from the experiences of other European countries and distill the best practices to create something of their own.

I will now attempt to provide a philosophical foundation for the self-imposed Turkish challenge of meeting the EU criteria in education. The occasion for doing this is the 17th Council on Education that lasted for all of last week in Ankara. The title of this piece was one of the discussion topics there, but what I have to say has little directly to do with the EU, or with the harmonization process. Instead, in gathering together some points I would have presented at the Council had I been invited, I will sketch an ideal curriculum that I believe will prepare students for the demands of the world towards which I think they are moving. I will also outline methods of teaching and assessment that would support such a curriculum in order to be prepared for the future world that I will describe. In what follows, my reasons for ignoring the Turkish drive towards the EU are twofold. Firstly, the drive itself is losing momentum rather rapidly, because of political anxieties in Turkey as well as in Europe. Secondly, I believe that the motivations for improving the education system in any country, not just Turkey, ought to be provided by a vision of the future, not by an exigent political or economic alignment. Although my arguments are based on the Turkish experience, they could apply equally to other countries.

If one agrees with my description (elaborated below) of the world in which students are going to work and live, then it would seem that the current education system is doing a pretty poor job of equipping them for that world. This is partly because students are mostly being taught knowledge and skills that were useful in the world that is past. They have an education system that does very little to help them connect with the world that they encounter in their own lives. On the all too rare occasions when they do, it is despite, and not because of, their education system. Even less does it prepare students to understand the world that impinges on their lives from outside in the shape of economic and cultural influences conveyed through the media and entertainment and news. Despite the mandated teaching of modern languages, and some improvements in the curriculum of primary schools, in the social studies they seem to be preparing them for a world which consists of just one country – Turkey, and just one culture – Turkish. Until recent tentative attempts to introduce a component of world history and modern history in the high school history syllabus, the history taught was heavily oriented to a study of the foundation of the republic and Ataturk’s life (i.e., up to 1938). No history was taught for the period after Ataturk's death. The curriculum assumes, moreover, that the world can be understood mostly through the tools of science and mathematics, and literature and the social sciences have a minimal role to play in making sense of the world. The requirements for the study of human societies are minimal for science students, as if they somehow needed to be less aware of the ways societies and individuals play a role in changing the world. The whole curriculum is infused with a bias towards positivism and behaviourism.

The assumptions about human learning underlying the curriculum are similarly obsolete and out of touch with current understandings. This is reflected in an assessment system that emphasizes recall over understanding, and examinations over concrete demonstrations of understanding. In order to enter institutions of higher learning in their own country, students have to undergo a test that is so universally feared for its high (above 85%) failure rate that it has spawned a multi-billion dollar exam preparation industry. According to some, the exam requires and tests for synthetic understanding, while most claim that it acts as a filter for keeping the numbers of new entrants to universities to the number of places available. It does not test how well prepared they are for university learning, but only how rapidly they can recall the techniques that are taught for rapid-fire responses to over a hundred multiple choice questions in 180 minutes. Consequently, while the university entrance exam is the ultimate arbiter of a school's success, schools as well as students (supported by their parents) are unable to resist defining their educational accomplishments in any way except by their success in the university entrance exam. The curriculum written for the high school by the Ministry of Education is crowded out by the university exam syllabus written by the Higher Educational Council (the YÖK), independently of the Ministry. In fact, collaboration and communication between these two pillars of the country's education system has only just begun - a classic case of the right hand only just beginning to find out what the left hand is doing. Meanwhile, Turkey's youth spend their middle to late teens and even early twenties enveloped in a miasma of obsessive anxiety about passing this exam. Their schools, knowing to what they owe their reputation, follow obligingly if they can. (The exceptions are some private schools with long established reputations for delivering what is regarded as a "good education".)

Let us for a moment put ourselves in the shoes of Turkey's youth and ask ourselves how we would feel in such a predicament. We would probably feel entrapped in a situation that we were incapable of changing, although we could see that it needed change. We would feel frustrated and alienated from our older generation, and would express that frustration in ways that would help us forget our helplessness, and give us a false sense of power and meaning in our lives. We would hold our senior citizens in contempt for exhorting us to excel and to bring glory to our nation, yet doing little that equipped us to do just that. We would observe that despite the great cultural wealth of our own country, we would need to go abroad, at least for a while, if we wished to make an impact in the world of science or technology or the arts.

In last week's Educational Council deliberations in Ankara, academicians, educators and educational bureacrats from the Ministry of Education and the YÖK and other institutions met ostensibly to consider what they should do to change this state of affairs. Instead, the council deliberations were beset with controversy over earth-shaking matters such as the weighting coefficients for students of religious schools in their university entrance exams, and whether to extend the system of centralized testing for university entry to the last three years of high school as well.

No surprises then that Turkey's youth are only dimly aware of how unprepared they are for the world that they will face, and do not know what to do about it. There are few signs that the politicians and bureaucrats who design educational policies in Turkey know any better about the world that students in this country will encounter.

Let us then start with the question: What kind of world will today's students live and work in?

Firstly, it will be a more complex world, meaning that the number of different factors that will influence the world will increase. But the difference between the world today and their world tomorrow will only partly be a matter of degree, since the quantitative changes will gradually create qualitative ones. The increasing complexity of the world, will, beyond a point, also stimulate the creation of new factors, new forms of interaction between them, and new institutions and other structures through which these interactions will occur.

Secondly, it will also be a world of greater interdependence. This interdependence will continue to manifest itself at at least two different levels: between nature and human societies, and between national actors like the state and its instruments, institutions like corporations and civil society organizations, and communities.

Thirdly, the interdependence will be global, not only in the sense of transcending national, cultural and even continental barriers, but also encompassing nature as well as human communities.

Finally, it will be dynamic in the sense that most of the interdependent factors will themselves be changing constantly, often in ways that are not entirely or at all predictable. There will also be a greater demand for skills of collaboration and of effective communication, of resolving conflicts and building peace and justice. These skills in turn will call for more sensitive intercultural understanding as well as for cultural self-confidence.

How would educators cultivate these skills and dispositions required for the kind of world that their students are likely to live?

They would need a different kind of curriculum, and therefore a different understanding of pedagogy. Such a curriculum would aim to develop skills of critical and analytical inquiry, of creative problem-solving, of thoughtful evaluation of actions and ideas. Such a curriculum would be based on certain principles, foster certain values, inculcate attitudes, develop abilities and encourage practices that underlie and facilitate the bridging of social and cultural differences.

The principles underlying the curriculum would include the recognition firstly that human universals underlie diversity; and secondly, that human diversity and differences are valuable both in themselves, as well as being resouces for survival and flourishing.

The values underlying the curriculum must include care for each other and for the planet; compassion, responsibility and respect for other beings, despite their differences; and the equality of the dignity and worth of all human beings.

Such a curriculum must encourage attitudes such as friendly and respectful curiosity, empathy, commitment and willingness to collaborate.

The abilities to be developed in such a curriculum must include seeking patterns, links and relationships between different perspectives; comparing and contrasting across differences, and seeking universals; exploring critically and empathetically beliefs and perspectives students do not share; respecting people who are different and treating them with dignity; and building understanding across cultural and social differences.

Finally, such a curriculum would also foster practices such as communication and dialogue with others who are different; collaborating across human differences towards common goals; resolving conflicts and building reconciliation and peace; and serving the community (adding to its long term social capital), whether local or global.

In order to form connections with the real world, such a curriculum would stimulate curiosity about the world by organizing itself around stimulating questions or themes about real-world issues and problems. It would encourage the student to pursue his or her own inquiry, and would regard the standard disciplines of natural and human sciences, mathematics, language and literature as windows into the ways human beings have thought about the world and organized their understanding of it.

The role of literature and language in such a curriculum would encourage students to develop cultural self-confidence by a study, first, of their own culture, their own history and society, by using their own cultural knowledge, but always placing these studies in a global context, so that the student sees his/her own culture as one that has developed in relation with others, and capable of influencing other cultures as much as being influenced by them. Secondly, the study of another language and literature other than the students' own would provide a basis for the nurture and enrichment of cultural intelligence. I should add that “cultural self-confidence” is not intended as code for cultural exclusivism, arrogance, superiority, or jingoism. Instead, it is the ability to see the students' own culture (that culture with which they identify) as a distinctive voice in the choir of civilizations. There may be parts of the song where the voice is silent, but it is not thereby rendered less important or valuable as a result. The “global context” is where they can hear the entire choir.

In the social sciences, such a curriculum would build awareness and respect for human dignity and diversity by studying different ways in which humans have expressed themselves in different situations, and exploring ways in which humans have accepted or transcended the limitations imposed by their own history, geography, biology or culture. It would encourage the exploration of human universals by the opportunities in all disciplines, especially in the natural sciences and mathematics, for exploring the unities underlying human and natural diversity. Throughout such a curriculum, opportunities would be designed for students to reflect on how they learn, and to connect the perspectives of different disciplines. It would also have structured opportunities for experiential learning, especially through community service activities.

I have so far outlined the kind of curriculum that I believe would enable students to prepare for a future that will demand dealing with diversity and continuous learning throughout life. But what kind of teaching would support such a curriculum? This could then suggest ways in which the training of teachers itself would need to change to accommodate the kind of curriculum I have outlined above.

The style of pedagogy that would support such a curriculum would recognize that knowledge is not just expressible in language in statements about the world, but also embodied in artifacts and performance. As teachers, they would need to recognize the diverse and plural nature of knowledge. Knowledge is after all meaningless without human beings. If human beings are already so diverse, then knowledge must be even more so, and so must the ways by which knowledge is made. Teachers would also acknowledge that there is more to be valued in knowledge than truth. There is also beauty, usefulness, compassion and balance. There is more in knowledge than can be expressed in just words, that shows itself in the execution of a perfect dance maneuver, or a creative scientific experiment, an elegant mathematical proof, or an expressive performance of the ud. This is the kind of knowledge that Michael Polanyi referred to as tacit knowledge.

The pedagogy that I have attempted to describe would draw on a balanced selection of local and global knowledge from the real world, and organize the knowledge around significant themes and issues. It would help students to choose appropriate concepts, metaphors and theories to build understanding, and apply and test that understanding on a real problem. It would equip the student to correct and improve on current understanding through reflective evaluation of the results of testing. It would also flexibly apply relevant knowledge and skills to make sense of new situations. It would allow the student to demonstrate understanding through performances and artifacts.

This teaching would create a range of activities allowing learners scope for individual as well as collaborative inquiry, and also allow some scope for inquiry that is trans-disciplinary, to enable students to experience apply skills learnt in one disciplines to other areas of learning, and to explore the different perspectives of each discipline. Above all, this teaching would provide opportunities for reflecting on the learning process to evaluate one’s learning, to discuss one’s learning with other learners, and to collaborate in build learning communities within the school.

What kind of a teacher would foster this kind of practice? The answer was given some time ago by Resit Galip, a former Minister of Education in a speech at Istanbul University in 1933:

“The teacher is not a machine for giving lectures, but is a resource to the students - one who inspires them to investigate and question, one who guides them and one who is able to sustain their enthusiasm for study and research. The real teacher is himself a life-long student."

How far is the teaching profession from this ideal? Judging by what I observe of my own teaching practice, I can see that I have a long way to go before I can claim to represent Galip's ideal teacher. But aside from my own shortcomings as a teacher, I also see that the conditions impelling a movement towards this goal are also absent. Students are generally hungry to learn, but are served such poor fare that their appetite for learning vanishes quite rapidly early in their school life, and is replaced with a hunger for grades. They are taught to abhor mistakes or failure, which are among the best stimulants for learning, and encouraged to think of earning grades as a measure of learning. The content of much of what they learn is unrelated to the world they live in, and exams are generally not designed to promote or test for understanding. For all these reasons, any attempt at redesigning the school curriculum in national education must be accompanied, if not actually preceded, by the re-education of teachers. But although they do realize that the lack of good teachers is a problem, the systematic re-education of teachers is far from the minds of those who control educational policy here.

As in many other countries, a larger vision for undertaking a thorough-going reform of national education is missing in Turkey, except perhaps in some rare private initiatives. Despite ministerial declarations to the contrary, current attempts at educational reform will therefore remain at the level of patchwork and tinkering, and subject to party-political and ideological whims of the moment reflecting the many fissures in Turkish politics and society. Since its inception as a republic in 1923, Turkey has witnessed at least two rather radical re-designs of its education system. Perhaps it's time for another one.

MY THOUGHTS ON WIKI'S

In the middle of September, I invited my friend and web mentor Tom Hemingway to our school to present a short workshop on wiki's and a project management software called Basecamp. While more than twenty teachers expressed interest in these Web 2.0 technologies, only about a dozen or so actually attended the workshop, because the others were teaching at the time. [I have promised to invite Tom back for another workshop later so that the others can benefit from it as well.] Thanks to Tom, I have begun experimenting with Wiki's as a means of presenting material for my course on the web, with the expectation that my students would collaborate in preparing and adding their own material.

This is not my first such attempt. I have for the past few years attempted to make up for the little sliver of time I have for TOK in our IB program by encouraging students to participate in discussions in a Yahoo Group for TOK for students at our school. Although I have told my colleagues about what I'm trying to do and left them to decide whether they would ask their students to participate, I seem to be the only teacher who actually tries this. With students I found that the pattern for each of the past three years has been initial activity, followed by waning interest, tapering off into complete silence in the second year. Last year, I had one of the seniors create a forum for our TOK discussions, but here too, the enthusiasm was limited, even though at one point I thought my students had finally begun to enjoy discussions on-line. This was one of my motvations for trying out a wiki, since it gave me an opportunity of training my students in using it, and explaining what I would like them to do. So far, I have not been very "directive"or insistent, but perhaps I should be, because the degree of participation has yet again been quite disappointing.

I have opened three wiki's, one on Wikispaces as a discussion space for colleagues about issues in school, and two on Peanut Butter Wikis for my business and management course and for my pre-IB course that I designed as a Grade 10 elective. (More on that later.) I found that it's about as easy (or difficult) to use wiki's as it is to surf the web and to exploit the various functionalities in an e-mail program like Outlook. (I'm not a master of Outlook, but I can share my calendars with others in school, and specify rules for dealing with messages from particular senders, beyond just receiving and sending e-mails.) Personally, had I known better, I would have preferred Wikispaces to PBWiki, because of more features and easier linking.

Dialogicity and Busman are my student wiki sites, for those who wish to view them.

There are several criticisms I wish to make of the wiki's. As you can tell by looking at them and reading the material, they are not designed to appeal to the visually oriented and verbally challenged adolescent. Nor do they make any attempt to "grab" the student reader and stimulate participation, especially if the student is one with not the best command of English. [English in our school is barely used by students outside the classroom, and even within it only for communicating with the teacher. The students who do best at English are using it actively outside school for more than just their homework.] Thirdly, especially in the case of Dialogicity, I have been told by a colleague teaching English in high school that the language used is too academic and challenging for most students in the class, although there has been some attempt at contributing comments and discussion. These are criticisms of these wiki's that I fully agree with. I need to work at improving the wiki's.

What were some of the assumptions I made in creating these wiki's that I may now need to revise?

Firstly, I assumed that the students would have a degree of self-motivation and curiosity that would energize them to try out a new technology of learning, and collaborate with their fellows into participating more actively on the wiki. I think I also assumed that the novelty of the technology, and my own enthusiasm about it, would motivate the students.

Secondly, I assumed that the language of the wiki's in my material would be within the reach of the reader, because I made a conscious attempt to simplify the language where I found myself becoming to academic in style and vocabulary. But clearly I need to work much harder at this.

Thirdly, I assumed that lines of text, with the occasional diagram, would be enough to hook the reader. After all, this is what I find in most other educational websites.

Lastly, when I was designing the big questions in the five major areas in Dialogicity, I tried to pose them in an interesting way, but I don't think most of my students are attracted to those questions. So it's my challenge as a teacher to help them see their value. Despite the initial enthusiasm among a handful, I can't assess as yet whether the wiki is helping the class as a whole to do that.

So when I hear Vicki Davis in the US enthusing about the almost 100% participation rate of her students in the wikis she have set up for them, I feel a mixture of admiration, envy and frustration. I took a look at one page in her wiki to get a clue to what makes it work. It was clear that her students were probably much more keen about using Web 2.0 than even the average US high schooler. This suggests that her school must in an affluent district where the parents and the administration also have a supportive attitude to the use of such technologies.Seeking any kind of official support from my administration would take up too much time and energy in meetings and discussions, so I shall probably do this thing on my own, and perhaps later run a workshop about it if I have anything to crow about, and if I'm given the time.

The other concurrent possibility was suggested to me by Tom - that Web 2.0 only works when there is already a culture of collaboration and communication towards common purposes. As he writes in his blog: "...if people don't know how to work well together in the same room, then the best wikis, intranets and telecom systems in the world won't help. " From what he told us at the workshop, Tom's own experience in his school (also with Turkish students, but from perhaps a slightly different social background than most of our students) has also been quite positive. Having visited his school during the last IB Day, I could sense why. There was a warm feeling of commitment and enthusiasm about learning. Perhaps it was just the atmospherics of the occasion, but having been there on other occasions, I somehow doubt it. I find this less commonly in my school, which is so obsessed by exams and tests and university entrance that the enjoyment of learning often quickly dissipates. Or perhaps I don't move in the right circles.

Before school re-opens next week, or perhaps right on Monday itself, I wish to make a pitch for the use of wiki's and blogs to my students, and also to the rest of the IB class of 2008. I would also urge on my colleagues the suggestion of Vicki Davis in her podcast which have been summarised by Steve Hargadon, i.e., use wiki's as an educational tool for the dollowing purposes:

* Lessons summaries
* Collaboration of notes
* Concept introduction and exploratory projects
* Dissemination of important classroom learning beyond the classroom
* Individual assessment projects

I will probably make some kind of Web 2.0 feature a part of my assessment in TOK and Business.

Here, via Vicki Davis's blog, is a series of articles written by a nineteen year old student, giving a student's perspectives on Web 2.0. There is a formidable list of applications discussed here, but here is his caveat:

All in all, I do not feel school systems or businesses should immediately jump on the Web 2.0 train, but I think it’s time they start considering it as an option and try some of the solutions it has to offer. Try some of the applications for a week or two and find if they work for you. If your a teacher, see if your class prefers writing in the friendly and social Writely, or the intimidating and feature packed Microsoft Word. Some teachers are already doing it...

PLAGIARISM VS COLLABORATION IN CREATING KNOWLEDGE

Plagiarism is wrong - as teachers never tire of telling their students - because it enables an author to pass off someone else's knowledge as one's own. But in the real world where work has almost always been a collaborative enterprise, to what extent can the knowledge worker lay claims of exclusive ownership on intellectual artifacts that could not have been produced without standing on the shoulders of many other knowledge workers? In a world that increasingly needs collaboration in the production of knowledge, where does collaboration stop and plagiarism begin? In one respect, the answer is quite simple: simply acknowledge the contribution of other people's knowledge creations in creating your own. That is why it is worrying when students or professors engage in plagiarism, either wilfully and maliciously, or (as seems to be more often the case with students) in ignorance. The BBC reported some time ago that many students don't regard copying as wrong. Even when they do, they don't always seem to understand how easily and unconsciously one can begin to plagiarize, and how to avoid it. After all, there are many grey areas requiring judgment, based on the student's skills, capactiies and intentions. The question becomes even more complicated when the available technology for the reproduction of knowledge enables intellectual products of all kinds - from logos through software programs to music and images - to be so easily replicated that the melody of the choral movement in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony ('Ode to Joy') can be appropriated as a mobile phone ringtune or the reversing signal for a car. In other words, there is a problem when a particular knowledge creation of an individual author is disseminated so widely in the public domain that it becomes "common knowledge", and one may not even be aware that one is plagiarizing from other people's knowledge creations. There is also an equal and opposite problem when one appropriates publicly available knowledge like proverbs and folk songs - cultural common property - into one's own work.

But there’s another point of view to be considered. I suppose a “post-modern” approach would be to simply re-define plagiarism so that the practice of copying and pasting from websites is acceptable.

Actually, the entire culture of knowledge production in a capitalist economy encourages stealing of other people’s ideas and deception, because of the competition to gain market share or profits for one’s own ideas. So although one of the foundations of this economy is respect for individual property rights, competition erodes this by the technologies that evolve to create and disseminate knowledge.

If we look at this historically, we might notice that individual property rights only became salient in societies which made possessive individualism a cornerstone of their economic arrangement (what we now know as capitalism). This is obvious in industrial capitalism, which often grew by investing and appropriating (sometimes even stealing!) publicly owned resources. The internet itself is the evolutionary product of massive PUBLIC investment in communication by the US Defence Department. But when the basis for the economy is shifting towards the production and circulation of ideas and what we broadly call knowledge, the competition for profits erodes the very basis of profit-making from innovation, partly because of the technology in use, and partly because it’s very difficult and expensive to assert individual property rights over ideas and the products of the mind. That’s why much greater attention needs to be paid to alternative “open-source” modes of creating knowledge, freeware, etc. Also, much of the mind-work that is done nowadays, much more than the muscle work that was done earlier, needs collaboration in and between networks of producers and users. So who is the “owner” of the final product? Shouldn’t they all share in its ownership?

Who will feed all these creative minds if all the products of their creativity is made freely available? There’s a simple and perhaps utopian answer to this question: let’s stop spending billions on war and destruction, and spend it instead on fostering creativity. Think of an economy where artists, scientists, intellectuals and teachers are supported from public resources and their creations circulate freely. This is already happening to some extent: who is paying for free weblogging software? Certainly not the user! Besides, it is remarkable how the profits of companies that complain of the loss of income from stolen intellectual property have not shown a tendency to shrink, despite the growing “theft”. What they are complaining of is that their profits could have been much higher if all their products were being paid for legally.

Lawrence Lessig, whose book "Free Culture" I have just started to read, points to the paradox that the pursuit of profits from the ownership of knowledge in the name of the so-called "free" markets has in fact led to a concentration of power in the hands of a few corporate executives and CEO's that has curtailed the free circulation of knowledge. But the so-called free circulation of knowledge is probably only possible in a more egalitarian society. Otherwise the hierarchies of power and privilege that prevail in less egalitarian societies are only "digitally enhanced" by the prevalence of free knowledge production, creating a digital divide.