Deschooling the Edublogosphere?

This post from NZ edublogger Leigh Blackall - which I picked up via Stephen Downes - hails (or at least hopes for) a comeback for Ivan Illich's 'Deschooling Society', which reminded me that I should blog the video of my Temporary School of Thought talk.

Click To Play

Many thanks to Vinay for filming that! He also blogged an audio recording of the event, which got picked up in a thoughtful post from Andrew J Cernaglia.

In a different key, I've just uploaded an article I wrote last year about Illich's influence on and warnings about the development of personal computing and the internet:

Carl Mitcham laughed when I told him I was working on an internet startup inspired by Deschooling Society. Now in his mid-sixties, Mitcham is a philosopher of technology, a professor at the Colorado School of Mines and former director of the Science-Technology-Society Programme at Penn State. He was also, from the late 1980s, a member of Illich's circle of friends and collaborators, the travelling circus which surrounded him from the closure of the Centre for Intercultural Documentation at Cuernavaca in 1976, until his death in 2002.

What made Mitcham laugh was his recollection of Illich telling him, in exasperation, “People are saying I invented this internet!” The thought of it was enough to make him throw up his hands in horror.

The story of Illich's influence on the internet and the reasons for his mistrust of it both deserve attention. Together, they present something like a paradox: how did a thinker whose vision of 'learning webs', 'educational networks' and 'convivial tools' inspired key figures in the development of personal computing come, by the late 1990s, to believe in 'the necessity of defending... our senses... against the insistent encroachments of multimedia from cyberspace'?

(Continued)

I just came across another blog that's picked up on Charlie Leadbeater's article on Illich and the DIY State this week, so it does feel like there's an appetite for these ideas at the moment. And if you were looking for more pieces of evidence, I guess you could say that us raising a second round of funding for School of Everything was also a good sign!

Recommended Listening

Somebody I've mentioned a couple of times on this blog is Dean Bavington, one of the friends I made in Mexico at last December's Illich colloquium. It was an amazing week, bringing together a bunch of thinkers from around the world who are working in Illich's tradition, as well as a mixture of Mexican students, activists and friends of the man himself.

With such a gathering, there's always the potential for people to be talking at crossed purposes or over each other's heads, but the one talk which really seemed to cross the barriers of language and culture was Dean's. When he spoke of the collapse of the Newfoundland cod fishery, he drew on all his academic discipline and insight, but he did so to tell the story of the place where he grew up and its people. As he spoke, he passed a cod jigger out into the audience, so that each of us could feel the cold weight of the object at the centre of his story.

I wish I could hand that weight to you - or even pass on a recording which caught a little of the atmosphere in the room that evening. Failing that, though, I was delighted to get an email from Dean a couple of weeks ago alerting me to a programme David Cayley had made with him for CBC, in which he tells much of the story. You can get a podcast of it here.

The interview, done several months before the colloquium, doesn't quite reach the emotional depth of the story as I heard it in Cuernavaca - but it is a great piece of radio, nonetheless. And it reminded me how much I look forward to getting to hang out with Dean again some time soon.

Fax Machines and the Invention of the Wheel

It's great to see Tim posting again on I Will Rush No More, one of my favourite blogs. For me, there's a definite connection between his practise of slowing down and the tradition of otium that I've been writing about. What I admire is Tim's talent for placing his reflections in medias res, reporting a conversation with a neighbour while clearing snow off his drive, or over breakfast with a friend:

I ask: "When do you think it all changed, all this speeding up stuff?"

He says: "Easy; it changed the day fax machines became available for the home-office. Then you never got away from it and it also created an expectation of urgency where you had to deal with it right away and get back to the sender."

In a comment on Tim's post, John Xenakis writes:

The fax machine? Naah. It began with the Xerox machine. No, I mean the Univac machine. Wait, no, I mean the telephone. The telegraph. The Pony Express. The carrier pigeon. The tom-tom.

Oh hell, it began when they invented the wheel.

I suppose John has a point, in that it can be worth pushing further back, recognising the extent to which the latest and most obvious source of aggravation may be less new than it seems. Often, it turns out to be an intensification of a pre-existing tendency (as I've been arguing about managerialism in the university).

One direction this can lead is to the sort of radical critique of "civilization" offered by Derrick Jensen, John Zerzan or Ran Prieur. It was Tim who first put me on to Ran's writings, while one of Ran's posts yesterday gives a nice example of how counterproductive rushing can be. He's quoting an email someone sent him about Alan G. Carter's The Programmers Stone:

"Alan Garter [sic] tried to find a reason why some programmers are 10-25 times more productive than others. He stumbled across the answer, and made a team of super-programmers. Then the rest of the organization turned on his team! His theory is that people are literally addicted to stress. Stress releases dopamine in the brain, which gives a the stressee a good buzz. When two people accustomed to different levels of stress meet, they often don't like each other because one is getting overly stressed and the other isn't getting their dopamine hit. Stress also shuts off what he calls juxtapositional thinking, a holistic, comparative mode of thinking."

Basically there are two kinds of thinking and you need both, but under stress you're limited to thinking that is narrowly focused, methodical, and not at all intuitive. And to have a productive/unstressed programming team, you first need an unstressed organization around them. Clearly this goes way beyond programming. This whole civilization is driven by stress, and has been for thousands of years.

(This reminds me, in passing, of a post a while back from JP Rangaswami, a friend of School of Everything, about the different types of laziness.)

But back to John's comment. If we have to trace the tendency to futile acceleration back from the fax machine, via the telegraph, all the way to the invention of the wheel, doesn't this just lead to paralysis? How on earth can you and me escape? ("History," Stephen said, "is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.")

In Illich's thinking, I can find two possible ways out from this paralysis. The first is the idea of thresholds. Particularly in his earlier work, Illich stresses the idea that technologies have a threshold beyond which they become counterproductive. So rather than the vertiginous regression that leads back from the fax machine to the wheel, we could seek to discern the point at which this happened. That's more or less what Tim and his friend seem to be doing in their conversation - though we might want to push the threshold further back.

Dean Bavington, who I met in Cuernavaca, gave an outstanding presentation on the technological threshold in the Newfoundland cod fishery. He illustrated this by passing around the audience a 'cod jigger', the fearsome piece of equipment which he believes represents the crossing of that particular threshold. Prior to the introduction of the jigger, cod could only be caught if they were hungry enough to take the bait; from that point on, fishing increasingly became the indiscriminate scooping up of biomass, until catastrophic collapse led to the closure of the fishery in 1992.

The second possible way out is by shifting attention from the technology itself to the qualities of relationships. What kinds of relationship does a particular technology tend to foster among those who use it and those around them? Does it tend to encourage instrumental attitudes, seeing other people or things as a resource, a means to an end or a source of exchange value? Does it decrease the amount of time and space the user has for those around them?

If we pay attention to questions like these, we may choose to go on using a particular technology, despite its general tendencies, because we see the possibility - with care - of using it in other ways. Or, as I suggested the other day, we may choose askesis - voluntary renunciation, temporary or permanent, of a particular technology, habit, or whatever - so as to allow room for otium, for time spent on the things that matter to us and with the people who matter to us.

This is where I see Anthony's thinking about gentleness leading - and it takes us back to where we are, clearing snow or talking over breakfast.

Why the only true schooling is a vacation (or "What I didn't do in my holidays")

It has been a week already since I got back from Mexico. I returned with all kinds of things to post about and no great desire to get posting.

Among the pleasures of the Illich colloquium, one was the almost total withdrawal from electronic communication. My reluctance to begin reporting back is partly a reluctance to complete my reintegration to the technological matrix, and partly a sense that the experiences and conversations at Cuernavaca took place not only in a different time zone, but in a different sort of time. Whilst there, they made perfect sense, but a process of careful and unrushed translation is needed, or they are in danger of becoming nonsense. (Leastways, that's my excuse for having been so inarticulate when people asked me how my trip went...)

The pleasure of withdrawing from technology would have been no surprise to Illich. One of the consistent strands in his work is a call to askesis, the discipline of freely chosen renunciation. The purpose of such renunciation is not self-punishment, nor does it imply a judgement on those who don't choose to join us in renouncing a particular habit, activity or technology. Rather, it is a way of making room for the pleasures of otium (of which, more in a moment).

All this, though, is foreign to us. When 'asceticism' is referred to today, it generally signifies a (probably perverse) religious practice. It suggests masochism - or, at least, that hatred of the body which the secular often regard as an essential feature of the religious. It is worth highlighting, then, that in Illich's writing, this aspect of asceticism is not simply downplayed, but explicitly countered. In a 1989 proposal for a five year course aimed at recovering 'the perceptions of self and other which led to the formation of ascetical disciplines,' he writes:

I will place the body rather than the mind at the center of my lectures, not because I can distinguish the two, but because I need a term, the term "body" to engage the student's interest in the traditional habits that cultivate personal centers which they might never have adverted to, such as the heart, the eyes, the limbs, the stomach, the flesh, the ears and the spirit.

'Ascetical habits' once stood in balance with 'critical habits' in the western tradition of learning, but were marginalised from 'the foundation of the University in the late Middle Ages'. Though he doesn't spell it out, I suspect Illich saw a direct connection between this and the disembodiment of knowledge characteristic of modern science. (An idea which deserves fleshing out in a post of its own.)

For now, back to the pleasures of otium, for which askesis makes room. In Latin, otium is leisure, peace and quiet, freedom from responsibility: something looked forward to in retirement or time off from worldly duties. It is the term used by Augustine to describe his calling to a life of study and contemplation, and it characterises the atmosphere required for learning in the monastic tradition. The connection is ancient: the Greek for otium is schole, from which we get 'school'. (And according to Strong's Greek Dictionary, schole is 'a vacation from physical work' and scholazo is 'to take a holiday', so the truest form of schooling really is a vacation!)

The opposite of otium is negotium, literally nec-otium, 'no-leisure'. This is business, occupation or employment - but also pains, trouble and difficulty. Such affairs may not be ultimately escapable. (For Augustine, the calling to otium is in tension with the negotium of ecclesiastical responsibilities.) Yet the value of escape, temporary or permanent, is not in doubt - and it is seen as essential for the pursuit of learning.

All this is of interest to those of us who enjoy the dance of words and ideas to the rhythm of history. The more practically minded may find it 'otiose' in the modern sense: idle, useless and a waste of time. (Mind you, those changed connotations do offer a striking measure of how values have shifted.) Yet there may be meat here for those of us who would negotiate the world of education today.

Both personally and on behalf of School of Everything, I am keen to take part in conversations about the future of the university and of higher learning in general. I share the opinion of those who see in the current crisis of Higher Education, not merely a need to defend the older professional model against managerialism (or to mourn its passing), but the hopeful possibility of new, marginal spaces in which we can explore other ways of organising learning. So I was intrigued, earlier this year, when I heard about the EduFactory project to explore the 'Conflicts and transformations of the university'.

Yet, not for the first time, I found myself disappointed by the conversation that ensued (through the medium of an unfortunately unarchived email list). A great volume of words was produced, theoretically dense, often leading to bad-tempered exchanges, yet suggesting also a great deal of intelligence and good intentions. It was perplexing. My friend Anthony, who has the advantage over me of being a certified academic, lost patience, told the list what he thought and went elsewhere. Essentially, he told them they were suffering from collective verbal diaorrhea, and he wasn't wrong, but what I hadn't located until I sat down to write this was the source of their incontinence.

Bearing in mind the concepts of otium and negotium, the problem may be seen from the name of the project, or from the prospectus for its second round (which began last month):

The first round of discussion on the edu-factory list showed that, despite the many differences between universities and countries, it is possible to identify a global trend and common experiences in the world of the university. These stem from the pervasiveness of the market and the processes of corporatisation that universities in many parts of the world are undergoing. But they also involve the struggles and movements that have contested academic borders as well as wider power structures, claiming the free circulation of knowledge and practicing alternative forms of knowledge production.

For the radicals of the edu-factory list, just as much as their supposed enemies, the university is conceived of as a factory for 'knowledge production'. No wonder they are so industrious in the manufacture of neologisms, or such Stakhanovites in their output of emails!

Government ministers often see universities (or, to be more precise, Oxford and Cambridge) as feudal anachronisms, holding out against good, rational, business management. The truth is stranger. The very roots of the modern university, as early as the 13th century, are in the turn away from otium as the proper atmosphere for study, towards worldy negotium. So the contemporary crisis is rather more like that of an old family business, run for generations on gentlemanly terms, which finds itself suddenly under new ownership and having its assets stripped.

After going on for eight centuries, most inhabitants of the university can barely imagine it as anything other than a factory for the production of knowledge. Yet the grounds for such imagination are just what study-as-otium can offer. Illich, again:

I want to cultivate the capacity for second thoughts, by which I mean the stance and the competence that makes it feasible to inquire into the obvious. This is what I call learning.

And, in another essay, 'The Cultivation of Conspiracy':

Learned and leisurely hospitality is the only antidote to the stance of deadly cleverness that is acquired in the professional pursuit of objectively secured knowledge. I remain certain that the quest for truth cannot thrive outside the nourishment of mutual trust flowering into a commitment to friendship.

Is there any hope for learning as a quest, rather than a production line? For these strange concepts of askesis and otium? 'The asceticism which can be practiced at the end of the 20th century,' Illich wrote, 'is something profoundly different from any previously known.'

I find hope in the company of those I met in Cuernavaca, but also in a series of encounters since I returned with some of the smartest, most technologically adept people I know. One is giving up sending email from his thirtieth birthday. Another will spend ten days over Christmas and New Year in a silent retreat. The third claimed to have spent the past few months 'shitting myself into a twelve inch screen' and to want reminding that she has a body. The possibilities are there.

Anyway, the great thing about otium is that you don't have to wait for the fulfilment of a grand project to enjoy it. You can start by switching off your computer, turning off your phone, stretching your work-cramped body and deciding to dedicate the weekend ahead to meditative idleness - which is just what I plan to do now.

Gettin' On Planes

Rather like Mr T, I have an aversion to getting on planes. Not an actual phobia, although I never much enjoyed the experience: all the boredom of a childhood car journey, sandwiched between two halves of a rollercoaster ride...

But eighteen months ago, I decided to give up flying - more or less. As you've doubtless heard a million times, as an ordinary citizen, not flying is pretty much the biggest difference you can make to your carbon footprint. (And don't get me started on carbon offsetting...)

I say "more or less". I realised a while ago that it would be hard to get through the process of setting up the School of Everything without taking some flights for work purposes. It's not exactly taking EasyJet to Prague for a boozy weekend, but I'm not comfortable with the amount of "necessary" flying required for business-as-usual - whether in business or academia.

But then today, for the first time since I quit, I found myself really feeling the need to fly somewhere. What's responsible for my fall from the wagon? This:

Ivan Illich passed away in December 2002. Five years after his death, a group of friends and readers are convoking other friends and readers around the world to meet in Cuernavaca. There, more than thirty years ago, thanks to the fruitful milieu provided by the Centro Intercultural de Documantación (CIDOC) headed by Valentina Borremans, he launched a critical debate on the major institutions of industrial society and the underlying public certainties supporting them... We want to call friends and readers of Ivan to gather on Mexican soil, the country where he lived so long.

The gathering is only ten days away. I have just written to the organisers, to check that it will be possible to take part. Assuming it is, and assuming I can find a way to pay for the flight, I'll be there.

The Philosophy of "As If"

Having been an enthusiastic participant in the Yahoo! Groups Alan Garner list for several years, I was delighted to discover that a similar list existed, dedicated to the work of Ivan Illich. It looks to have become rather quiet, but I'm enjoying working my way through the archives, with the intention of introducing myself and (assuming the locals are friendly!) inviting along some of the people I've met in the past year who've expressed an interest in developing a conversation about Illich's ideas and influence.

Anyway, in the context of a discussion about the roles of the individual and the state in social change, I came across this great paragraph:

I have been wrestling for a long time with context vs individual responsibility. I have concluded it is not either-or, but both that matter. Yes, of course, we must each take personal responsibility for our own situations. We must pull a Vaihinger "as-if". The only alternative is madness and depression and curling up into little shivering balls of protoplasm. At the very same time, holding two contradictory ideas all at once, context is all. Sort of a C. Wright Mills sociological imagination riff. Context is all, yet we must act as if we are in total control of everything. So, we must together work to change context, work to make the world better for all, work to drag a kicking and screaming bad tempered world together into the commons of the god of all. At the same time we must, at the individual level, work with each person and ourselves to take individual control of as much of our lives as we can grab and self-direct within the context in which we exist.

The poster's name is Dan, and what he says reminds me of conversations I've had with a different Dan. I wasn't familiar with Hans Vaihinger, the philosopher mentioned, but the importance of "as if" resonates strongly with my own experience and the approach to reality to which it has led me.