Fuller, Comenius and Holistic Education
By John Taylor; 2008 May 06, 09 Jamal, 165 BE
Yesterday we absorbed some key ideas of R. Buckminster Fuller into the Master's scheme of twelve social principles. Under the last of these, principle number twelve, universal peace, we categorized the following insight of the great visionary "generalist,"
"In spite of all humans' innate interest in the interrelatedness of all experience, long ago these world-power-structure builders learned to shunt all the bright intellectuals and the physically creative into specialist careers. The powerful reserved for themselves the far easier, because innate, comprehensive functioning. All one needs to do is to discover how self-perpetuating is this disease of specialization is to witness the inter-departmental battling for educational funds and the concomitant jealous guarding of the various specializations assigned to a department's salaried experts on each subject in any university."
This rooster-like tendency of professionals to jealously guard their own turf is surely one of the biggest reasons that greenhouse gases are being spewed out on a tonne-per-minute basis, and more generally why peace and environmental purity are so elusive to this generation. The super-rich and super-powerful long ago mastered the game of divide and conquer. Zero-sum gaming, strife and competition are ingrained into education from the earliest age. Fractional thinking means makes even our best and brightest helpless before the most glaringly obvious challenges confronting the planet.
Jane Jacobs, the great localist genius, saw the problem too. She named it "credentialism," which refers to the gap between real qualifications and official credentials. A worker with years of experience solving a certain problem is ignored while a new graduate with paper credentials promising that he can solve the problem gets the job, often with disastrous results.
What Fuller is talking about is a broader, more global problem to which credentialism and specialization blind us. The degradation of the environment is a symptom of an invisible disease that, by definition, evades conventional expertise. It is axiomatic, if schools were addressing this problem, the environment would be getting better, not worse.
Global warming is the mother of all global problems, and our narrow epistemology is at the root of it. Nobody has ever faced the warming of an entire planet before, so no profession can claim to have experience, qualification or credentials in it. Like any problem that has never been encountered before, no matter how experienced or well-trained a worker may be, it is unlikely they will grasp it.
From a purely technical point of view, decarbonizing the world economy would be an easy task. Electric motors and power transmission through wires are proven technologies that have been used around the world for over a century. In the past few years a new method has been perfected to transmit direct current over any distance without the losses and degradation characteristic of alternating current power lines. Why is this not being applied?
Fuller, in his essay called "The grand strategy for solving global problems," wrote,
"Energy first: We need to develop about a dozen types of renewable sources of energy and we need to develop ways of distributing that energy. We now have the know-how to connect together all the world's electrical generating plants. That one project would almost double the amount of energy available in the world because right now most generating plants run at about half capacity and use the other half for peak demand only. By interconnecting they could all swap power (especially between the light and dark sides of the earth) and therefore be run at almost peak capacity most of the time -- without building any new generating plants."
George Monbiot's recent bestseller on the environment dealt with this very problem of power. The distribution of electrical power around the planet needs to be regularized, just like the human body distributes its power by means unified, interconnected networks known as the circulatory and nervous systems. Inspired by Fuller, a small number of engineers have been advocating an intercontinental power grid for decades, but they are so obscure that even Monbiot did not seem to have heard of them when he wrote "Heat."
Generally speaking, technical experts are servants of nations, not continents or the globe, which is exactly why the globe is in chaos. As Fuller points out, a tiny number of bosses and owners, not as driven or intelligent as those under them, dominate the wealth of the world. Born into the ruling elite, they learn the basics of power manipulation early. They easily take advantage of our frenetic culture of competition among experts for scarce resources. They throw the professions a handful of specialized chickenfeed problems while reserving for themselves world embracing policy.
In religious terminology, divide and rule is so easy to accomplish because our education and professional experience ignores the universality of God, Spirit and the soul. Fuller in his own way appreciated this as well,
"Our brains deal exclusively with special-case experiences. Only our minds are able to discover the generalized principles operating without exception in each and every special-experience case which if detected and mastered will give knowledgeable advantage in all instances." (Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, 1963)
Greatly as I admire Buckminster Fuller, I think it is a great pity that (like most in the English-speaking world) he did not seem to know about Jan Amos Comenius. This entire thesis of credentialism and overspecialization had already been worked out in detail centuries earlier in the thought and writings of the latter.
Comenius invented a scheme to unify all knowledge into a holistic singularity that he called "pansophism." He envisioned a unitary educational system aimed at the "whole person." The entirety of knowledge would be systematically simplified and taught as object lessons (a technique he invented) from the earliest years. Indeed the entire split between science and religion, not to mention the division into "two cultures" of science and art, might never have taken place if educators had universally applied the brilliant educational innovations worked out by Comenius. Jean Piaget, for example, wrote in a paper written for UNESCO that,
"Nothing is more moving, in following Comenius career, than the fact that this eternal exile, eternally a member of a minority group, never tired of drawing up plans for international collaboration: general schemes for universal peace, proposals for collaboration between the Churches, more specialized plans for international societies for erudite research, but, above all, plans for the international organization of public education and the final project for a Collegium Lucis, which was to be a kind of international ministry of education." (Jean Piaget, http://www.ibe.unesco.org/publications/ThinkersPdf/comeniuse.PDF)
Another writer on the web offers some more background to the “
“… I find myself inspired by the great unbuilt British college, the
When a world government is formed, its first and most important task will surely be to found Comenius's Collegium Lucis, a world embracing institution charged to institute the first world curriculum for every child from the earliest years continuing on up to their professional practice. Its motto's should be "Crush Credentialism!" and, “One person, One World!”
No comments:
Post a Comment