Humanity in 2011 --- Impacts on Education_

: Created: 21 May 2011

This is a keynote speech delivered at the International Conferrence of Educational Research held on 2011 May 18-20 at Manila.

Introduction

The Greek writer Sophocles said in 496BC:

Wonders are many

And none is more wonderful than man

The most distinct feature of this wonder is that human beings are time-binders; that we know that life is finite, limited by time, and we must make the time we have meaningful and happy.

Because humanity has so many wonders, I am going to describe what we are and how we are in the 21^st Century in four dimensions, D1, D2, D3 and D4. I hope that will help us understand ourselves clearly and therefore know what life is all about, and how education could help each of us lead a happy and purposeful life.

I was asked to present the latest in educational research in this conference. I have chosen to speak on the present topic instead, for a good reason. What is the point in doing research if we do not know what education is?

I am qualified to speak on educational research, because I began doing it in 1958. By 1964 I was the Director of Research for Toronto, a most vibrant center, together with Tokyo and Los Angeles. I did a few meaningful projects that I am proud of. In one project I discovered with a team that five-year olds who were in kindergarten the first time drew the classroom with the sun in it. Those same age kids who had begun kindergarten at age four, and then in school the second year, drew the classroom with a clock on the wall instead of the sun. It showed that schooling changed the concepts of space and time, even at age five.

In another project with 405 Grade 3 pupils, I discovered that 31% of them were reading at a Grade 4-5 level, and 46% were reading at a Grade 1-2 level; only 23% were reading at the Grade 3 level. But all those kids were studying at Grade 3 classes.

Why? The only reason is an administrative one, that schools must be fair, and therefore all eight-year-olds must be put into the same grade so they are equal. If you wonder how schools treat the concept of equality, there you have it.

I quitted my job in 1968. It was a very prestigious and powerful job because I had 72 schools doing what was called classroom research. Under my direction many teachers got promoted into principal and higher positions. But I was not able to make any change in the school system, despite the strong evidence for change. Our schools today are the same in structure and concept as they were some 400 years ago. I went into teacher education and never looked back at educational research. Researchers are supposed to lead for change. We do not do research to get promotions, or to spend public money, least to get a paper published for fame.

I did have a paper published that I am proud of. It had the title Education in the Cybernetic Age, a Model. I take the liberty of including a copy of it for your enjoyment. It was published in 1967, way before the appearance of desk-top computers and the internet. It describes how learning should proceed for a child about now, in 2011.

Dimension I, Humanity in Tradition

Humanity denotes the condition or quality of being human. It has different purposes and functions in different cultures. It also has a common base, of being alive, healthily and happily. One way of looking at humanity is from the vantage point of death, a final and often abrupt termination of life, ending in nothingness? I put a question mark there because it may not be so. We shall see.

In the Judaic-Christian tradition, God had created man after His own image. At death he will return to Him in Heaven, happy. God has also given man a free will, to choose, and to create his own character. However, we all see how the first man and woman were driven out of Eden for disobedience (which is a choice). They were cursed to bear the original sin, including all their descendants.

In the Buddhist tradition, human lives are all sufferings. One could strive to lead a compassionate and charitable life leading to nirvana, a state of fulfillment and lasting joy in the universe.

Confucius defined man as “two men” with the word ren or love. Human nature is good, aware and reflective, self-striving for fulfillment and dignity, achieving harmony with Nature and other human beings. For the Chinese, time is not clock-time like the Greeks. Time is always measured and filled with life activities. It is continuous and lasting through the vitality of the family. Typically, a family functions in three generations, bounded by the learning and filial piety activities of its members in intrigue ways. Thus, children learn to care and respect their parents as they observe the way the latter care and respect the grand parents. In the end, when one dies, he is sure that everything he had would be continued, shining more brilliantly in the lives of succeeding generations. We might say that Confucian wisdom helps people to conquer time and death. It also enables society to thrive in harmony and peace. In a number of UNESCO reports on man’s future, published from 1979 to the end of the last millennium, many scholars had expressed the belief that, if humanity was to survive the 21^st century, it would do so with the Confucian conception of man and family.

We are all products of our traditions. We will not be what we are if we deny the values and customs and conditions which help shape our development and being. By looking at what is common in the traditions outlined above, we may confirm the following points:

Human beings are free, aware, self-striving, and purposeful.
Each person comes from a past, which he inherits from his ancestors. Each will create a future which his children will share and expand.
Human beings are time-bound. They manage time to build better life conditions, instead of submitting to what is given. They may even conquer time to achieve immortality, in meanings and deeds.
The human family is a unique institution for human development and happiness. It perpetuates life and makes history, a distinct feature of mankind.

From this traditional conception of humanity we can confirm that the purpose of education is to help individuals to be free, productive, and happy. It is not to prepare individuals to work in a vocation, and to earn money that they could become slaves to consumerism.

A person is free when he/she feels capable and responsible, enjoying being in charge of his/her own life. An example of this is how a child has learned to ride a bicycle for the first time, going where she wants to go, and feeling the wind passing through her ears. It is not the freedom of liberty, like exercising the right to vote, or doing things at will. It is sad that many schools today teach children the responsibility of defending their own country, going to war to kill other human beings with no questions asked.

Educators can do well to read Jacques Maritain, a distinguish 20^th century Catholic philosopher, when he said in Education at the Crossroad: “The right of the child to be educated requires that the educator shall have moral authority over him, and this authority is nothing else than the duty of the adult to the freedom of the youth.”

Another saying, which is now tradition, was from J.F. Kennedy whose Education Defense Act started educational research as a burgeoning activity at the dawn of the Space Age. He said: “Our most common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”

My friend and colleague at the University of Toronto Marshall McLuhan, guru of the Information Age, had pointed out another dimension of the one-world reality which he described as the global village, that: “Our new environment compels commitment and participation. We have become irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other.”

Is it not crystal clear that we must now teach children to be free and responsible human beings, rather than individuals submitting to economic, political and technological ends? If the function of research is to point to the right direction and to discern the most effective ways of reaching the destination, it should begin by sorting out the present conditions of humanity, as well as identifying the needs of education, rather than inventing funny names for schools, such as making “schools as learning environments”.

Dimension 2, Changes and Impacts

Change is a fact of life, its essence being growth and development. Yet, change necessitates adjustment. When change occurs too quickly, too big, and too often, nobody can adjust or cope effectively. Then, people become helpless and not free.

Let us now make a list of the changes that had occurred in our time to see how they had affected humanity and education. The list is neither comprehensive nor complete. It is presented to trigger your interest so you might add your own items which had affected you significantly.

We begin with the most recent events, namely, how the most economically powerful nations, The United States and Japan, appeared to be helpless in the face of a financial failure and a natural disaster cum technological failure. Briefly, the US has become the biggest debt-owing nation on earth, and it has resorted to simply print money to pay its debtors, who had bought its treasury bills with real money earned with labour and products. At about the same time, just as we begin the second decade of the new century, the Fukushima nuclear accident was brought about by earthquakes and tsunami. The Japanese, who should still remember the hurts of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atom bombs, could now only silently accept the continuous radioactivity damages to their earth, air and water.

The citizens of both these two countries have the best and the longest years of education in the world. Their technological and financial knowhow has no equals. How could they be so unable to cope with the failures of their own creations? Why did the failures have to occur? Any answer would demonstrate that our present way of educating people has failed to enhance our quality of life.

We now turn our attention to recent history. We do so because we heed the warning that people who forget history are doomed to suffer the mistakes of the past. Let us begin with World War II and continue to our present day, a period of 70 years.

The events in the following list had occurred in sequence but with a lot of overlaps in time. So we will not attempt to attach the exact dates on them. For many of us, they are still fresh in memory as we go through the list.

Hitler’s attempt to annihilate the Jewish people
America experiments with massive intelligence and aptitude testing of people drafted to fight in the war
America dropped the A-bomb on Japan, despite its readiness to surrender
The launching of a global trade with Coca-cola
The American dream
The GI Bill and upward mobility through education
China turned to Communism
Counseling and vocational education
Mobility and the loss of family roots
Behaviour modification
Consumerism
Stress and massive psychological and psychiatric treatments
The Space Age and the building of more deadly weapons
Educational research unlimited
Superpowers and the Cold War
Air travel and tourism
The Vietnam War
The drug culture
The sex revolution
Women liberation
Asia’s Four Little Dragons
Disappearing of rural and small town communities in America
End of colonialism and the brain drain
World-wide immigration and multiculturalism
Fast foods and obesity
The break-down of the family institution
The stock market and ever renewing financial instruments
The new economy
North-south disparities
The global village and one-world reality
The Postmodern Age
Education as the largest industry
The Preliterate Cultural Revolution of China
The Information Age
The opening of China and the factory of the world
The dissolution of the Soviet Union
Desk-top computers and the internet
The virtual reality
Electronic games and violence
Information overload
The European Community
DNA imaging
The microsecond decision in information processing
Massive financial failures generating wide-spread despair

So many of these events have altered the conditions of humanity so fundamentally that we are no longer what we were before. I cannot review all of them in a short speech. So I shall select a few for discussion.

~ Americans, 73% of them reported they were unable to kill another human being face-to-face, were shocked emotionally seeing so much death and misery in the WW II battlefields. They returned home after the war determined to make a dream into reality, the American Dream. Couples married their high school sweethearts. They lived by themselves, away from their parents. They would have a bungalow, a bunch of children, cars and dogs, together with all the labor-saving electric gargets. The husband went out to work and got promoted to higher and higher positions through education, paid by the GI Bill. The wife stayed at home to look after the family, and chatted with other housewives at mid-morning tea parties. They would be happy ever after in this self-contained family.

The dream busted in less than two decades. The nuclear family disintegrated, either because the couple drifted apart having less and less to share, or the upwardly mobile husband had found new attractions, or because the kids left home in their teens leaving an empty nest behind. All these had resulted from a growing individualism, a product of a craze for material gratification and an abandonment of traditional values.

Many more factors joined together to break down the American family in the ensuing decades. By 2000, a new book based on online surveys, with the title Millennials Rising, the Next Great Generation, describes the American family having to endure the new movements and trends of feminism, sexual freedom, a divorce epidemic, fewer G-rated movies, parents who were informed to consider themselves ahead of a child’s needs, gay rights, film nudity…..and a prominent academic’s 1969 proclamation to give the family a decent burial. Today, as it exists, the family has acquired many new names, from single-parent to multiple-parent-siblings, to stepmother or father, to single-sex etc. There are neither the emotional bonds nor the role model there that kids needed to grow up into independent and functional adults. Many working mothers only see their children in “quality time”, by mutual appointment.

Sadly, many young people in the developing countries, including China, are now pursuing the American Dream, without knowing its conditions and consequences.

~ What about the sex revolution? Its goal is free and instant sex. We see the actions too often in TV and movies that, as soon as boy meets girl, they hurry to take off their cloths to make love, losing not a minute. What we do not see are the shocking statistics of tens of millions of children born from teenage and unwedded parents who grow up without normal care. Being sexy is now the dominant concern of children as young as four and old people of eighty. Love-making is no longer related to emotional bonds, mutual responsibility and respect, or genetic reproduction. It is merely a quick satisfaction of a momentary desire.

To be sexy now dominates people’s attention all over the world, fueled by consumerism bent on selling the need to be sexy. Everything from head to toe has to look and smell sexy, presumably for self confidence, but really for the profits of industries which prey on people’s ignorance and psychological insecurity. How wide are the industries? It is your guess.

~ American banks had created the credit card to make money. It has become the biggest export. By now, it has also proved to be the bank’s source of failure and a government liability under the “too big to fail” consideration. The American government has also found a way to have countries around the world to help pay its bank failures. It is printing money to cheat without feeling shameful.

Nevertheless, banks continue to promote more and more credit cards, because the latest annual profit was US$30 billion. American families now hold 10 credit cards on average, and personal bankrupts are on the rise every day. More alarming, 84% of all American students have credit cards. The average university student has 5 credit cards. The average annual debt for each student is US$20000. Might we need to do research to find out how our own students are using the credit card? Or to develop effective programs to teach students personal financial management, regardless of age?

~ The Information Age emerged in the 1960’s. Within a decade, television brought into the living room vivid scenes of everything from childbirth to killings in the battlefields. In the next few decades, TV was to define life for viewers of all ages, with sitcoms, news, talk shows, special reports and, most forcefully, sex-play and violence. TV is a cold medium, capable of imprinting messages into viewers’ minds without their being aware of it. It triggers imitation and simulation, the most effective acts of learning. With so much violence portrayed on electronic screens and monitors in recent decades, no one is surprised that violence has become the number one threat to us all.

What is surprising is the close collaboration between the US military and the entertainment industry in creating violent games for public consumption. As a result, young people are now playing the same games that the US army uses for training soldiers. The list of these games is extensive, easily accessible in advertisements: “Total annihilation, the new landscape of war”, “The joyous feeling of riding and guiding your missiles into enemy targets”, “Just like real army except for the syphilis”, to name just a few. Studies have shown that all of the adolescent assailants in the school killings between 1997 and 1999 were deeply engrossed in media violence.

However, the information age has brought about many other positive conditions for humanity and learning. For example, it has made schools obsolete and learning individual and free. It has also demanded that teachers and parents, as well as other authorities of education, like the Church and government, review and alter their roles and methods in educating the young.

The fact is, that today’s children, as young as 3 years old, are able to access information of their choice by using the computer and the i-phone. Many elementary school pupils have travelled more than their teachers. They also can download clearer and deeper information on any topic than their teachers could teach them. The conventional role of the school in providing information is no longer relevant.

There are, nevertheless, many roles that schools and teachers can play in helping children to grow up into effective and happy adults who are fulfilled and contributive to society. These roles are new and personal. They change according to the changing conditions of humanity and, as such, they need to be identified sensitively and responsively to suit everyone involved.

Information is not context-free. All kinds and forms of information are instruments to make the receiver feel or do something, usually in accordance with the purpose of the giver. The problem of the information age is that when information moves so rapidly and in such large quantities that people become loaded down by them, unable to sort out what they are, how they are meaningful, and what intention they carry. Consequently, we could only passively cope and become preys of the massive amount of information that daily come to us, like junk mails, advertisements, television, videos, CD’s, billboards, loudspeakers, magazines, lecture, emails, blogs, the facebook, twitters, and so on.

Information is not knowledge. It is certainly not wisdom. Information appears as statements of facts of the world, including true facts, false facts, virtual facts, falsified facts, engineered facts, all of which need be sorted out in order to be useful. The most important learning for children today is to learn how to separate useful information from that which is irrelevant or harmful. It is the responsibility of parents and teachers to assist them in this learning.

Much emphasis has been given on teaching children how to process information. That is largely and effectively done by Bill Gates and Yahoo and Google and individual bloggers. Our schools should now concentrate on helping students develop intelligence and skills to transform information into knowledge, and knowledge into wisdom. They should teach students to do so all their lives.

Dimension 3, Obsolete Schools and Parental Responsibility

Today’s schools are the same in structure and organization as they were some 400 years ago. They were originally designed like army barracks, to control and discipline people. Long rows of classrooms allow the headmaster to see in a glance that all teachers and students are doing their work inside, or if there is a student being punished to stand outside the door. In the morning, students line up in the yard before going into the classroom to be counted. There, they sit in rows to do what is assigned, so they will be tested and evaluated afterwards. This is army practice.

The public school in history served a minority of selected people to be educated for leadership roles. Even as late as 1940’s, only 70% of the14-17-year olds were in school in America, the most educationally advanced country in the world. They were taught to advance from one grade to the next until, at graduation; some 17 percent were able to attend university. The rest would take white-collar jobs in the civil service and private companies. Today, the same education system is serving all children, regardless of their ability or interest. Even those who suffer from sense-impairments and the disabled are put into the same classroom as everybody else. This is done with the modern value that all people are equal. This value and educational arrangement are being transferred to most countries around the globe under American influence.

For 12 long years from age 5 to 17, children are taught what is called subject matters, some of which has little to do with life. They are also taught how to succeed in tests and examinations. Everyone will advance from one grade to the next, regardless of how well they do. However, those who gain high marks in examinations will have the advantage of entering the preferred universities and, later, graduate schools. As for students who had been lagging behind since the early grades, they must sit in the classroom until it is time to leave school. Thus, we can imagine the dynamics of the learning process in the average classroom, with students going on divergent ways at very uneven paces.

The responsibility of the teacher is to “cover” the curriculum on time. He must also keep students in check with an acceptable discipline. There is little else he could do in caring for the personal wellbeing of individual students. In fact, a teacher must not touch any student even in elementary grades, else he be accused of committing a sexual assault.

In view of these circumstances, one can rightfully conclude that our schools are obsolete, when placed in juxtaposition with the vibrant changes outlined in D2 above.

One would also wonder why our schools would lag so much behind when so much change is happening so fast. There are no ready answers. We might only say that, as education expanded in scope and size, the traditional shareholders gradually abdicated their responsibilities to allow government bureaucrats to reign.

The traditional shareholders of education are parents, the Church, and government. Parents had the God-given power to oversee the education of their young. They could transfer some of the operational power to the government by voting. But they must carry out the responsibility of caring for their children and teaching them the living values and traditions of their culture. They must also keep government bureaucrats in check as they manage or mismanage educational resources and policies.

However, as they are, parents have been so affected by the barrage of social, economic, technological, familial, and humanity changes, that they are no longer able to accept and carry out their responsibilities as parents. A very large percentage of them could only take care of themselves. They are happy to hand their children over to the schools, knowing well that they are obsolete. The Church has its own troubles too, managing its finance and the clergy. As for the politicians and bureaucrats in government, they are but self-serving individuals.

The United States, which has been exporting her educational theories and practices to most emerging countries, is keeping one very important heritage to herself, namely the private schools and universities supported by independent endowments. These private institutions, which are governed by managing councils made up of public- minded elites, are still teaching people rather than books and tests. They produce most of America’s leaders.

This diversity of educational institutions is a unique American tradition. It is the legacy of the founding fathers, who were thinkers and philanthropists who made up the leadership which had helped shape the spirit and believes of America in the pioneer years. Perhaps those leaders, who had so exalted equality as a guiding principle for American society, could not foresee that the public and private schools of the 21^st century could never have the same conditions for teaching students to be free individuals. Perhaps equality could never be implemented in a society which maintains different levels and varying qualities of educational facilities. The fact remains for those of us, who admire the beauty and richness of the United States, that equality is but a rhetoric that begs for real life in the dynamics of human society.

Dimension 4, Self-actualization in Global Perspective

I shall now turn to speak on something more constructive. In view of the fast changing conditions of humanity, we can only be certain of a few things as we move forward into the future. They are:

(1) Human beings are free and creative agents. They will continue to be self-striving, seeking fulfillment and happiness.

(2) Children are born to families. Regardless of changing conditions, parent(s) continue to be responsible for caring the young and maintaining with the latter the linguistic and cultural traditions from which they are a part.

(3) Schools will continue to exist. The roles and relationships between teachers and students will change. Hopefully, teachers will educate themselves to be free and caring persons, committal to a profession trusted with new and increasing responsibilities.

(4) Learning will largely be self-seeking activities, facilitated by increasingly more convenient electronic communication devices. The school, as community, will be a place of sharing and exploration of knowledge and skills, ideas, emotions, wisdom, aspirations, all of which involve the achievement of human purposes and happiness.

(5) Children need nourishment, love, and security to grow up healthily. They need to know who they are and what they could become to develop independence. They need value and dignity to develop character and love. They need confidence, responsibility and the appreciation of other people to strive for excellence and self-actualization.

(6) Children in a globalized world will be faced with many psychological and social forces impinging against normal growth and development. Parents are important. Excellent education in the 21^st century will be seen in societies which encourage and facilitate individuals to freely learn, to assume responsibilities, and to aspire to reach goals that are larger then life.

The western powers have invented a one-world and postmodern reality. People will suffer from increasing disparity in many important issues, including education. Poor nations could do little to counter the general trends of development, and to save themselves from exploitation. They can, however, build new schools and educative systems to enable their children to be truly free, by knowing their identity and cultural heritage, by maintaining mutually respectful relationships with Nature and other human beings, and by aspiring to live humane and happy lives.

Conclusion

We have come back to the beginning of this speech to ask the question: What can be done to improve education?

The answer is simple.

We must explore efficient ways of educating parents and community members on the true meaning of education, and how it is important to life in its personal and universal senses. In other words, being free and responsible should be in people’s awareness, and their specific meaning and deeds should be important topics of all public communication and the media.

We must also research for change.

In macro perspective, we should not build any more schools in the same way they now exist. They are expensive and not useful. We need to revive “school architecture” and the innovative concepts of learning environments which became prominent in the 1960’s, which activity diminished because the government had diverted its central attention to becoming wealthy and powerful, neglecting people and their education. We must heed the vice of wealth and power by seeing the stark social reality of the United States today that 44 million people or 14% of the population are living on food stamps, and 43% of all citizens are spending more than they earn. There is no dignity or value for either the rich or the poor in a country founded on the principles of equality and freedom.

In micro perspective, we must find effective ways of helping children to know themselves as independent human beings, to accept responsibilities, to care for the environment and other human beings, and to aspire for values and actions that will uphold the continuity and dignity of humanity.

Thank you.

May 2011

Resources

Humanity in 2011 --- Impacts on Education__Kong Shiu Loon