Wanted outcome

Stephen Downes asks us a difficult question:

“what I ask readers to consider is what we want the outcome of an education to be by considering the four points of a pyramid:

a young Marc Andreesen who as a student at a public university was able to develop the first commercial web browser;

the second, the author of the piece, an apparent ‘intellectual’, familiar with the works of Agnes Martin, Claes Oldenburg, Julius Evola and Corey Robin;

the aforementioned billionaire who believes people like him “should get to make decisions to reorder life as we know it without interference from anyone else”;

or the people in small towns who value “the ordinary comforts of kinship, friendship, craft, memory, legend, lore, skills passed down across generations.””

None of the options is ideal, but I won’t duck away and will explain my choice.

1. The student first and foremost represents potential.

2. The ‘intellectual’ in the list is a writer who certainly impresses and outperforms many with his wit and erudition, but I don’t know enough to estimate his concrete impact for us.

3. I have also thought about the desired outcome before, and I want to quote from here:

“According to Stephen Downes, education should help the student to “become the kind of person they want”¹). […] there is the chance that the student themselves readjusts his or her wish about what they want to become. […] if the student’s wish was just to be a rich person without much effort, and now they see that this also entails cultivating recklessness and unsocial skills, which is not what they really want, either?”

OK, if they still do want to become recklessly rich, there is still our chance that they will fail, otherwise we must apply democracy (to neutralize their economic power, the power of the few, built on scarcity, by the political power of the many. I think this aspect of democracy is getting increasingly forgotten, especially if some people think their ‘intellectual’ superpower might be better for the problems than the masses.) So, no to the billionaire with his manifesto.

4. The option of the small town life has a lot of appeal for me, not only because I grew up in a rural place. I remember, the essay title of my final A-levels exam in 1972 was something like “Life off the shelf?” and asked us to compare large city vs. village life; I argued for a smaller town in between.

Later I have come to regard networks where much knowledge (and ethics) is learned “from individuals in one’s close proximity. Via ‘ripple’ effects or, as I expressed it in my first vague post, via contagion. Later I learned that this is compatible with connectivism, see ebb and flow. And it has a lot to do with decentralisation, as opposed to central authorities and templates.” (Copied from this ethics21 post). And I have a lot of respect for indigenous ways of knowing which is similarly learned.

But I am not sure if I would like the hierarchical element suggested by the formulation “passed down across generations”, and the associated stagnation that seems to exclude progress. Also, the context here was about people who don’t leave these places, and I would prefer taking to the road like the journeyman and then come back or not.

So I would aim at option number 1, the promising student, because the potential is important, even if the actual outcome may sometimes be awkward.