Personal Blogs

Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop'd and window'd raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta'en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,
And show the heavens more just.

King Lear Act 3, scene 4, 28–36

Weller traces the metaphor of scarcity to classical economics in his paper, (A pedagogy of abundance), but the metaphor has, of course a longer history than that and one that ties it down to issues of social justice – so brilliantly comprehended by King Lear in his madness outside in a storm and experiencing ‘scarcity’ for the first time.

Of course it was always going to be the case that capitalism in its advent and after justified the obvious inequality between capital and labour by pretending that ‘scarcity’ was a metaphor of the human condition – in the socio-economic ‘myth’ of Robinson Crusoe for instance, although there were others (Marx called them ‘Robinsonades’).

I’m not saying this just to quibble with Weller but to emphasise that education and scarcity was usually a relation experienced first by the poor ‘houseless wretches’, and to emphasise that the internet accidentally and alone does not remedy poverty by the provision of abundance.

We still have to look at the quality of what is distributed in any network and to whom. The metaphor I prefer here is Lear’s one of superfluity – things that flow on and above any need or wish that might be ever felt, other than in a system of regulated desire that has become its own self-justification, the market. The market in modern society depends on the production of wishes and their commodification as things and it is the market (described as ‘free’ and ‘open’ by its lovers but actually nothing of the sort) that has been the mechanism of unequal distributions of ‘abundance’ and ‘scarcity’ with respect to material matters.

That doesn’t mean that we are not in a new pedagogic situation. One of superfluity. That something is superfluous to our needs and wishes does not mean that it is valueless but only that its value is limited to those who learn to value it – and that can go for ‘One Direction’ memorabilia as much as for ‘King Lear’. But it does mean that, faced with a ‘superflux’ of choices, we need skills to help us to come to know what we value, including what we might value given adequate comprehension, and how to select from the superflux what meets the criteria of personal value (it need be no more than that) we have allowed ourselves to develop.

So in a new pedagogy, we have:

1. Excess of potential learning objects of undifferentiated value as they cascade down to us;

2. No universal or absolute authorised or agreed prescribed criteria of value of ‘what is best for us’ (we used to – people called ‘Shakespeare ‘eternal’ and all kinds of other absolutes, Matthew Arnold thought culture 'the best that has been thought');

3. A recipient population of learners whose needs and wishes, it has never been in the interests of an unequal society to develop.

What we need is what Paolo Freire called, ‘a pedagogy of the oppressed’, a means by which people develop both the quality of the cognitions that frame wishes and with it an ability to discriminate between things which will meet developing needs and a need for development, rather than merely supporting them in the stagnant status quo.

So, teachers need simultaneously:

1. To offer access to the superflux of abundant resources;

2. Help people to understand their needs by developing their cognition and metacognition (thoughts and ways of evaluating their thoughts).

Learners can only cope with ‘abundance’ in stages:

1. Exposure to the  ‘superflux’, including the ability to be overwhelmed and know why they are overwhelmed;

2. Ability to organise and sort the material via cognition;

3. Ability to evaluate the material once it has been processed;

4. Ability to know that they have made a  ‘selection’ but it is not the only one they could have made or might make as they learn more, ‘metacognition’

I suppose I labour all this to attack what I believe to be the real enemy, which is the ‘philosophy’ of associationism (a modern re-vamp of behaviourism) and recognised in computer and brain sciences by the term ‘connectionism’. The guru of this view in philosophy is Paul Churchland and its Churchland who fed to Siemens and Downes the framework of connectivism.

It’s all just behaviourism or ‘associationism’, they say in the end. We know nothing except by the virtue of contingent and accidental associations. What we know forms patterns to which we give names but they are patterns that change in the chaos of complex interconnectivity. Knowledge and skill are just examples of 'pattern recognition'.

We therefore don’t need a ‘pedagogy of abundance’ but a pedagogy of emergent criteria that allow us to make choices and selections in a newly emerging world. In the latest ERSC general national report (for 2015), it is reported that the main mechanism differentiating access to university by class is the poorer choices of school subjects working class children make. I don’t see that connection as accidental, even though I do not see it as planned. It is a reflection of inequalities running throughout a society where social justice has a low cognitive priority. Let’s go back and construct or re-construct – not be slave to the accidents of association.