From: Stephen Talbott [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Thursday, November 30, 2000 10:09 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: NetFuture #114
NETFUTURE
Technology and Human Responsibility
=========================================================================
Issue #114 A Publication of The Nature Institute November 30, 2000
=========================================================================
Editor: Stephen L. Talbott ([log in to unmask])
On the Web: http://www.netfuture.org/
You may redistribute this newsletter for noncommercial purposes.
NetFuture is a reader-supported publication.
CONTENTS:
---------
Quotes and Provocations
The Nasdaq as Santa Claus?
Technology, Animals, and People
The Pigs of Iowa (Lowell Monke)
Industrialization of the hog
DEPARTMENTS
Correspondence
I Don't Ask `Why?' Often Enough (Anna Gabutero)
Rapid Advance in School Isn't the Key to Success (Mary VanBuskirk)
An Experiment in Delayed Math Teaching (Sanjoy Mahajan)
When It Was Time to Read, I Just Read (Robert Solomon)
When a Child's Precociousness Blinds Teachers (Paul Munday)
Can Children Be Spared Automation? (Frank Thomas Smith)
About this newsletter
=========================================================================
QUOTES AND PROVOCATIONS
The Nasdaq as Santa Claus?
--------------------------
Where have all the daytraders gone?
And what has become of the mantra that was so relentlessly drilled into
our consciousness as recently as a year ago: "The wise investor buys on
the dips and stays the course"?
That's reasonable advice in a bull market, but insanity in a bear market.
Did those investment counselors really believe we had moved beyond bear
markets into an endless succession of guaranteed, double-digit-earning
years? And, if so, did they not realize that this belief, once
transferred to a large enough populace, guarantees an investment bubble?
They were, in fact, running a kind of Ponzi scheme, and instead of owning
up to it now, they intone with unctuous paternalism: "The market
correction is a good thing, since it is teaching the naive American
investor that markets can go down as well as up".
Clearly a lot of people did believe that today's high-tech-driven economy
had transcended all sorts of out-dated and stodgy behavior. For example,
it was (and still is, of course) widely believed that the new economy is
all about creating new needs rather than meeting real and current ones.
There's a faint whiff of the old socialist planner in this notion: the
attempt at arbitrary creation of needs has a rather flippant arrogance to
it -- as if real needs could be dreamed up by a committee in a product
planning meeting.
Of course, the market will winnow the nonsense over time -- and may do so
in an orderly manner when only a few enterprises are following the new
logic. But when entrepreneurs begin to believe en masse that artificial
need-creation is what the whole game is about, then we should hardly be
surprised to find weird, large-scale, and highly disturbing tangents
pursued in the market place. The best guarantee of economic stability is
the earnest effort to meet real needs. It is true that our needs evolve
-- *must* evolve -- and also that they can be educated; but this is a far
cry from the greedy arbitrariness that has come to dominate the market.
Finally, one can see in the current fate of technology stocks yet another
reflection of our penchant to attach grand and inappropriate significance
to whatever the technological tea leaves happen to whisper to us.
Technology just seems to have that effect on us; we can't separate it from
notions of a New Era, despite the fact that a one-sidedly technological
mindset is exactly what forecloses on the very possibility of thinking
creatively about the new.
I believe that technology *is* the bearer of profound significances, and
that we should attend to them. It's just that, so far, we seem to be
getting them all wrong. This fact itself is probably our most important
clue. As I have often urged: there is something in technology that
reinforces our own errant tendencies, requiring us to take up a certain
resistant stance toward it in order to wrest from it the real (and
considerable) benefits it holds out for us.
We can hope most of those daytraders have gone off to school themselves in
this healthy resistance. Their gain from doing so will be vastly greater
than what they would have received if the Dow had run straight up to the
predicted 30,000. Who says technology doesn't bring us gifts?
Technology, Animals, and People
-------------------------------
If you want to see the prevailing tendencies of technology in human
society today writ large and clear, then look at our application of
technology to animals. In factory farms around the country you will find
millions of cows, chickens, and hogs engulfed in a kind of holocaust
pushed a few rungs down the evolutionary ladder. Portentously, this
occurs at a time when we are increasingly disinclined to distinguish those
other rungs from our own.
The basic facts are hardly in dispute, and the literature documenting them
is both vast and readily available to the public. Summarizing the
situation a year and a half ago, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., wrote in an op-ed
piece, "I've reconciled myself to the idea that an animal's life has been
sacrificed to bring me a meal of pork or chicken. However, industrial
meat production -- which subjects animals to a life of torture -- has
escalated the karmic cost beyond reconciliation" (*Newsweek*, April 26,
1999).
And Michael W. Fox, author of *Eating with Conscience*, provides more of
the details than you will probably want to know, including these:
The cruelest fallout from the industrialization of agriculture is the
treatment of farm animals, now coldly referred to as "production
units." One particularly gruesome example of inhumane farming is that
most gourmet, milk-fed veal comes from calves raised in almost complete
isolation for sixteen weeks. They live in narrow crates where they can
neither walk, turn around, nor comfortably lie down. They are fed a
liquid diet laced with antibiotics and low in iron to keep their flesh
pale. In a further effort to keep their flesh pale, the calves are
kept in a state of borderline anemia by depriving them of hay and
roughage, which they crave.
Another example of cruel factory farming is the extremely abusive
practices used in commercial egg houses. More than 90 percent of the
eggs we consume come from laying hens that live in a cage with a floor
space only about twice the dimensions of a regular phone book. Four or
five hens share this space. There is not enough room for the hens to
lie down, fluff their feathers, or even stretch their wings. Because
of the cramped cages, chickens become crazed, pecking one another
severely, sometimes to death. Poultry producers solve this problem by
"de-beaking" the chicks with hot knife machines....
In many commercial sheds, seventy thousand to one hundred thousand or
more laying hens or broilers (raised for meat) crowd together under one
roof. Diseases and infestations often sweep through the flocks at an
alarming speed and require extraordinary applications of various drugs
and toxic chemicals. A Maryland farmer, who now farms organically,
told me that commercial egg factories hyperstimulate young hens with
artificial light to get them to start laying eggs before they are fully
grown. The industry uses the term "blowout" to describe what happens
to some of these hens when they are forced to lay too early -- the
hens' vents (posteriors) burst, and they die.
Broiler flocks have sometimes gone crazy, and in wave upon wave, bash
themselves to death in mass hysteria inside the poultry shed. A
Virginia farmer first told me of these things in 1976. He said that
hearing seventy thousand birds become one mad wave of feathers,
excrement, and death almost drove him crazy, too. Furthermore, hens
are starved for up to thirty hours before they are slaughtered.
Poultry producers reason that any food given during this time would not
be converted to flesh, and [is] therefore a waste.
You can be sure there are technical fixes for all the more disruptive
symptoms of abuse; after all, the operations would hardly remain
economical if chicken flocks regularly went into a self-destructive
frenzy. You can also be sure that, more often than not, the fixes are
further instances of abuse, and that the technical mindset behind the
fixes is the necessary foundation for the entire process of abuse.
Despite the conditions that Kennedy, Fox, and so many others have
described, there has been no great outcry, and the buying public has not
risen up in rebellion. Part of it may have to do with the extreme
insularity of a technologizing and globalizing society. Just as the urban
ghetto and disintegrating rural town are rendered invisible by
superhighways, so, too (as Lowell Monke points out in this issue's feature
article), our efficient, technologically sophisticated systems of animal
"husbandry" have put the sources of our dinner out of sight.
Even so, I still can't imagine that our society would tolerate what goes
on in food production if it weren't for our increasing habituation to
mechanically conceived processes governed by the sterile terms of "input",
"output", and "efficiency". The reduction to numbers and mechanical
abstractions is another way of concealing the world from view. These
scarcely conscious habits of mind, incidentally, reveal a level of
technological consequence that is rarely considered when we talk about the
pluses and minuses associated with machines in the classroom or on the
job.
You may think that the implications of technology for animals have little
to do with the implications for human society. Tell me, then: where is
there any clear articulation of distinct principles for the two cases?
The language of efficiency and technical capability is the same
everywhere, and by its very nature makes no such distinctions. Moreover,
as Lowell's narrative makes clear, the technological manipulation of
animals for human uses is already a technological manipulation of humans.
Just ask those people in Iowa who have been forced, against their wills,
to live with the daily stink and pollution of the hog factories.
By the way, I am a meat-eater, even if I sometimes go lengthy periods
between indulgences. But there is no way I could bring myself to eat meat
if doing so required me to patronize the flesh factories. Fortunately,
there are alternatives, such as organically certified meat (which is
typically more expensive). We face a clear choice here, and one of the
choices is as sick as can be. The other one will doubtless affect your
pocket book -- but in the healthiest possible way for all concerned.
SLT
=========================================================================
THE PIGS OF IOWA
Lowell Monke ([log in to unmask])
At any one time there are between 14 and 15 million hogs in Iowa. That's
about seven times as many pigs as people living in the state. For those
who haven't visited Iowa recently, this statistic may conjure up images of
Babe in the City and hog-crossing signs on the highways. Fifty years ago,
when the number of hogs wasn't much lower, that might almost have been
true. But during the past two years, while I've been thinking about this
article, I've driven thousands of miles along Iowa highways and gravel
roads and have not seen a single pig out the window of my car.
With rare exceptions, Iowa's 15 million hogs spend their lives in long
rows of narrow, low-roofed, windowless buildings called "confinement
units." Hog production in Iowa, and every other state, has gone the way
of chicken production -- to enclosed, highly concentrated, totally managed
environments. Confinement operations are so isolated from anything like a
natural habitat that the pigs wouldn't know the difference if they were
raised in Times Square. This contextless living is made possible, of
course, by a massive application of technology.
Fear of Open Spaces
-------------------
I worked for a time in the 70's on a farm that used some of the new
confinement methods. Earlier, as a youngster, I helped my dad raise what
are now called "free-ranging" hogs, who had considerable area to roam. It
was a lot of work. Hogs are foragers, and therefore natural-born
explorers. They pig-headedly believe that the grass really is always
greener on the other side of the fence. It seemed we were always chasing
loose pigs back into the hog lot and mending fences.
Confinement hogs, on the other hand, not only don't search for ways to get
out of their pens; they won't even go through the gate when you open it.
Raised all their lives in steel and concrete pens with just enough room
for them to trade off at the feeding trough, the pigs are scared to death
of open spaces and refuse to walk through an opening without being pushed.
Though this struck me as neurotic when I first witnessed it (along with an
aversion to open spaces, confined pigs develop a strange appetite for
their penmates' tails, leading to the industry-wide practice of amputating
pigs' tails shortly after birth), there may be some intuitive wisdom at
work here. Because the hogs get almost no exercise in these pens, they
are easily overstressed. The first time I helped move sows on a
confinement farm about 500 yards to a farrowing house (where they give
birth) I was told to be very careful not to spook or hurry them. Just
about the time my coworker got done explaining why, one of the sows
dropped over dead, presumably of a heart attack.
Sows are the most susceptible to these sudden deaths, since they are the
most immobile of the hogs. Throughout the farrowing period they are held
in long, individual slots too narrow to turn around in, with just enough
room to lie down and enough space at the bottom of one side to let the
sucklings, who mill around in a slightly larger adjoining pen, get to
their milk.
The farm I worked on was primitive compared to most of today's operations,
in which the hogs usually never see the outdoors. This is because, with
several thousand hogs being held in tight quarters, the greatest enemy is
the microscopic germ. Disease can sweep through a confinement unit in a
matter of hours, so the "filthy" conditions of the mud wallow must give
way to operating-room sterility -- air filtered, workers scrubbed, as few
external objects entering the building as possible. (My nephew works at a
large facility where he is required to shower and change clothes before
entering any of the buildings.) Still, the danger of catastrophic illness
is so great that antibiotics are generally blended into pig feed in much
the same way we add vitamins to our processed food.
The Virtues of a Factory Operation
----------------------------------
All of this is done, of course, in the name of efficiency. Hogs that have
no room to move, nowhere to go, nothing else to do, tend to belly up to
the food trough more often, and because they don't burn off many of the
calories they take in, they put on weight considerably faster than free-
ranging hogs. Climate-controlled buildings prevent the hogs from using
calories to keep warm or from going off feed when it gets too hot outside.
And the constant flow of antibiotics insures that they will never lose
their appetite or waste calories fighting off illness.
The results of these new methods are impressive. Hogs get to market
nearly a month earlier than when my dad was in the business. There is
less "attrition," and more hogs can be raised per worker on far less land.
The result is that more pigs get to market in a year, meaning more income
for the producer.
There is also an efficiency of scale. By offering a steady and plentiful
supply of large numbers of hogs to processors, growers command a higher
price than the small producer who sends animals to market only a couple of
times a year. This has proven so advantageous economically that vertical
integration -- the total control of hog production by corporations who own
not only the hogs but the feed, transportation, and medicine -- has all
but pushed the small farmer out of production.
To date, Iowa has prohibited the last step in vertical integration, the
ownership of the hogs by the processors themselves. However, other states
lack this restriction and there is growing pressure in Iowa to allow
further vertical integration. (There is also considerable bending of the
rules.) Presumably, it will only be a matter of time before all hog
facilities are owned by the corporations who sell the pork to consumers,
with the actual raising of hogs contracted out to "hog factory" workers.
Even today, most hog farmers using confinement methods do not own the hogs
they raise. They merely grow them for large agricultural corporations.
The farmer still incurs the cost of raising the hogs, but because the
producer corporations can make favorable deals with the processors, the
farmer is guaranteed a "reasonable" price.
Saving the Hog from a Hog's Life
--------------------------------
As anyone living in Iowa (or who has been reading NetFuture) will tell
you, this is not the end of the story. Technological progress always has
side effects, and certainly this has been the case with hog production.
In "The Web and the Plow" (NF #19) I observed that as the machinery got
bigger and the size of farms larger, the relationship between the farmer
and the soil grew more distant. This seems to have happened with a
vengeance in hog production.
Everything that is done with and to the pigs is determined by narrowly
conceived, quantitative measures of efficiency. Transformed into
biological machines in the eyes of the farmer, hogs are abstracted onto
the ledger sheet as numbers pertaining to inputs and outputs, rates of
attrition, pounds gained per pound of feed, cost per head versus price per
pound, and so on. The sterility of the hog's living environment is merely
a reflection of the sterility of agribusiness: a manufacturing process
guided by the need to reduce the growth of living creatures to as little
uncertainty, as much human control, as possible.
Nothing escapes this abstract, quantitative orientation. Several years
ago, Dennis Avery, former senior agricultural analyst for the U.S.
Department of State, wrote an opinion column for the *Des Moines Register*
/1/ defending hog factories. Among his claims were the following:
"[W]e're producing 50 percent more meat per hog, partly because the hogs
are becoming healthier and happier as more of them move indoors."
Considering my own experience watching the sow die of heart failure and
the neuroses of the feeder pigs, I wondered as I read this how he was
going to support these two claims. His only other allusion to hog health
and happiness came midway through the article:
Confinement hogs suffer lower death losses. Apart from the obvious
question of the needless suffering of the hogs, 10 percent of the crop
is lost when 10 percent more of the outdoor pigs die than confinement
hogs.
Leaving Avery's erroneous and misleading math aside, it is evident that he
is assessing the health of the hogs, not by any observation of robustness,
but solely by a statistical measure of their ability to survive until
slaughter (an odd measuring tool, considering that death comes several
weeks earlier for confined pigs). As for happiness, Avery seems to imply
that all a hog needs in order to be happy is freedom from the stress of
dealing with the vicissitudes of outdoor living. Thus, the overcrowded
pigs milling around on concrete floors, doing little more than eating and
sleeping, are happier than the pigs I used to see squeal with delight as
they romped around in our fields, burning off precious, expensive calories
while exposing themselves to all the wind, rain, mud, heat, and cold that
lead to their "needless suffering" (and slower growth). That the confined
pigs would almost certainly die in their cages within a few weeks if their
high-tech life-support system were removed seems not to enter into Avery's
definition of health and happiness.
Then, too, there's the question of human health and happiness.
Raising a Stink
---------------
About as many hogs reside in Iowa today as in the 1950s. Back then the
stink of hog manure was something that constituted a minor annoyance in
the countryside, depending on the direction of the wind. Most farms were
set up so that the livestock were situated to the northeast of the farm
house, so the prevailing southwestern breeze of summer would send the
smell out into the fields. With only a couple hundred head of hogs per
farm, the smell rarely became oppressive, even for someone standing in the
hog lot. Not so when that same space is occupied by 10,000 head of hogs
producing about as much waste as a city of 25,000 people.
The waste is generally caught in large lagoons and eventually spread on
fields. The smell is intense and constant, and those who live close by
(within about a two-mile radius) find it not just annoying but
debilitating. At first the complaints of neighbors were pooh-poohed by
the mostly absentee owners of the hog operations. ("Hey, that's just the
smell of money.") Because there is as yet no accepted way to measure
toxic levels of odor, there was no "scientific" way to establish levels of
smell pollution. The headaches, nausea and other ailments that neighbors
of the hog factories complained about were passed off as psychosomatic.
But as significant numbers of hog workers began suffering "real" physical
illnesses (and even a few deaths) from over-exposure to hydrogen sulfide
gas, an effort has begun to address the problem. And it is the nature of
this effort that I find illuminating. Rather than reconsider the high-
tech, concentrated method of raising the hogs, researchers within the
industry and at universities like Iowa State have focused on developing
new technologies that will somehow remove or suppress the smell from the
manure. The National Pork Producers Council alone has allocated $3.5
million dollars to help find technical solutions to the odor problem. One
innovation, the Houle spreader, injects the effluent into the soil,
effectively suppressing the stench.
But there is just too much of the stuff for the soil to hold, and it often
leaches through to water tables. There it joins with other fertilizer
runoff to pose a growing health hazard throughout Iowa: nitrate-laced
drinking water. Many of the holding lagoons themselves, which took years
of research to design so as to seal off the waste from the soil, have
leaked badly. Several have recently broken down, spilling into streams
and killing hundreds of thousands of fish. Now, huge, glass-lined tubs
are being developed as an alternative.
Getting Used to It
------------------
In his last book, *The Technological Bluff*, Jacques Ellul /2/ contended
that every new technical solution creates other problems more difficult to
solve than the original one. And, of course, Langdon Winner /3/ has
elaborated on the way large technical systems eventually begin making
their own demands on us. The hog industry in Iowa testifies to the
accuracy of these claims. Every new problem caused by technical solutions
has resulted in expensive efforts to find technical solutions to that
problem, and with each new problem-and-fix cycle, high-tech agriculture
becomes more heavily anchored, more problematic, and more expensive. As
the challenges become more complex, the ability of farmers, especially
small farmers, to deal with them erodes. As Avery notes with apparent
satisfaction, "The Houle spreader costs $25,000, and small farmers can't
afford them."
More and more, the people raising hogs are, like my nephew, not farmers at
all, but simply employees. They know hogs, but did not plant or harvest
the corn that the hogs eat. Indeed, they may never have planted a crop at
all. Like the hogs they raise, they have very little connection to
nature, and little sense of agriculture's deep dependence on nature's
gifts. Like good technicians in other fields, they encounter the problems
in their units and seek technical solutions within the narrow parameters
of that environment. To a great extent, any problems extending out beyond
their buildings are someone else's problems.
This technological orientation has pervaded agriculture for a long time.
But only in the last several decades has agriculture detached itself so
thoroughly from the natural environment and become so technologically
complex that its demands on the human population have become widely
perceived as problematic.
Some of the problems have evaded technical solution altogether and people
have been required to adapt to them. Odor remains, for now, one of those
problems. In response, the Iowa legislature has passed two extraordinary
bills protecting hog factories from the very communities they once were
touted as serving. One bill excludes the factories from nuisance laws;
they cannot be sued by neighbors for the pollution and misery they cause
(not to mention lowered property values). The other denies the right of
counties to ban new hog factories through zoning laws. Having invested so
heavily in the development and establishment of this form of hog
production, and having been assured by researchers that all the current
problems will be solved in time, the state has simply told its
disempowered citizens, "Get used to it."
Dilapidated Towns
-----------------
The consequences of technologized agriculture are not confined to the
physical environment and the immediately surrounding communities. The
entire fabric of rural life has been thrown into decline. In 1900 there
were 229,000 farms in Iowa, nearly all operated by resident families.
During the 1980's, when massive machinery and computerized management
enabled massive operations, Iowa lost nearly a third of its farms. By
1998 there were only 97,000 farms left, many of them owned by individuals
or corporations with no direct involvement in the farm work at all.
This consolidation of farms has had a devastating effect on rural
economies. A Houle spreader may cause $25,000 to change hands, but most
of the money for such equipment drains quickly from the community into
distant corporate coffers. Much of the profit from the largest hog
factories benefits absentee owners and never reenters the local economy at
all. A study conducted by the University of Missouri found that
Independent producers create three times as many jobs as corporate
contract production. For each 12,000 slaughter hogs produced under
corporate contract, the study estimated that 9.44 jobs would be created
(4.25 on the farm and 5.19 in the community) but that 27.97 would be
displaced (12.6 on the farm and 15.37 off the farm) /4/.
Another study, this one in Virginia, found that adding 5,000 hogs to a
local area across a number of small farms produced 10% more permanent
jobs, a 20% larger increase in local retail sales, and a 37% larger
increase in local per capita income, compared to the same number of hogs
added through corporate farming /5/.
Rural Iowa has lost nearly a third of its population in the last 50 years.
What were once thriving small towns populated by multigenerational
families, are now either bedroom communities for nearby cities or near-
ghost towns, home primarily to aging retirees.
My wife's home town of Luverne is situated in the midst of some of the
lushest top soil on Earth. Like many other small towns in Iowa today, it
resembles much more an inner city ghetto than a Norman Rockwell painting.
Most of the town is boarded up, and many of the old homes are badly in
need of repair, occupied mostly by transients and the elderly. There is
little work and there are no services that would make the town an
attractive place to live. Most of the farm houses and magnificent barns
that once bracketed every section of land nearby have been torn down, and
the islands of trees that inevitably surrounded the farmsteads have given
way to the ocean of corn needed to feed the constantly hungry hogs.
Unbounded Faith in the System
-----------------------------
As for the small farmers that remain, the irony is that, despite all the
economic benefits they bring to the community, this doesn't necessarily
translate into a profitable business for the farmer. Although price
discrimination favoring the huge producers is prohibited by law, the U.S.
Department of Agriculture refuses to enforce the law. In a telling
justification for allowing "volume premiums" (and a good illustration of
the ideological reductionism in agricultural policymaking that ignores all
but the narrowest of economic factors) one official stated bluntly,
"Volume premiums are the American way" /6/.
Caught up in an almost religious faith in technology, many of those most
likely to be hurt in the future seem unable to understand just what it is
they are struggling against. Last summer the *Cedar Rapids Gazette* /7/
interviewed Kevin Lauver, who at forty years old has finally fulfilled his
dream of becoming a farmer. He managed this only because his father
retired and Kevin didn't have to mortgage his entire future earnings to
buy the high-tech equipment he needed to farm five hundred acres.
"Lauver, who now farms seven hundred acres," says the article, "knows that
efficiency-driven consolidation could eventually force small-to medium-
sized farms like his out of business." And, yet, "he believes the markets
will rebound and technology that will make it easier for farmers to do
their jobs will mean a strong future for agriculture." At the end of the
article, ignoring his own personal history, Lauver reportedly again
expresses his faith that technology will somehow be the salvation of his
family farm: "Lauver is determined to take advantage of each new advance
in technology, allowing his two young sons to grow up on the same farm he
did."
I think this *Gazette* article captures well the irony of agriculture's
relationship with technology, one that hog factories epitomize. While I
wish Mr. Lauver well, I wonder how many other children will have to be
deprived of growing up on a farm as he gobbles up the land and applies the
new advances in technology needed to make his personal dream come true.
A final caveat or two. First, I am not suggesting that rural America
should be frozen in a time capsule, exempt from all forces of change.
And, second, I'm not a card-carrying member of PETA (People for the
Ethical Treatment of Animals). I remember the high-pitched squeals of
pain from the male pigs we castrated soon after birth (so they wouldn't
fight when they got older) and the exhausting days I spent holding older
pigs still so my dad could "ring" them (clamp a metal ring through their
noses to keep them from rooting up our pasture grass).
Raising pigs commercially has long entailed a certain degree of cruelty.
Perhaps this helps explain why hardly anyone in Iowa today objects loudly
to the pigs' treatment. And yet, there is no absolute necessity for
cruelty. We *could* have applied our technological prowess to traditional
hog-farming so as to reduce the need for mistreatment rather than to
increase it radically -- and, likewise, we could have used appropriate
technologies to increase the vitality of rural communities rather than to
destroy them.
It's a question of choice (by consumers as well as farmers), and that's
the element that seems to have fallen out of the technological worldview.
When, aiming for total control and mechanical efficiency, we reduce the
concrete contexts of life to the abstractions of an algorithmic production
process, it's no accident that we lose sight of the larger moral and
social implications of our choices. And this means that we lose choice
itself. Thus, a century after Frederick Winslow Taylor introduced "The
One Best Way" to factory production, its application to farming, an
activity in which working and living are totally intermeshed, has taken
place with a fatalistic disregard for its impact on the quality of rural
life -- both human and animal.
This transformation has been painful for me to watch. Yet pain is often
what awakens us to choices previously ignored. One might hope that due
reflection upon the suffering of millions of hogs -- creatures who feed us
and even provide the tissues that patch up our own ailing hearts -- will
lead to such an awakening on this issue.
Lowell Monke, PhD
Assistant Professor of Education
Wittenberg University
Springfield, OH 45503
937-327-6422
[log in to unmask]
NOTES
1. Avery, Dennis, "Big Hog Farms Help the Environment", *Des Moines
Register* (December 7, 1997).
2. Ellul, Jacques, *The Technological Bluff* (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B.
Eerdmans, 1990).
3. Winner, Langdon, *Autonomous Technology* (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1977).
4. ICRP Discussion Points: Family Farms vs. Hog Factories, 1997
(http://www.farmweb.org/b/icrppoints.htm).
5. Ibid.
6. Hassebrook, Chuck, "Say Yes to Common Good in Farming," *Des Moines
Register* (December 24, 1999), pg. 7A.
7. Associated Press, "Farming in the Millennium" (June 20, 1999),
(http://www.gazetteonline.com/agri/ag682.htm).
Related articles
----------------
** See the "Agriculture" heading in the NetFuture topical index
(www.netfuture.org/inx_topical_all.html).
=========================================================================
CORRESPONDENCE
I Don't Ask `Why?' Often Enough
-------------------------------
From: Anna Gabutero <[log in to unmask]>
Hi,
I just received my first issue of NetFuture (#113), and it was thought-
provoking enough to make me go through your archives. I find your ideas
(especially those concerning computers and education) both troubling and
interesting -- I'm on my third year of college, majoring in computer
science, and I never thought about it this way before. It appears I still
don't ask `Why?' often enough.
I haven't found anything I can disagree with yet, but that's just probably
due to shock. =) I'm sure this feeling will subside in the next few
days, as your ideas reach a compromise with mine, but you've definitely
given me much to think about. Thank you.
Anna
Rapid Advance in School Isn't the Key to Success
------------------------------------------------
Response to: "Do We Really Want Higher Test Scores?" (NF-113)
From: Mary VanBuskirk <[log in to unmask]>
I could not agree more. I am continually baffled by parents who are
obsessed by high intelligence and rapid progress through schools. Of
course, I am not a parent, and would perhaps see things differently if I
were one, but it seems to me that, perhaps given a basic threshold of
intelligence, success in life by any measure you choose (financial gain,
prestige, happiness, whatever) is facilitated by social and communication
skills, motivation, drive and focus, and not at all by intelligence. I
know more highly intelligent people who are unhappy and unfulfilled.
Rapid progress through the school system can be calculated precisely to
reduce (if not eliminate) the development of social skills by guaranteeing
that the child is placed in an alien environment. Here I do speak from
experience -- how does a shy thirteen-year-old learn to interact with
fifteen-year-old classmates?
Love your newsletter -- keep up the good work!
Mary VanBuskirk
An Experiment in Delayed Math Teaching
--------------------------------------
Response to: "Do We Really Want Higher Test Scores?" (NF-113)
From: Sanjoy Mahajan <[log in to unmask]>
Dear Stephen,
In Issue #107 you say (about learning to read):
The idea that earlier is better is one of the strangest notions ever to
seize hold of parents. Why not assume that later is better? Certainly
it can be easier, with much less stress and alienation on the child's
part. Children all have their own rates of development, and it is
impossible to comprehend all the suffering that results from forcibly
subjecting them to the standardized schemas of school and labeling them
accordingly.
You may be interested in an experiment in mathematics teaching, carried in
the schools of Manchester, NH -- no formal arithmetic until grade six.
Till then arithmetic was done only as the need arose (page numbers in
readers, using the index, estimating lengths, etc.), and students spent
the time instead in reading and telling stories and enjoying learning.
The author of the experiment, Supt. Louis Benezet, describes it in his
classic papers, which are at the Benezet Centre:
http://wol.ra.phy.cam.ac.uk/sanjoy/benezet
-Sanjoy
* * * * * * * * *
Sanjoy --
Some fascinating material on that web site. Many NetFuture readers will
be interested in it. As for Benezet, here's one snippet I extracted from
the introduction to his papers:
I feel that it is all nonsense to take eight years to get children thru
the ordinary arithmetic assignment of the elementary schools. What
possible needs has a ten-year-old child for a knowledge of long
division? The whole subject of arithmetic could be postponed until the
seventh year of school, and it could be mastered in two years' study by
any normal child.
(A similar point applies to today's "computer literacy" education.) It
remains, of course, to get a handle on what "pre-math" education could
look like. You may remember a piece back in NF #80 called "The Toddler as
Geometrician". There I quoted John Alexandra on teaching children that
the shortest distance between two points is a straight line: "But even
one-year-old children already know this: when frightened, they will run
to their parents in the straightest of straight lines." Alexandra went
on:
At that age, however, they know it only in their legs, where this
knowledge is unconscious, asleep. The mathematics teacher's task is to
draw out and make conscious what children already know unconsciously,
rather than to push concepts into their memories. Teaching through
movement and art does not reduce the accuracy of the resulting intel-
lectual concept. It enhances the concept so it can be experienced
through the whole human being. Art thus becomes a fundamental medium
of education, even for academic subjects.
The time will come, of course, when the student's concepts need to be
sophisticated, intellectual, and fully conscious. He'll stand the best
chance of gaining such concepts if we let them form at an appropriate age,
having first allowed the knowledge implicit in movement and imagination to
ripen to its fullest. Then it's partly a matter of making explicit what
is already implicit.
Steve
When It Was Time to Read, I Just Read
-------------------------------------
Response to: "Do We Really Want Higher Test Scores?" (NF-113)
From: Robert Solomon <[log in to unmask]>
Dear Steve,
I learned to read in fourth grade. Couldn't do it before then. I was
interested in reading a particular book and just picked it up and read it.
Bob Solomon
When a Child's Precociousness Blinds Teachers
---------------------------------------------
Response to: "Do We Really Want Higher Test Scores?" (NF-113)
From: Paul Munday <[log in to unmask]>
When I read your piece "Do We Really Want Higher Test Scores?" from NF
#113, I was reminded of a conversation I had had with a friend who, like
myself, had had the misfortune of being labelled a "gifted" child, and I
thought you and perhaps your readers might like to share it.
We were talking about our common experiences, in particular a precocious
interest and ability in maths (something which, hot-housing parents should
note, has failed to persist into adulthood). My friend, who has the
enviable ability to cut straight to the heart of these matters, said of
this: "why did no one ask the one blindingly obvious question -- why are
you sitting inside reading maths books instead of going outside and
playing with all the other kids?"
I often wonder why no one asked this simple question and why no one seemed
to grasp the equally obvious answer -- that we found maths easy and the
unpredictable, human business of socialization difficult. Equally strange
is that, seemingly blinded by our abilities, no one sought to question
what use they were to a child. I think I can confidently answer that they
were of no use at all except as a means of hiding away from the world.
As both of us agreed at the time, had someone had the insight to ask these
simple questions, our paths in life to where we are today might have been
considerably easier. I can only shudder in horror on reading of some of
the pressures placed upon children today, and think, if I might be
permitted to draw a metaphor from elsewhere in your newsletter, that in
human life, perhaps even more so than in plant life, the valorization of
(a narrowly intellectual) monoculture over (social) diversity can have
many unforeseen and potentially dangerous effects.
yours,
Paul Munday.
Can Children Be Spared Automation?
----------------------------------
Response to: "The Trouble with Ubiquitous Technology Pushers (Part 3)"
(NF-112)
From: Frank Thomas Smith <[log in to unmask]>
Dear Steve,
I would like to comment about your article "To Automate or Re-enflesh?"
[part 3 of "The Trouble with Ubiquitous Technology Pushers"] in NF #122.
All the readers of your article are adults and most are probably willing
to at least take the warnings seriously. Nevertheless, the impulse to
automate everything automatable, under the impression that to do so is
beneficial, is a widespread phenomenon. We adults can say: Wait a minute
-- do we really want this? But what about the children -- who have no way
of knowing what is happening to them?
The pervasiveness of automation is relatively new, so we grew up in a
milieu quite different from the one our children are experiencing. We sit
at home working and playing with computers, and our kids, those imitators
par excellence, naturally want to do the same. And they do, in their own
way -- especially with the games. Do we forbid? Difficult, when they are
only copying us. At most we can impose limits of time and content if we
don't wish to be looked upon as scrooges.
But what about the schools? There is a campaign afoot to computerize
education -- from kindergarten on up -- and this is the most dangerous.
If the adult world is on the road to total automation, can not at least
children be spared, can not schools wait until children reach the
appropriate age for automation? You mentioned the necessity for finding
reasonable stopping places. I suggest that the most urgent stopping place
is in school -- at least in pre-and primary schools. Difficult, I know,
because this is an extremely lucrative business for soft and hardware
companies who, together with the politicians, have convinced parents that
their kids should be computer literate before their milk-teeth fall out.
In Argentina, where I live, the president has promised that before his
mandate ends there will be a computer in every classroom; this in a
country where many children can't even afford pencils and notebooks and
the educational system is a shambles. Your excellent article will be
reprinted in the next issue (November-December) of SouthernCross Review.
Kind regards,
Frank
Frank Thomas Smith
http://www.SouthernCrossReview.org
=========================================================================
ABOUT THIS NEWSLETTER
NetFuture is a freely distributed newsletter dealing with technology and
human responsibility. It is published by The Nature Institute, 169 Route
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Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst*.
Copyright 2000 by The Nature Institute.
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