Jonathan ... I applaud your analysis of the role of mis-education. In 1993
the Conservative govt published its science white paper: Realising Our
Potential: A Strategy for Science, Engineering and Technology. At the time
there was much disquiet about the manner in which this was pushing for "key
cultural change" that would turn publically funded universities to the
service of industry and the military. I was on the staff of the Faculty of
Science and Engineering in Edinburgh University at the time. I published a
critique of the White Paper in Environmental Values, and I vividly remember
one of my professorial superiors, on seeing a draft, sending it back with
the words, "Be Careful" written across it. Various meetings were held in
Edinburgh University to discuss its implications. I remember a dean in the
humanities saying that all faculties were seeing it as being a template not
just for science, but for how the govt expected academia in general to be
moving.

Interestingly, on a quick search on the web I can find refernce to
"Realising our potential" but not the actual document. Below are some
extracts of my critique ... there's enough quotes there, with ref numbers to
the sections, to get the jist of what it was saying. Doubtless you are
already aware of this, but I often think of 1993 as being a seminal turning
point - the official point at which universities were told to start
filtering the service of knowledge via the service of money and the
military.

Alastair.


First published in Environmental Values, 5:1, 1996, pp. 3-30.
http://www.alastairmcintosh.com/articles/1996_emperor.htm

The White Paper opens with the statement that, "The understanding and
application of science are fundamental to the fortunes of modern nations ...
(being) intimately linked with progress across the whole range of human
endeavour.... They provide ... a vital part of humankind's armoury for
solving long-standing, world-wide problems, such as poverty and disease, and
for addressing new global challenges such as those facing the environment"
(1.1). ...


Science is to be the first line of defence in the armoury which Britain's
historic role in free trade demands. ... Without alluding to any critique of
techno-economic history and its environmental consequences, the Paper says:
"The history of the United Kingdom has shown the intimate connection between
free trade, the application of science to tradeable products, and national
prosperity. The industrial revolution which played so large a part in
creating the modern world was made possible by our great engineers of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In a world where ever fiercer
competition prevails, history's lessons are highly pertinent" (1.2).

... science must "generate relevant and industrially applicable results"
(1.8). The paradigmatic mindset is one in which, "The major challenge facing
the United Kingdom today is an economic one. The nation's first priority
must be to improve the performance of the economy to meet the competitive
challenge..." (2.1). It is therefore necessary that "opportunities should be
generated, on a much larger scale, for interaction between scientists and
businessmen involved in the day-to-day business of selling in competitive
markets" (2.29).


While acknowledging that "science and technology do not respect political or
national boundaries (6.1), ....  through the Technology Partnership
Initiative the UK is willing to build on its "track record in transferring
environmentally-sound technologies"  to developing countries and "the
Overseas Development Administration has a key role to play in promoting
sustainable development in countries supported by the British Aid Programme"
(6.4). Notwithstanding the weighty consideration given to the topic in the
Government's White Paper on the Environment (This Common Inheritance, 1990),
this is the only mention made of sustainability in the Science and
Technology White Paper.

In a chapter on defence science and technology, the Paper notes that, "As
the Gulf conflict illustrated, technology can provide the decisive edge in
military operations" (4.1). It is in this chapter that the only mention is
made of a specific environmental technology: "water pollution control" (4.7)
is cited as one of the 'spin-offs' from military research. New conceptual
ground is broken with the frank statement that military purchases of
commercial technology "produces opportunities for 'spin-in' from the civil
to the defence sector" (4.6).

Measures such as the Defence Research Agency's Pathfinder programme will
ease opportunities for industry and "allow industry to influence the nature
of the Agency's work to facilitate wider future applications" (4.12). In
these respects the White Paper is commendable for its openness in rendering
so lucid the relationship between state and the military-industrial complex
which has placed Britain second in the league of global arms exporters, with
20% of world market share (Guardian Weekly, 12-9-93).


.... The White Paper attempts to address this, expressing such pedagogical
intentions as: "The government wishes to harness the intellectual resources
of the science and engineering base (ie. graduates from tertiary educational
institutes) to improve economic performance and the quality of life".
Reference to this happening, "in future" (3.9), indicates policy change. It
is suggested that PhD training in universities should become "more closely
related to the needs of industry" (7.17).

  .... The White Paper attempts to address this, expressing such pedagogical
intentions as: "The government wishes to harness the intellectual resources
of the science and engineering base (ie. graduates from tertiary educational
institutes) to improve economic performance and the quality of life".
Reference to this happening, "in future" (3.9), indicates policy change. It
is suggested that PhD training in universities should become "more closely
related to the needs of industry" (7.17).

As graduates undertaking a PhD are in mature control of their own lives,
there is little cause for concern here and many would welcome a move towards
more applied PhD research. But such is not the case for children within an
age category or a social class where schooling to a government curriculum is
compulsory. Of these, the Paper disturbingly states that, "the Government
... has embarked on a radical agenda of changes in the education and
training system, including changes in the school curriculum ... for the
whole of compulsory schooling". This will "ensure for the first time that
all pupils, girls as well as boys, will study a broad and balanced programme
of science and technology right through to the age of 16" (7.2). It
continues, "more young people must perceive science and engineering in
industry as an attractive and worthwhile career. They must also see the
value of developing the entrepreneurial skills which will help businesses
exploit more effectively the results of research, science and technological
development" (7.7).



-----Original Message-----
From: Discussion list for the Crisis Forum
[ mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Jonathan Ward
Sent: 09 November 2009 17:31
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Recent Royal Society of Edinburgh climate change event

Dear All,

Picking up where Tom left off, and in conjunction with Nick's comments, I'd
like to wade in with what I see as a crucial area.

I spent many torturous months this year researching and writing my thesis.
The thesis aimed to identify whether the impact of educational reform in
England during the period of 1979-2005 could be part of the explanation for
a notable gap between action and rhetoric on sustainability goals.
Furthermore, it aimed to posit a hypothesis that, not only have the reforms
contributed to unsustainability, they have also left significant numbers of
school-leavers and graduates without the appropriate cognitive skills,
normative values, social goals and philosophical understanding to translate
increasing environmental awareness into the necessary individual and social
action.
    The hypothesis used a novel employment of the concepts of
path-dependency and normative values to demonstrate how the market-led
reforms could be continually culturally legitimised, and how those reforms
left a lasting impression upon individuals and society. The thesis
demonstrated the importance of education as a tool for achieving national
goals and creating structural relations and value-sets in society.

My main findings were in summary:

    *

      Education has become a market with increasing corporate
      involvement at all levels. Its main purpose is to improve the
      economic performance of England.

    *

      The government has been steadily moving from provider to
      commissioner of education and public services which reduces
      democratic control and promotes a view that private-sector values
      are the most desirable for all forms of life.

    *

      Knowledge is a key component of the English educational system,
      but is subject to utilitarian market values. Knowledge and
      policy-formation is under control from dominant power relations
      and discourses which favour business interests.

    *

      Key skills of literacy and numeracy are another key component, but
      cognitive and philosophical skills which aid individual learning
      have not been considered key. The ability to follow instructions
      has been prized more than creativity or the ability to understand
      and contextualise information.

    *

      The successive reforms have reduced the autonomy of teachers to
      anonymous Fordist-workers, and reduced the critical autonomy of
      students creating a cultural legitimation of the hegemonic
      economic discourse.

    *

      Market values have resulted in a culture of short-term targets,
      limited and discrete curricular goal-orientation, accountability
      through testing and intense competition. As a result social goals
      and skills have been diminished at a normative level along with
      long term and holistic thinking.

    *

      The system has resulted in inequality and promotes a physically
      and socially unsustainable model rather than an egalitarian
      localised comprehensive system.

    *

      Environmental knowledge has been taught within a science framework
      that is based upon a humanist utilitarian view of nature which
      forgoes the social construction of the environment.

    *

      A narrowly defined concept of meritocracy threatens to leave a
      more permanent class system disengaging people from society.

    *

      The expansion of higher education has led to increasing strains
      upon the objectivity of institutions as corporate funds are sought
      and rising fees favour the middle- and upper-classes, again
      resulting in social inequality.

A couple of excerpts:
The graduates of the English educational system in the last thirty years
have been systematically imbued with utilitarian free-market views that work
on commodification and individualism. Success has been marketed as getting
high-grades, meeting targets and achieving high wages, to elevate ourselves
above our peers, often marked by material benefits.
As such we look for short-term ways to improve our lot, where basic
knowledge or 'key skills' are more important that understanding and critical
autonomy.  Britain is now neo-Fordist: the assembly lines have moved to the
office in the KBE. The loss of social goals, critical autonomy and reflexive
views of knowledge and learning, and indeed wider ranges of what constitutes
a 'successful' person, has left a large part of the population unable to
link environmental and sustainability knowledge to their own actions and to
power relations. Key generations of English citizens are task-oriented, but
not challenging of orthodoxies or concerned with placing the problems
discussed here into an holistic understanding which identifies root causes
of problems, not just dealing with symptoms. Empathy is lost through the
ascendency of individualism, and natural and social goals have reduced
intrinsic value rendering real sustainable changes impossible.
    The challenges of sustainability and climate change are ones that relate
to the fundamental modes of human behaviour, and as such, with education
clearly being the social tool for creating societal structure, values and
norms, we must re-examine the fundamentals of society, with education being
at the top of the list. We are approaching a critical point in tackling
environmental degradation which requires long-term, equitable and holistic
approaches based upon genuine sustainability criteria. These concepts sit
uneasily alongside the current socio-economic and political systems in the
majority of nations.
Contemporary economic growth depends on high levels of consumption and a
willingness and desire for more that is not, and should never be, sated.
In addition, to reach these levels of ever increasing services and
consumption, dedicated and flexible skills are needed to ensure an expanding
and more productive workforce (population) is present to carry out this
work.
    Sustainability requires strong collaboration with community based ideals
and solutions. This is clearly incompatible with the evolution of the
English education system that has evolved from the evocative speech of
Callaghan back in 1976. and all the subsequent reforms of the New Right and
New Labour. Another impact upon behaviour and norms generated by the
resulting marketisation of education, is the indoctrination of marketisation
traits in the broader population at large. An uncritical acceptance of
marketisation leads to a loss of democratic control from governments to
corporations. The level of democracy then depends on what information the
market operates on, and what are externalities for it.
Many of the aspects of life and society that sustainability cherishes may
possess little incentive for capital investment or monetary value, rendering
them unheeded by markets. At the heart of markets is the desire to make
profit. Increasingly, profit is assessed on a short-term basis in accordance
with the demands of shareholders. What generates profit, particularly in the
short term, does not correlate automatically with what is good for society.
Therefore, a radical overhaul of power-relations and governance is needed if
any sustainability reforms, especially educational, are to come to light.
    Sustainability clearly requires holistic thinking and integrated
approaches to policy and planning. In educational terms, environmental
education and sustainability cannot be taught as a subject. It cannot role
out along linear, positivist lines. It must be integrated across all of
education and be more process, and philosophical, in its basis, than
knowledge based. What is science other than a social act of discovery, a
form of rigorous inquisition? Science has been placed at the forefront of
the National Curriculum in the UK, but it has been reduced to principally a
form of Knowledge transfer served to arm young people with the knowledge to
allow the nation's economy to expand. The primary skill learned, is that of
so-called 'parrot-fashion' learning.
Regurgitation of spoon-fed 'facts'. Our economic modus operandi is soaked in
marketisation, and, with it, specialisation.


For me, education is both a tool for, and a mirror of the, surrounding IPE
and domestic ideologies, but there is a path-dependency, albeit a remediable
one, in the evolution of these processes. We need to harness education and
integrate it into environmental planing and for the sake of democracy and
society too, utilising the fact that education can teach people preferable
normative values, social goals (as opposed to simply atomised competitive
traits), and importantly the ability to learn and challenge. Sustainability
will always be changing, even if one can somehow define it. It's a dynamic
and reflexive process that projects forwards, so it is informed by
knwoledge, but built on skills, norms and cognitive abilities.

Those of you who teach will know what I mean by people passing exams to get
grades, not to get understanding. In such a system, what good does it do to
introduce a class on sustainability?

I hope this adds to the debate, and if anyone is interested in the full
thesis, I am more than happy to send it to them rather than have it rot away
on my hard-drive.

Best wishes

Jonathan



Barker, Tom wrote:
> That argument is not valid. Thatcher, however misdirected she was, was
> not a dictator. She was out within weeks of revealing the solidity of
> her anti-Europe position. Since then, the Tory membership have come
> out on her side to a rather significant extent, so the official
> position has changed, but it could change back at any time.  Any
> sustainable future must involve the democratic process, surely.  Even
> the limited democracy that we have is better than relying on the whims
> of a 'benign dictator'. We need to move forwards, not backwards.
>
> Did you notice the call from the government this week for greater
> coordination between universities and industry, in order to ensure
> that students emerged from their degrees as fully formed industry
> fodder  Even Nick's "damagingly irrational prescription" is better
> than that.  Long gone are the days when universities were about
> learning and scholarship.  Blair saw to it that universities left
> behind notions of increasing general levels of education and
> understanding. There is little hope that way except in the teachings
> of the few individual staff who are somewhat enlightened (and
> increasingly frustrated), but at least it is in the right direction.
>
> tom
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> --
> *From:* Discussion list for the Crisis Forum
> [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Brian Orr
> [[log in to unmask]]
> *Sent:* 08 November 2009 18:35
> *To:* [log in to unmask]
> *Subject:* Re: Recent Royal Society of Edinburgh climate change event
>
> Dear Nick,
>
> We still have quite a lot of work to do to close the gap between us, I
> suspect.
>
> Enlightened dictators sound pretty good to me - Castro seemed quite a
> long way from a disaster to me - but who will replace the good one
> once he/she has died?
>
> But more seriously, maybe as few as 10% of the population, if
> sufficiently determined, could turn the rest of the sheep around with
> little problem. But certainly we don't need a majority. What
> percentage of all the people who could vote, voted for our last
> elected dictator, Mrs Thatcher?
>
> Brian
>
> On 8 Nov 2009, at 16:08, Nicholas Maxwell wrote:
>
>> Dear Brian,
>>
>>                  Perhaps I didn't express myself very clearly.  What
>> I intended to say is that we cannot rely on enlightened dictators to
>> solve our problems for us.  We have to do it.  A majority of people
>> need to understand what our problems are, and what we need to do
>> about them (including of course what to do about failings of
>> democratic systems).  That in turn requires that our institutions of
>> learning are rationally devoted to that end.  Judged from that
>> standpoint, universities are at present a disaster.  All of us
>> associated in any with universities or education ought to be doing
>> all that we can to bring about an intellectual and institutional
>> revolution so that the basic task becomes, not to acquire and apply
>> knowledge, but rather to help people tackle cooperatively those
>> problems of living we need to solve to make progress towards as good
>> a world as possible.
>>
>>                    Nick
>> www.nick-maxwell.demon.co.uk < http://www.nick-maxwell.demon.co.uk>
>>
>>     On 8 Nov 2009, at 14:34, Brian Orr wrote:
>>
>>>     Nick,
>>>
>>>     I agree very much with your general thrust below. Where I
>>>     disagree is where you say :-
>>>
>>>>     "Our only hope of tackling our problems in more intelligent,
>>>>     humane and effective ways than we do at present is to tackle
>>>>     them democratically."
>>>
>>>     Our democracies are now a busted flush because they are in the
>>>     hands of the 'enemy' who now offer the lobotomised public very
>>>     little real choice.
>>>
>>>     Until we have a sufficient majority of 'educated' people we will
>>>     not be able to wrest control of the process. But getting to that
>>>     majority is going to take much time as will the process of
>>>     wresting control and then employing that control.
>>>
>>>     The Trade Union movement some 100??? years ago began the process
>>>     of making workers aware of the reasons behind their impoverished
>>>     existence. This can't be a bad model.
>>>
>>>     But there's nothing like getting your hands dirty to drive
>>>     lessons home. We need colleges and universities that combine
>>>     teaching why we have come to the very sorry impasse we're in -
>>>     and at the same time teaching those who have the inclination
>>>     about the practicalities of living lightly.
>>>
>>>     This latter is of fundamental importance because it is one of
>>>     the few practical things we can do in the face of the threat of
>>>     modern civilisation crashing down around our ears.
>>>
>>>     Brian Orr
>>>
>>>     On 8 Nov 2009, at 13:11, Nicholas Maxwell wrote:
>>>
>>>>     Our fundamental failure is our failure to create institutions
>>>>     of learning rationally designed and devoted to helping us solve
>>>>     our problems of living, including our global problems - thus
>>>>     helping humanity make progress towards as good a world as
>>>>     possible.  What we have had, instead, is universities devoted
>>>>     to the idea that, first, knowledge is to be acquired and then,
>>>>     second, it is to be applied to help solve social problems.
>>>>     This is a damagingly irrational prescription.  We need to
>>>>     appreciate that all our current global problems have been made
>>>>     possible by modern science and technological know-how
>>>>     (dissociated from a more fundamental rational quest for
>>>>     wisdom).  We urgently need to transform our universities so
>>>>     that they give intellectual priority to (a) articulating (and
>>>>     improving the articulation of) our problems of living, and (b)
>>>>     proposing and critically assessing possible solutions -
>>>>     possible actions, policies, political programmes, economic
>>>>     enterprises and structures, philosophies of life.  The pursuit
>>>>     of knowledge and technological know-how would emerge out of,
>>>>     and feed back into, the central task of helping people come to
>>>>     understand what our problems are, and what we need to do about
>>>>     them.
>>>>
>>>>     Our only hope of tackling our problems in more intelligent,
>>>>     humane and effective ways than we do at present is to tackle
>>>>     them democratically.  This in turn requires that a majority of
>>>>     people have a good understanding of what our problems are, and
>>>>     what we need to do about them.  And this in turn requires that
>>>>     we have institutions of learning rationally devoted to helping
>>>>     people come to such an understanding, by means of discussion
>>>>     and debate.  It is this that is horribly lacking in our world
>>>>     today: see http://www.nick-maxwell.demon.co.uk/Essays.htm .
>>>>
>>>>                           Best wishes,
>>>>
>>>>                                  Nick Maxwell
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>