Unsustainable society is insanity

"Our attitudes toward consumption and material goods and our apparent lack of interest in curbing waste at a time when our resources are running out is clearly insane"

Edward T Hall, Beyond Culture, 1976.

Posted with Blogsy

What is education for?

Learning is an innate human drive - absolutely necessary for the survival of an individual, and our culture, and the human species.

But Westerners assume that our reality is THE reality from a superior system of thought. This then gives us the right to free others with inferior thought from their ignorance and make them more like us.

Thus we try to solve problems created by this stance with the very thinking that is the cause.

Conventional science has become dogma.

Isn't it a worry that much of our education stifles the learning we need to improve the habitat and society we depend upon? We've bureaucratised beyond the true purpose. Mass education shoehorns people into the system instead of serving their interests as citizens. Where is the service ethic? Are we clear about the major problems that universities are capable of solving?

Professors are inefficient when their work is overly structured - teaching mostly educates professors!

Timetabling bears no known relation to what is necessary for a flourishing society.

Participation is necessary for productivity, contentment, social conscience, and responsibility of citizens. Or we just spend lots of scarce resources on conformance to tests of knowledge transmission.

Bigness and growth is a pernicious - largely unrecognised - pervasive disease, and works against all we know about what it takes to produce better citizens. Factory education isn't the right way to organise learning.

To build resilience in the way we respond to the sustainability of society imperative, we need a transformation in culture, not more of the same.

Eco-consciousness and true democracy, not conservatism and reductive science.

Lester Milbrath urged us to "learn our way out" of the crisis. Marshall McLuhan wanted to "escape into understanding". Are we ready and capable and willing?

Are we reflecting on the way we look at things, how we behave politically, how we make decisions, how we prioritise, how we organise our lives, and how we think? That is the important impetus for learning.

 

 

 

Posted with Blogsy

Portrait of a man

“Every man's work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.”
― Samuel Butler

Posted with Blogsy

University students can be change makers

Isn't that the true purpose of higher education, to foster change for the better?

Photo from Dr Michael Pirson, taken somewhere in the New York region

Posted with Blogsy

Violence or social conscience?

Neoliberal ideology is physically different thinking from collaborative thinking

This has implications for assumptions about markets operate

See the TIME report on new neuropolitics research here

Posted with Blogsy

What's needed for professional action?

This diagram shows the multi-faceted understanding of personal attributes, knowledge and understanding, and skills

 

Posted with Blogsy

Is Marketing killing us?

I went to listen to Bryan Gould, once almost PM of the UK and former VC of the University of Waikato, speaking in Hamilton last night on "Democracy Hijacked". He thoroughly and eloquently laid out the story of 40 years of big business supplanting elected democratic government, and the dire consequences for the majority of us who are cast as consumers instead of citizens.

His new book sets out the details - to be published later in the year. I will be reading it as soon as I can.

I am struck by how little a part of the total world economy is product-based marketing. Most so-called wealth - for the already rich - now comes in trading money rather than making things and doing things that serve real basic needs.

Marketing is a powerful apparently democratic idea if taken back to its roots - going to market to buy and sell surplus outputs. It is a massive lost opportunity to make lives better if marketing is reduced to the easy path of finding ways to sell people what they want - we deserve - and need - better than this.

Service for reward is the authentic purpose for modern commerce, otherwise the cost of profiting is just too high.

Bryan Gould consistently talks sense on things that matter in our society. He is evidently a good man, with good intent. He urges us to talk deliberatively on important matters.

See www.bryangould.net

I also recommend Marvin Brown's book "Civilizing the Economy: A New Economics of Provisioning".

 

Posted with Blogsy