Contributions to envisioning a new post-Corona education
(for Bojan Brank)
We will not surmount the challenges of today (as a germinated future) if we do not become literate in new ways.
The very term ‘literacy’ is ripe for change. Functional typographic literacy – reading and writing – is now only the most basic condition for managing in the modern world, but barely sufficient anymore. General typographic literacy does allow us some rudimental communication in the mediated space of the screen, but it doesn’t generate – not alone, at least – our capabilities for wisdom and good decisions, protection and development, individually and collectively. For that, we need new forms of literacy, from our earliest age and on a systemic/societal level. Typographic literacy, as powerfully elaborated by Prof. Neil Postman in his seminal book ‘Amusing ourselves to death’, has lost the war with TV, and now, the internet.
What are those new literacies we need, what is the blueprint for the new education? There is a lot of debate about that. My take on it derives from and is inspired by all the contributions so far, but packages it somewhat differently. I’ve never seen anyone talk about these literacies in this interconnected way, as the architecture for the new set of ‘scaffolding’ we would need to stop repeating the mistakes of the past – and of the present.
The 20th century educational system was created for an industrial, mass internalisation of a relatively scarce and not easily obtainable knowledge, largely defined as the sea of facts. They were hard to get in a systematic manner, at the time, if they had not been concentrated in special books called ‘handbooks’ and – given the human species’ reluctance for hard cognitive work and adding to its cognitive repertoire – into special physical spaces we know as ‘classrooms’ and time intervals, ‘classes’. Everything in the educational system, including the training of teachers, was subjected to this approach.
There was a reason for this, as thoroughly explained by Prof. Todd Rose in his influential book ‘The end of average’. Industrialised education as we know it today was developed in America at the beginning of the last century from the need to discipline and train predominantly rural populations for the work in modern factories. Assembly line of the Sloan type demands standardisation, synchronisation, routine. It is the ant colony ideology, rooted in behavioural conditioning via repetition, reward and punishment. Behavioural psychology of the Pavlov/Skinner type in practice. Hence the bell for the beginning and the end of classes: it mimics the factory siren, the beginning and the end of the shift, the sound stimulus for collective synchronisation. Individuality in such a scheme is pushed to the side.
‘Average’ – actually, to perform just a bit above it, but not a lot – has become the main measurement of success. The system doesn’t know what to do with irregularities and deviances: whether ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ (good or bad overall), they are putting friction into the industrial process and have to be eliminated. In some of the most developed countries in the world, exceptionally talented children, in whatever the way, are considered children with ‘special needs’. Well, they do have them; it’s just not what we usually think of the phrase. So, we don’t know what to do with them. The system has not been made for that. The consequences for all od us are dire.
Current education as we know it is the last fruit of enlightenment – and it really has been, despite the current shortcomings – which hasn’t undergone an ideo-technological transformation. The classroom is the last modern archeological artefact. It took a global pandemic to lock us into our homes, for us to realise that we actually can do it even a bit differently. This could be a chance to re-evaluate the whole notion of education, too.
Postindustrial society, often summarized in the label ‘4th industrial revolution’, requires new forms of literacy, for new forms of societal organisation and new ways of life. I will now depart somewhat from some often-mentioned areas of learning deemed crucial for the new world, although they are subsumed into my suggestions. I think we have a bigger fish to fry than just transform the economy. We have to transform ourselves, as social and political beings, if we want to survive on this planet (before we can even start thinking about moving to another one).
We need new kinds of literacies in order to stop repeating our past and current mistakes. It’s tragic how great consumers we have become, and how bad citizens! We choose wrong people to lead us, for wrong reasons, based on wrong assumptions of what is important, caused by our various functional illiteracies actively stimulated, and even created, by our political-economic-media elites in whose interest it is that we stay that way. We are easily governed and controlled because of them. Any system that calls itself ‘progressive’ HAS to pay attention and do something about this new civilisational curriculum. This new enlightenment project has to focus on the following kinds of literacies.
1. Archetypal/narrative literacy
In short: story is the most powerful technology humans have ever invented. It most powerfully pushes us, individually and collectively, in various directions of action. It is a gravity control machine: it can, literally, lift us up to the stars, or drop us into moral abysses. Ideologies, religions, economic systems, fashions, trends, entertainment, media… they are all stories, narratives, particular ways of constructing, conceptualising or mediating the human reality. Most of them are created with the purpose of influencing not just our thoughts and feelings, but our behavior. They all have ideological or (and) commercial targets.
It is critical for us, to the point of our own survival, to understand how stories work and why they are so powerful. Why and how are we evolutionary primed to react strongly to them? Why are we so immersed in them? The most bizarre thing of our world is that this literacy – probably the key one for the modern times – is not taught in this way yet. It’s one of the most widely studied arts and crafts in the world, but in the utterly utilitarian way: how to tell strong stories to become famous, make money, or be very good at selling stuff. But we don’t learn how to defend ourselves from strong stories like populism, conspiracies and various sorts of propaganda, whether political or commercial. This literacy is the antidote for almost any of the manipulations unleashed upon us by the digital space, in all its guises. This whole dark theatre of problems has but one common approach: the use of strong emotional, archetypal, narratives.
Archetypal stories are formulas: about the fight of good versus evil, ‘us’ and ‘them’, an external enemy who jeopardises our way of life, about the essence of the true hero… They are templates for dealing with our collective anxieties, evolved and inherited over the millennia. Drama and conflict, packaged into a formula, sit at their heart. Many anthropologists, from Vladimir Propp to Claude Levi-Strauss, have pointed out the formulaic nature of archetypal stories. The most famous of them in this regard, Joseph Campbell, has created in 1949. the most enduring, and most used, formula of all: his seminal book ‘Hero with a thousand faces’, not only an inspiration and a tool for George Lucas to crack the code of ‘Star Wars’, but for Hollywood blockbusters overall.
This template is as powerful as it is simple to understand. Once we are aware of it, it is easy to lift the bonnet of a hot emotional story to see which simple structural buttons crafty storytellers such as populists and propagandists – and we have to give them a credit for that – are pressing to get desired reactions from us. If there is a subject that we should consciously be trained in from the very early days of our lives (not just as passive consumers of these kinds of narratives in their commercial form), if there is a new primary collective inoculation against a dysfunctional society, if there is an intellectual BCG vaccine against ideological tuberculosis, archetypal narrative literacy is the answer.
This, of course, requires new teachers in schools on all levels. Who would be these breakers of the spell? This is where radical innovation kicks in. This is a mission and the space in which script and speech writers, novelists and copywriters, film directors and editors – storytellers of all colours – can find new expressions of their societal usefulness. Instead of naked and cynical commercial exploitation of our narrative illiteracy, turning it into a mere ‘business’ or ‘fame’, here’s a chance for a great karmic redemption, for contributing to the common good. They would be the new secular catechists, in a mission to demystify mystification.
2. Impulse literacy
Umbilically connected to the previous one is the ability to understand and control our emotional impulses. Modern world is an enormous, entirely human-made, machine for stimulating various, often contradictory, impulses and desires. Everything is ‘affected’, emotionalised: our news, our religions, our economy, our everyday relationships. If a thing doesn’t stimulate emotions, especially entertainment, it’s boring; and boring doesn’t sell in a Huxleyan world of ‘amusing ourselves to death’.
Rational discourse and a way of life is the most tragic victim of the modern society. We are conditioned, from cradle to grave, to be impulsive, to crave instant gratification: right now, right here, to put ourselves always in the centre, our opinion, our desires, our wants, our feelings. The modern world, driven by profit, was shaped around us like an old comfortable glove so that everything is instantly available, the impulse does not suffer. It’s bad for business.
Impulsiveness is a deeply human trait, it is how the animal inside us breathes. That why ‘civilisation’ is hard work because the essence of it, in many ways, is about taming the impulses, or some of them at least. Hence the laws and politeness and consumer protection rules and training for non-conflict communication and team work and other demanding categories. It’s hard work. Hence the very idea of education, fired up by the still only half-realised hope that education in itself is enough to ‘civilise’ somebody. In other words, to increase the control of the impulse by a peculiar way of cramming facts into one’s head. To which I can only remember the opening words to George Orwell’s essay ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’: ‘As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me’.
Unfortunately, traditional academic attainment fulfills this civilising mission only partially, largely because our internal impulses are a great deal the result of our biological and cognitive evolution: the way our brain (and mind) process reality and the dozens of ‘cognitive biases’, heuristics, that make the main part of our daily functioning, especially in decision making and the feeling whether we are ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. We now know, without any doubt, that we are deeply irrational creatures, using our schooled mind largely to post-rationalise our emotion- and bias-spurred decisions. The groundbreaking work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, followed by a legion of other cognitive scientists, has proven this. The fictional rational ‘economic man’ or ‘econ’, the favorite fantasy of the traditional economists, has turned out to be false. “Behavioural Economy (BE)’ has entered the mainstream of our intellectual life, ‘nudges’ have become the new policy-making tool. We have, grudgingly, accepted our irrationality.
Sadly, not in schooling. The curriculum, globally, does not reflect these breakthroughs in cognitive sciences. We do not teach children (nor adults) to know and identify our common human biases. The only people who do study them are the ones who use them to influence us, in various ways: governments, advertising, sales… The warfare is asymmetrical: there is a concerted, hyper-rational, well-funded and immensely knowledge-rich universe of experts and interests focused on stimulating our impulses for various, largely commercial, gains, versus the whole of the atomised planetary population unaware even of the concept of the cognitive biases, let alone of what to do about them to mitigate the automatism of our decision making, with sometimes dire personal and collective consequences.
Herein lies one of the big paradoxes of our modern lives, already full of various stimulated and engineered incompatibilities. There is a huge discrepancy, a chasm, between the officially proclamated political and educational mission and the everyday commercial one. The former, superficially and even hypocritically, demands of us to behave as rational, responsible citizens, while the latter trains us to behave like irrational, irresponsible consumers; to act on impulse, because without it the consumerist economy will grind to a halt. It is a deep, fundamental problem that requires deep, fundamental training. Not mere education. Long, concentrated training for which no one of any power has any real interest.
It is a pessimistic outlook as it doesn’t seem likely that it will happen soon. Even Kahneman, the father of the concept, is pessimistic about it given the utter inability of our political elites to even recognize the challenges of these fundamental energies. In one of his interviews, he points to overconfidence as the plague of the political classes, and most of us collectively. It all stems from our cognitive biases and our ignorance of them.
And yet, long term, we don’t have a choice. We either become literate and skillful in managing our evolutionary cognitive traits, or we will keep repeating the mistakes of the past. Archetypal narrative and impulse illiteracies are the main reason that, in the words of a Canadian philosopher Joseph Heath, ‘civilizations collapse into barbarity and not the other way around’. Look at what is happening in some of the most developing countries in the world, especially Anglo-Saxon (which in itself is not a coincidence). In only a year or so, the supposedly highly civilised societies has started crumbling into chaos, insecurity, ineptitude, racism and social disorder. Most advanced economies on the planet that send intelligent buggies to Mars can’t produce simple surgical masks or disposable plastic aprons. Or feed their citizens. Thin as the egg shell is the sheen – or, as Prof. Heath had called it, ‘scaffolding’ – of civilisation covering our evolved impulses.
It is another chance for cognitive scientists, marketing strategists and sales people to contribute to the world beyond their professions. They are uniquely positioned to part the drapery of the grand theatre we are surrounded with and show us what’s backstage: incentives and narratives designed to trigger our cognitive heuristics for the profit of vested interests.
3. Attention & algorithmic literacy
As a consequence of the previous two, the true global pandemic for the last few decades has been the one we’ve been most oblivious of: the attention illiteracy. Attention, a neurologically restricted resource, has never been under more duress and wastage. Like a rare and precious element, everyone is mining for it. One of Google’s mantras is that ‘money follows attention’: whoever attracts it is in a better position to monetise it. Attention is capital. It used to be ‘please, give’; now is ‘please, share’.
We, indeed, do live in the ‘attention economy’ and we can see it by the number of books, articles and debates that all try to conceptualise the same problem: we are cognitively overloaded and distracted, and hence tired, frustrated, anxious and intellectually impaired, especially because of the paradoxical nature of requests we face from the media sphere, in very persuasive packages. Emotional vampires of all kinds have developed a myriad of ways to trigger our impulses, and with it attention, to their advantage, leaving us to stumble through our everyday life in a fog and dizziness of FOMOs, inadequacies and anxieties, losing our ability for self-reflection, empathy and quality decisions.
Attention illiteracy is not only a grave problem for the current world, but is set to become one of the major barriers for our education in the future. The ‘4th industrial revolution’ requires strong focus on self-learning, largely outside of the institutional settings, learning on the internet, in expert groups and via MOOCs (massive online open courses). It demands an unwavering, almost ascetic dedication, ability to control our impulse for following any random (or deliberate) distraction placed in our path, willpower to resist the urge to hypersurf, to lose ourselves, for hours, in the infinite bowels of the internet, immersive worlds of online games and the endless circus of You Tube, Netflix and other entertainment platforms. This is, currently, an insurmountable task for the world full of such distractions. Trivialisation of our lives and our attention, as also noted by Prof. Postman, quoting Huxley, is the bane of our world.
Why are we so attention-illiterate? Being unaware, and untrained, in how archetypal narratives and our impulses work is certainly the key to the answer. However, there are environmental factors that hugely contribute to it. As Joseph Heath also pointed out, we live in a civilisation that is cognitively the most demanding of all we created so far in our collective history, and the one, also, that has an in-built, commercially-driven, predatory relationship with our attention and our time. Two technological phenomena amplify this illiteracy.
One is the ubiquitous algorithms, as one of the primary means for mediating our screen reality (which largely means ‘just’ reality) – and the ways they support the commercial, the political, the news and the entertainment interests. They are created not to ultimately give us what we really need at any particular point, but what may be the most commercially viable for their creators and advertisers. And, yes, that often means starting with what we need, as a profiling factor. Very quickly, though, some other dynamics kick in.
Douglas Rushkoff, in his manifesto Team Human, powerfully summed it up: ‘Algorithms don’t engage with us humans directly. They engage with the data we leave in our wake to make assumptions about who we are and how we will behave. Then they push us to behave more consistently with what they have determined to be statistically most probable selves. They want us to be true to our profiles. … Technology is not driving itself. It doesn’t want anything. Rather, there is a market expressing itself through technology – an operating system beneath our various computer interfaces and platforms that is often unrecognized by the developers themselves. This operating system is called capitalism, and it drives the antihuman agenda in our society at least as much as any technology.’
‘Algos’ are, essentially, a conditioning, training system for automation and ‘outsourcing’ of the criteria we use to allocate our attention. The result: the economy of attention gains money, we lose sleep and sanity. They may help us find what we think we want, but they also endlessly distract and manipulate us. Again, it is a combination of our cognitive proclivities, our archetypal and impulse illiteracy, and the socio-cultural system deliberately created to predate on them. Algorithms are just part of the story. Maybe even a bigger problem is the deliberate addiction engineered into our mobile operating systems.
Mobile phones, with the exception of pacemakers and dildos, is the most intimate personal technology we have developed so far. According to various research, we use them more than a hundred times a day and touch them more than a thousand! There is no human being in our lives that gets the same treatment. There is a reason for that. Both major global mobile operating platforms – Android and iOS – are purposefully designed to stimulate and develop addiction, the way casino machines and gaming rewards work. We’ve learned to crave notifications, endless little hits of dopamine, the addiction neuro-chemical. Mobile phones have become the dopamine pumps.
These pumps are hitting our future, our youth, the hardest. We rely on them to get us out of the shit we have created, by seeing the world with different eyes, being different politically, commercially, socially. Different, as in ‘better than us’. Looking at who visits the fast-growing clinics for technological addictions, it makes me wonder… Narrative, impulse and attention illiteracies are making us physically sick.
Attention illiteracy is actually ‘digital obesity’, stuffing ourselves with distractions to bursting levels, killing our ability to focus on really important things in life. No one sleeps in front of a voting booth to be the first one to do it in the morning. We do it in front of Apple stores; we queue for hours to be the first to run into a department store on Black Friday and fight over a discounted toaster. We have become fantastic consumers, and lousy citizens. The Friday is right to be called ‘black’; there’s nothing bright and positive about it. That is why many of the things we are bewildered about in these Corona days are happening. We are letting them happen, oblivious of the forces at work.
This is the real epidemic worth talking about. It stops us seeing our current, and even more importantly, incoming problems. Covid-19 is a minor inconvenience compared to the looming climate crisis. And we haven’t managed to organise ourselves to give even the most basic protective equipment to the medical staff fighting for our lives! We have run out of food, and jobs, in days. It doesn’t bode well for what’s coming if we don’t become more attention-literate.
4.Teamwork literacy
Again, everything is connected.
Same illiteracies are making us self-focused, even selfish, and less capable to work in a group. When the impulse rules and is beguiled by iconic stories, when we are the permanent center of our own attention, and when that attention is fragile and easily seduced, our empathy with the points of view and needs of the others also suffers. Again, it has direct consequences for what we need to function well in the modern and the rising post-industrial society.
That society is even more complex. Many occupations are becoming context-defined and depend on the complementary skills of our collaborators and team members. Lone cowboys are gradually losing their prairies. ‘The unit of delivery’, as they say in the digital project world, ‘is the team’. For this, we need impulse control and empathy. Successful team work is a balancing of energies: introversion vs. extroversion, different communication styles, agreement on the shared mission or objective. Team work is a training in introspection and self-understanding. Prof. Todd Rose has written about it in the book I’ve mentioned above, especially the probably most useful conceptual tool for thinking about an individual in a team environment (that nobody knows about), his ‘jagged profile’.
This is a simple, but powerful, concept. We all have pronounced and less pronounced sides of our personalities, especially judged against a specific professional or group context. Take that staple of job recruitment ads, a ‘good communicator’. It is one of the lamest descriptions around, a meaningless concept unless put into a specific context. What communication skills are we talking about? Great at presenting in front of a dozen senior people, or just to their own team? Great at 1-2-1, but hopeless in brainstorms? Excelling at written communications, or barely able to write anything coherent? There are many, many sides to a ‘good communicator’. Which of them is crucial for this particular context?
Similar could be said for various other characteristics companies and recruiters are using to describe the positions they are hoping to fill in with good candidates. ‘Energetic’ (what kind of energy: steady, but slow, e.g. marathon, or fast and short, e.g. sprint?), ‘smart’ (glib to the point of useless), ‘driven’ (pathologically, or something else?). Here’s one from my own experience, but carefully thought-through: one of the four ‘buckets’ of characteristics Google uses to evaluate candidates is ‘Googliness’ (the right mental/cultural match), in which one strong dimension is ‘thriving in chaos’. As in, chaos shouldn’t paralyse us, but be treated as an opportunity to radically change things for the better, or to seize on a commercial opportunity. Chaos favors the agile, the nimble, the flexible. Chaos is good, if treated right. So, if you don’t index well on this trait, you may have a tough time in companies like these…
Team is an assemblage of personalities for a particular context or a particular objective. Understanding of the personal, our own, ‘jagged profile’, and those of others around us, helps with ‘synergy’ (another favorite business buzzword). Like a team of astronauts or special forces, complementary skills and personalities matter; there is less ‘bending’ to fit in, less stress. There is more understanding and acceptance of everyone’s contribution to the whole, of the ‘me-shaped hole’ that appears in our absence.
Again, we don’t learn about this in school, or later. We are emotionally illiterate, which means, often, group illiterate. Like in our evolutionary past, our survival depends on getting together, large and small, globally and locally.
5. Statistical literacy
In a world full of numbers, knowing how to read them is paramount. From the early age, we are told that truth is in the numbers, that they equal science, that our decisions should be ‘evidence-based’ and that if we were to avoid the mistakes of the heart – an utterly blind and irrelevant organ, as far as our decisions are concerned – the options better be supported by numbers.
What we have to learn, too, is that many vested interests have become spectacularly skillful in manipulating numbers to influence our opinions and decisions, to reduce our understanding, to mislead and, again, seduce us. Many common-place phrases reflect this, from ‘99% of statistics tell only 49% of truth’, to Disraeli’s famous ‘There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics’, to Andrew Lang’s (well known in the marketing world) that ‘Most people use statistics like a drunk man uses a lamppost; more for support than illumination’. General numerical literacy is not enough; we need practical statistical, too.
Our days and screens are full of graphs, stats, percentages, averages, wind-battered numbers standing alone in the spotlight, outside context, orphans temporarily adopted by anyone eager to use them as ‘credible’ witnesses for their stories and their excuses. Statistics is the ammunition for the guns of stories, and we are the clay pigeons for their cannonade. As with other illiteracies in this essay, it is tragic how much this particular one contributes to our civilisational naivety. People like Hans Rosling and a few others were valiantly fighting this fight, but without systemic support, we will continue falling victim to another, even more insidious, enemy of the rational thought.
Examples are all around us. Understanding the difference between ‘average’ and ‘typical’ creates a wholly different perception of reality. If the average salary in a country is 450 euros, but the typical one (the most common) is 250, what does that tell us about the quality of life there? In mass marketing, averages are one of the most dangerous numbers to base the decision on, which is why successful companies are using them with caution. Typical is closer to reality.
Or, understanding the ‘base’ for measurements: the starting level to measure the change of anything, rise or fall. If the economic growth of a country is a bit higher than the neighborhood, although from a lower base – and the typical growth for a similar country from the similar base would be expected to be even higher – is that a political success or spin? ‘Lies, damned lies and statistics’. Context is always God, whatever is claimed to be the King.
Probably the biggest blind spot we have in this kind of literacy, again, due to our cognitive heuristics, is our fundamental inability to deal with probability. Human brain simply doesn’t understand real statistical probability, largely because we are wired to find narratives in everything. Even if it’s perfectly statistically possible that a basketball player has ten successful throws in a row, even the beginning of the series makes people think that (s)he is ‘hot’, ‘in the flow’, or some other more or less magical way of thinking about the possible reasons. We fabulate probability.
The same goes for bad patches: at work, in exams, in presentations and other evaluating situations. Statistically is a given that some of the people – who have, otherwise, been diligent in the same activity – will have the nerves, weaker concentration, lower physical energy, distracting thoughts due to external events and various other reasons for a lower performance on the day of the big evaluation – and they will be punished for that. Understanding probability is yet another reason why final exams of various kinds are a crude, sometimes cruel, but statistically not very robust way of evaluating someone’s abilities. And, yet another thing that Prof. Todd Rose had written about.
Our brain loathes incoherence, the feeling of randomness is horrifying to us and the brain makes up for it with narratives, stories that bring ‘certainty’ about reasons for events, or their probability. This is exacerbated in the times of commotion and uncertainty, as it is the current Covid-19 pandemic, if the culture we are part of has a proclivity towards this kind of thinking, or if various manipulators nudge us into their narratives as the answer to our anxieties. A lot of superstition, wrong bets, wrong interview candidate evaluations or wrong investments are driven by this phenomenon. Narrative and statistical illiteracies are cousins happily lodging in the same common room of our mind, to our common misfortune.
6. Creative literacy
Someone once called creativity ‘the last resource’; what we do when we don’t know what to do. Creativity is closest to real magic in our individual and collective endeavours. It creates new industries, new perspectives, new inspirations, new resources and new ways to solve problems. And yet, as documented by many activists fighting for the global school reform, something tragic is happening with this vital force during school years.
Some years ago, NASA developed a special creativity test for its scientists, then, just out of curiosity, decided to use it to test 1,600 school children as well, 4 and 5 years old. What they found astonished them: fully 98% of kids fell into the ‘genius’ category, creativity-wise. When the test was repeated with the same children five years later, the results dropped to 30% and by the time kids were fifteen, it was only 12%! By the time they reached adulthood, it barely registered at 2%. The conclusion was that the school, as we know it today, systematically kills our creativity, our natural state of being, the superpower we are all born with and we posses until the merciless press of the industrial educational and employment system squeezes it out of us. This is not a new phenomenon and was explored in painful detail by distinguished researchers such as Sir Ken Robinson. (and, again, Todd Rose)
Creativity is about ‘new’ and ‘different’ by definition, departure from the norm, change, shake up, disruption – all of the bothersome concepts most of our official environments are trying to avoid at all cost. As creative beings, we have managed to produce the mother of all paradoxes: we’ve built a civilisation that treats its most fundamental and magical trait as an enemy, as a nuisance, as an illness that should be eradicated with processes, measurements, systemic and cultural norms that punish deviations from them. New educational system requires new ideology of not just acceptance, but active celebration of the ‘neuro non-typical’, eccentricity, radical thinking and contrarianism of all kinds – provided it doesn’t jeopardise the safety, security and personal integrity of others. And I mean this in the most basic, not symbolic or status terms. Given the nature of our current educational systems, this is likely to be the most difficult one to implement, for two main reasons.
The first is what I mentioned at the beginning of the article: the system based on standardisation and mass averages, teacher training and the evaluation of their – and the student’s – performance, daily structure of activities. All of this is fundamentally opposed to creativity. The second reason is understanding and acceptance of the very notion of creativity by the respective ministries and their governments. The worst side of our current collective predicament is that we are led by a cabal of thoroughly uncreative and unimaginative people. Some of them so much so, that they are perilously close to evil. The exceptions do exist, but are rare and put the rest in an even starker contrast.
* * *
The curriculum for these new kinds of literacy already exists. Literature, thought leaders and methodologies as well. Nobody can credibly say that we don’t know how to pull off this new enlightenment project. Even successful experiments abound, not just in Finland. The only thing that we truly lack is the absence of the systemic will to even try it. The challenge to the status quo is simply too big.
It makes me wonder why. After all, these literacies abound in various branches of the economy, with a lot of money invested in supporting and developing them. Advertising, political propaganda, sales and the whole of the entertainment industry make a killing through archetypal storytelling, impulse-stimulating tactics, attention-hacking, super-rational team organisation, and intensive use of data. Creativity is written all over consumer-based industries. These people truly understand how human nature and our cognitive heuristics work, and they have weaponised this knowledge. Sometimes, they use it to develop new ideas that genuinely improve the way we live our lives. But I can’t shake off the feeling – and my insider experience confirms it – that most of the times it is used against us, in an ideological system that puts profit above people and above the planet.
These weaponised humanities have created a stealth methodology, the ‘black ops’ kind of thinking (to use the expression by Prof. Mara Einstein) that slips vested interests under the radar of our attention and our understanding. Enlightening the people through these new literacies would fundamentally shift the balance of power, our perceptions of reality and our priorities in life, as well as our very selves and the political and economic systems we believe in (or just support, even if we don’t believe in them, for all different human reasons…). But no one in power will like it and that’s why this text is going to be just another utopian platitude devoid of any chance of actually being implemented. Six illiteracies are the recipe for control.
That vicious circle has to be at least weakened, if not broken, if we care about ourselves, on this speck of dust we call the planet Earth.
(Originaly posted on Lazar’s LinkedIn profile on May 10, 2020)