Connecting the Dots: Knowledge, Communication, Science, History

"He says lie down, shut up, take your clothes off... you do."

James Burke's description of the authority of doctors provides an example of why I enjoy his perspective on history: it's a blunt, humourous and--for all intents and purposes--accurate representation of our trust in the medical system, and by extension (I'm sure Burke would add) an indication of our faith in science itself.

The description is provided in "What the Doctor Ordered", episode six of Burke's series The Day the Universe Changed. In this episode, Burke discusses the establishment of a doctor-centered medical expertise via the military surgeons of the French Revolution, and the development of systems of bureaucratic efficiency that are echoed in today's managerialist institutional governance.

Burke's "connectivist" approach is what I enjoy about his series, and I've come to realise that it's a quality I enjoy in a number of theorists who have informed my own way of thinking--particularly Harold Innis and Michel Foucault. Innis and Foucault might seem like an odd couple to put in a room together. While questions of knowledge--not just epistemology, but also about economies of knowledge--are at the heart of the matter for both authors, their views on the subject differ theoretically. Yet as intellectuals they seem to share a fascination with the processes and mechanisms of societal and civilisational change and, not coincidentally, with communication and media--from Foucault's fascination with language and its "formations" to Innis' sweeping historical accounts of communication technologies. Both authors betray a concern with the organisation of power, and they both combine this with the investigation of ways of knowing and the (possible, and historically contingent) instrumentalities of knowledge. This encompassing interest is what leads them to politics, to culture, to economics and to the rituals and problems of social organisation and social life over time.

For Burke, there is the same concern with knowledge and its use. The "connections" made are between the grand abstractions of theory and the one-off solutions to pressing demands of everyday life, with an emphasis on the complex and quirky effects of circumstance, politics, greed, curiosity, religion, objects and technologies, and the new social relations engendered by (and engendering) everything else. In other words, historical messiness: not as a deviation from the kind of theorising provided by the "grand narratives", but rather an attempt to theorise the messiness as is, to trace historical developments as emergent and interconnected in multiple, multidimensional ways, and from which patterns develop in any case--just not always predictably or in ways that seem to "fit".

Take Burke's narrative of medicine: theory and practice, another persistent divide, had to be brought into a working relationship in order for medicine to take on the shape it has today. In other words, surgeons who practiced in the field became doctors who taught what they'd learned to others, and they taught it in institutional environments. Additionally, the doctor had to become an expert, with control over the patient based not on coercive power but on knowledge. Knowledge was generated in new environments and in new ways--the hospitals, built to house large numbers of sick people according to their ailments, provided the evidential input (in the form of patients) for observation, description and classification--all of which was recorded. Statistical analysis, a new mathematical tool, was brought to bear on this data as medical experts sought numerical patterns that could describe and explain (and predict!) the physical world. And for the first time, the patient became just that--an object, or even a collection of symptoms, to be acted upon by medical technologies.

The nineteenth-century concern for numbers was influenced by other developments--an example of which is the one Burke points to, the overpopulation of English cities during the (second) industrial revolution. In other words, a "mass" urban society was confronted with the epidemic of cholera, which required a radical solution. The answer they found involved the use of numbers to track human activity and correlate it with disease (early epidemiology, and the famous London water-pump).

This development, which ultimately pointed to the mobilisation of numbers to make change (including to the landscape of London), was relevant in multiple fields of activity in the nineteenth century including education. Numbers became more important because there was simply more of everything: more people living in crowded cities, more patients collected together in larger hospitals, more students in the schools. It was hard to get a grip on all those people, never mind finding a way of getting them to act in the right ways at the right times--and the more people there were, the more you needed to get them to act the right way, if anything was going to work at all. The connection between nations and numbers is exemplified by the roots of the word "statistics".

Thus Burke argues, "the transition by medicine from bedside to hospital to chemistry is complete. And with it, the disappearance of the patient from our story. His complaint, once voiced personally and authoritatively, is now reduced to a string of numbers on a computer terminal." Burke views the developing medical profession as the beginning of expansive influence for forms of numeric governance. The latter took on an authority that was to extend to numerous areas of our lives--articulated through the use of statistics, correlations, causes and effects. The expertise of doctors is what preserves life, our lives, hence our acceptance of its authority. The (manageable) "population" is born, and here there is a strong connection to Foucault's theories of governance (bio-politics in particular) and his discussions of "medicalisation".

In the final episode of Connections (series 1), James Burke gestures at a linear wall chart of the "History of Agriculture" and articulates his central thesis: "This makes you think in straight lines. And if today doesn't happen in straight lines [...] why should the past have?" Burke's question has implications for the pursuit of (instrumental) knowledge--implications that are clearest in the context of the contemporary university and its shifting position in a network of knowledge "production". What assumptions might be undermined by this view of innovation, in a socio-political landscape so littered with both past accounts and future plans for "strategic" discovery? In what ways might national governments, for example--ever-more dependent upon marketable "innovation" and the development of policy that leads to this profitable result--come to implement/reiterate linear narratives of "progress"?

The search for a successful template for development, or for a proven path to prosperity in uncertain economic times, is constrained by risk. This reminds me of one last point from James Burke (Connections, series 1, episode 1): knowledge of the future tends to bring power over the present. But what role might there be for a re-assessment of the messy, non-linear past?

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Some references for the above topic: James Burke "Re-Connections", a series of recent interviews; The Day the Universe Changed; The Birth of the Clinic and The Order of Things by Michel Foucault; Empire and Communications and The Bias of Communication by Harold Innis; various by Marshall McLuhan (James Burke indirectly quotes McLuhan on a regular basis).

The Proof of the Pudding

Throughout the first few weeks of September, we've seen a number of reports released, both in the U.S. and Canada, discussing and describing (quantitatively) the positive outcomes that students generate from obtaining university credentials. These reports have appeared at roughly the same time as the international university "rankings", which were unleashed around the middle of the month--along with OECD education indicators and Statistics Canada reports on tuition fees and national education.

The strategy here seems straightforward enough; after all, at the beginning of the school year, it's not primarily students but rather their parents--in many cases--who are concerned about whether the college or university experience is going to be "worth the investment". (I would argue that the parents should also look to their own departing children if they want to know the answer to that question-!) It's a great time to capture an audience for the debate, since students beginning their last year of high school at this time (most of them still living at home) will also be searching for relevant information about possible PSE options.

These articles are reports stir up the debate about public vs. private funding of PSE, about the rising proportion of university revenue generated by tuition from students and families, and the cost to the state of educational expansion. They also pitch university education primarily in terms of its economic value--not only to individuals, but also to the state (since educated people are "human capital"). Education correlates with increased income over one's lifetime, with better health (saving taxpayer dollars), and with inter-generational class mobility. These arguments, along with those citing tough times for the government purse, are frequently used to support a pro-tuition-increase position both in the media and in policy debates.

All these points may seem valid enough until we consider the fact that while students may all technically pay the same amount in tuition (say, at a given university or in a particular program), they don't all receive the same "product". And universities generally advertise to them as if the same product is really on offer to everyone. Which it certainly isn't--the costs alone (which exceed tuition) are borne in entirely different ways by different students, a point briefly raised by Charles Miller as quoted in this article. If my parents pay for my tuition and living expenses, then what costs am I absorbing over the period of a 4-year undergraduate degree? How does this compare to a situation without parental support? Low-income students are less likely to have family help and more likely to take on a large debt burden; they are less likely to have savings accounts and personal investments, less likely to be able to purchase cars and condos when their student days are done.

Aside from the variation in economic circumstance, students also bring differences in academic ability and social and cultural capital to their degrees, which means that development differs for each person and so does their overall capacity for career-building.

Not only does university have different "costs" for different people; it also has highly variable outcomes. Some students will land solid jobs and find themselves upwardly mobile after completing a bachelor's degree. Others may continue to a Master's or even a PhD and discover that gainful employment impossible to find, for a variety of reasons. There's also the question of whether students obtain jobs in their chosen fields--or within a particular income range, for that matter. And once they do find employment, earnings differences by gender (for example) still persist to the extent that women in Canada still earn significantly less than what male employees take home for equivalent work.

Another form of quantitative justification, the rankings game is an attempt to make the intangible--the "quality" of education, or of the institution--into a measurable, manipulable object. Part of the yearly ritual is the predictable squabble over methodology, which generates much commentary and debate, particularly from those institutions that have found themselves dropping in the international league tables. This quibbling seems ironic given that all the rankings are embedded in the same general global system of numeric calculation, one that feeds international competition and now constitutes and entire industry that rides on the backs of already overburdened and under-funded university systems. While the public may rail against the supposed over-compensation of tenured professors (salaries represent the universities' biggest cost), institutions continue to engage in the international numbers game, pumping money into the yearly production of "free" data that are then made inaccessible by the ranking organizations (who profit from their use).

Education reports, with their quantitative indicators of the economics "benefits" of higher education, are a part of the same overall tendency to assess, to compare, to normalize and standardize. Earnings-related numbers often provide rhetorical support for policy agendas that involve higher tuition fees, since proving the "private" benefits of education means that we can charge the user or "consumer" of education for access to these (eventual) benefits.

Rankings and statistics serve as a means of informing risk assessment--for governments, when funding is increasingly based on "performance", and for students, when it's about choosing the "better" university. But no numbers can truly gauge or alter the inherent risk of education and knowledge, the ineffability of the paths we take to discovery, the serendipities of fortune and temperament that can lead one person to the gutter while another may hit the heights of achievement. Students have moments of inspiration, they meet undistinguished professors who never publish but turn lives around. They form unexpected friendships and stumble on opportunities, skewer themselves on pitfalls both obvious and unseen.

In other words we cannot ac/count for this most joyful and painful side of our educative experience--the unknown element which is frequently the most formative one; and the more we attempt to inject certainty into this process, the more we set ourselves up for disappointment. This doesn't mean there's no use for numbers, for evaluations and assessments, for attempts to improve our universities. But sensible decision-making, whether by students or by governments, will always involve more than a measurement.

The basics: About this blog, and me.

Since this is a new blog, I thought I would start out by describing it and myself. I think setting a kind of 'tone' in the first post might help me to frame the rest of what I write here.

A bit about me, to set the context: I'm a graduate student, an international transplant (from New Zealand to Canada), and I've lived in four Canadian cities, in three different provinces. My degrees are in three 'disciplinary' areas (Communication Studies, Linguistics, Education), and my education history is a long and somewhat messy one that I won't recount here. I've worked variously as a fast-food jockey, an ESOL teacher, a scrap-yard cataloguer, a dishwasher, a researcher, a graphic design assistant, and a census-taker. I've also participated both as volunteer and paid worker in quite a few elections (aided in campaigns, worked on election information distribution, registered voters, acted as scrutineer, assisted Returning Officer, etc.)--since well before I was allowed to vote.

These days I'm working on a PhD and I have a teaching assistant position each year. Though I haven't yet taught a whole course myself, I've taught more than many PhD students at my level, since I started my first TA position when I was still an undergraduate. My grad school teaching experiences have also been a bit more diverse than the norm--I've been fortunate enough to work with different courses every year (sometimes in different departments), including in the teacher training program run by my "home" faculty. Working with teacher candidates is rewarding because of the very real and direct challenges they face in their own classrooms during practicum, which foreshadow what is to come later in professional life. The discussions have a kind of relevance and immediacy to them that can seem absent with first-year undergraduates. Still, it's a different experience working with the younger students, and it's rewarding in other ways.

There are probably a number of things about the way I try to work--as a writer/researcher, as a teacher--that will bleed through to this blog, just as the questioning I bring to my research also comes into the classroom when I'm talking with students. Teaching, and reading, have taught me that I have broad interests and a pretty tangential way of thinking; so I've learned to keep relating things back to a theme or to some common question. And one way in which I like do that is to return to the discussion and definition of key terms and basic concepts. In tutorials I've tried to emphasise asking fundamental questions, the answers to which often seem “obvious” but which tend to help demonstrate how the "easiest" question can turn out to be the toughest one to answer.

This kind of questioning is more than just an exercise devised to provide fodder for course grades. My feeling is that if underlying, often apparently "only" philosophical, issues are not debated and fleshed out, then the overall direction of teaching and learning and also of our theorising and policy-making, will be uncertain and/or skewed. There will be a lack of solidity to the proposals, and no cohesion around the principles. We want a "knowledge economy", but we don't know (or bother to define) what "knowledge" is. We talk about increasing a nation's economic worth by raising the number of post-secondary graduates it "produces"--but we don't question the reduction of civic participation to numbers of degrees earned. We want children to "learn", but only if this learning shows up in the results of standardised tests. We demand “evidence” of progress, efficiency, and effectiveness, without wondering about what it is that we allow to “count” as proof, and who defines it.

When these fundamental concepts are left un-discussed and undefined—as well as un-critiqued—outside of scholarly journals, the scaffold of common understanding on which politics and policy should be built becomes biased and superficial, and is weakened at its base.

Being critical is about more than just talking about what’s wrong; eventually we must be able to propose solutions as well. This will mean learning how to work with people whose views we may not share. For this reason I think we also need to cultivate an environment of mutual respect for discussion.

That's a difficult task. I know that naturally, there will always be some perspectives with which I agree more than others (and some that to me are just egregious). For example I tend to be anti-marketisation, because looking at the effects of that particular trend in governance is part of my academic work--and I haven't seen much evidence of its 'success' (depending of course on how you define that term). But that doesn't mean I won't try to have a reasonable debate with someone who is strongly pro-market; without that kind of debate, we can't solve policy problems and we certainly can't delve deeper into the core issues that drive governance decisions. And it doesn't mean that I'll argue blindly for some other viewpoint, since I'm still unsure about what the "best" answers are to the challenges of our current context. I have no problem admitting that. But I try to resist the binary options that are so often placed at the heart of political debates and the programs they support or attack.

That's partly why I'm doing a PhD--not so I can bolster my pre-formed opinions with a credential, but so that I can try to understand the situation (in its often stultifying complexity) and make a contribution to improving it. Perhaps it sounds ambitious, but surely it's a project in which we all have a role to play, as educators, students, intelligent and informed commentators, and engaged members of society. Surely we all have a stake in whatever 'solutions' are chosen, which makes the quality of debate all the more important. If we can't talk across--and beyond--our differences, then small, ideologically-driven factions will be more likely to gain influence over government and policy-making, something Canadians are already starting to recognise.

Learning how to understand others’ points of view, working to negotiate reasonable compromises across differences, thinking critically about language and information, allowing multiple forms of evidence and experience to inform our conceptualisations—these are all broad skills that will be necessary for us to cultivate if we are to resolve the great social, political and economic dilemmas that will confront us in the coming decades. Education will play a role, but that role will depend on whose idea of “education” is prioritised and mobilised through policy and governance.

I suppose talking about the context of what I write here has ended up leading to a rather lengthy ramble on the importance of education for the future of our species—a predictable message after all! I can only hope I’ve at least couched it in interesting terms.