Greetings, gentle readers.
When posed the question of the cause of Canada's seeming dearth of innovation and scientific creativity, particularly in the field of entrepreneurship, Dr. Peter Hackett made some very poignant, yet very mildly-targeted remarks. I expounded on one of them, and was helped along in the exploration of the topic by several individuals. Shayne Tymkow, James Kropfreiter, and Fritz Kropfreiter, take a bow. The point changed from education failing to nurture so much as to instruct, to big business as the barons of industry and commerce controlling the economic welfare of society, to governments increasingly dependent on worker-drone mentalities in order to maintain power, and finally to society at large for failing to create a socialist nirvana where the proletariat control the means of production.
I followed that up with this contribution:
I'm reminded of the Monty Python "Church Police" sketch, where the officers of the church/peace petition to find the murderer through the use of prayer...
"O Lord, we beseech thee—tell us: who croaked Leicester?"
(at which point, a large Gilliam-esque hand descends from the heavens and points to Eric Idle. A voice booms:)
"The one in the bracers, he done it!"
(Idle is seized by the detective-parsons before admitting:)
"It's a fair cop, but society's to blame."
"Right," comes the rejoinder, "We'll be charging him too."
In short, I think it a bit of a cop-out to lay the blame on the nebulous invisible limbs of "society" at large. Sometimes, economic adversity can act as a stimulus for innovation, as people look for ways to use creativity as a means of escaping seemingly deterministic economic strata.
As evidence, I offer this:
http://images.businessweek.com/ss/08/12/1205_sb_necessity/1.htm
I think there's something more existential going on, and our society has done nothing to arrest its progress - we're reaching Hegel's "End of History." No one wants to be the progenitor of his or her own values any more. The thymos, or superego, or whatever you want to call the part of the human existence that strives to achieve beyond precedent, is in serious decline, and as much as that process is being encouraged by big business, government spending, curricular design, and identikit educators, the ultimate responsibility is an individual one.
Not to just act as a mouthpiece for Fukuyama and Bloom, et aliter, but isn't North America a wallowing sty of political and philosophical apathy? Doesn't the political right historically grow in power and stature when people cease to critically analyse and act upon conclusions drawn?
James is probably right. No one cares any more. Voter apathy has never been more pronounced. As long as our material needs and creature comforts are provided, we can lead lives of quiet desperation and never worry about the greater good or the examined life. The more anxious of us will take up some spurious cause and use that as a rationalization for intellectual torpor. Stop global warming, save the muskrat, end third-world debt, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, fur is murder, meat is murder, KFC is murder, murder of a murderer may or may not be murder, feed the children, feed the fur-wearing murderers to the children, blah, blah, blah. People can champion these little short-term, third-rate, first-world indulgences until they choke.
Bottom line - we're not achieving, creating, or innovating because we've got comfortable little cages. It's not the fault of our captors. We just built a very cozy jail, and we don't want to get out.
Just my tuppence-worth.
—mARKUS
14 January 2011
13 January 2011
Ad Infinitum, Ad Nauseam
Greetings, gentle readers.
One of the great men whom I have the honour of knowing was just interviewed by my old university chum, Todd Babiuk. Dr. Peter Hackett was asked to explain the culture of innovation in Canada, or lack thereof. The interview can be found here:
http://www.edmontonjournal.com/business/Canada+failing+create+culture+innovation/4095349/story.html
The interview followed hard upon an interview Dr. Hackett did with the Canadian Science Policy Centre, and can be viewed on YouTube here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNhW0ErMXNA
Here's my response (for those of you who haven't heard me blather this already):
I will try and compose a more comprehensive response soon, but my knee-jerk reaction at the moment seems to rest with a couple of comments that seem nested in the middle of the interview. There is an issue with gauging the amount of successful innovation in a society or culture by using a monetary scale. That strikes me as a topic for lively discussion, but skirts what I consider to be the point: how does one foster a culture of innovation, risk-taking, creativity, etc.?
Seems almost corollary to Aristotle's challenge to define "the good life." I reckon that Peter touched on some areas of the solution—most saliently, how NOT to do so. "Streaming", "tracking", and all those other educational buzzwords sound great when designing pedagogical approaches to conditioning and developing the human mind for achievement, but are symptomatic of the character from H.G. Wells' "War of the Worlds" who proclaims that the only way to defeat the Martians is to go underground, and teach children SCIENCE,
and not (if memory serves correctly) "poems and all that rubbish."
Students have been increasingly treated as a commodity, rather than potential creators of their own values. Schools have become less concerned with a liberal arts education, and more preoccupied with training toward an economically-specific skill-based objective.
I reckon that the answer to many of these questions—why does Canada have such a low rate of PhD. graduates? Why is entrepreneurialism not viewed as a significant or even viable contributor to a nation's well-being?
The answer may be rooted in the failure of our educational system to foster critical thinking, epistemological discussion, the love of learning, and an ongoing inquiry into the human condition as preconditions for understanding technical and scientific principles.
Why get a PhD., when a technical certificate will get you the job in fibre-optics that you want? If students feel compelled to learn more, understand more, APPLY more, then they will push the envelope to extend the body of knowledge that defines their disciplines.
I reckon that we've thought too much about what kids learn, but not how or why, and that's the fundamental basis of my analysis. At least for the time being.
Cheers,
—mARKUS
One of the great men whom I have the honour of knowing was just interviewed by my old university chum, Todd Babiuk. Dr. Peter Hackett was asked to explain the culture of innovation in Canada, or lack thereof. The interview can be found here:
http://www.edmontonjournal.com/business/Canada+failing+create+culture+innovation/4095349/story.html
The interview followed hard upon an interview Dr. Hackett did with the Canadian Science Policy Centre, and can be viewed on YouTube here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNhW0ErMXNA
Here's my response (for those of you who haven't heard me blather this already):
I will try and compose a more comprehensive response soon, but my knee-jerk reaction at the moment seems to rest with a couple of comments that seem nested in the middle of the interview. There is an issue with gauging the amount of successful innovation in a society or culture by using a monetary scale. That strikes me as a topic for lively discussion, but skirts what I consider to be the point: how does one foster a culture of innovation, risk-taking, creativity, etc.?
Seems almost corollary to Aristotle's challenge to define "the good life." I reckon that Peter touched on some areas of the solution—most saliently, how NOT to do so. "Streaming", "tracking", and all those other educational buzzwords sound great when designing pedagogical approaches to conditioning and developing the human mind for achievement, but are symptomatic of the character from H.G. Wells' "War of the Worlds" who proclaims that the only way to defeat the Martians is to go underground, and teach children SCIENCE,
and not (if memory serves correctly) "poems and all that rubbish."
Students have been increasingly treated as a commodity, rather than potential creators of their own values. Schools have become less concerned with a liberal arts education, and more preoccupied with training toward an economically-specific skill-based objective.
I reckon that the answer to many of these questions—why does Canada have such a low rate of PhD. graduates? Why is entrepreneurialism not viewed as a significant or even viable contributor to a nation's well-being?
The answer may be rooted in the failure of our educational system to foster critical thinking, epistemological discussion, the love of learning, and an ongoing inquiry into the human condition as preconditions for understanding technical and scientific principles.
Why get a PhD., when a technical certificate will get you the job in fibre-optics that you want? If students feel compelled to learn more, understand more, APPLY more, then they will push the envelope to extend the body of knowledge that defines their disciplines.
I reckon that we've thought too much about what kids learn, but not how or why, and that's the fundamental basis of my analysis. At least for the time being.
Cheers,
—mARKUS
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
