Odysseas Elytis and the Ed-Tech Revolution
Anyone using Google on November the 2nd saw this:
How many different ways can you read that? Surely it cannot simply be read as an honour paid by the largest internet corporation to a winner of a Nobel prize. Can it not also be seen as a cartoonification of a poet whose work opposed all cartoonification?
On the same day, one of the Greek state TV channels repeated a documentary about Odysseas Elytis. He spoke about his concern for “αυτό που λέμε Ελληνικότητα” (a distinctively Greek culture), saying that this…
is nothing other than a way of seeing and feeling things. Either the broad sweep of things or something humble and close to hand. Either the Parthenon or a pebble. What matters is “ευγένεια”* and quality, in contrast to the size and quantity that count for more in the West.
(* a sense of what is elevated, refined, civilised, gentle, considerate, humane)
δεν είναι τίποτα άλλο παρά ένας τρόπος να βλέπεις και να αισθάνεσαι τα πράγματα. Είτε στην κλίμακα τη μεγάλη, είτε στην ταπεινή. Θέλω να πω, είτε σ’ ένα Παρθενώνα, είτε σ’ ένα λιθάρι. Το παν είναι η ευγένεια, η ποιότητα, σε αντίθεση με το μέγεθος και την ποσότητα που χαρακτηρίζουν τη Δύση.
Later he says that the Greek concern for quality (ποιότητα) is a concern for the spirit (πνεύμα – a Greek word that has not yet died, while the English equivalent, “spirit”, is now used only by antiquarians or human resources buffoons referring to things like paintball afternoons that boost the team spirit of their utterly replaceable human resources).
The most pressing question for Elytis in this interview is what Greece should do about the growing European Union (this was in 1980). First he considers the option of Greece isolating itself, but then decides against that, embracing instead the entry of Greece into the broader European federation, confident that it will be able to chart a new course in European waters that will not sacrifice quality for quantity, and spirit for mere economic calculation (perhaps it was easier to be confident back in 1980?).
And immediately his thoughts turn to education, for how can Greece conserve, promote and develop that concern for what is distinctively Greek – for everything that cannot be cartoonified or reduced to the calculable exchange values of the market – except through education?
This serious and deep education (as he describes it) will be quite different from the current, overly technical education. And how could it be otherwise, since it will have at its centre a concern for culture – for our ways of seeing and feeling things, very particular things – for ευγένεια, ποιότητα and πνεύμα?
Was Elytis wrong? He says nothing about the liberation of the child. He says nothing about fighting indoctrination. So is he completely mistaken? And because he was speaking about a period prior to the digital revolution, are his words now irrelevant?
Those of us who believe that Elytis grasped something essential to education face a task so enormous that it is probably impossible. And to bring home the enormity of that task, it is worth watching the first few minutes of Dan Brown’s Open Letter to Educators.
The young man, who has dropped out of a college seen to be out of step with history, is a near-perfect advocate of the digital ed-tech revolution. He speaks with all the passion of someone who believes they are authentically themselves. And the digital pedagogues – ed-tech entrepreneurs like Marc Prensky and Nicholas Negroponte – want us to believe that young people like this are the authentic voice of a new breed of human being: the digital native. Of course, this is utterly naïve. The passionately delivered words of this man do not rise up out of some authentic substratum of humanity. No, they rise up out of a way of seeing and a way of not feeling created by an entire industry – by an entire economic system.
50 seconds into the video the young man says:
We are in the midst of a very real revolution, and if institutional education refuses to adapt to the landscape of the information age it will die and it should die.
He trots out the old dictum that this is the information age, and he tells us later (2.52) that education is about information.
Education is about information. This has been parroted again and again and again by pseudo-pedagogues on conference podia around the world.
This is the Age of Information, isn’t it? So education must be about information, surely?
No, dammit. Education is NOT about information. It is about CULTURE. Or at least it damn well ought to be.
The digital revolutionaries ignore the question of culture. Why? One reason (see Seth Godin) is that culture is already being handled perfectly well by TV, the music industry, cinema, and the other mass media. The kids get all the culture they want from the culture industry – an industry in which number is the only thing that ultimately matters.
Provisional practical conclusion: Every ed-tech conference must begin by showing the clip of Odysseas Elytis talking about education, culture, quality and spirit, and anyone lending tacit support to the Prenskies and Mitras of this world must be obliged to come up with a convincing argument as to why Elytis was wrong.
Torn,
Enjoyed the post and I’m a big fan of Greek poets – Seferis is one light I always return to for sustenance but Elytis and Kazantzakis are both always in a strange way for me – friends.
Of course school will always be about what kind of society we want and will be largely about culture. I don’t think any “digital revolutionary” would deny that. But if we step back, we have to define what we are talking about when we say “culture”.
You seem to use it as a catch all, a way of thinking and feeling. Fine. But that isn’t something you teach or direct with a curriculum. It is something that is everywhere, a force majeure – you’ll have to take your case outside the classroom and into society if you are to have any impact. We can’t expect school to be an isolated factory where we create taliban like counterculture products/automatons that then go out and create a world that is better. I reject this kind of ideologically driven schooling and any change must come from society – not school.
I do think sometimes you push a person’s ideas into a corner you have already made. I don’t think the discussion about education is so black and whiite nor there is any “digital” conspiracy going on. Long before digital, there were many others using schools to create “products” and not using schools to create critically thinking, “free” beings.
David
David,
Thank you for taking the trouble to respond. I welcome that. Let me address the points you raise:
1. “I don’t think any ‘digital revolutionary’ would deny that [education is about culture].” But why do they say so little about culture? The digital revolutionaries foreground the liberation of the individual (using the depressingly thin notion of negative freedom beloved by the likes of Hayek and Friedman) and the needs of an economy that insists upon the commodification of everything. The idea of a culture that might challenge and resist that commodification and that might help individuals understand and resist the violence perpetrated by that system, doesn’t seem to get a look in. Or did I miss something?
2. “[Culture] isn’t something you teach or direct with a curriculum… you’ll have to take your case outside the classroom and into society.” Of course. I don’t think Elytis was thinking only of school. We need a nationwide debate about how best to bring up the young in such a way that their dynamism becomes one with the culture that is bequeathed to them. But you are wrong if you think it can’t be part of the curriculum. A curriculum that puts culture at the centre needs to insist on activities like drawing from nature, poetry, story-telling, dance, farming, sailing, theatre, music, oratory, debate, mountaineering, film-making, democratic participation, voluntary work in the community, etc. That would use digi-tech, but in a way guided by a love of a culture and a place and a history and a society that is essentially beyond the tech. Let me contrast this idea of the kernel of the curriculum with Prensky’s view: “If we really offered our children some great future-oriented content (such as, for example, that they could learn about nanotechnology, bioethics, genetic medicine, and neuroscience in neat interactive ways from real experts), and they could develop their skills in programming, knowledge filtering, using their connectivity, and maximizing their hardware, and that they could do so with cutting-edge, powerful, miniaturized, customizable, and one-to-one technology”.
3. “ideologically driven schooling.” Any pedagogy presupposes an ideology. Mitra, for instance, pretends to be against indoctrination, but to assume that the world is information and society is reducible to the individuals living in it, and to be silent about the crushing weight of the international economy and about the history of democracy, is to spin an ideology as questionable as any other. And what happens to kids when they spend hours and hours day in day out surfing and gaming on the web? They acquire a way of seeing the world, their place in it, and a way of not feeling that is as much a doctrine as anything else.
4. “…a taliban like counterculture products/automatons that then go out and create a world that is better.” Why the hell mention the Taliban? What has that got to do with anything that Odysseas Elytis might have been hoping for? Speaking for myself, there is nothing whatsoever to be done unless there is a grassroots movement that believes in a new notion of culture. What all forms of totalitarianism loathe is people who really believe in something beyond the blind apparatus of power. The danger of a new totalitarianism comes not from sensitive people like Elytis, but from insensitive and opportunistic advocates of the prevailing technocracy like Prensky, who insist that we bin the past as fast as possible in order to keep up with the accelerating wheels of the economic machine.
5. “you push a person’s ideas into a corner you have already made.” Hey, you just pushed me into a corner with the Taliban. If I do the same, I would welcome that being pointed out.
6. “…black and white” We live in difficult historical times. We need to make a decision about whether to lend our support to the prevailing commercial forces, or to raise our voice against them. In that sense it is black and white. I oppose the prevailing neo-liberalism. I rarely see a digital revolutionary taking a stand against it. I draw the assumption that they are happy to be bedfellows of the neo-liberals. I may be wrong. I stand to be corrected.
7. “Long before digital, there were many others using schools to create “products”…” Yes, although we need a radical new (and democratic) conservatism, it is not a question of going back to the past. Elytis was himself unhappy with the schools of his time. He was looking forward to a new approach to education even as he wanted to save and develop something distinctively Greek that already existed. I also look forward to a new and unprecedented form of education that will be part of a cultural renaissance that will put an end to the subjugation of all social life to the imperatives of the economy.
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