Crippling Epistemologies and Governance Failures: A Plea for Experimentalism

CHAPTER 2: Professional “wrighting and wroughting”

To prescribe methods automatically blocks the development of better methods. — jane jacobs Education (stricto sensu), training and personal development are capital goods whose “just price” is difficult to gauge at the time of buying. The just price worth paying is the discounted value of the streams of benefits of all sorts that can be derived over one’s lifetime from buying or acquiring such capital goods. Since one never knows for sure what one will be confronted with in life, it is difficult to know in advance what one should invest in: skills? basic knowledge? character-building? a mix of them? Should one learn how to speak another language or how to swim, or take another few courses in physics? Given this framing of the question, the argument has often been made that education, training and personal development should be as general as possible, so as to be of use in the widest possible range of circumstances. On this basis, literacy and numeracy are often presented as fundamental necessities in primary and secondary schools. On the other hand, since specialized and therefore specific knowledge is greatly valued, because it is purported to yield extremely high benefits if one invests CHAPTer 2 Professional “wrighting and wroughting” PART I: CRIPPLING EPISTEMOLOGIES 43 in the right specialized knowledge base, there has been an equally strong tendency to develop a very narrowly focused, in-depth pursuit of certain disciplines, skills or traits. This specialization has begun to erode the secondary school’s “liberal education” curriculum, but it has mostly challenged the post-secondary education system (PSES), where choices become agonistic. This dilemma is made all the more acute by the fact that the right mix of education (stricto sensu), training and personal development that goes into the production of successful human development is somewhat ill-defined. In most professions the three components are extremely important: a surgeon, an architect, an orchestra leader, a mechanic, an engineer, a designer, a lawyer or a social worker must draw heavily from all these sources to be successful. It has been argued that in many other areas the full complement of these components is not essential. This is a view that, personally, I have some difficulty with. It is difficult not to find a confluence of knowledge, skills and character in most successful activities, even though many observers are prone to occlude the importance of diagnostic skills in the work of a good mechanic, manual dexterity in the work of a surgeon, perceptive skills in the work of an internist or empathy in the activity of a social worker. The PSES has a variety of functions in society: to produce ever more literate and numerate, active and responsible citizens; to develop the human capital necessary for the maintenance and enhancement of a country’s competitiveness and living standards; to develop perception , mind and ability, in order to facilitate entry into the labour market; to supply an adequate mix of knowledge, skills and personal development to students; and so on. Educators, trainers and developers, as crucial producers within the PSES, have suggested different strategies and emphasized different approaches to this multiplex task. Educators have traditionally focused on general 44 CRIPPLING EPISTEMOLOGIES AND GOVERNANCE FAILURES principles as means of teaching students how to think critically. Trainers have focused on imparting skills and abilities that cannot be transmitted without focusing on schemata that are highly specific to the task at hand. Personal developers have taken the view that knowledge and skills can be developed only on the basis of a capacity to grow as a human being within the community to which one is acculturated. Few institutions have chosen to focus exclusively on one approach over the others. Most have elected different mixes of activities, while emphasizing one dimension or another. But most have not developed as rich a meshing of that one dimension with the other approaches as they should have, nor have they drawn as much from expertise in the external environment as they should have. Even institutions that have privileged co-operative education have often managed the internal–external interfaces rather shabbily. They have not ensured, for example, that what should be acquired through work experience actually is acquired. To map the PSES one might imagine a triangle with each of these views at one of the apexes, and most PSES Figure 2.1 The PSES triangle Education Personal development Training PART I: CRIPPLING EPISTEMOLOGIES 45...