The Other School of Economics

More #Humanities at School to prevent the next business f*ck-up

With relatively low media coverage, Australia is facing a pretty defining ‘moment’: the design of a new National Curriculum which is to supersede individual State Curricula over the years Kindergarten to Year 12 (K–12).
Teachers and education professionals have now embarked on the ambitious project to design a new education structure “to support all young Australians to become successful learners, confident and creative individuals, and active and informed citizen; as well as to promote equity and excellence in education”.
If properly seized this opportunity could be to schools and academia what the superannuation reforms of the Hawke / Keating era have been to the economy: the type of visionary stuff whose consequences we are still measuring 20 years later. If properly seized. (1)

The point of this post is to suggest that to get it right the designers of the new curriculum should reinforce the role and place of Humanities in what students learn. They should focus on going beyond the increased ‘business requirements’ to ‘deliver’ vocationally-trained and technically-ready students satisfying employability criteria, and instead set the goal of making better students by making better-rounded human beings. A consequence of which will be the re-appreciation of the role of Teachers.

The Mother and Aunty of all battlelines: Culture and Education

It is a cliché but let’s reassert it again: getting Education right, and preserving the integrity of its Schools and University Campuses is a fundamental challenge for any self respecting Nation.
The classroom is where every kid’s apprenticeship for becoming a citizen starts… and Uni campuses where the first expression of this citizenship has been at times vehemently expressed. Think La Sorbonne in Paris, 68, Berkley in the 60s, the University of Political Science & Law in Beijing in 1989…
Closer to home we can reminisce how former Australian PM Kevin Rudd campaigned on an Education Revolution in 2007. This was before the GFC. The following months revealed what a premonition that was.

Culture vs Business

Policy makers and economic commentators have spent the past two years on a hangover from the Global Financial Crisis rivaling in eloquence to explain how things possibly went so wrong.
We have heard a lot about technical financial fixes. However your correspondent firmly believes that the real issue is the development of a materialist mindset caused by excess focus on business disciplines and an alarming shift away from the Humanities and the true appreciation of cultural disciplines.

How many times have I met successful corporate warriors whose hyper-specialised (and obviously valued) business skills where in stark contrast with a total lack of literary, philosophical or historical culture. The same persons who would dominate the-meeting-on-the-latest-project-update would – without a shadow of guilt – confess not regularly reading books ‘because – you know – we just don’t have time’. These are the same people we trust to guide us and steer our economy. Right?
Worse. The ultimate insult I recently overheard in a business meeting held at a major Australian company was something along the lines of “interesting philosophical considerations, but let’s focus on the outcome”
What situation have we got ourselves into where the words “interesting” and “philosophical” can now be turned back as negative comments? – and, yes, semantics does matter.

It is this mindset that needs to be corrected if we want to address the excesses of an increasingly materialist and commercially driven society. Business managers need to (re)learn the appreciation of ‘good things’. It would help them develop empathy, self awareness and a few other basic social #human skills, which could prevent the next f*ck-up.

Where do we start? At school. In the classroom. Amongst other places. (2)
How do we do that? By rediscovering the virtue of the Athenian Education. Call it Renaissance if you don’t want to go that far back in time.

The idea would be to re-balance the pragmatic requirement to ‘train’ students so that they can be readily employable, with the aspiration to ‘educate’ well-rounded individuals through the appreciation of the Humanities and the Arts.

Double jeopardy – The ‘Two Cultures’ debate needs to be prosecuted once for all

A useful framework to position this debate could be an old debate raging since the 1950s: “the Two Cultures”

More than 50 years ago – in 1959 – C. P. Snow, an English physicist, civil servant and novelist, delivered a lecture at Cambridge called “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,” which was later published in book form. Snow’s famous lament was that “the intellectual life of the whole of Western society is increasingly being split into two polar groups,” consisting of scientists on the one hand and literary scholars on the other.
Snow’s basic thesis was that the breakdown of communication between the sciences and the humanities (the “two cultures” of the title) was a major hindrance to solving the world’s problems. After rightly diagnosing the divide, he went on to assert the supremacy of Science over Humanities – not so good.

As British literary critics F. R. Leavis puts it “For Snow, a society’s material standard of living provides the ultimate, really the only, criterion of “the good life”; science is the means of raising the standard of living, ergo science is the arbiter of value. Culture— literary, artistic culture—is merely a patina or gloss added to the substance of material wealth to make it shine more brightly. It provides us with no moral challenge or insight, because the only serious questions are how to keep increasing and effectively distributing the world’s wealth, and these are not questions culture is competent to address.”

The point of this paragraph is that Snow’s deeply anti-cultural bias has all but gone away. His idea that the individual’s ultimate value is purely a function of his place in the tapestry of society has crept into our modern corporate mindset.
The hard core positivist pro-science fundamentalists of the 1950s have been replaced by the economic rationalists of the 2000s, but the terms of the debate seem unfortunately still relevant.

This is the nut we need to crack.

To be clear. This not a post against Sciences. The study of natural, social or economic sciences provides us with intellectual pleasure, excitement, and profound insights into the nature of reality. It is essential to our development as a society.
However it has to be balanced and integrated with the study of the Humanities, which are equally profound insights into the human condition. The works of great artists, writers, and composers, such as Victor Hugo, Mozart, Leonardo da Vinci, and Shakespeare, are as valid and relevant now as they were when they were originally made.

Reasserting the importance and relevance of Humanities is what this new curriculum needs to do.

Is it feasible? Yes.

An intriguing and innovative example demonstrating the positive value of re-appraising the teaching of Culture comes from the introduction of Humanities courses into the syllabus of Medical Schools in the US.

“if it’s good enough for US doctors, it can’t be bad for Aussie Kids”

In 2006 the NYTimes reported the story of Mount Sinai School of Medicine which began an art-appreciation course for medical students, joining a growing number of medical schools that are adding humanities to the usual forced march of physiology, pathology and microbiology.

Similar programmes have been implemented at Yale, MIT or in California.

The goal is to enhance aspects of professionalism including empathy, altruism, compassion, and caring toward patients, as well as to hone clinical communication and observational skills.
This includes the use of poetry and prose, especially about and often written by doctors and patients; narrative ethics, in the form of elicited patients’ and preceptors’ value histories; and visual and performing arts, including art and photographic exhibits, readers’ theater, plays, musical performance, dance, and independent humanities research projects
Humanities and arts were identified as a potentially rich method for addressing these concerns. The craft and artistry of literature and painting can help learners see clinical situations and patients not only from different perspectives, but also with greater clarity, identifying insights and feelings in ways learners might not be able to fully articulate.

A study, published in The Journal of the American Medical Association in 2001, has found that looking at painting and sculpture can improve medical students’ observational abilities.

Initial trials have been a success and this new trend in teaching is on the uptake. Partly intended to make better doctors by making better-rounded human beings, such art courses are being joined by other, mostly elective humanities courses — and in some medical schools, like the one at the State University at Stony Brook on Long Island, whole humanities departments — that bring playwrights, poets, actors, philosophers and other imports from the liberal arts into the world of medicine.

Conclusion

Two points to conclude:

1 – Annabel Astbury raised an important issue on her blog about “the skill to teaching”:

“I wonder, when people talk about teaching and education’s need to change, whether we sometime forget about some of the basic traditions of the profession. The knowledge of the teacher, the quality of the materials with which they work should be carefully scrutinised and then revered. We shouldn’t see teachers as a fashionable commodity or as purveyors of faux luxe. I think it’s time to look at the teacher as artisan and look how each type, with their own expertise in whichever area they practice, can offer something of much more value to an individual than the generic educator who seems to take on everything.”

A refocus on the Humanities would translate into ‘a Renaissance in teaching’, and therefore would certainly contribute to achieve what Annabel is advocating: the reverence of the quality of the studied artistic materials coupled with the better appreciation of the unique skills required to be a good teacher. And who knows, we might even dream of a future when we show true appreciation of what they achieve and start paying them like bankers.

2 – The French have a popular say: “Culture is what’s left once one has forgotten everything”.  Sounds like a pretty concise and compelling reason to focus on it.

{ leLaissezFaire }

Footnotes:

(1) If you think the above statement is too emphatic just look-up how 100 years ago the French definitively settled the transition to a stable republican regime after decades of political turmoil by dispatching teachers equipped with a canonical curriculum to every corner of the country. (‘Les hussards noirs de la République’ – Black Hussars of the Republic)

(1bis) “the superannuation reforms of the Hawke / Keating era” consisted in shifting Australians’ retirement income from Pensions (retraites) to Superannuation (fonds de pension – different from the US pension funds, much more regulated). The contribution to the fund is mainly done by the employer who has to provide the equivalent of ~9% of the employee’s salary to the fund. I wrote that we are still finding out about the consequences of this reform 20 years later, because the ‘cushion’ of savings locked-away in superannuation funds (that people cannot touch until they retire) has been tagged by many economists as one of the reasons why Australia avoided a major recession during the GFC. The Nation’s savings where safely protected and untouchable, adding to the sentiment of financial safety and preventing panic.

(2) Press and Media are probably another area for improvement

(3) Source US Medical Schools teaching Humanities: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/17/arts/design/17sina.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all