If free trade agreements had to be ratified by a popular vote,
how many workers would vote for them?
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How
do we learn the things we value most? - From Journeys by Brian Alger.
(
Brian Alger is the author of The Experience Designer: Learning, Networks and the Cybersphere. )
He has designed and implemented
projects for KPMG, UNESCO, Connected Intelligence, The Madeiran Ministry of Portugal, Apple Computer, The Learning Partnership,
Scotch College, Australia and The Composers in Electronic Residence. Brian has appeared on City TV's Media Television
and TV Ontario's Parent Connections, in Computing Now magazine, and had delivered presenatations in Canada, the United
States, Australia, New Zealand and Portugal.
He has spent 11 years as a public school educator. During this time
he received the Marshall McLuhan Distinguished Educator Award and produced The Virtual Community Project- described as a national
benchmark in the use of multimedia in Education. )
Here, he did an overview of our thoughts about education and
communications by rank provided below: ( It is from his Experience Designer Network archives 000636 )
RAY TAPAJNA: REALITIES OF THE STREETS
VS. REALITIES OF THE CLASSROOM - From Brian Algers - The Experience Designer Network - How
do we learn the things we value most?
" Artist and author Ray Tapajna explores the gap
between the realities of the street and the realities of the classroom. He states that factory work gave him more knowlege
about life than the classroom. In a sense, the conclusion of his education gave way to the challenges of authenic learning.
In Learning Styles: Whose styles are these and what are they for?, Ray provides a number of interesting insights into his
own learning...
THE LANGUAGE OF THE EDUCATED
There is a language of the educated that holds
rank over common sense thinking.
The experience of learning and the experience of being educated are not the same
thing. Sometimes, however, there is a tacit assumption that learning and education are synonymous. If we consider learning
to be an unavoidable lifelong experience then it would be true to say that learning does occur while we are being educated.
At the same time, it is not correct to assume that the vibrancy and pervasiveness of learning is captured within education.
While the language of the educated and educated speak about learning, they often do so from a narrow, isolated and self-serving
perspective. Learning is something far more significant than being educated.
The tensions that exist between education
has taught us and what our own learning experience inform us represents a kind of void- or an emptiness between schooling
and life. In exploring his own experiences, Ray Tapajna contrasts his own education with his life experiences.
To do this , he challenges the underlying assumption embraced by the "language of the educated" and notices a sense
of disconnection to "common sense thinking." This common sense thinking, I believe, orignate in his own life experiences
that have tended to conflict with what he had learned inside education.
THE REALITIES
OF THE WORKER
Somewhere somehow workers
have to be encouraged to speak out and
write in their own ways about the ills of society. Why should an educated class
without any real world experience run the show? We now have elite groupings who have exported middle class jobs
creating a working poor class in the USA.
Ray provides an interesting set of statistics that reveal trends in our
economic decline. Barbara Ehrenreich provides a first-hand account of the effects of the working poor on
people's lives.
The idea of an educated class without any real world experience is one that captures
a fundamental problem. While we would have to admit that education is a real world experience, the point here
is really that it is a separate and distinct kind of experience that is often disconnected with other "stations of life"
that we move through.
Perhaps part of the problem may be that the underlying assumptions of education have
become immersed and subsumed by purely economic orientations to "progress" that education is economy. In a sense,
a student is from a very early age a "worker" in training. It may also be that our economic drive is sustained
by an ability to avoid , or at least marginalize, what we might call "real world experience" or "common sense
thinking" since these kinds of experiences and thinking would challenge underlying assumptions, change priorities, and
encourage fundamental change. The language of the educated is, in this sense, the language of avoidance.
IF YOU ARE NOT PART OF ANY NETWORK YOU DO NOT EXIST
*
When we talk about networks, they are not soley related to the internet and the computer world. Today, networks might
be the stock exchange, bankers, the European Union, the coca fields, clandestine labs, secret landing strips, politicians,
bureaucrats, the statistical Americans who are part of some data classification etc.....* Manuel Castells ... however,
if you are "missing in action" from any of these groupings, you are not counted. You are outside , looking
in just as those who are discouraged and no longer seek employment. And if you have given up trying to find
a job - you are not part of any data network and are considered employed not unemployed.
HAS
GLOBALIZATION "UN-NETTED" YOU? - IF YOU ARE NOT PART OF ANY NETWORK, YOU DO NOT EXIST.
Education is a data network that seeks our attendance and attention. If we are part of the
network, the we are awarded with degrees. If we stand outside of the education network, then we are ignored and /or marginalized
in society. Our education systems have labels for these people - drop-outs.
Our education systems
instill a belief that to be "successful" you must be a contributing member of society. A degree is a
symbol of achievment that impliess a readiness to contribute. The problem is we blindly accept and organize our lives around
economic definitions of success and contribution, then we isolate ourselves from ourselves.
In a sense we are taught
to believe that we need to be part of the data network- that if counted and statistically labelled we are then in some manner
a successful contributing member of society. If we fall outside of the data network and remain uncounted then the implication
is that we are not a successful contributing member of society. The inherent stupidity is this proposition is
obvious, yet it is a proposition that drives much of our culture and influences our personal experiences in life.
A VOICE IN THE MATTER
Workers have no voice
in the matter although they are the core of any economy.
International networks including the WTO
rule and control the flow of wealth outside the will of the people with workers having no voice in the process.
( Free traders in a global economic arena use Adam Smith to defend their network. However, Adam Smith held workers
and labor as something sacred and the core of society.)
It is much the same in education. The curriculum is the economy.
Students have no real voice in the matter of education, although they are the core of learning.
We do not need any conspiracy theories to
know that free trade and globalization have not evolved in any natural economic fashion but have been driven by a network
of powerful forces outside the will of the people and without the consent of workers who are the core of an economy.
The following site will demonstrate a educated language that is far from "real world common sense thinking"
by so called experts from the Bildenberger network - note especially nothing even implys what workers think at
http://euro-med.dk/?p=12051 and note Ray Tapajna's comments at the end of the article.
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