Education & Society

These Think Tank pages carry thought-provoking items of potential interest that may otherwise be obscure or difficult to find.

• Offering social and economic commentary, futurological considerations, global and community news snapshots, and much more, they are intended to help set basic construction and development in the context of truly sustainable development.
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• Submissions will be assessed for inclusion based on relevance, novelty, challenge and legality. The views expressed will remain those of the authors and not Benfield ATT, who remain neutral on all such items.

Title	Inflation Worries & Solutions
Author	Keith Hudson, Futurologist
Date Published	28 June 2006

When money used to be gold or silver or cowrie shells that had to be dug out of the ground or dived for under the sea then its value represented the hard work that had already gone into it. Since governments nationalised money and produced it without effort by issuing bonds to pay for their bureaucrats and armies, then it is no wonder that major currencies are now worth about 1/40th of what it was a century ago. Since about the 1980s, major governments, worried about inflation, enhanced their confidence trick by pretending that their central banks were independent. But, since then, inflation has continued apace, albeit invisibly to most consumers, being hidden within property prices and astronomical sums being daily ricocheted in electronic form around the world by speculators and investors. But major governments are now so frightened by the prospect of inflation broadening out again into the general marketplace that central bank interest rates are perforce having to rise even at the risk of bringing world economic growth to an end. The only legislative way out of this looming disaster would be if governments merged their national currencies into a world currency and allowed a truly independent central bank to issue it. But this will never happen because of the tribalistic nature of nation-states. However, another solution could be the rise of an independent world currency such as EBay's PayPal system, the winner so far of several different electronic currencies that have been tried on the Internet. The increasing number of PayPal transactions now going on means that governments cannot possibly keep track of it for taxation purposes and if they were to try to do so then their revenue departments would become even more overwhelmed with complexity than they are already. Once launched on the back of national currencies via credit cards, PayPal has the potential to become independent in tomorrow's world -- just as nationalised currencies were launched on the back of gold-based currencies a century ago. The possibly of a new independent currency outside the control of national governments has been underlined in recent days by the announcement that Google is shortly going to announce its own new currency for its searchers and advertisers.
Keith Hudson, Bath, England,

Title	London terrorism and the Bonaparte syndrome
Author	Keith Hudson, Futurologist
Date Published	8 July 2005

Yesterday's terrorist attacks in London and the immense economic consequences to this country that will follow -- never mind the human suffering -- really bring us to the nub of the problem in today's world.


This is that, despite all our modernity and technologies, we are as tribalistic as we ever were in the earliest days of man because the proclivity is still within our genes. We are very much at the mercy of the decisions of single individuals such as President Bush or Prime Minister Blair -- or at least of small cliques around them -- when they decide to make war, despite the fact that the respective countries are supposed to be democracies. They are the most recent manifestation of whole nations being manipulated. This occurred in the last century when we think of the Soviet Union, Germany and China, or a century before when we think of the earliest of the modern sort of tribal chiefs, Napolean Bonaparte.


Coming back from a touring holiday in France recently I can still remember the hundreds of miles of straight, poplar tree-lined roads we drove along. These were built two centuries ago by Bonaparte in order to get his vast regiments around the country quickly. This was yet another reminder that the modern nation-state arose side by side with the modern artillery regiment. Our forms of governance and the civil services behind them were moulded into the same hierarchical form of governance as armies. However democratic Western nations are supposed to be, and despite the holding of elections from time to time, we still end up with a system whereby a very small number of individuals at the top of the pyramid can either forcefully direct, or manipulate, millions of other people.


Last night on BBC Newsnight, its diplomatic editor, Mark Urban, who probably has more brains than the whole of our secret services put together, gave his opinion that the London terrorist attacks were probably carried out by a small group which planted bombs within a few minutes on underground trains that radiated along different lines from the nexus of King's Cross Underground Station and then, within a few minutes' walk, accessed the tourist bus on which another bomb was planted. It could, of course, have been a single person, just as it has been a single person, Osama bin Laden, who initiated the whole wave of current terrorism, due to the repression of millions of his fellow subjects by the hierarchical powers of the Saudi Arabian royal family (only two generations from outright camel-borne tribalism in the Arabian deserts) in association with Wahhabi religious interests on the one hand and American interests, political and commercial, on the other.


The end of the nation-state in its present pyramidal mode, was prefigured by the nuclear bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Today, a nuclear bomb could easily be smuggled into a country -- as are hard drugs and illegal immigrants -- inside freight containers. Whole governments, as in Washington, London, Moscow or Beijing, because they are so centralised and hierarchical, could be completely destroyed by terrorists and whole nations could be thrown into disarray. During the Cold War between the West and the Soviet Union all developed governments built underground facilities whereby centralised governance could continue, but today such duplicate systems have been neglected. They would be impossible to recreate now due to the increased complexity of modern life, the dumbing-down of politicians and those in government service, and the sheer cost and operability of such systems.


Due to our genetic make-up, shaped as it has been by millions of years of ancestors living in small groups and requiring leadership and rank ordering in order to survive in difficult environments, we cannot avoid the constant urge to yield our collective judgement to individuals or small numbers of individuals. But in those small groups of our predecessors, leadership was always accessible, the knowledge on which they acted was always transparent to all, and rank ordering was always in a constant state of flux as young adults reached maturity with new ideas and skills.


The nearest form of small group 'governance' in modern life to our tribal-prehistory is the peer review system in scientific research whereby reputation -- and thus natural authority -- is reached by competition of the best minds available in a particular discipline. This doesn't always work smoothly because outdated ideas have a habit of sticking for quite long periods but it certainly produces a more continuous process of adaptation than our present mode of repeated warfare between this culture and that, between this nation and that.


The notion of democracy is a fine thing, so long as everybody takes an interest in policy-making and has the capacity to understand what is involved and to contend in a rational, peaceful way with those who have other views. This is supposed to be what happens within Congress or the House of Commons but, as we know, they were both led by the nose by President Bush and Prime Minister Blair in the decision to invade Iraq which, as sensible people foretold, has led to a vast increase in terrorism and world insecurity. The Middle East is now a tinder-box.


I am quite sure that if mankind is to survive then we will need to develop a type of forum governance in many different policy areas whereby everybody can be involved if they want to be and have the intellectual apparatus and willingness to thoroughly understand what a particular problem involves. We can begin to see this in the spectacular rise of thousands of specialised groups and non-governmental organisations in recent decades in developed countries. They have a particular attraction for the young who are increasingly turning away from any sort of respect or admiration for our present political set-ups and politicians. In these, as in scientific peer review, I think we can dimly see the beginnings of new forms of governance. But all this, as was the rise of the modern nation-state, will probably take a couple of centuries to unfold.

Keith Hudson

www.evolutionary-economics.org

Title	The future of education
Author	Keith Hudson, Futurologist
Date Published	20 June 2005

In the last few weeks I've been changing my mind about the need for education vouchers. Or, rather, I've been changing my interpretation of what has been the reason why the standard of education in state schools in the larger developed countries has become increasingly dumbed down.


I still think that education vouchers will be inevitable in several countries such as England and America, and the short item from today's Independent on Sunday concerning the growing amount of extra private tuition being paid for by parents of state schoolchildren is further grist for the mill.


I am now beginning to think that the basic reason is that a country's total education system -- state plus private -- really reflects the structure of the job market. The reason why such a large part of the education system in the larger countries has become dumbed down is that the majority of the skills required in the job market have also become dumbed down as a result of industrialisation, mass production, automation, computerisation and rationalisation generally by the larger manufacturers (and many services) which increasingly supply the bulk of the staple consumer goods of today's society.


For example, the manufacture of a car, which used to take 70 or 80 person-hours within living memory now takes only 25. Even within the last five years, the largest American manufacturer of domestic washing machines reports that the number of person-hours required to assemble each one has declined from about 3.5 hours to 1.5 hours.


Forty years ago, few (highly-paid) car factory workers in my home town of Coventry -- and I knew many because I supervised them -- thought that secondary education or any form of examination qualifications were unimportant, particularly for their sons. Why? Because, after a quiet word with someone in the personnel office, they could always get a job for their sons in their own workplace. Even if it meant their sons being "on the brush" at a lowish wage to start with, their sons could almost automatically advance to higher-paid machining jobs within a few years -- even into the most sacrosanct (and highly-paid) of all of them, the toolroom -- according to the informal "apprenticeship" system then operating.


All the time, however, automation was being incorporated step by step and this, together with the post-war baby-boom effect of the late 1970s, produced a dramatic increase in youth unemployment. Since then the prospects for the young have only been partly alleviated by an increasing number of (generally poorly-paid) service-type jobs which have blossomed in developed countries because of the prosperity given to us by the ever-cheaper cost of energy from decade to decade.


At the same time as the skills of most jobs have become dumbed down since, say, about the 1870s, a growing minority of very high-skill jobs -- in administration, financial services and in science and technology -- has been necessary. Whereas, in the 1870s, the number of these jobs would probably have amounted to no more than 5% of the population, the proportion today probably amounts to about 20-25% of the total. And the necessity for these sorts of jobs is growing. In England, this number of highly-paid, highly-skilled (or at least highly-protected) jobs is almost completely supplied by the 7% of those who were educated in private schools and who were, until fairly recently, catered for by a small group of highly favoured universities which formed, and then supplied, the networks of administrators, media and financial people, politicians and scientists who actually run the country even though they have to look over their shoulders occasionally at the whims of the public when it votes in general elections.


But even this "establishment" of 25% of the population is insufficient and the big divide in general quality between the state education system and the private fee-paying schools has somehow got to be bridged unless countries such as China and India -- where education is much more highly valued (and often paid for) by even poor parents -- will not overtake us and consign us to the trash bin. This is why there is now so much controversy over the standard of state education in the larger developed countries and why, in England and America, quite a number of alternatives are now being (hesitatingly) explored by officialdom -- charter schools, home schooling, special schools and (in England anyway) a new breed of low-fee private schools, less pretentious than our traditional ones for the rich and better-off middle class.


It is very interesting -- and probably significant -- that state education has only appreciably declined in quality during the last century in the larger countries. The standard of state education in the Nordic countries, Switzerland and Singapore is much higher. This is probably due to the fact that small developed countries -- if they are to survive and prosper in the modern world -- need a proportionately larger basic overhead of high-skill jobs than larger countries even though their "ordinary" jobs are also dumbing down. Accordingly, their social and income divisions are nowhere near as evident as in countries such as England and America.


Where does this interpretation leave us? It leaves me in the position of no longer wanting to be repeatedly calling for more private education and free choice. It will happen anyway by parental pressure at the margin -- such as shown in the item below. Unfortunately, this process will take at least a couple of generations and a large number of children with potentially bright minds at birth will continue to be blunted by both poor state education and lack of motivation by parents who have themselves received only a rudimentary state education.


In the meantime, the growing social, educational and income divide that is now characteristic of the larger developed countries will continue to grow -- also, probably, for at least a couple of generations. And there'll be some developed societies in which, for a variety of other reasons, the building of the bridge between the standards of state schools and private schools will not occur. I wouldn't dream to speculate on which countries will succeed and which won't.


Keith Hudson

www.evolutionary-economics.org

Title	Education for tomorrow's world of work
Author	Keith Hudson, Futurologist
Date Published	5 January 2005

It is almost impossible to introduce new ideas to most people over 30 years of age because, by then, their frontal lobes have stopped developing. Between puberty, at around 14 or 15 years of age, and mature adulthood at around 30 years of age, millions of new brain cells are made and millions of new networks are consolidated. After then, the individual's frontal lobes don't change very much. A very great deal of hard work has to be done by an individual in order to learn and consider new ideas -- to significantly strengthen some neural networks at the expense of others -- and not many people are willing to do that. Most adults who try to learn to play the piano finds it very hard-going, if not impossible.


This is why creativity in the arts and the sciences drops off quickly after about 30 years of age. Expertise may continue to grow in subjects of a more general nature but brand-new, precise ideas, particularly in highly complex subjects such as mathematics and science, are very rarely implanted and successfully developed. These need to be introduced and hopefully, established long before the age of 30.


This phenomenon is also the reason why new ideas take at least a generation to be accepted. Ideas that seems so very obvious to us today, such as Alfred Wegener's theory of continental drift, took about 30 or 40 years before it stopped being scorned and began to be accepted by young geologists while the networks in their frontal lobes were still open to further growth and new facts could be well associated.


Exactly the same lag in the acceptance of ideas has happened in the case of education policy. Research into the brain, particularly the outer, crinkly 'thinking' part of the brain called the cortex, grew explosively about 30 or 40 years ago. One of the first things that neuroscientists discovered was that, although the frontal lobes of the cortex seemed very mysterious, the rear lobes (roughly behind a line between the tips of one's ears) could be well mapped (by gentle probing with weak electrodes) into three main processing areas -- the visual, the auditory and body-sensing.


By now, neuroscientists have mapped out all the subsequent processing areas of these three main senses extremely accurately in the rear cortex. They are close to understanding precisely how we are able to perceive the world and also, in the in-between areas of the rear cortex -- the association areas -- how we are able to cobine the three perceptions in carryin out extremely complex skills such as logical and meaningful speech (perhaps a second language also), abstractions, artistic representations, manual dexterity, mathematical skills, advanced musical skills -- all before puberty.


Another very important discovery made about the rear lobes was that the new-born baby was born with an enormously large excess of brain cells and, from that moment onwards, they begin to die in large numbers every day unless they are stimulated. This means that if particular sights, sounds, and tactile opportunities are not experienced for a few years, or even a few months, then skills in these departments are very much reduced, if not totally absent. If, for example, a child never hears a spoken language and never has chance to practise it in its earliest years then, after about nine or ten years of age, it will never be able to learn how to speak or to understand language. Similarly, abilities in other complex skills, such as mathematics or dancing or music or even normal give-and-take socialising with peers can never be implanted after puberty.


Most of this sort of research was largely ignored by educational theorists and certainly by governmental policy-makers for the state school system. Instead of ramping up funding for nurseries and infants schools where they would get the bigggest bang for their bucks, state educational bureaucrats have, for the most part, been concentrating on trying to improve secondary education and by far the most funding has gone there and into the universities.


Well, the chickens are coming home to roost now. Most universities are having to institute remedial education into basic literacy and numeracy into the students' first year. Employers are complaining that they are finding it increasingly difficult to find good recruits.


Fortunately, however, some of the neuroscience findings of the last 30 years are now beginning to diffuse into educational systems and experiments such as 'Headstart' in America and serious applied research projects are now being carried out on early learning. One of about a year ago a year ago in this country showed clearly that a middle-class child of low ability starting school at 5 years of age would overtake a working class child of high ability by the time they both reached 7 years of age. And from then onwards the disparity in educatability would increase until at least 11 years of age. For the first time in over a 100 years of educational theorising by well-meaning liberals the alarm bells started ringing in earnest.


More research since then is only confirming these initial findings. The findings of the most recent one in this country carried out on 2,800 children who had attended nursery schools shows that, by the age of 5, they were already a year ahead of those children who had been kept at home until the age of five.


No more need be said on this matter here, and a brief account from The Times follows. We can take it that some major policy changes will start taking place in all developed countries.


But what needs to be said now is that it is to be hoped that neurological research into the frontal lobes of the cortex ought not to linger for too any years as was the case with rear lobe research. Becausde specific processing areas have not been able to be mapped out so easily, research has not been so productive until extremely recently when sophisticated brain scanning equipment has become available. The preliminary finding are clear enbough however, and they have been revolutionary.


Instead of millions of brain cells being culled -- as in the rear cortex -- new ones are made in the frontal cortex. They are no doubt stimulated by the newly-launched sex hormones into the bloodstream of children at puberty. The development of the frontal lobes are very much to do with the sort of brain that an adult needs. Note, however, that the complex skills that are learned in the rear cortex cannot be rectified by the new brain cells of the frontal lobes -- rather the basic skills, inasmuch they exist at puberty, are now being elaborated and prepared for the adult world.


Something else is very different between the learning that goes on the rear cortex and the frontal cortex. Before puberty, almost anything by way of learning material is snapped up eagerly by children if it's presented to them skillfully. They don't have to be motivated to learn. It is as though the rear cortex is trying to prevent any more brain cells dying and wants to retain as many as possible by using them frequently and vigorously in as many activities as possible.


The situation is very different in the case of the development of the frontal cortex. In the modern world it is becoming very clear that most post-puberty teenagers have very little interest in learning as such. They are very reluctant to learn anything new unless it has relevance to their iminent adulthood. So instead of teaching specific skills that might be useful educational theorists have been instructing teachers to teach something even vaguer for the past few decades-- how learners can become 'flexible' learners for anything that might come along. Apart from teaching students how to become familiar with the internet there has been no new addition to the secondary school curriculum.


By and large, this is simply not working for most teenagers. A quarter of 14-year old boys in England, for example, say that they regard secondary school as a prison. Most of the remainder are only kept motivated by making their examinations easier from year to year. The standard of education in basic subjects at 16 years is barely more than the standard reached by 11 and 12-year olds in Victorian schools a century ago.


What is different, of course, is that a century ago most school-leavers left school and went straight into the adult world of work with well-defined jobs from which, once learned, they might not ever leave, only getting better and faster as they grew older. However, today's teenagers, even at 16 years of agge, are largely mystified by the adult world of work except the very visible low-paid jobs of a physical nature. And, in today's mechanically-assisted society, as many of these jobs can now be done as well by women as by men. Thus boys are even more mystified than girls about the world of work -- and behave accordingly at school with increasing truancy and misbehaviour.


Teaching at a state secondary school must be the most stressful job of any in the country, so stressful, in fact, that bright students at university are increasingly turning away from teaching as a profession and the educational standards of teachers are themselves being lowered in order to attract trainee-teachers in sufficient numbers. This is particularly so in the harder subjects such as foreign languages, science and mathematics.


Now that sophisticated brain scanning methods have only just begun to be used in order to understand the frontal lobes in more detail, it is still premature to be specific about the specific networks that develop there between puberty and 30 years of age. But one thing is very clear. Teenagers of 15 or 16 are already fully adult in a physiological sense. They have all the powerful sexual and family-making urges of adults. In all previous cultures of man, young people of this age would have already passed through traditional initiation ceremonies, welcoming them into the adult world and allowing them, if they wish, to practise as adults -- to work, to start a family.


In modern society, the world of work, an accepted place within it, the opportunity to set to set up a homestead are continously withdrawing into a longer-distance future. From the age of puberty onwards, no teenager can expect to obtain a job with a reasonable income for at least another 10 years. And, for ordinary young people these days, they can't expect to be able to afford a home of their own for at east another 10 years.


Psychologically, this is now becoming far too much to expect. Millions of years of evolution of our predecessors and 150,000 years of being a new species have never prepared us for this. We have no genetic behaviours which can comfortably carry most people forward for another 20 years before they are allowed into the full adult world. This is quite at variance with anything that evolution has prepared us for.


Instead, the adult world freezes young people out of their world. In all sorts of ways -- particularly by way of credentialism -- barriers continue to be erected. And the result? Teenagers see what lies ahead and are increasingly turning towards a world of their own. They take almost no interest in how the real world is run. Increasingly, the survivors of this ten-year traipse across a desert are only those who were fortunate enough to be brought up in a middle-class professional family where they learn the necessary patience, knowing that, sooner or later, their parents will help them to find opportunities in the mysterious networks of the adult world.


As for the rest, they will get by as best they can with the few skills they've learned before puberty, but not developed by their frontal lobes since, and will increasingly ignore the values of the adult world. A growing underclass, housing estates from hell, not voting at general elections and the plunging family size are just some of those symptoms which have been gathering pace for several decades. They're somehow treated as separate problems that can be fixed by suitable legislation and yet more new types of social service devices. All theseought to be telling the adult world by now that something is going seriously wrong in the (mainly) state educational systems of the developed Western world.


Keith Hudson

www.evolutionary-economics.org