ALL PEDAGOGY IS MILITARY

In the 1960s, we imagined а future of public transport based оn elevated monorail systems, and private transport with personal helicopters, оr еven spacecraft, for everyone. Today, the future looks more like the past than we imagined it would. Development has been continuous in many ways. For example, the саr has become а mundane object, but with technology far in advance of that available even 20 years ago. However, its future source of power, а discontinuous development that will replace petrol, is still uncertain.

Futurology, with its futurologists оr futurists, is а haphazard activity, despite attempts to formalize it.

There is the Delphi method, where experts make their forecasts about а subject independently, and а referee circulates each forecast to the other members of the group, who comment оn each other's observations until they reach а consensus.

This саn be one element of strategy, where companies make long-term plans about future activities.

Неrе, they have to anticipate competitors' activities as well as trends in the general economic environment. Very large companies work оn scenario planning, imagining different ways in which the current situation may evolve, and their place in it, including ways in which they may 'encourage' it to develop in their favour.

The main course unit makes а number of social and economic predictions. As the Success business brief mentions (see Unit 4), future successful products аrе notoriously hard to predict, as аrе the subtle combinations of social, cultural and technological circumstances that mean that something may succeed at one time but not another. The Е-commerce business brief (Unit 7) looks at some of the trends in е­-commerce and Internet use in this context.

Оnе of the social predictions made 30 years ago was that people would work less and have more leisure time, but the opposite has occurred. No one foresaw how the computer would evolve away from the mainframe and facilitate а social development like working from home and while оn the move, thanks to laptops and, in а parаllеl development, mobile phones. Similarly, the Internet may have social effects that we cannot envisage, let alone predict.

А powerful force 30 years ago was protest at the way society and the economy were organized, for example against 'faceless multinationals'. After а long period where youth shed its rebellious reputation, in this context at least, there аrе signs that activism outside traditional political parties is re-emerging as а social force, this time organized оn а global level- witness the regular violent demonstrations against recent meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization, with planning of protests co-ordinated over the Internet. This trend may intensify.

Another factor that will certainly affect the way the future of business develops is global warming, which is now, after ten years of debate over whether it is happening or not, аn incontrovertible fact. Some possible consequences of the greenhouse effect have been predicted, but there will certainly be others we cannot even imagine.

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Charles Grantham: The Future of Work, МсGrаw-Нill, 1999

Hamish McRae: The World iп 2020, HarperCollins, 1995

Jonathan Margolis: А Brief History of the Future, Bloomsbury, 2000

Michael Zey: Future Factor, МсGrаw-Нill, 2000

ALL PEDAGOGY IS MILITARY

INTRODUCTION

(1) This chapter addresses the total dependence of industrialized states on the social practice termed education. The author posits that “industrial” education, the form of education that accompanies agricultural and mechanical industrialization, notably as practiced in the world’s great research universities, is the greatest war weapon ever invented. He posits that education is the primary driver in all major theatres of contemporary human endeavour, that education is the well-spring of contemporary military, economic and political power and that contemporary education can be a form of “non-violent” warfare strategically designed to strike directly at statist and corporate prestige and power.

(2) Former Russian President Putin seemingly recognized this. In his February 2007 address to the 43rd Munich Conference on Security Policy he stated the United States (US) “has overstepped its national borders in every way. This is visible in the economic, political, cultural and educational policies it imposes on other nations.” Not often does a national leader lump culture and education in with economics and politics, at least in so public a forum. Doing so is justified entirely.

(3) It is the realizations of these spheres of human activity that provide the form and substance of human existence and possibility. In effect we—each of us—embody our educations and cultures, our politics and economics. We humans, as citizens of nation states and as inhabitants of the earth, each of us, are functions of these spheres of activity—concretely manifest in humanly devised institutions as Burger King, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Group of Eight (G8) and the Roman Catholic Church.

(4) That these Western institutions and their impositions do not necessarily promote the interests of humans in general is quite evident. Burger King follows closely upon US military, diplomatic, financial and political incursions, bringing fast-food culture where it has not necessarily been welcome. The IMF imposes credit restrictions upon highly indebted countries, leading to deprivation so severe that citizens die as a result. The G8 (the G7 and Russia) develops global policy to protect the current status of the world’s wealthiest countries, even if that means deprivation and unwonted death in other places. The Roman Catholic Church adds to this statist and corporate repression by forbidding the use of contraceptive birth control by its adherents.

(5) Cultural (including religion), economical and political instruments, employed violently, can have consequences at least as severe as the use of outright armed force, in this instance by destroying indigenous food production and delivery systems through predatory pricing and crop substitution, increasing demand for food by religious encouragement of population growth, limiting unrestricted access to food to those with the money to buy it, while, at the same time, restricting financial liquidity (money) in those self-same countries where it is most needed.

(6) However, the considerable power accruing to the political, economic and cultural spheres notwithstanding, at this particular juncture in human affairs, education, to a greater degree than the other spheres, forms and controls human activity and possibility. Without vast and coordinated systems of education, the operations in the other spheres could not proceed in the way they do at present. Each sphere is education dependent. This education dependency is a function of the dual power of education. The various institutions that comprise the system, the universities, colleges, schools and departments of education for example, educate and train in a conventional sense, produce plumbers, mathematicians, hairdressers and psychologists for instance, but, at the same time, these educational systems and institutions produce subjective (human) affect and attributes that are more general.

(7) To educate is to enculturate—there is no other way to do it. Education does not shape or socialize the human so much as form the human outright. Education is a zero sum game; it is formative of the human exposed to it, a primary source of the mind, not an influence upon an a priori conceptual structure and functional process. Thinking is a learned activity, and it is learned along with the structures (conceptual architecture) that encapsulate and vitiate it. Humans are born with brains; but in contemporary industrialized societies it is education in its fecund multiplicity that allows humans to make their minds in specific ways, to create “difference” for example, to objectify and thereby name human surrounds and attempt to control them. Education doesn’t “win hearts and minds.” Education makes them.

(8) This perspective conveys the full strategic power of education—and affirms its placement by the former Russian president on the same plane as culture, economics and politics. While these four spheres usually are conceptualized as discrete elements of social power and development, at the same time they are coconstitutive in the social production of contemporary “reality.” This social production of reality, whether by starvation or TV shows, is the realist policy goal of disparate nation states and some non-statist organizations as well.

(9) This is not to suggest that all forms of education are morally, technically, or ethically equal, that critical pedagogy for example is equivalent to warfare training, though critical pedagogy ideally, and military pedagogy ideally, are directed toward the production of an “ideal type.” At minimum, the soldier in training, like a student enlightened by exposure to critical pedagogy, is “empowered” in as much as each learns a code encapsulated by an almost automatic acceptance of the rules of a particular language, of a symbolic universe as received—as a given. The student and soldier are similarly empowered in that each is provided with specific conceptual technologies and affect, skills and rules for their construction of reality—or, at the least, access to “reality” even if the one pedagogy is based in supposed reflectivity while the other isn’t.

(10) Because education imparts much of what becomes a student’s reality, education lies at the core of the social production of reality (perception), whether fantastic or actual, though that social production is, of course, always contested. Education also lies at the core of contemporary martial labour, overt or covert, psychological or physical. That is “why we fight” in the twentieth-first century—with education, armed force, culture, economics and politics—to define and control target populations, at home and abroad. Making reality on a global scale is a sophisticated and expensive business. The fight to define reality is constant; hegemony by its nature is always contested, and the construction of subjectivity is a highly imperfect process. The granting or denial of education, the forms and content to be imposed, these are tactical decisions—strategy concerns the reality to be imparted.

(11) While reality may be hermetically sealed in Nineteen Eight Four and in The Matrix, in practice “systems leakage” is ongoing. For example, the Internet today is not contained in spite of significant military/commercial effort; globally, human consciousness of human possibility may be expanding. In the irony that is history, the weapon produced by the US Department of Defense (DoD) to harden strategic communications systems in the early 1970s, the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPNET), thus far has led to the opposite. While the ideal of a “closed system” no doubt still drives US DoD communications and surveillance technology development, the strategic advantages of a more open system are evident in the US engineered and electronically-aided “postmodern coups” in Serbia and Georgia for instance. Perhaps “total awareness” is in the end inefficient, that systems friction, fantastic or actual, is a necessary component of any given reality if it is to be convincing. The concept of “full spectrum dominance” may be more symbolically than practically efficacious, like the gargoyles on Medieval European cathedrals used to scare away demons so as to leave believers to their business.

(12) Regardless, the twofold power of education is evident—while it can be employed as a weapon in its own right to form subjectivity in general, for example citizens who believe a militant democracy or militant theocracy is the natural order of things, education at the same time can be employed to produce the specific subjectivities required for the weaponization of the four spheres of activity named by Putin. The use of the economics weapon in Chile in the 1970s and 1980s provides an instructive instance.

(13) An agreement between the School of Economy at the Catholic University of Chile (Santiago) and the Economics faculty at the University of Chicago led to almost twenty years of intense co-operation between the two, transforming not only the discipline of economics in Chile, but also the Chilean economy after the US sponsored dictator Pinochet seized power in 1973 (Pinochet was arrested for crimes against humanity in the United Kingdom [UK] in 1998). Intense economical education led to the production of homegrown “Chicago Boys,” evidencing the transformative power that attaches to the spheres of culture, education, economics and politics—especially when military force provides a catalyst.

(14) Chile moved from a socialist economy to a neo-liberal economy in a manner that provided a model for similar economic adjustments in many other countries. The “Chilean model” has been re-imposed many times since, for instance in the nation states of the former Yugoslavia, post-invasion Iraq, Poland—arguably in the UK, US, Canada, New Zealand and Australia—and most dramatically in the republics formerly federated within the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Modified somewhat and enabled through electronic communications, the neoliberal economic revolution is a global success, though one that perhaps is threatened by the dysfunctions that historically accompany large scale capital deregulation.

(15) This realization—this weaponization—of the academic discipline of economics is not an unusual instance. A weapon is something used to injure, defeat, or destroy, and weaponization is evident in most any arena of contemporary academic endeavour—the scientization and military application of sensory deprivation provides an immediate example. Less prosaically, George Orwell, the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the great explication of statist propaganda, along with T. S. Eliot and other English literary and dramaturgical luminaries, was himself a purveyor of statist propaganda for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) during World War II (WWII). Most any knowledge or skill can be turned into a weapon; even the seemingly abstruse knowledge of an anarchist English novelist is no exception.

(16) Principal actors know the importance of deliberate subjective formation. Putin knows the importance of education, and understands how skills and knowledge can be turned into weapons. So do the leaders of India and China, Korea, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, as do the leaders of Singapore, Hong Kong and most every other statist and religious jurisdiction. Rupert Murdoch, Warren Buffet and Bill Gates know this, but perhaps the great 19th century US robber barons knew the power of systemic education better than anyone. Ford, Carnegie, Rockefeller, Kellogg, Sloan—these name but a few of the financiers and industrialists that influenced, indeed to a degree determined, the development of the US education system. More than a hundred years after a comprehensive system of educational thought (pedagogy) and institutions was more or less in place in the US, its influence, as Putin articulates, is now one of global imposition.

(17) These 19th century US philanthropists understood the importance of controlling the production of subjectivity. Like their steel plants and oil refineries, humans too could be made in accord with the broad needs of a burgeoning industrial economy and an increasingly powerful nation state. Though exact specifications for this mass production have been difficult to define and implement (like taxes, they are always contested), the school systems put in place during the Industrial Revolution still produce more or less uniform subjectivity en masse in the US and in most every other country with an industrialized education system. It is the nature of the beast, liberal protestations to the contrary.

(18) The subjective qualities, the “ideal types” the system will strive to produce is firstly a political issue and only secondly technical (pedagogical); this is the case as well in theocracies where the issue may seem solely religious. Interestingly, in the 1990s when the USSR lost its political authority, its economic system, much of its culture and military power, it maintained its education power, allowing Putin’s regime to reorganize and remilitarize the Russian nation state only ten years later. The depth of the Russian education system was responsible. Education power and the price of natural resources are to Russia’s current comparative advantage. Education power, latent and actual, is strategically under appreciated however. For example, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) publication The World Factbookdoes not have a category for the quantification of education, though that agency well may have comprehensive education registers that are not included.

(19) Though tradition (culture) is powerful, education theoretically isolated from this broader setting, is not an ideal state independent of the agentic factors (the human beings, machines that carry systemic logic, etc.) that vitiate it. Education is a social process with no existence independent of its manifestation in quotidian practice. Education, like other social practices, must be reinvested regularly or it will not thrive or even survive. Strategically important knowledge and skills will be less available or lost altogether if the system is not protected, this ultimately weakening any given jurisdiction in all four spheres of activity, and putting its military power at risk. Not all countries have an educational heritage as deep as Russia.

Date: 2015-01-02; view: 948