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Friday Sep 20, 2024
Tuesday, 3 April 2018 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}
By Sajeeva Samaranayake
Establishment of the great divide
Anthony Giddens in his ‘Consequences of Modernity’ refers to the fact that time, place and social activity were locally defined until the invention of synchronised clocks and maps.
These inventions, enhanced mobility and communication, together with the growth of professions and their expert systems would help the city and Central Government to ‘lift out’ social activity from localised contexts and re-organise social relations across large time space distances. The city would become all powerful – with its power to describe, define and give meaning to the periphery. 
The village would lose power to the city in this continuous and inexorable process. In the city we would be pre-occupied with data analysis, information overload, number crunching, macro plans and think tanks when a simple conversation with a villager over a ‘kahata’ in a boutique would provide better insights on what really happens in the periphery. My little experience in development taught me that I must take all the wealth I have collected in my lap top to the village – open it and share it with communities.
Giddens thus shows that modernity is a double-edged phenomenon. Modern social institutions have created vastly greater opportunities for human beings to enjoy a secure and rewarding existence than in any type of pre-modern system. But the sombre side is the frequently degrading nature of modern industrial work, growth of totalitarianism, threat of environmental destruction and the alarming development of military power and weaponry.
Western colonisation established this blue print of inclusion and exclusion. Colebrooke and Cameron institutionalised the enabling structure with the stroke of a pen and J.R. Jayawardene ushered in neoliberalism to institutionalise a dual economy for a divided society.
After these First and Second worlds served by the private and state sectors there is also a Third World within, composed of both legal and illegal immigrants who must find an alternative land to live and work. Finally, after 500 years of the Portuguese Fort that came up in Colombo I did not believe I would live to see another emergent empire repeat history in front of the old Parliament.
In these 500 years we produced great scholars, pandits, intellectuals and professors. My question is what have we learned collectively? If we really cannot do better than repeat the same mistakes over and over again we cannot be – as Dr. Wijewardena says, going forward. It is not the clock that takes us forward but our ability to re-assess the past, learn from it, shed bad habits and move forward as new human beings – modern, up to date and present in every sense of those words.
There is a remarkable exception to this great divide in the work done in the 1930’s and 40’s to set up a rudimentary welfare state. Here was consciousness and a commitment to one citizenship. (No matter that the biggest beneficiaries remained the urbanised middle classes.) What is of enduring value is the ethic of public service and how this resonated with our cultural values of guiding the young and healing, as a practical expression of unconditional love….
Ownership and development
We must indeed stay open to the enormous possibilities that new technology and digital networking can bring in the hands of the present generation of youth. They fascinate me and we must sit with them and learn from them. Most of all we must design those spaces that will make this possible. This again is a matter of architectural and social planning. Spaces embody values and most of our meeting spaces are unapologetically hierarchical – even in our universities.
Most of all we need to support our youth to escape the ‘end-user’ trap that we have come to occupy as a society. We have become end-users of foreign ideas whether this relates to our government, development, education or consumer goods. The problem with this passive condition is that we become followers rather than innovators, original thinkers or leaders.
We are a nation that enjoys lunch but grudge washing the dishes afterwards. Buffets at hotels and lunch sheets on plates in every ‘bath kade’ testify to this. There is a rich word called “tantra” we use in our Sinhala for democracy. A practical meaning of tantra we can adopt for our everyday use is the continuity of full awareness from beginning to end. This is the mentality that sees ‘refuse’, ‘garbage’ and ‘waste’ as something else – a resource.
This also drives us to thoroughly understand the beginning of things. It is because we took democracy for granted and paid insufficient attention to its origins that our own version lacks depth in the fundamentals of collective and non-violent debate, discussion and argument. Finished products that come into our hand are great conveniences but when we don’t appreciate how and why it was created it would become diminished in both value and meaning. This is why taking full ownership of those subjects we are responsible for is vital.
As human beings we will truly care for and develop those things we own. Lacking full ownership, as end users, we would simply become corporate cogs serving corporate ends. True individuality will not emerge. And if we become reduced to tenants of this land – we are unlikely to put our heart and soul into development.
This is the connection between ownership and development. It is the toughest lesson both Governments and foreign donors struggle to learn. They don’t want to relinquish power and control; and they want the people to fit in with top down objectives. The mistrust remains as the project ends.
Re-thinking citizenship
Digital natives are local citizens before they evolve into global citizenship. The quality of the latter would be influenced by the quality of the former. Despite the late colonial commitment to one citizenship this idea was eroded by primordial ethnic identities.
The whole citizenship project became secondary in any event due to the colonial scramble for status. Status remains all important today. The stark choice of being ‘nobody’ or ‘somebody’ meant that commons would have no value, nobodies would be despised and a nobody who made it upstairs would not have anything further to do with that old identity. Education, instead of being a leveler was the way to maintain or achieve socio-economic status. We all know why public transport has not improved in this society – just the roads…
Our pre-modern social organisation was caste based. This is our common origin. It is not a matter of shame but plain history. We teach our children equality in school and pay great attention to caste in marriage and social relations. With this duplicity we have not outgrown caste consciousness. In our professions, offices companies and departments we have simply reproduced caste, displaying the same elitism, narrowness and exclusiveness that affirm hierarchy and reject egalitarianism.
As a result of the elitism, dignity and pomposity of the old professions and services many new social care professions needed by society – like psychologists, counsellors, therapists, social workers, child protection workers and others remain outcastes; unable to gain a footing for their proper establishment.
Established professionals who dabble with these new trends remain unconcerned as they remain firmly ensconced within their status and privileges. The new IT professional on the other hand appears less dependent on the patronage of their superiors and less affected by the tyrannical norms of dress and protocol which control other new professions.
Education as a function of authority, religion and market
Hegemonic reason and authority came together to educate Sri Lankans en masse from the 19th century. Social contributions came in the form of asserting ethnic and cultural identities as repositories of indigenous values. These two sources have become self-fulfilling values that upheld narrow authority in society on the one hand and narrow ethnicity on the other.
Since 1977 education has been effectively commoditised by the market with private tuition organised to supply the right answer scripts for the demand posed by examinations. This market is also unabashedly narrow and mercenary. Universities have followed suit. All this has confirmed the average Sri Lankan youth as uncritical rote learners. A mediocre elite reproducing more mediocrity – suppressing and punishing excellence and free thinking which challenges the status quo.
The essentially social and emotional beginnings and outcomes of education were left behind. Violence by teachers and students has been one of the significant by-products. Education itself as a form of violence done to children and youth is a very important subject of research.
In this context the Australian researchers Lankshear, Snyder and Green (Teachers and Technoliteracy: Managing literacy, technology and learning in schools, 2007, Allen and Unwin) sound some pertinent words of caution. They stress the autonomy of education, its essentially social function, and a need for thoughtful and effective integration of new technologies in accord with vital educational purposes and standards. These purposes and standards they warn, must not be sacrificed to the “technological dance or to the escalating corporatisation of education with which new technologies are so closely associated.”
They refer to important questions that must be posed under the pressure to technologise learning.
Transformative learning as the way forward
We must distinguish between abdicating and maintaining learner autonomy in the face of new technology; between being controlled by the many faces of power – political and economic, and negotiating and selecting what is useful for us; and between knowledge as commodity and knowledge as learning experience that changes and enhances our humanity.
The speed of technology coupled with our impulsive natures must be balanced by a broader view and this view is provided by a focus on relationships. Beyond digital natives and their teachers, we must give value to their relationships. More than the Third World and First World distinctions we must review the relationships that created this division. Edmund O’ Sullivan in ‘Transformative Learning – Educational Vision for the 21st Century’ provides a solid introduction to this new way of thinking.
The need to slow down and come home
I must end with the need to deepen consciousness and not sacrifice this at the altar of progress. Peace comes only with the re-discovery of humanity and this remains our neglected foundation. The real issues we face are much more basic, and even simpler, than our high-flown male, conceptualised, pre-occupations. They relate to our relationship with our self and with one or two other people and our adulthood and maturity in managing these.
Contd. on page 25
What fails here affects the rest of society. When we see the ravages in our public-sector institutions, due mainly to a lack of maturity, the inability of the powerful to connect and make meaningful human relationships outside their circles of cronyism the roots seem to lie neglected at home.
Human peace makes all things possible and this is the first pillar we must re-establish in places of higher learning. It is the lack of balance in our education that failed to produce professionals who are also human beings. It is therefore time we listened more to voices like Goleman, Peter D’Almeida, Chapa Bandara and Blake as we try to factor in the perspectives of Prof. Worsak. Optimism tempered by realism is what I suggest. Those historically separated and unequal patterns we stand on must be discerned and acknowledged. Only then can we work through them to reach higher ground. Technology by itself cannot take us there.
That scarcity is unfounded and that emerging technology can make this world a place of abundance sounds like a promise we heard before. Even economics founded on the premise of unlimited human wants and the freedom of choice in a finite planet must now re-consider.
Perhaps we need to review the outcomes in terms of Gross National Suffering or Happiness, and I am confident we can agree on the latter. We can also agree that aesthetics, ethics or spirituality and play indicate the direction of teaching innovation. But for any kind of taking stock or sober reflection my formula can be set out in terms of a 3S method – slowing down as an antidote to speed; silence as an antidote to multiple voices competing for attention; and simplicity as an antidote to complexity. Right now, we are racing each other to a precipice. Reduce speed now…or crash later.
(Read the first part of this article here.)
