Languaging and Learning Redux

                One of Maturana’s favorite sayings about languaging is that it is the process through which we “bring forth” a world.  We bring forth a world because there isn’t an objective and inert ‘real’ world that we merely have to describe.  The way we describe it, language it, helps shape what it is we can know, see and say about that world.  Individually and culturally we go through a continual process changing and adapting our relationship to the material surroundings we confront.  We have what he calls a ‘structural coupling’ with that context.  That is, there are certain material conditions that must be met to sustain our continued existence.  We depend on languaging to identify, maintain and reshape those conditions.  The organism, both the individual and social, is responding to, learning about and changing the environment that sustains them.  This process is called autopoiesis.  It requires that the changes sustain the structural coupling while providing necessary or desired adaptations along the way.

                Learning is essentially autopoiesis.  It requires us to both keep what we know that still applies or is helpful while simultaneously languaging new forms of being into existence.  Looked at this way, it should be obvious that the modern project of education has failed.  There is too much preservation and not enough creation.  There is too much expert privilege and too little communal access. There is no doubt that our current system produces new ideas and technology at a rapid rate, but to participate in the change a person has to drag centuries of old knowledge with them.  We have sped up expert learning while excluding most of the population from the language games that produce it.  There is a valid argument to be made that only a limited number of people are even capable of those expert language games and access to them should remain limited.  It is true that we probably don’t want just anybody designing the next bridge we have to drive over with our family, but the expert model has estranged people from the world that we are ‘bringing forth,’ and that is dangerous. 

                I think the problem is a problem of scale.  Obviously, none of us can know everything.  We have evolved expertise in areas that take an enormous amount of specialization to master.  What we haven’t done is to ‘scale’ those advances into a narrative of common purpose.  Only a few people may know how to make an atomic bomb or execute a credit default swap, but for them to enhance or preserve the ecological and social coupling that sustains us, everyone has to know what they are and have a voice in saying that they should exist.  No one can know everything, but everyone has to know what the larger narrative is about the things that only a few people can master.  We have assumed that a few really smart people could decide things for all the rest of us.  They can’t.  We have the expertise to make more and more creative forms of plastic, but should we make any plastic at all?  Technology and expertise unchecked by a communal consensus is folly.  We have the most advanced scientific practices in history, yet more and more people are ignorant, fearful or suspicious of them.  Why is that?

                Cultures are transgenerational engines of autopoiesis.  When the narrative breaks down, they fragment into more and more competitive and disfunctional units, each trying to control narrative of the time.  Some of them are bound to very far away from the things that sustain our structural coupling with the material world.  Some of them are bound to create wild and crazy ideas about reality. (In my household, we call those people Republicans).  Because they are languaging only with people in their group, they became more and more distant from any dialogue of reconciliation.  The way we approach education will not solve this.  A better approach is to rethink the relationship between expertise and community.  People have to participate in making knowledge in order to use and trust it.  More fundamentally, they have to have a say in what knowledge is produced and how it is used.  The citadel approach to the university has outlived its usefulness.  We need a model of education that is inclusive and not competitive.  Smart people doing stupid things is no way to build a future.