Tradition & Energy: Calculating Our Educational Power Bill

Seeing an orbital image of planet Earth at night you immediately become aware of two things. Firstly, how much energy is used to maintain the human experiment; secondly, how inequitably it is distributed around the globe. As James Lovelock recently observed, ivilisation is energy-intensive?yet the real energy that is involved in human existence cannot be seen as easily as the orbital photo of our nightly planet suggests.

The real energy driving the human experiment is psychic energy. There is undoubtedly some correlation between the physical energy emitted each night by our cities and the psychic forces that are driving late-modernity, yet this tells only part of a much bigger story.

Much of the mystic energy driving the human experiment is bounded by conventions. In reality it is kind of a believable offer to make claims that conventions are energy streams that draw on power from the past, condense and focus energy in the present and, like a torch light, channel and project energy into the future. The fibre optic cables and satellite transmissions that bring speed and flexibleness to the planet and its globalizing economy and culture, as well as the urban incandescence of the Earth at night, are in truth the by products of an invisible but obviously outlined confluence of energy generating conventions.

Roots & Rivers

Rabindranath Tagore, one of India’s great poets, describes creation as a waking up, an explosion of energy. Not the traditional Big Bang, but something akin as Brahma awakens and its joy is boundless. The roots of the Indic tradition lie in this expression of boundless-joy. Today this story has merged with many others like the course of the Ganges as it first meets the great rivers of Yamuna, Ghaghara and Kosi and goes on through twists and turns, finally spitting again and again in the monsoonal Delta of Bengal.

Similarly, the turbine engines of culture are alive with the dynamic dance of practices, churning away like the great brook Ganges as it makes its ( untidy ) way to the ocean. The stories cultures tell themselves are the source of much energy, the dreams ( and nightmares ) that induce states, drive business and government big wheels are far more forceful than nuclear energy. The fables and metaphors that frame our comatose daily coming and goings are what we want to turn to when wanting to rethink civilisation and our job in its upkeep.

The Academic energy bill

When you think of traditions as conduits of power it is possible to look at any social structure and ask about it: What traditions power it? Who pays? Are there alternative energy sources?

Take one of societies most complicated and contested establishments : Education. A long way from being monolithic education is a undoubted power grid generating massive energy for the expansive and carnivorous industrial and the cultural practices of a globalising world.

The energy of this system draws on an array of traditions each bringing to the current system energy in the form of values, practices and beliefs. The humanism that drove education for centuries has been absorbed by the utilitarian needs of a rapidly globalising society. The pragmatic concerns of utilitarianism are at least in part off set by an opening up of democratic processes and a greening of the school. Furthermore, we also have the romantic tradition placing the child at the centre of the learning equation. Thus we find humanist, utilitarian, democratic, environmental and romantic strands at work; all provide energy and work to maintain the coherence of the system.

And the cost? The humanist tradition privileged the old elites, where culture and money and power coalesced, the poor payed; the utilitarian, as power shifted from the old elites to the new, a new form of education emerged and the user pays, ultimately the poor are excluded and as money flows upwards, they pay again.

The democratic offers a way out, as does the environmental : both result from customs that challenge hierarchies, yet both are too fragmented to test the dominance of the practical, their effect is ameliorative but they contain the potential energy to test this dominance should a change in the world-system bring about a power failure – such a shift might be either social or environmental. And the romantic? Kid centredness is forceful, as it is the base of both soft and hard individualism, but it is too simply coopted by the dominant cultural elites, especially those looking for a cultural off-set for the vacuum made by the loss of humanism to utilitarianism.

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Evans D. Smith

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