In a post titled Let's put our heads together and start a new country up, "Gideon" remarked:"Personally, I am and always have been an anarchist; biased towards
Schumacher-like "small is beautiful" communities based around voluntary
co-operation; I believe the nation state to be an artificial and unwieldy construction."
Let me suggest, here, that to create such communities as Gideon desires would require a complete reorientation of everything we do, down to our ways of thinking and studying the world. Unfortunately, the thinkers are at present too preoccupied with something else, with training their thoughts toward success in a system that is "pointed the other way". The systems that encase human thinking, therefore, have to change.
Toward this end, I'd like to suggest that we scrap all of the universitites, lay off all of the professors, and re-hire these same professors according to their qualifications to teach in a new array of departments. It's a small step, but one that might prove useful in building a better society. I'd be open to suggestions as to how the sciences and the humanities be rearranged -- maybe I can suggest changes in another post. The subdivisions for social science would preliminarily exist as follows:
Department of Ideological Deprogramming
When I was a teaching associate in graduate school, I felt hopelessly paralyzed by my inability to relate to my students, most of whom I felt had inappropriate prior attitudes about 1) the purpose of college, 2) proper study habits in college, 3) participating in classroom settings, 4) the way the world worked. I also felt paralyzed by the university's inability to show me how to teach such students in an inappropriate manner. My department advised me to "be creative" beyond the typical lecture/ note-taking format of the university classroom, but was terribly unclear about effective teaching beyond such advice.
I feel that the mismatch between being taught by the university and teaching the undergraduates was partly the fault of an educational system that seeks largely to deny people the fruits of the mastery of knowledge (see David F. Labaree's HOW TO SUCCEED IN SCHOOL WITHOUT REALLY LEARNING for the historical genesis of the dysfunctional nature of American schooling in particular), through grading systems, credential systems, and forms of education that create dependency upon teachers rather than the mastery of techniques of inquiry. If we are to free knowledge from the system while at the same time creating systems that deliver knowledge, we're going to have to ideologically deprogram everyone in the system, from kindergarten through the university. The task at hand is in getting people to realize that there are a multiplicity of ways for doing academic work where they might have relied upon only one way before, to replace closed-mindedness with open-mindedness. This would be a "department of deschooling" in the way Ivan Illich used the word "deschooling." Thus it wouldn't be sufficient to start a Department of Ideological Deprogramming in a Department of Education, because the former would regard the latter as part of the problem and not part of the solution.
Department of Democratic Studies
One of the problems common to the various organizational frameworks imposed upon human societies in the 20th is that there is 1) a common failure of communication-lines between the management end and the labor end of organizations, and that this is caused by 2) a failure to democratize organizations of any significant size. The solution is not "better communication," as a Department of Communication might advise, nor is it "better organization," as a Department of Organizational Studies might suggest in a meeting with the "heads" of any organization all of which are eager to implement some top-down pseudo-solution to the "problem" they perceive. What's needed, I argue, is better democracy, democracy that works rather than getting bogged down in disagreement, endless meetings, or dictatorship, democracy that empowers all workers in all organizations to control the tasks of group management.
Department of Ethnographic Studies
As Deirdre McCloskey pointed out in THE RHETORIC OF ECONOMICS, many writers in the field have taken to using statistical analysis as a substitute for substantive argument. I would argue that the trend McCloskey cites is true of the social sciences as a whole, and that what's happened is that thin analyses of real-life situations are being "legitimized" in academic contexts by a common academic obsession with the mathematical organization of data. The end result is that academic journals publish studies whose conclusions bore the heck out of me -- their authors go into technical-sounding analyses of situations they have failed to recognize culturally, and thus they generalize aimlessly about things which appear to me as highly specific to particular cultural contexts.
What's clearly needed IMHO to resolve this problem is a return to ETHNOGRAPHIC STUDY as the basic method of obtaining knowledge about people, and statistical (and technical) analysis as a supplementary form of ethnographic study. Ethnographic studies background the collected observations of their students in a multi-cultural context, they concentrate upon the collection of "thickly described" detail (to paraphrase a term made famous by James Clifford), they reconcile the necessary role played by the ethnographic observer with the scholarly need for objectivity -- in short, ethnography makes up for the deficiencies of all the social-scientific methods commonly not described as "ethnographic." Furthermore, today in the academy, ethnography has become a general tool for qualitative research not merely in anthropology or folklore but across the social-scientific disciplines. It's time for a Department of Ethnographic Studies, rather than keep ethnography chained to a dozen departments working separately on the same thing.
Department of Critical Social Theory
This would be a department that would extrapolate from the philosophical thesis of Max Horkheimer's "Traditional and Critical Theory." Traditional theory, argued Horkheimer, is obsessed with disputes about the categories in which reality is to be encased. Analogously, the modern university is concerned with whether social reality is to be analyzed by the department of Sociology or Anthropology or Psychology or Economics or Political Science or History or Cultural Studies. On the other hand, critical theory, argued Horkheimer, is concerned that theory point the way to a better society. Thus the Department of Critical Theory would be concerned not merely with the collection of data about the past, as would be the goal of today's Department of History, but instead with humanity's production of a multiplicity of possible futures, with the aim of selecting the best of these futures. The Department of Critical Theory would be more than a Department of Political Economy; it would stand the labor of today's Department of History on its head, producing a "history toward the future," without averting its eyes from practical psychology and social engineering.
Oh yes. All courses would be taught collectively by the Departments as a whole unit (with a "lead teacher" for each department). Classes would be non-graded, evaluated by a narrative evaluation system that could (if necessary) be systematized by the Learning Record or the Online Learning Record.
Any suggestions?
