Adapt or die out Laurie Loper Psychologist
That’s the choice all species face. That’s the immutable law of nature. In the wild, it governs the survival chances of all species. That urge to survive is in their DNAs. In the wild it causes polar bears, for instance, to roam unbelievable distances searching for food. Humankind, too, is subject to that immutable law. It too has the same survival urge, with various peoples expressing this in the diverse mechanisms they develop. Giving humankind some advantage over other species, the cultures it evolves are the interesting mechanisms in the survival equation for they have the power to mitigate threats to the peoples involved, should any happen along. Providing those cultures do their job, things ought to work out well. But what if change occurs – particularly rapid, radical change – sweeping away things that had for centuries been regarded as permanent fixtures? As we know, cultures do lock people into particular courses of action so an appropriate response to threat might well not be mounted quickly enough.
28 Good Teacher Magazine Term 4 2012
In the case of education, it has two cultures associated with it that are universal – teaching culture and the larger, more powerful and pervasive education culture. Both have been around for so long, they are taken for granted so much, long ago they disappeared beyond everyone’s consciousness. Especially so the latter. The fact that education culture operates beyond our awareness poses problems. In particular it sets up a situation whereby we are no longer in control of how best to develop the capacity to learn of our young, contrary to what is otherwise thought. Given that culture and DNA are tightly entwined – one theory has it that culture imprints DNA – what we have here is a situation that’s bordering on one where our DNA might be setting us up to be on a destructive course. Being unaware of our culture’s influence, means no threat is detected even when there patently is one. In such a case, no action results, things drift, makeshift solutions are employed, things don’t improve. More makeshift solutions get trotted out, oftentimes appearing more convoluted and contrived than the ones before. Things lurch on, eventually desperation sets in, decision making goes into free fall. Observing this, thinking people from outside of the education sector wonder what the hell is going on. Can’t anyone connect the dots and see what’s happening? Can’t anyone see how relevant a knowledge of culture and it’s influences would be in the situation? Since such knowledge remains hidden beyond awareness, nobody can. Even if that wasn’t the case, the practices and patterns of thinking employed around learning are traditional and work in concert to deny the reality of what’s going on. Throw in a situation like quake-torn Christchurch, there’s infrastructural issues to further complicate things. While education’s decision makers at the top level are never backward in pointing out that New Zealand is up there with the best in the world, obviously none of them see things heading inexorably towards the type of culturally caused nemesis that is said to have