The article illustrates why the modern state should not be in charge of public education.  But I think it also suggests that there [...]]]> This article on Mises.org (HT: Blake Stephenson) gives an example of how the negative feedback loops inherent in large, centrally directed bureaucracies stifle the use of judgment, local knowledge and initiative.

The article illustrates why the modern state should not be in charge of public education.  But I think it also suggests that there are problems that exist in all collective human endeavors that educators, social scientist and entrepreneurs need to try to overcome.

Why can’t we all “learn” from history?   Why don’t organizations learn?

Experience teaches.  While individuals can clearly be very resilient to recognizing the lessons of their experience, when the consequences of their actions fall squarely on them, it is difficult for them to be completely immune to the implications reality has for their thinking and behavior.  Even when we are resistant to such lessons, we are bothered by conscience and failure.    Reality provides a kind of ‘control’ for our errors.  Yet peoples, governments and organizations seem to be remarkably oblivious to lessons which can be drawn from their past.  They repeatedly take the same actions that are detrimental to their purposes.  They fail to draw conclusions about the consequences of their collective behaviors and they are slow, if not entirely resistant, to making use of innovations suggested by the experience of their members.

One of the reasons for this is that there is a fundamental epistemological difference between the natural and social sciences.  Strictly speaking, experiments cannot be made in the social arena because social structures and relationships are far too complex to isolate one-to-one causal connections between actions and results.   In the social realm, every moment is always different from the one before it.  History never repeats itself.

For these reasons, irreducible judgment and understanding (verstehen) are essential.  We can learn by reading history, however.  We can practice exercising our judgment about social dynamics by comparing the considered judgments other individuals have made about particular historical situations in the past.   This is practice in developing and considering likely stories about social cause and effect.  We can also learn from economics, which  tries to uncover the abstract and timeless principles of human actions.

The difference between the learning that occurs in individuals  about the immediate effects of their actions and the “learning” of group is that the composite results of the actions of individuals is not immediate and cannot be directly observed.  There are unintended and unobserved results of our behaviors that are beyond our conscious recognition and control.  Social science studies the results of human action but not of human design.  According to Frederick Hayek the “economic problem”–which is to say the fundamental social problem–is the need for agents’ actions to be coordinated to make use of the knowledge (and learning) available to all of those agents separately.  In order to make use of dispersed knowledge, we need experimentation, judgment and risk-taking on the part of diverse individuals and some form of feedback that translates individual learning into a form that will tend guide the actions of others.

In the nexus of voluntary exchange (the “market”), the price system and the institutions of private property help to coordinate the knowledge and decisions of all the agents involved.  In The Use of Knowledge in Society, The Creative Powers of a Free Civilization and Competition as a Discovery Procedure, Hayek describes how certain institutions tend to make use of fortuitous discoveries and local knowledge for the mutual benefit of agents in that nexus of exchange.

Strictly speaking, groups of individuals do not learn; concomitantly, institutions cannot learn. But social structures can be so constituted that they allow individuals to make use of the knowledge and learning of the other individuals in that group.

Figuring out how to order all of our collective affairs in such a way that optimizes the use of the knowledge of the members of a group who do not possess that knowledge themselves is an exciting task for those who care about learning and progress.

Leonard Read was one of the greatest advocates for peace and human freedom.  His advocacy for these principles was founded on a deep gratitude for human beings and the creativity they [...]]]> Rachel’s last post about music and the market reminded me of this most fabulous article by Leonard E. Read called “The Miraculous Market.”

Leonard Read was one of the greatest advocates for peace and human freedom.  His advocacy for these principles was founded on a deep gratitude for human beings and the creativity they express.  Read’s works are a great example of what Maria Montessori believed should be an integral part of education: inspiring gratitude for human beings and what they have achieved through social cooperation.  In To Educate the Human Potential, she writes:

It is hoped that when this sentiment of love for all subjects can be aroused in children, people in general will become more human, and brutal wars will come to an end. But a love for science and art, and all that mankind has created, will not suffice to make men and women love one another. To love a beautiful sunset, or look with wonder on a tiny insect, does not necessarily awaken a greater feeling of affection towards humanity, nor does a love for art in a man beget a love for his neighbour. What is very necessary is that the individual from the earliest years should be placed in relation with humanity.  There is no love in our hearts for the human beings from whom we have received, and are receiving so much in bread and clothing, and numerous inventions for our benefit.  We take and enjoy all that is done for us without gratitude, like atheists who withhold their gratitude and love from God.  Perhaps we teach the child to thank God and pray to Him, but not to thank humanity, God’s prime agent in creation; we give no thought to the men and women who daily give their lives that we may live more richly….Every achievement has come by the sacrifice of the sacrifice of someone now dead….

Let us in education ever call the attention of children to the hosts of men and women who are hidden from the light of fame, so kindling a love of humanity; not the vague and enaemic sentiment preached today as brotherhood, nor the political sentiment that the working classes should be redeemed and uplifted….

Sustainability requires a balance of conservation with use. Governments everywhere subsidize consumption and tax saving [...]]]> It is important to note that the economic crisis we are in right now is not the result of technical or material conditions.  It is an economic problem, a problem regarding the coordination of individuals’ plans and the available resources.

Sustainability requires a balance of conservation with use. Governments everywhere subsidize consumption and tax saving and conservation.

Governments subsidies the production of roads, cars, the extraction of oil, deforestation, you name it. Most harmful is their use of artificial credit expansion from the federal reserve to subsidize widespread short-termism and present-focused consumption over savings and long term stewardship.

What has caused the crisis?  Too much consumption, too much borrowing, too much lending at high risk, not enough thought and care, too much unsustainable growth leading to a widespread miscoordination of plans with the facts of reality.  What is the proposed solution?  More of the same: to keep the economic engine going by encouraging more present consumption, over borrowing, protecting bankers from risky lending, and a continuation of directions of unsustainable growth with more easy credit.

We cannot continue this pattern indefinitely.

“We are perishing for want of wonder, not for [...]]]> “If the idea of the universe is presented to the child in the right way, it will do more for him than just arouse his interest, for it will create in him admiration and wonder, a feeling loftier than any interest and more satisfying.” ~Maria Montessori

“We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders.” ~G. K. Chesterton, quoted by Leonard Read, in I, Pencil.

Last night I had an amazing conversation with my incredibly precocious 12 year old neighbor. Our conversation brought us to the idea of being self-sufficient, and what I would, or wouldn’t be able to do without the help of others. I was inspired to bring out I, Pencil, a short essay by Leonard Read, founder of the Foundation for Economic Education, and read it with him. I went and got a pencil, simple, yellow, out of my desk, and we sat down together.

“I, Pencil, am a complex combination of miracles: a tree, zinc, copper, graphite, and so on. But to these miracles which manifest themselves in Nature an even more extraordinary miracle has been added: the configuration of creative human energies—millions of tiny know-hows configurating naturally and spontaneously in response to human necessity and desire and in the absence of any human master-minding! Since only God can make a tree, I insist that only God could make me. Man can no more direct these millions of know-hows to bring me into being than he can put molecules together to create a tree.” I, Pencil, Leonard Read

If you have never read this essay, I highly recommend it, I especially recommend reading it with your younger friends. My neighbor became so engaged! He began thinking of all the different people involved, and how we really aren’t very self sufficient at all. If we can inspire young people to see the wonder in the world around them, not just in nature, but in their own clothes, and plates, and pencils, in the simple things we can take for granted…if we can do that, we can begin to engage them to appreciate the “millions of tiny know-hows”, and once they appreciate them they will be prepared to protect them.

2-minute video of Milton Friedman paraphrasing the I, Pencil story (the essay is better, of course )

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6vjrzUplWU]

“How can the mind of a growing individual continue to be interested if all our teaching be around one particular subject of limited scope, and is confined to the transmission of such small details of knowledge as he is able to memorize? How can [...]]]> Maria Montessori writes the following in “To Educate the Human Potential”:

“How can the mind of a growing individual continue to be interested if all our teaching be around one particular subject of limited scope, and is confined to the transmission of such small details of knowledge as he is able to memorize? How can we force the child to be interested when interest can only arise from within? It is only duty and fatigue which can be induced from without, never interest! That point must be very clear” (6)

“knowledge can be best given where there is eagerness to learn” (3)

The end of the eductionist “is the child’s spontaneous interest and application” (16)

“The child should love everything that he learns, for his mental and emotional growths are linked. Whatever is presented to him must be beautiful and clear, striking the imagination. Once this love has been kindled, all problems confronting the educationist will disappear” (17)

Doesn’t the fact that interest, eagerness and knowledge cannot be forced in from the outside require us to understand the child? Not only the general needs and tendencies of any age group, but the interests, needs and tendencies of each particular child we seek to guide? If so, this would mean that a classroom cannot be centrally planned!

It’s a pity they didn’t publish just a little more of [...]]]> I found out recently that the Christian Science Monitor published an excerpt from John Maynard Keynes’ “General Theory” next to an expert from Frederic Bastiat’s “What is seen and what is not seen” about economic stimulus. What a cool idea!  Here’s the link.

It’s a pity they didn’t publish just a little more of Bastiat’s article.  He goes on to apply the idea of the broken window more explicitly to questions of stimulus.  He shows that all government spending and stimulus requires a drain on resources (through taxation, inflation, and/or government borrowing), which amounts to an anti-stimulus somewhere else.  This is just a fact.  So the real issue about economic stimulus is not whether to have stimulus or not, but whether it is more effective for governments to direct the resources available for stimulus according to a central plan or to allow dispersed individuals to allocate their own resources according to their local knowledge.

Here’s a video that was flying around the blogosphere last week that applies Bastiat’s principle of the broken window to the recent issue of stimulus.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xV5Ulu86-TY&hl=en&fs=1]