Conscious Choice: Trading Knowledge for Information

February 2001

Trading Knowledge for Information

by H. Peter Steeves, Ph.D.

Suppose that all of the toilets in Chicago were to stop working at the same time. All at once and all across the city, we push the magic levers and...nothing. Nothing disappears; nothing is whisked away; nothing happens. Suppose, then, that it stays this way for days, for weeks, even. What would be the most likely result? There would be chaos. People would leave the city en masse, others would end up getting sick, business and daily life would grind to a halt, the metropolis would crumble — the kingdom would be lost for the want of a commode. And the consequences would undoubtedly be more or less the same in a smaller town as well, for the real problem is not the size and the complexity of the hidden infrastructure that makes city life possible. The problem is that we don’t even truly know how to go to the bathroom anymore without the comfortable cocoon of technology that makes it passively possible.

So what is it that we do know? We live, supposedly, in the age of information; but this should not be equated with an age of understanding. It is wrong to think that as a culture we have been accumulating knowledge — as if we know everything every previous generation has known and more. What we know are different things; and truth be told, we may in actuality know less (and less important things) than our predecessors. Our culture — our educational system — has commodified knowledge, stripping it of its relevance to daily life. Thus we may be able to access a Web site with a naughty bathroom-cam, but we would be hard pressed to stay healthy in a toiletless Chicago.

A Liberal Dose of Education

These days expertise with the Internet is considered a better indication of one’s being educated than possessing the ability to build an outhouse. Being "educated" has come to denote having access to and possessing general cultural information. It allows us, in effect, to lead a largely unexamined life. This, in itself, is no real surprise. It is the logical result of life in a Liberal state.

The term "Liberal" is meant here not in the sense of liberal vs. conservative, but in the classical sense of the term: Liberalism as the foundation for most of our Western institutions and political concepts. Liberalism, as defined in this way, assumes that we are all isolated, selfish, and competitive. It assumes that only a social contract can bring us together into a community, that only a strong set of laws will keep us from each others’ throats, that only an invisible hand can save us collectively. It is the worldview that Rousseau, Locke, Jefferson, Gore, and Bush all share. And it is the philosophy upon which our educational institutions are based.

The Liberal community is a community only in a very specific sense of the word: it is the setting and the backdrop against which disparate individuals meet and interact with one another. These Liberal selves — busy choosing their own ends and values — are drawn together out of the need for and the availability of work, thus creating a community of buyers, sellers, consumers, producers, owners, and laborers. As a result, education becomes just another commodity, and educators take on the role of trainers, preparing the next generation to enter the corporate community and function appropriately.

It is clear that the marketplace is not a value-neutral playing field. Values, of course, are taught whenever a student reads a book or takes an exam. The Indians of the Six Nations knew this already in 1744 when the College of William and Mary offered to take a dozen of their men and educate them "properly":

"We know that you highly esteem the kind of learning taught in colleges," came the reply, "but you, who are wise, must know that different Nations have different conceptions of things; and you will therefore not take it amiss, if our Ideas of this kind of education happen not to be the same with yours. We have had some experience of it. Several of our young people were formerly brought up at the colleges...but when they came back to us they were bad runners, ignorant of every means of living in the woods, unable to bear either cold or hunger,...spoke our language imperfectly,...they were totally good for nothing. We are, however, not the less obliged by your kind offer, though we decline accepting it; and to show our grateful sense of it, if the Gentlemen of Virginia will send us a dozen of their sons, we will take care of their education; instruct them in all we know, and make men of them."

The Corporate Agenda

This is not a condemnation of the public school system. On the contrary, they might be our last and final hope. Private schools have proven to be even greater Liberal indoctrinators than their public counterparts. The country barely raised an eyebrow when ex-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich’s history course, "Renewing American Civilization," which he taught at a Georgia college and which was shown by satellite TV at over one hundred other locations, was financed by corporations. The lack of outcry is remarkable given the obvious sell-out: each corporate sponsor donated a minimum of $50,000 in order to get a say in the course’s content and structure.

But corporations are moving in on the public schools, as well. They already provide software to public schools in desperate need of high-tech makeovers. Lack of funds and public grumbling over taxes in general and school levies in particular make public schools scramble for the free corporate handouts. But when, to choose one example, oil companies produce a CD-ROM on maintaining the environment, and this software is to be used in public elementary schools, the price of the handout becomes clear. These children may not grow up to work for Exxon, but they certainly won’t grow up questioning it either. They won’t think twice about the foundational belief that the environment exists for humans to use, and that our only real responsibility is to use it in a way that allows it to be continually profitable.

The solution, however, is not simply to stop corporations from providing educational material or to bar them from opening up neighborhood DeVry Institute-clones as if they were Starbucks outlets. What is needed is a major overhaul of the philosophies underpinning education.

The Place of Knowledge

Perhaps capitalist society always will have pressure to choose information over knowledge. After all, information is a commodity, easily captured in ones and zeros, in soundbites, as a final-round question from Regis Philbin. It is more easily packaged and sold than knowledge, more easily passed along to consumers — and students. Knowledge is more elusive. It is harder to gain, commodify, and sell. From a (short-term) capitalist point of view, it is hardly worth the effort.

Television, in fact, offers a good example of the trade-off between knowledge and information. Thirty minutes of network news gives us data, factoids, and soundbites — all without context, and all with equal import, as if everything is happening in the same place, and has equal value. How can we help but register the data all the same?

In terms of values, Daniel Kemmis — the communitarian ex-mayor of Missoula, Montana — puts the point in this manner: "Public life as we all too often experience it now is very much like a Big Mac — it can be replicated in exactly the same form anywhere. And just as our acceptance of placeless‘food,’ consumed under placeless yellow‘landmarks,’ weakens both our sense of food and of place, so too does the general placelessness of our political thought weaken both our sense of politics and of place.... No real culture — whether we speak of food or of politics or of anything else — can exist in abstraction from place."

Since identity is constructed by the marketplace, and the marketplace is inherently placeless, the marketplace sees no need to inform viewers — or teach students — about their local community. Instead we disseminate and consume facts, contextless information about, for instance, "the environment." The environment, in this lack of context, surrounds us but does not include us. It must be protected — as a resource. It is best understood generically — as a placeless every-place — and best analyzed scientifically by experts with specialized information at their disposal to which we, the lay public, do not have access. The result is that American elementary school students know a few things about the Brazilian rainforest (typically, how its disappearance is endangering some colorful or cute animals), and they know nothing of the needs and history and richness of the land beneath their own concrete.

It is time to remember that education, in order to foster knowledge, must be part of the process of coming to know one’s self. And — contrary to the Liberal view — self understanding inherently requires an understanding of the world and others. Even individuality is a function of social perspective, and I only know myself to be a Self in virtue of the fact that I know you to be the Other. It is this fact — coupled with an awareness of our shared world — that provides an initial foundation for education. The people and places which give us meaning, constitute our identity, inflate us to life, and comprise the content of our actual daily experience are particular people and places — my wife, my neighbor, this grove of trees filled with life, this Midwest landscape. These are the primary relations that constitute me and my world, and knowing them must be a top priority.

Understanding one’s place in Illinois, then, should not preclude knowing about deforestation in Brazil, but it must include knowledge of this Midwestern land and its life, human and otherwise. Understanding this life and this land, in fact, is key to understanding Amazon deforestation — mainly because our modern Midwestern way of life typically contributes to the problem.

Of course, this local knowledge must include a variety of perspectives; education is (partially) a systematic making-of-the-rounds in an attempt to synthesize a worldview and self-understanding. American Indian voices and pioneer settler voices and Polish immigrant voices and animal-life voices — all should be stops along the way. But the focus of inquiry should be the act of selection and not exclusion.

Aldo Leopold worried in A Sand County Almanac: "I once knew an educated lady, banded by Phi Beta Kappa, who told me that she had never heard or seen the geese that twice a year proclaim the revolving seasons to her well-insulated roof. Is education...a process of trading awareness for things of less worth?" Our insulated roofs, our magically functioning plumbing, our factory schools have in fact traded awareness for things of less worth. First we must recognize this. Then we must change it.

H. Peter Steeves, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University.

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