Andrew Yang アンドリュー・ヤン

We live in a time when media dominates not only our attention, but perhaps even the physical planet itself. The impact of media’s ecology and flow is as significant to the planet as its biogeochemical cycles; an earthquake can shake the Earth, but the ways that media motivates humans to act also can shape the very land we live on.

With the surprise election of Donald Trump as president of the United States, we can see how so-called “reality TV” and sensationalist news reporting circulated Trump’s image/brand so effectively that over 47 million people were convinced he should be a world leader. Trump firmly believed in the adage “there is no such things as bad publicity.” His ability to manipulate media and public opinion simply by being ever-present and on every screen meant that US voters came to accept him while also becoming desensitized to his bullying, his bigotry, and his outright lying. The whole idea of valid information or “facts” has become irrelevant to a great number of people, what matters is the idea of Trump, a meme for the rage of many white Americans.

As a politician who denies the scientific facts of human-induced global warming, we can expect Donald Trump will try to make major changes to US policy that will result in increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as well as increased drilling and fracking for fossil fuels―actions that will physically (and not just metaphorically) transform the landscape. He intends to abolish the EPA (the environmental protection agency of the US) and pull out of the Paris Climate Accord. This is how the ecology of our media―specifically, the successes of spectacle and the failures of journalism―can be directly linked to the ecology of our planet, to our physical atmosphere and to climate change itself. Media ecology is inextricably woven into the conditions of the Anthropocene; Trump’s actions on climate, pollution, and fossil fuels may end up being inscribed in the geological record for millions of years to come.

Ecology is a complex system with feedback loops, with non-linear forms of cause & effect, and with non-intuitive consequences. If we plan to “design” it, then we need to think more complexly and more long term about what media structures and what educational structures we can try to put in place to avoid such unexpected, and potentially catastrophic, changes. Or is it that media ecology is just too complex for us to understand? Whatever “media literacy” is, clearly those of us who work professionally in media or education have not succeeded in cultivating that literacy. Or to be more specific, we have succeeded in doing that for only a fraction of society. Perhaps that fraction of society―the supposed “media elites” of which I (as a writer) and you (as a reader) of #Five# clearly belong―have lacked the necessary sophistication to grasp media’s and culture’s true complexity. It is not an ivory tower as much as a media bubble.

There is no better evidence of the extreme media bubble we all live within than the remarkable failure of polling by the New York Times and other news outlets to predict Trump’s victory. The hundreds of millions of dollars spent on ineffectual advertising by the Clinton campaign also points out fundamental misunderstandings about what people care about and how media communication really works. For all the interconnectivity of the Internet, we are increasingly isolating ourselves by customizing what we hear and see.

Days before the election Trump repeatedly insisted that the voting system―the medium of democratic representation in the US―was “rigged” against his success. His election proves that he was both right and wrong. Wrong because he obviously won, but right because the US election system does not in fact reflect the views of the American people overall: only 56% of those who could vote in this election did vote, which means only 27% of all eligible voters actually wanted him as president. Media is not only a matter of visual or linguistic representation, but also political representation. The election system as a medium―indeed as its own form of media―seems very broken.

Perhaps we have lost trust not only in politicians or governments, but also the infrastructure of our various mediums (electronic, political, representational) to communicate what we feel is most urgent or crucial. The flow of media is yet another cycle and feedback loop that defines our planet’s sustainability. Trump barely won the election, but it was a landslide all the same, the creation of a geological fault that we must somehow overcome. Time to get to work.

Andrew Yang アンドリュー・ヤン

I must confess, I feel lost about learning. For almost 30 years of my life I have been a student of some kind, while for the last 20 years I have been a professional educator. The nine commentaries on learning that I have written for Five over the last two years reflect my curiosity and my confusion about learning in this contemporary moment. As an academic and artist I sometimes feel like a media cyborg, a digital/analog composite that produces and consumes information at an unforgiving pace—keeping up, creating content, and supposedly educating others for a world of accelerating expectations and uncertainties. Other times I feel like Alice from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland because of the way that informational interconnectedness feels unfamiliarly familiar, equal parts exciting and anxiety-inducing, changing at every turn in a way that “we must run as fast as we can, just to stay in place.” *1

Reflecting on this, I watch my four-and-half year old daughter start to become a media creature herself—learning to write her own name, drawing elaborate pictures, and taking interest in mass media (especially Disney princess stories). So far she spends most of her time with books and almost no time with computerized screens—in fact she tries to convince her parents to spend less time on our computers—but I know that this will all change soon. In earlier essays I suggested how “media ecology” is also a matter of biological ecology and political ecology at the same time. Given that, I think about my daughter’s own opportunities for learning within such a multi-layered ecosystem and wonder: Should she have more chances to walk around trees and touch natural grass? When should she begin to learn a second language? Is public school the best option if I was bored all of my early school years? Most formal education is a kind of social (and thus political) training: schedules, classrooms, and textbooks all structure socially specific ways of thinking and being, whether they are Confucian, democratic, Muslim, capitalist, or some complicated combination. Which direction should I set my daughter towards if these years of education play such a large role in forming her worldview?

I get the sense she also feels like Alice much of the time, in the midst of constant and strange discovery. Of course almost everything she encounters is new to her at her age, but it is also true that everything in wider culture is becoming generally “curiouser and curiouser.” Whatever choices I try to make for my daughter, what do I really know in the face of so many unknowns within a perplexing, 21st century wonderland of uncontrolled economic growth, climate change, pervasive social media, and a 24/7 surveillance society? All of my concerns for her learning just a few sentences ago seem trivial when I ask myself “What kind of education makes sense for a child living in world where the global temperature will soon rise by 2oC, or in a country where Donald Trump is a serious contender for the next president?” What kind of parent I can be seems to link to what kind of teacher I can be. I ponder my enculturated blind spots, my assumptions, my “filter bubble,” and how they affect my understanding of what it means to educate and to be educated.

And so: I feel a little lost about learning right now, disoriented. Perhaps I should take some of the teacherly advice I sometimes give my own students about how learning is most fundamentally about becoming comfortable with ambiguity. This does not mean being comfortable with vague opinions, with indecision, or with ignorance; it is the willingness to embrace the psychological discomfort that comes from asking basic questions about everything around us, and then asking them again. So perhaps this disorientation is exactly what I need to feel in this moment: down a rabbit hole, among strange new creatures, and swimming in a sea of uncertain knowing—learning to be Alice as a way of learning to learn.

Figures:
Scenes from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, an apt metaphor for navigating our media ecologies.

Reference:
Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. London: MacMillan and Co. 1866.

Andrew Yang アンドリュー・ヤン

Confusion and possibility: With the exponential growth of what we can know it is not clear what is worth paying attention to, much less learning. But to what extent are our decisions to pay attention and to learn determined by informational content, or by the particular form that the information takes? There is abundant research showing how particular forms of media affect how ideas are communicated and understood; indeed, some go so far as to claim that “the medium is the message.”*1 However, what media (mediums) count as relevant in our media ecology is largely unquestioned. Blogs, radios, smart phones, TVs, and traditional forms like books certainly count as mediums, but I would argue that we view the activity of a medium as fundamentally passive―simply the physical substrate to convey the encoded and immaterial information that contains the real meaning. This traditional understanding of media is an extension of the Cartesian mind/body dualism dominant in western philosophy: physical forms are means, but never meaning―the medium is essentially a form waiting to be filled with content.

But what if we considered objects such as an egg, an apple, or a hammer as forms of media as well? By this, I do not mean that an egg, an apple, or a hammer functions as a symbol for an idea―this would simply replicate the view of cultural meaning being carried upon a material medium. Instead, I am suggesting that the meaning embodied in an object is about the object itself, although in an expanded sense. For example, when cracking an egg into a frying pan there is a possibility, in that moment, to do more than just cook it. There is the opportunity to consider where the egg came from―the store, the farm, as well as the mother hen. Was she a caged hen, or one that was allowed to roam free? Were her feathers brown or white? What was she eating that made the color of the yolk congealing in the pan so orange? If we can imagine what new chicken that single egg might have become (given a different history) then we might also consider the ancient dinosaurs from which chickens and their eggs evolved over the past 65 million years.

Through this view, the egg is a medium in a different sense―it is a medium of its own existence as well as for the ecology of other objects, activities, histories, and possibilities that connect the matrix of mental and material associations that it (the egg) can evoke. This conception of media and its ecology locates a medium’s meaningfulness (meaning fullness) within its power to provoke deeper interpretation and critical imagination, not merely its ability to deliver packets of information. In terms of knowledge and learning, the shift in priorities is away from the acquisition of data and back towards the cultivation of deeper, holistic understanding.

We might call the egg-as-medium some kind of “holographic entry point.” I borrow this term from philosopher Thomas Kasulis’ description of the role that torii（鳥居）and shimenawa（しめ縄）play in within Shinto practice to designate objects and sites connecting humans to the larger totality of nature.*2 Typically we think of parts as connecting to make a whole; in turn, the whole can be broken down and reduced into its distinct parts. Kasulis argues that what makes an object or site “holographic,” is its ability to help us to understand that every part also contains the whole. The object or site as a medium doesn’t convey any one piece of data, instead it embodies meaning itself. Rather than thinking of messages, media, people, and objects as externally related to each other, the holographic perspective understands them as internally and inextricably related―a whole in every part, form as context for its own content.

This approach doesn’t mean that traditional notions of media should be completely rejected, however it does invite the possibility of picking up a smartphone and at the same time recognizing that we are picking up nuclear-powered electricity stored in Peruvian-sourced lithium that then flows through Shenzhen-crafted integrated circuits housed in a metal case whose aluminum was mined by hand in Brazil. It suggests an expansive and holistic alternative to a media philosophy that is currently so focused on filtering and reduction into informational parts. As low-tech as it is high-minded, the holographic view calls for a new media ecology of learning about things and with things, not simply through them.

Footnotes:
*1 McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Mentor: New York.1964.

*2 Kasulis, Thomas P. Shinto: The Way Home. University of Hawaii Press: Honolulu. 2004.

Andrew Yangアンドリュー・ヤン

If the Anthropocene is a new geological epoch in which “nature” and “culture” are no longer separable — either conceptually or materially — then what is the status of traditional ideas like “aesthetics” that have historically relied on those distinctions? With shrinking natural resources, growing populations, increased connectivity but also growing social inequalities, what aesthetic forms within our media ecology will be generative of new and meaningful sense?

While the German Romantics cultivated the notion of “aesthetics” as “beauty,” the term aesthetics has its etymological roots in Greek, where its foundational meaning is the ability to “sense” or “perceive” more generally. Many of the images that have helped us perceive the unprecedented changes to the Anthropocenic Earth are thanks to technologies of “remote sensing” — satellites and sensors of every kind with the power to observe physical dynamics at large scales. Through such technologies, everything from the clearing of the Amazonian rainforests and the dynamics of global weather patterns, to the desperate migration of millions of refugees across Europe and the Mediterranean, can be tracked in detail and at a distance.

The Blue Marble is arguably the most iconic of remote sensing images, a picture of the whole Earth taken by astronauts in 1972 (see Figure). An encompassing view, the Blue Marble would seem like the most “realistic” of all pictures, and an ideal image for the Anthropocene: aesthetically compelling, data-rich, and contemplative because it visualizes the finite planetary boundaries of “spaceship Earth.” But the Blue Marble is also extremely abstract, reducing all of the detailed and complicated dynamics into a smoothened and singular view.　

Do images of the current migration crisis captured by photojournalists succeed any better? Although they are proximate and on a human scale, such images are often just as remote to us as a view from outer space — both represent situations most of us simply never personally experience. Images of either kinds provide some perception of events, but they lack the feeling of personal participation that is necessary to truly sensitize us to these situations. How can we make our sensing less remote in an Anthropocene that is thought to demand a new level of sensitivity and responsiveness?

Projects in the UK like Forensic Architecture and Citizen Sense exemplify an approach that makes use of images and data from inexpensive cameras or sensors in a way that allows people to interpret acts of pollution, military conflict, or other complex events. Rather than just “see” the world, these projects allow citizens to closely analyze political and environmental situations for themselves, giving birth to new forms of investigative, grassroots, and research-based aesthetics of participation. Storyplacers and Media Conte, on the other hand, try to make use of mobile & digital media platforms as a means of engaging personal narratives of place and community. Not only is the idea to create records of experience, but also to potentially mobilize self-organization and spur social movements around matters of local concern.

But just as aesthetically important may be projects like AI-KI 100 (100 Cheers) , by the Japanese art collective Chim Î Pom. Visiting Soma City soon after the 2011 Tohoku disaster, the art collective collaborated on a performance with a group of local residents. Huddled arms-together in the midst of a ravaged landscape they yelled whatever came to their mind, from the inspirational to the absurd: “Go Tohoku!” “Soma makes great strawberries!” “I want to wear a swimsuit!” “30 micro Sieverts!” The cheers were an aesthetic response that expressed hopes, frustrations, and fears to create forms of participation and awareness as direct as they were empathetic.

As Chim Î Pom puts it, the Soma City residents were both the victims of the disaster as well as their own aid workers; rather than being “remote” to the situation, they were exactly in the middle of it as participants. Perhaps something similar can be said for Earthlings experiencing the uncertainties of the purported Anthropocene — we in the middle of it; as its perpetrators, its potential victims, and our own rescuers alike. The new media for this new epoch will require aesthetic forms that are collectively meaningful but less remote, forms that can make sense of the world as not just information, but also as complex, lived experiences beyond the bounds of data.

References:
“The Blue Marble” image from 1972, NASA.
http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view.php?id=55418

The “Forensic Architecture” project at Goldsmiths, University of London.
http://www.forensic-architecture.org/

The “Citizen Sense” project at Goldsmiths, University of London.
http://www.citizensense.net/

The “Storyplacers” project (Japan/Finland collaboration).
http://storyplacers.tumblr.com/About

メディアコンテ / Media Conte
http://mediaconte.net/

Video of Chim Î Pom’s “KI-AI 100.”
http://video.pbs.org/video/2071709279/

Andrew Yangアンドリュー・ヤン

“the Anthropocene… is the most decisive philosophical, religious, anthropological, and political concept yet produced as an alternative to the very notion of ‘modern’ and ‘modernity’.”

– Bruno Latour, “The Anthropocene and the Destruction of the Image of the Globe” lecture from the 2013 Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh.

Where are we? The Earth, no doubt. More difficult to answer is when are we. As humans we have been transforming our environments non-stop for the last 200,000 years of our recognizable existence as a species: hunting, taming, building, growing, mining, burning, and re-routing the world to suit us. And yet that 200,000 years is just a tiny fraction of the Earth’s deep time, in fact just 0.000014 of its current age; when we are is actually the thinnest sliver of planetary time.

Ironically, just when the Earth became so much older for humans, it also became so much smaller. Vast and unexplored just some 400 years ago, we have now quickly discovered that it is not only relatively small but also finite. As our species has exponentially spread to every crevice of this rocky planet we have shaped the landscape and lifescape to such an extent that it is no longer possible to clearly distinguish what is human and what is Nature. It is a novel situation for scientists and poets alike, indeed for almost every aspect of modern life that has relied fundamentally on the distinction between “the cultural” and “the natural” as separate realms of activity.

How can we take measure of this historic change? Right now an eminent group of scientists, the International Commission on Stratigraphy, is debating whether we have initiated a new geological era: the Anthropocene. Although our current era, the Holocene, began only some 12,000 ago at the end of the last Ice Age, since then our civilizations have become the primary engine of change on the planet. From a geological perspective this means that the reality of the hypothetical Anthropocene is a matter of the future as much as the present; human activity like large-scale agriculture, intensive fossil fuel use, atomic explosions, and human-driven mass extinction are significant not simply because they are technological innovations, but because their biogeochemical mark will be legible in the sedimentary rock millions of years from now.

Of course from our current, collective human perspective we care about the forces that define an Anthropocene because they affect our lives directly right now, but the geo-logic of the Anthropocene also insistently reminds us that our behavior on climate change or any other macro-scale phenomena in the present also directly affects human and non-human life well into the future. Will there be geologists to read the traces of Anthropocene in the rocks millions of years from now, and if so is there any chance they will be our human descendants? Or will our anthropocentric actions in an Anthropocene be responsible for a future devoid of humanity?

Given the immensity of these questions, I suspect the idea of the Anthropocene is here to stay, regardless of what official decision the Commission of Stratigraphy makes. For even though the Anthropocene is in one sense a scientific construct, its meaning as both a realistic description of life today as well as a broader metaphor resonates far beyond science. The Anthropocene has the potential to reframe long established concepts like “environmentalism” and “sustainability,” which have become so vague as to risk irrelevance. Unlike those terms, the Anthropocene is neither an adjective nor an aspiration, but instead a state of being identifiable within the narrative of the planet’s history. What renewed significance might political movements against nuclear weapons, historically framed by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, find if also understood in the context of deep, geological time? Deep time helps us make sense of life on Earth right now by looking far into the past as well as far into the future simultaneously — in the “long now” of the Anthropocene the past and future are active creations of this living moment.

These might seem like bold claims for a concept whose formal status is not yet decided, but again it is precisely in its possibilities for transcending the confines of any one disciplinary expertise that the Anthropocene notion gains its strength. As an inescapably unifying idea, it invites us to consider new ways of learning that extend traditional academic boundaries as well as disrupt them. Its expansiveness is not about diluting any one focus, but instead connecting otherwise scattered foci. As Bernd Scherer, an organizer of the ongoing “Anthropocene Project” at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin has commented, the concept, ”is so interesting because it is an idea in the making, it is not already defined by disciplines as a categorized notion… it lets us talk across disciplines.”

When “culture” and “Nature” are no longer divided, traditional disciplines have to reconceive their boundaries and their meaning. If the Anthropocene is taken seriously then vast transformation of the way we think about knowledge and media is not only necessary, but in fact inevitable — conceptual thinkscapes as features of the planet will transform just as physical landscapes do within the Anthropocene condition….(to be continued)

References:
*Latour, Bruno. 2013. “The Anthropocene and the Destruction of the Image of the Globe,” as part of the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh. Accessed from:
http://www.hkw.de/en/programm/projekte/2014/anthropozaen_curriculum/anthropozaen_curriculum_1.php

*Scherer, Bernd. 2015. “The Anthropocene Project Part 1,” lecture at the Anthropocene Conference at the Tate Modern, London. June 5, 2015. Accessed from:
http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/conference/anthropocene-project

*The Anthropocene Campus
http://www.hkw.de/en/programm/projekte/2014/anthropozaen_curriculum/anthropozaen_curriculum_1.php

Andrew Yangアンドリュー・ヤン

“There are uncertain truths — even true statements that we may take to be false — but there are no uncertain certainties.  Since we can never know anything for sure, it is simply not worth searching for certainty; but it is well worth searching for truth.” – Karl Popper, In Search of a Better World (1984)

Philosopher Karl Popper was famous for wrestling with what distinguishes science from other forms of knowledge-making.   He argued, for example, that while Marxism and Freudian theories of psychology might be intellectually worthwhile, they were not scientific forms of knowledge because they weren’t open to falsification —- their logic made them largely immune to contrary evidence.  In this view, scientific knowledge is so powerful because it is characterized by risk —- scientific claims leave themselves open to critique, they are provisional, and they invite the possibility of being proven wrong; a certain kind of uncertainty defines it.

How does this understanding of science help us make sense of an immediate disaster like the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear disaster, or a long-term and evolving crisis like global climate change?   In the case of the Fukushima Dai-Ichi event, both the Japanese government and TEPCO lost credibility and the public’s confidence because they withheld crucial information and denied key facts about the nuclear meltdown as it progressed.   It was a highly dynamic and uncertain situation, but in those moments officials provided false certainty so as to protect their authority and perhaps also to avoid responsibility.  But it is also true that others played a role in undermining public confidence in Japanese officials. For example Gregory Jaczko, chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, contradicted official Japanese reports in the days after the accident by claiming that there was no longer protective water in the spent fuel pools, when in fact there was.  In both cases important uncertainty was masked by unrealistic confidence and fear of telling the truth.   The facts did eventually come out —- misinformation as well as the unintentional errors of Japanese and American officials were revealed through further evidence.   Yet, the aftermath of Fukushima was clearly a failure of science because the social component of scientific understanding was so poorly handled by those in charge.

The validity of science relies on knowledge being both collective and based on observable evidence —– this is why a scientific experiments must be repeatable to be meaningful, and also why public demonstrations of experiments were so important when modern science was establishing itself in the 16th and 17th centuries.  The equivalent of such a public demonstrations today is the news conference, but in the Fukushima instance neither Japanese or American scientists were honest and transparent about what they didn’t know, leading to an unrealistic sense of safety for some Japanese and an unnecessary sense of fear for some Americans who thought clouds of lethal radiation would float over the Pacific at any moment.

Climate change science is also full of uncertainty, and especially in terms of predictions about future sea level rise or global temperature increases that depend on highly complex computer models. That predictive uncertainty, however, is very different than what we learn from historical data, which strongly supports the conclusion that human fossil fuel use is a primary cause of measured global warming.  Of course no scientific inference can be proven 100%, and many conservative, pro-fossil fuel politicians in the United States have abused and twisted this philosophical point to claim that since all scientific theories are fundamentally uncertain, then the relationship between fossil fuels use and global warming is also uncertain and mostly speculative. Since there is no scientific “proof” of human’s having a role in global warming, they argue, there is no reason to change the way we use fossil fuels.

In the last two years the media have done a better job sharing the evidence for global warming and because of this the value and validity of that scientific knowledge has actually increased as more people come to understand the data, the theories, and the large-scale significance of climate change.  Perhaps recent climate change science will become a case of scientific knowledge’s success, an example of collective knowledge in action.   It remains to be seen. In response to this shifting public knowledge, the same conservative American politicians that before denied global warming now respond to journalists’ questions by saying, “Well, I am not a scientist, so I can’t comment.”   It is a cowardly tactic, but maybe it is preferable to their earlier refusals to acknowledge the problem at all.   However by denying their ability to even understand the science such politicians may be doing something even more dangerous — trying to escape from the responsibility of making decisions about our risky and unknown future. In fact, we all need to be scientists to whatever extent possible if we are going to meaningfully confront the uncertainty of climate change that we must all face as a global community.

References:
Popper, Karl. In Search of a Better World. London: Routledge, 1995.

“Shaken Faith” by Paul Blustein. Slate, September 26, 2013.
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2013/09/nrc_response_to_fukushima_a_mistake_turned_public_opinion_against_japan.html

“Why Republicans Keep Telling Everyone They’re Not Scientists,” by Coral Davenport. The New York Times. October 30, 2014.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/31/us/why-republicans-keep-telling-everyone-theyre-not-scientists.html?_r=0

Hadfield, Peter. “Let’s Have a Cup of Nice, Safe Plutonium” New Scientist, Issue 1910. January 29, 1994.

Andrew Yangアンドリュー・ヤン

“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education”   –  Mark Twain

Like many other countries, the United States is in the midst of an educational crisis.  Its university system is a paradox where the price of tuition has skyrocketed while the quality of the education it provides seems in decline. In 2014, for example, the average college student had $30,000 in educational debt, and yet less than 60% of students successfully graduate college within six years.  The situation is equally troubling in many public elementary and high schools across the country that are experiencing a decrease in funding at the very moment when they are expected to implement a controversial, national effort to improve education through a curriculum called the Common Core.

The Common Core is meant to do two things: (1) To make student learning more relevant by focusing less on the memorization of facts and more on critical thinking so to prepare students “for college and the real world,” and (2) to create a consistent system to track individual student progress and measure teaching effectiveness.  Many parents are angry about the Core because they believe its standardized tests create unnecessary stress that harms their children’s learning experience.  Since the introduction of the Core, students have done poorly on its tests, a result that Core supporters think is both natural and temporary, reflecting the low educational expectations that existed before the new standards. The head of the U.S. Department of Education, Arne Duncan speculated that much of the opposition to the Common Core was from “white suburban moms” who feel that “all of a sudden — their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were, and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were.”

While Duncan was roundly criticized for his comments, they express a growing concern about whether our ideas about education are mirroring trends in American popular culture where — more and more — there is emphasis on the importance of personal confidence over one’s actual skills, abilities, or knowledge. The fear is that making young people (and their parents) feel good has overshadowed the goal of substantial learning itself.  If this is true in elementary and high school, then ironically the situation may be even worse within universities where money has been poured into the construction of luxury dormitories and recreational facilities instead of the hiring of more full-time faculty.  Indeed, many believe the tripling of college tuition in the last 30 years and the supposed decline of academic rigor can be traced to this trade-off in the attempt to create “student-centered” campuses. If universities have become less about learning and more about catering to student lifestyles, then the whole purpose of the Common Core to prepare students for the “real world” seems at risk of contradiction. Perhaps parents recognize this subconsciously, helping to explain the surprising level of suspicion many have towards the Common Core’s aspirations and its methods.

Given the slow pace and immense complexity of educational reform, what alternatives are there? Paypal founder, Peter Thiel, believes an answer is to drop out of school all together. Over the last three years Thiel’s foundation has given over 60 students a grant of $100,000 each to leave college and pursue their own projects — small businesses and non-profits of various kinds.  Alas, Thiel’s fellowships can impact only a few; what’s more, the reason to drop out is not actually to explore a different form of education, but rather to skip education in favor of specific entrepreneurial goals.

Others navigate the even bolder route of “unschooling,” leaving the formal system of educational in the pursuit of self-directed learning that is not only free of tuition, but also free of the mediocre classes, teachers, and regimented schedules that many feel define schools today.   Artist Kione Kochi has published a series of semi-autobiographical “zines” called How I Quit School that describe the unschooling experience of a Japanese girl who leaves her Tokyo high school to explore her own educational path:

“Unschooling was a process that would take her forward, but not right away… Being independent in her education meant that she had to be proactive. She knew that. But she also needed to slow down without becoming restless and stay motivated when she felt as though she wasn’t doing enough. There was a lot more to self-teaching than doing what she enjoyed.”

It isn’t that unschoolers deny the value of school completely, instead they recognize when formal education no longer encourages active interest in learning and personal development. Indeed many unschoolers return to formal schooling later, but only when it makes sense to — with authentic interest, but without unnatural obligation. While unschooling isn’t suited to everyone, clearly neither are current systems of education that discourage real learning.  Perhaps we, like Mark Twain, need to seriously revisit how school may (and may not) be enough to fulfill the broader aim of a meaningful and life-long education. After all, the larger goal of creating truly sustainable forms of education may be impossible if we rely upon unchallenged assumptions about what students are really learning and what that learning is ultimately for.

References:
“Your So-Called Education” The New York Times (May 14, 2011) By Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/opinion/15arum.html

The Common Core Standards
http://www.corestandards.org/what-parents-should-know/

“Tricked-Out College Campuses, From Water Parks to Luxury Dorms,” ABCNews.com (Oct 13, 2014) By Katie Yu and Lauren Effron
http://abcnews.go.com/Lifestyle/tricked-college-campuses-water-parks-luxury-dorms/story?id=26164491

“Arne Duncan: ‘White suburban moms’ upset that Common Core shows their kids aren’t ‘brilliant’,” The Washington Post,  (November 16, 2013) By Valerie Strauss
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/11/16/arne-duncan-white-surburban-moms-upset-that-common-core-shows-their-kids-arent-brilliant/

“The Dropout Fallacy,” Slate (May 23, 2014) by Alison Griswold
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/how_failure_breeds_success/2014/05/peter_thiel_drop_out_grant_encouraging_students_to_stop_out_of_college.html

Peter Thiel On Why Everything Good Is Actually Bad And Vice Versa,” Forbes (September 15, 2014) By Jeff Bercovici
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2014/09/15/peter-thiel-zero-to-one-book/

“How I Quit School” By Kione Kochi
http://microcosmpublishing.com/catalog/artist/kione_kochi

Growing Without Schooling
http://www.holtgws.com/

Andrew Yangアンドリュー・ヤン

“The Japanese government’s attitude toward this shrine is a test of its ability to understand and confront its legacy of militarism and war crimes… We see the homage at Yasukuni as nothing less than a challenge — not only to us but to the world.”  
– Cui Tiankai (Chinese ambassador to the United States, former ambassador to Japan)

Every few years another professor and I bring students from our college of art in Chicago on a study trip to Japan. The trip explores a variety of topics about cultural change and continuity, especially the idea of cultural identity and modernization in post-Meiji and postwar Japan.  We engage with a diversity of materials ranging from early Shinto texts to the first Godzilla film, and visit sites such as the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum as well as the Yasukuni Shrine and Yushukan War Memorial Museum.

On our first trip our assistant, herself a Tokyo native, tried to dissuade us from visiting Yasukuni where, among the two-and-a-half million souls, fourteen Class-A war criminals are interred.  As Ambassador Tiankai’s comments show, visits by Japanese officials to Yasukuni continue to create distrust among Japan’s Asian neighbors.  Our trip assistant argued that since we were foreigners it might put the students at risk from belligerent nationalists who might also be at the shrine.  We asked her if she had any negative experiences at Yasukuni.  “Oh no,” she replied, “I would never go there!”  And indeed, as our group made its way up the hill from Ichigaya station on that very first trip, she somehow disappeared.

The next day we recounted to her how we felt neither intimidated nor particularly welcomed at Yasukuni; as visitors we tried to behave as we would visiting any other shrine or spiritual site we visit during the trip – respectfully, but without “paying our respects.”   On our next trip two years later, our assistant didn’t try to keep us from going to Yasukuni. In fact, she came with us and offered her own perspective to the students about the shrine, the war museum, and their relevance to Japan’s postwar identity and complex relationship with other Asian nations. Her attitude changed from avoidance to engagement.

This last summer we made another study trip to Japan. The morning before the Yasukuni visit three of our students, Korean nationals, suddenly refused to go. They had talked to their parents the night before and were told that it would be a shameful place for a Korean to go; their parents had essentially forbade it. We respected their decision and asked them to write an essay explaining what they knew about the shrine, its recent history, and exactly why they decided not to go, but educationally it seemed like a missed opportunity for them.  The rest of the students, including a number of Vietnamese, Chinese, and also a few Korean students, found a balance between their personal discomfort and their desire to learn more through personal experience.

Is the main value of our visit to Yasukuni and the Yushukan because they are controversial?  Yes and no.  Such a visit doesn’t provide an important context  “on Japan,” but rather on the complex interaction of historical memory, politics, and media that maintain Yasukuni’s symbolic role. In this way the nationalistic perspective that the museum puts forth is perhaps more significant that the shrine itself.

Domestic and international media alike make much political use of Yasukuni – from the visits of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to the recent one by pop star Justin Bieber.  Given the media spectacles that surround the shrine, is it possible for a visit to Yasukuni to not be a political statement?  I believe it is. Visiting as a form of study provides an important and independent lens to gain a deeper understanding from their own perspective as critically-minded learners, rather than simply image consumers.   As educators we have a responsibility to encourage students to bear witness to controversial issues intellectually, not just emotionally, and perhaps especially if they personally distasteful or challenging.  Just as reporters seek understanding through first-hand experience, our students (in this case, future artists) have a crucial role to play in weaving the communicative fabric of our culture: making sense of its contested threads, mending its seams, and ultimately forming new patterns of meaning.

References:
“Shinzo Abe risks ties with China in tribute to war criminals.” Washington Post. January 9, 2014

Andrew Yang アンドリュー・ヤン

In our current “information society” it seems that learning should be easier than ever. If more information actually means greater possibilities for learning, then digital information offers an exponentially expanding horizon, increasing at some 2,300,000,000GB per day worldwide. The hope of “big data” is that we can learn about things we weren’t even asking questions about – novel patterns should emerge from the oceans of information. But there are many paradoxes lurking: What if so much data makes finding meaningful information similar to finding a needle in a haystack? More importantly, who is allowed access and to which information?

The case of former CIA employee Edward Snowden raised these issues in a dramatic way when he leaked thousands of government files to the public. He revealed that the U.S. had secretly collected enormous amounts of phone and email information thought to be completely private. A year later, it is still not clear if the government’s actions were illegal. Meanwhile, although Snowden has been charged with espionage, recent polls show that 57% of young Americans (ages 18-29) believe that his actions were beneficial and that citizens have a right to know about government surveillance programs. In other words, if Snowden did spy, it was at least to stop other spying.

Perhaps just as interesting, the poll shows that as many as 28% of the people hadn’t heard anything about the leak at all! Snowden’s revelations lose meaning unless they are widely known. Alas, even though information may be available, there is no guarantee that people will necessarily learn anything from what there is to know. Why are so many (especially young) Americans still ignorant about the Snowden leaks? Perhaps it’s harder and harder to distinguish meaningful “signal” among the vast background of “noise” within media today.

How much can be learned without having to break any law? Artist Trevor Paglen has uncovered remarkable details about many secret US surveillance programs and their locations by carefully searching publicly available information. Paglen’s writings, photographs, and sculptures challenge the mysterious aura of “state secrets,” showing how secrecy often hides out in the open: Professional spies are real, but they are the exception. Instead, it is everyday people working for companies and governments who are the ones most responsible for maintaining the systems of surveillance and secrecy that are so troubling and undemocratic.

In Japan, the LDP’s recent creation of a “Designated Secrets Bill” has outraged many because of powers it gives the government to keep information from journalists and the public, as well as punish whistleblowers. Such secrecy laws are deeply troubling when the Japanese government and TEPCO continue to be criticized for the lack of transparency, especially concerning the Fukushima disaster and its related risks. The US government praises the new law because it helps protect its own military and diplomatic information, though at the cost of Japan’s own freedom of the press.

Today’s informationrevolution is an unprecedented opportunity for learning, but like the universe itself, its expansion continues to accelerate. How will we navigate big data, net neutrality, secrecy, and privacy? Of course accurate and open access to the information is crucial, but the most meaningful information will no doubt involve the most risk.

References:
The estimated daily increase in digital information
http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/bigdata/what-is-big-data.html

Opinion poll on Snowden’s secrets leak
http://cdn.yougov.com/cumulus_uploads/document/c3cn5y4itm/tabs_HP_snowden_20140328.pdf

Artist Trevor Paglen
http://www.paglen.com/

Japan’s “Designated Secrets Bill”
http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2013/12/31/258655342/japans-state-secrets-law-hailed-by-u-s-denounced-by-japanese