What if education is the problem?

Just for kicks, I want to challenge some of the fundamental assumptions that Sen is advocating for and the possible side effects of his reasoning.

1. Education

Time and time again, Sen advocates for more education. Yet, he never specifies what he means by education. Certainly, it's not within the scope of his book to outline an entire education model -- but this is not what I want to argue. Rather, I want to discuss what Sen means by education. I presume, Sen is talking about institutionalized, formal education. Pulling from Ivan Illich's book Deschooling Society:

"Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby 'schooled' to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with the ability to say something new. His imagination is 'schooled' to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavor are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to server these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question" (1).

The entire book actually speaks to several interesting aspects of Sen's argument:

(1) The difference between means and ends
 • Send views income as a means to more important ends (health, literacy, etc.)

Sen states that freedom is both an end and a means to other ends (like health). Yet, what if the means you use to achieve that end actually undermine an important aspect of agency. That is, education is a powerful tool -- it shapes identities, funnels ideas, and manipulates thought. If we are to take Illich's argument above seriously, it seems, institutionalized education actually leaves us with a disturbing logic that conflates process with substance. What if the solution Sen proposes actually leaves individuals with the belief that "more treatment" means "more results." Sen would criticize this argument if we were talking about income, but he would not if it came to education or literacy (separating "education" as an institution from the actual development of intellectual capabilities). Self-education is thrown out the window in favor of societal education; individuality is exchanged for a cultural funnel. Importantly, we shape development, under the umbrella of "freedom," as nothing more than the development of a taste for consumption: consume more education, more health care, more, more -- not more learning, health, etc -- more institutions. At this point, the cycle of consumption has become perfected. Those who once were liberated by these institutions become enslaved to them; without them, the can not be learned, healthy etc. The relative standards have changed. To not consume is to lose the rat race.

(2) Relative Deprivation that Sen talks about on page 96 and elsewhere

Sen talks about relative deprivation and the effects it can have. This seems like a positional arms race -- absolute position barely matters, relative position is what matters the most! Thus, especially if the above logic of consumption holds, the more institutions we create to consume -- or the more we consume in general, the more the gap between the haves and have nots grow. At this point, deprivation becomes a never ending game -- so long as inequality exists, deprivation exists. Like a Ponzi scheme, consumption requires more and more players to sustain itself. Perhaps this explains the final critique:

(3) Savages, victims, saviors complex (I think this phrase was coined by a Harvard publication)

The underlying premise of the human rights movement is the idea that there are: savages, victims, and saviors. It is the job of the saviors to save millions of innocent victims form the barbaric savages of some other world. How do the saviors save them? Show them how much material goods they are lacking. Show them how relatively awful they are living. Then bring them the institutions which require indefinite consumption.

(4) 6th Extinction

According to Jared Diamond, a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of “Collapse” and “Guns, Germs and Steel,” the world is approaching a "6th extinction:"

He outlines the levels of consumption here:

"The average rates at which people consume resources like oil and metals, and produce wastes like plastics and greenhouse gases, are about 32 times higher in North America, Western Europe, Japan and Australia than they are in the developing world. That factor of 32 has big consequences. ... People in the third world are aware of this difference in per capita consumption, although most of them couldn’t specify that it’s by a factor of 32. When they believe their chances of catching up to be hopeless, they sometimes get frustrated and angry, and some become terrorists, or tolerate or support terrorists. ... People who consume little want to enjoy the high-consumption lifestyle. Governments of developing countries make an increase in living standards a primary goal of national policy."

"If India as well as China were to catch up, world consumption rates would triple. If the whole developing world were suddenly to catch up, world rates would increase elevenfold. It would be as if the world population ballooned to 72 billion people (retaining present consumption rates).

"Some optimists claim that we could support a world with nine billion people. But I haven’t met anyone crazy enough to claim that we could support 72 billion. Yet we often promise developing countries that if they will only adopt good policies — for example, institute honest government and a free-market economy — they, too, will be able to enjoy a first-world lifestyle. This promise is impossible, a cruel hoax: we are having difficulty supporting a first-world lifestyle even now for only one billion people."

Essentially, even though what Sen argues for sounds reasonable, can we really support it in the way he is advocating? I don't think we have to reject his argument for interconnectedness or his emphasis on freedom, but I think there is a missing component of what we want to achieve. Global consumption and standard of living at a U.S. level? Or, if we are to truly be free, to we have to break the shackles which enslave us -- of consumption, of the logic of more and more treatment, of development as more.

The full piece is here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/02/opinion/02diamond.html?ex=1356930000&en=07a742d70360f175&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink&_r=0