The dream realized

So, now we have discussed all of the principles but the last one in a bit more depth. The last principle is the one that people usually find the most hokey, like paragogy itself is just a big scam. We might even wonder whether the medium in which we chose to present paragogy in the first place is a bit of a scam (see Lisewski and Joyce, Examining the Five Stage e-Moderating Model). Five principles for learning? Give me a break.

But paragogy started off as a critique or, let's say, a parody of andragogy, that is, as a riff or inversion of the five principles that form the basis of Malcolm Knowles's program or design for adult education. We said, it doesn't always work like this. There isn't always an adult educator around, for one thing. People often learn from one another in a less structured way. What's going on here?

With some considerable work, we were able to put together a paper that was acceptable for an academic conference on "Open Knowledge". At the conference, there were some other people who were curious about the future of learning and education in an increasingly networked society. Many institutions of higher learning are justifiably curious about the same thing.

On the one hand, society is undergoing some educational inflation: jobs that previously required a bachelor's degree now require a master's; jobs that previously required a master's degree now require a Ph. D. And yet at the same time, the cost of education is going up, and education loans constitute a significant portion of debt in several Western countries. It is not clear that, in a time of economic recession and a broadening divide between rich and poor, that access to education is improving. Some speak of a "crisis" in contemporary education -- to go along with the other crises facing modernity, no doubt.

Enter paragogy! Of course,we do not claim to have made much of an impact on global problems with our writings (as yet); nevertheless, we have received a number of kind comments telling us how timely this effort is. Paragogy reflects the contemporary cynicism about old, hierarchical, institutions -- as well as the hope for something different. It does not need to be a rallying point as much as a description of what is actually happening in contemporary society now.

We are somewhat less excited about visionary perspectives on what may happen to learning and education in the future, and are more interested in practical efforts. Partly this comes from our experiences, where brainstorming and opining reached the limit of its usefulness. We became more interested in developing systems that work.

That is, systems that work for our own educational needs, and that help drive the cost of a quality education down significantly (potentially to zero, or to the nominal costs associated with getting on the internet). We are interested in the large scale and complicated problems facing a global society.

Here's an example from a conversation with my aunt. Rising incomes in China promote a greater demand for ivory, while poverty in West Africa makes poaching an attractive job option when two elephant tusks fetch $2000 or more. Can education help? Since many people in China want to learn English, what about the idea of putting some information about elephants into language learning materials? (E.g. explaining that the tusks do not just "fall out".) This seems like a very clever idea, for education-minded people who like elephants. But what about creating real job prospects that don't feature breaking the law in Africa?

It seems that global problems are always going to come with a "but" like that -- something that brings the complexity home to roost. The "dream" of some answer that will solve all problems has basically been explored to death under National Socialism! Paragogy does not look for final solutions, but rather an ongoing re-problematization of issues of concern.

With examples coming from Occupy Wall Street to the ways in which people think about love in the Internet age, "para-" institutions are springing up all over. This is itself the dream realized. And yet, despite "a generation of 20- and 30-year-olds who are used to self-organizing [who] believe life can be more participatory, more decentralized, less dependent on the traditional models of organization, either in the state or the big company" (Yochai Benkler), big companies and states are still very much a part of our daily lives. It's not so much that "small is beautiful" but that we do not yet understand well the organizational patterns that make society work well for more people more of the time.