Everyone’s arguing about Steve Jobs - but are we speaking the same language?
Sunday, February 18th, 2007Steve Jobs recently lambasted teacher’s unions for killing the quality of our educational system. Don Dodge says it’s about incentives, and Robert Scoble agrees. Giovanni Rodriguez says Jobs made a dumb move.
Of course, each of these statements contains partial truths. Taken together, they make up an ever greater part of the whole.
But a core problem problem, as I see, lies in lacking a common epistemological (how we know) and ontological (how we are) framework. In other words, we’re all speaking different languages–different memetic structures, if you will.
Let me be more specific: every issue involves both the individal (agentic) and collective (social), as well as the interior (subjective) and exterior (objective).
In simpler terms, education involves the interior (psycho-spiritual) and exterior (physical-economic) development of individual teachers and students, as well as interior (cultural) and exterior (systemic) development of the collective.
That’s the theoretical issue at hand, as I see it.
Now, in terms of the existential issue–who we are–I believe that the noise of the ego gets in the way of open, honest dialogue. Imagine if everyone just assumed that they didn’t know anything and instead committed to separating subjective opinion from observable fact until the most objective possible outcome was reached.
What if everyone saw each other as the expression of the same evolutionary impulse, and knowing that the only goal that mattered was to create a more awakened, unified, and enlightened culture? What if we really came together as one–politicians, educators, business leaders, et al.–couldn’t we create a radically better future?
I think so.
