Murray Grimwood looks at the importance of knowledge, education and critical thinking in a finite world

As a nation, we have to develop a different approach to education, knowledge, and research. It is also increasingly important that we place facts – scientifically authenticated – above the increasing cacophony of assertions, including the incorrect parts of our current societal narrative.

In recent decades, education - tertiary education in particular - has been commodified. Along with other social ‘goods’ like health, universities and polytechnics were urged to compete and to have ‘business plans’; a short-term ideology overrode learning, as it did all else.

Big-picture, that trend towards commodification was inevitably going to run into planetary limits; resource limits, energy limits, and biocapacity limits. Forward bets laid without those limits factored-in were going to be increasingly irredeemable, and debt – whether student, faculty or government – is merely a forward bet.

Three societal upwellings have broken over that tableau, arguably as a result of the growth narrative hitting the ceiling. They are: a guilt-assuaging re the most recent local human/human overtaking-event; a resentment from descendants of those most recently locally-overtaken; and a rainbow-hued reaction to overpopulation.

They deserve a separate treatise each, but they are all clouding academia – clouding knowledge – with unprecedented intensity, just when clarity is needed most. Suffice it to point out here, that Maori are not indigenous; they arrived five minutes before Europeans. They were not of one mind any more than any other culture is; there were rise-to-the-top psychopaths at one end, empathetic others at the other. They lived with a marginal energy surplus – hence post-battle cannibalism.

Human history is nothing more than myriad overtaking’s; European vs Maori being just the latest (and an orders-of-magnitude minor issue compared to the present generation vs all future ones).

Lastly, rainbow-hues have one thing in common: a lesser emphasis on species reproduction.

All three have pervaded education (and politics, public service and the media) with interesting rapidity. The unasked question is: Why?

That the education crisis is part of the polycrisis, is undeniable. Thus, just at the time that essential-to-life items are getting ‘more expensive’, educators used to a certain amount of ‘income’ feel increasingly hard-pressed. That is understandable but needs to be looked-through; the issue is systemic and outweighs individual aggrievement.

Put bluntly; retention of knowledge is more important than academic income. Some far-sighted academics have offered to reduce their incomes and some have taken early leave to give others a chance; this is commendable, but inadequate in terms of total response.

To cut financial cloth to traverse a temporarily tight era, is one thing. Quite another is the urgent need to address the permanent global era beyond peak growth – inevitably some form of coming degrowth – along with its implications; ever-reducing incomes, ever- depleting and increasingly contented resource-stocks.

There are obvious implications for institutions such as universities.

Universities could have – and should have - warned that this impasse was coming. They could have – and should have – pointed out that the model used in economics was flawed (it counts flows but not stocks; the latter tend to be finite, curtailed and sometimes irreplaceable).

They could have - and should have – been tracking the Limits to Growth and humanity’s unsustainable rates of extraction, consumption and excretion. With few exceptions, they emphatically haven’t.

If we trace that failure, inter-disciplinary genuflection emerges as the front-runner (see textbook, below). The trend from free tuition to fees (1989) then loans (1992), then the moves to increase restrictions (2012) and arrest defaulters at the border (2013), has been paralleled by an increase in the need for international fee-paying students; all should have been warning signs.

There is only one way that trend has been going, the obvious question is (and should always should have been): Why?

The truth is that front-end-of-First-World incomes have been part of the planetary over-consumption problem; worsened by the increased expectation – via debt - that the future will pick up the tab. Increasingly, inevitably, the future will default.

It can even be argued that as the present has been living at the expense of the future; payments should really be from teacher to pupil. If we ask who should be leading the discussion; what to do; what to triage; how to deal with debt – the part-answer is: the universities. But the other part is? Us.

We – jointly and severally - have been increasingly ducking the real costs of things. We need a mature discussion about what a future society would look like if reduction threatens us with degenerating hospitals, libraries and universities – and if we actually want those outcomes. We also need a societal discussion about debt; its issuance and its future consequences.

Two towering examples of academic empirical case-building, are Professor Tom Murphy (astrophysicist, UCAL) and Adjunct Professor Nate Hagens (Minnesota). I commend their websites to readers, particularly Murphy’s free textbook. (Referencing both saves this op/ed from becoming a book itself).

That an astrophysicist ventures ex-silo into the divergence of cognitive approaches, is a takeaway requiring urgent academic discussion; his cognitive cogitations have ramifications for a much wider audience. If those gentlemen have it right – and only a very silo-blinkered academic would/could challenge the Murphy textbook – then academic leadership has some serious introspection ahead of it.

Paralleling tertiary issues, primary and secondary curriculums are being re-written and some folk are lamenting the abandonment of things like ‘times tables’ and the Periodic Table. Nobody is appraising the link – as usual - but that trend from hard building-blocks towards emotionally-held concepts parallels our offshoring of manufacturing.

Mindless consuming doesn’t require understanding of molecules or mass – Amazon’s delivery system takes care of all that; unlimited stuff appears at a swipe, by magic. On the other hand, we have to acknowledge that teaching, thus far, has contributed to our species getting into the hole it is in now, and teaching thus far, has been well short of addressing the matters raised in that Murphy textbook.

Worse, in my opinion that ‘well short’ label goes all the way up to the Chief Science Advisor to the Prime Minister; to the top (gangs? This is a polycrisis; where’s the relativity? – and she has been asked the Limits to Growth question; she cannot plead that which she is demonstrating).

In terms of the recently-leaked school Curriculum, all may not be lost; Earth systems and energy concepts are indeed key to getting humanity out of the impasse it has gotten itself into, and any trend away from siloing towards holistic (systems) thinking, has to be a good thing.

As long as we stick to fact-based science, who cares what the headings are? (Keeping in mind that while folklore can be verified by fact-based science, the reverse is not guaranteed).

Humanity is headed for a bottleneck, beyond which most prior assumptions will not hold. Just how things play out is yet to be determined, but the writer regards anyone who thinks that electronic retention of knowledge is permanent, as deluded. Yet universities, like libraries and hospitals, are busy hurrying their data into grid-dependent server-farms somewhere. The written page has more chance of surviving the coming event(s), a concept which should be understood by all who like to teach using reference material.

The recent government ‘bailout’ is just another in a lengthening list of can-kicks; attempts to nurse an obsolete system down the road a little further; past the next election, past the one after. ‘Carbon neutral but not now’. ‘Off fossil energy but not now’. ‘Economic growth will solve all problems’. And ironically: ‘Green growth is sustainable growth’; since Bernays the increasing trend to distort/discredit inconvenient truths has infiltrated even environmental thinking.

There has also been a trend to ‘silencing on behalf of the lambs’; the removal of inconvenient science via funding-removal, and the lauding/funding of whatever validates desired outcomes; predictable, but societally we need to be well beyond the point where the tenure of a Mike Joy depends on private philanthropy.

So – Quo Vadis?

Education parallels greater society; those of us alive have experienced nothing but growth offsetting debt. Within that system, we told ourselves that growth was forever, and built our systems and lives on that basis. Uncomfortable thoughts about what/who that growth was built on, horizontally or vertically, we largely ignored; we were also incredibly energy-blind.

We can – and should – celebrate the growth of knowledge, with the proviso that we cannot re-write the Laws of Thermodynamics (whichever way they are taught). With an increasing number of bets being ‘off’, vast collections of traditional assumptions are no longer fit for purpose.

Students cannot expect to repay debt as easily as in the past, and perhaps not at all. The same goes for educators with mortgages; governments too; the future is increasingly tapped-out.

Yet the passing-on of knowledge is perhaps the most valuable gift we can give future generations, and it can be done for free. As can everything else; capitalism is merely a human construct which fitted the growth epoch.

It may be that society recreates the ethos of the WEAs of an earlier era, and that existing infrastructure – lecture theatres and laboratories – becomes not superfluous, but over-booked.

It may well be, that current-level Professorial salaries are untenable (as private-sector CEO salaries are increasingly untenable). Their getting ‘poorer’ will merely reflect a post-growth society all in the same basket; the span between survival and surplus tells us that those with surplus surplus, can contribute more than those – like indebted students – already close to the margin.

The problem comes when knowledge is lost, much like the current mass extinction although unlike extinct species, knowledge can – theoretically - be regained. Then there merely remain the means of distribution, and the increasingly difficult task of rebutting incorrect posits (not made easier by the fact that some are firmly held within academia).

There were already glaring faults in the university system – siloing being an obvious example – before we arrived at this impasse (this writer has been banging on for years about the need for cross-discipline systems linkages), and in many ways a re-jig was overdue.

Conflicts/pandemics/climate aside, young people today will need the knowledge – and skills – to deal with a post-growth world. Much of what qualifies, is currently being taught en passant, or extra-curricularly. This should not be.

Equally, we shouldn’t be throwing all the files out with the folders; that Murphy textbook - an as-good-as-it-gets example of knowledge-extrapolation - emanated from within the academic system. It also demonstrates something equally as important as knowledge; the ability to think critically and logically, indeed, that may be the most future-useful gift any teacher can give any student at any level.

*Murray Grimwood comments on interest.co.nz as powerdownkiwi.