[Edu-sig] Microsoft's KPL

[Arthur]

> From: Laura Creighton [mailto:lac at strakt.com]
> Sent: Friday, October 07, 2005 9:26 AM
> To: Arthur
> Cc: edu-sig at python.org
> Subject: Re: [Edu-sig] Microsoft's KPL
> 
> Part of our problem is that the development of 'education for all' has
> historically happened in the economic climate where the great need was
> to convert surplus farm-labour into industrial workers.  

I don't know, Laura.  You paint a coherent picture. But one considerably
more clinical than anything I can relate to from my own frame of reference.
And in that sense cynical.

In these kinds of discussions I find it difficult and unwise to move outside
my own frame of reference - what I know first hand.  As a historian or
economist I have nothing to contribute.  As an observer - and a decent one,
I think - perhaps I do.

Some good ol' (perhaps unexpected) flag waving:

I am one generation away from "your not wanted here", nothing but the shirts
on our backs, arrival here through Ellis Island.

>From there it's been right out the civic books, the ones we are supposed to
be too sophisticated and cynical to take seriously.  Opportunity. Reward for
hard work. Recognition for merit. No limits. None. My older sister has fun
from time to time introducing me to people you read about in history books,
or will. She might be one herself.

And in the middle of this - and essential to it - has been free public
education, with enough high-minded people contributing enough high-minded
effort to move my friends and family along in no particularly direction
beyond that which we have had the opportunity to chart for ourselves.

*That* is why I get emotional at threats to it - perceived or real.

Art 



 


Thus the sort
> of things that were considered essential to a 'good education' was the
> sort of things that may you _employable_.  (Before then, a huge number
> of people didn't have _jobs_, simply a huge amount of work they needed
> to do.  Housewives are in a similar position today.)  For better and
> for worse, this has produced an educational infrastructure which is
> driven by the demands of the employers on soon-to-become workers.
> 
> This works fairly poorly when combined with advanced high-technology
> consumerism.  What happens when what your potential employers want
> most from the soon-to-be workers is 'to not have to employ them at
> all'?  As long as consumers keep spending, that is their only real value.
> 
> This is decidedly at variance with historical precident, where one's
> value was as a _producer_, and where consumption merely happened to
> balance the books, so to speak. (_Lack_ of consumption mattered,
> in that if you produced something that nobody wanted, you would end
> up with surplus stock, and the indication that something was terribly
> wrong with your business model.  Or maybe the harvest was extra good
> this year ....)  Scarcity was the norm.  Forgetting the problems
> of 'my factory won't scale' and 'my product is so expensive that
> I have very few potential customers', you could build a working
> business model based on the idea that you could sell all that you
> could produce.  Thus converting all the farm workers into producers
> made sense.
> 
> But with prosperity came an end to scarcity.  The first manufacturers
> ran into it when they discovered that the cost in transportng their
> good to new customers made their prices uncompetitive.  At this point
> in time, improvements in transportation technology drove the ability
> of large firms to increase their markets.  Current technology is so
> advanced that you can pick up raw materials from Canada, ship them to
> South East Asia, make cars out of them, and ship the cars back.  It is
> one big global market now.  The attempts to sell in China is the
> pushing back of the last -- admittedly huge -- frontier.
> 
> But the upshot of all of this is that scarcity is over.  The market in
> goods and services are saturated with offerings.  It doesn't do you
> any good to make any more, since all you will do is waste money and
> add to the glut.  Indeed, you are better off spending your money in
> advertising, trying to promote averice, and 'stimulate demand'.
> 
> And where human beings really shine is at unskilled labour.  If you
> invest heavily in touch screens and bar code readers, you can lower
> the skills needed for a checkout clerk.  But they are cheaper than
> robots at picking up goods and passing them over the sensors.
> 
> And it makes sense to pay them, at rates which exceed the value of
> the service they provide.  You just pass on their costs onto the
> price of the goods.  Because what keeps this over-balanced system
> running at all is amount of circulation that the money does.
> Impoverishing the check out clerks to the point where they can no
> longer function as consumers does not serve the interests of the
> market as a whole.
> 
> But this means that the whole 'what is the purpose of education'
> question is in serious need of revision.  It used to be that preparing
> people for productive lives was enough.  These days a productive life
> may not be what is wanted.  Perhaps a meaningful one would be a better
> goal to strive for.
> 
> Laura