Enlightenment and education for all
De Estigmergia
After reading the articles regarding some threads of thoughts behind the open educational resource movement (The Age of Enlightenment, Standing on the shoulders of giants, Origins of the public library as a social institution, Popular education, Folk high school and Free software movement), here are some of my thoughts around it:
First of all, one could see the European enlightenment movement as something that evolved from a very Occidental point of view, parallel to the idea of progress as an economic and material process (but also to science itself, where the human being and his reasoning was -still is- the centre and measure of everything). That at first glance has little to do with for example the harmony with Cosmos that Confucianism spread, or the idea of enlightenment in Buddhism (Bodhi as the "awakened" or "knowing" consciousness of the fully liberated). However, if we consider how for example the revolution of knowledge and progressive thinking of the Age of Enlightenment lead to liberation from the Middle Ages' culture of superstition, repressive traditions and irrationality, and how that movement created the intellectual framework were, for example, Spinoza used reason and logics for proposing a pantheistic view of the universe (where God and Nature were one), or many thinkers pursued the truth in whatever form, then we maybe should find some interesting connections.
Meritocracy in Confucianism, for example, as the revolutionary idea of replacing the nobility of blood with one of virtue, seemed to be admired by Voltaire, despite the fact that it led to schools were the Rújiā statemen made possible a solid and centralized corporation of government officers, one of the clues for the origins of unity of the Chinese state, and that led then to the growth of Confucianism as a "state religion" (with authoritarianism, legitimism, paternalism, and submission to authority as its worst derivates). I wonder how much of that evolution from reason to meritocracy to totalitarianism has to do with rationalism itself as a kind of contradictory construction, like Adorno wrote about it, being at once liberatory and totalitarian.
That incites me to an exercise of comparisons, where one may think of the metaphor of standing on the shoulders of giants, not only as the progress of knowledge when it's supported by the previous findings and ideas of the past, but also as another possible way of approaching the most modern one of the wisdom of crowds (that leads to the amateur-expert dilemma, that so many controversies has made arise). That is from my point of view strongly related to the open source examples of how distributed collaboration, and education/teaching as well (as an intrinsic part of it), can be done nowadays with the right use of ICT. The free software movement represents also a way of doing/learning/creating projects that has affected, for its own technical and ideological merits, many areas of human activity in this times of "digitalization" of knowledge, and it has many complex "operative features" related to concepts like the benevolent dictatorship (where central human nodes of projects had the right to decide, when conflicts emerge) or the tendency to meritocracy (as a natural system for involving participants into dynamics of reputation, as the main force for (re)generating creative activity). Peer reviewing in academic fields could be considerer as an influence in this movement (nothing surprising if we take a look at the origins of Internet itself in the university sphere), a system for making science and knowledge evolve in an scalable way, but I wonder to what extent is that combinable to free access to information and to education as a human right.
Let's say that, somehow, there is on one hand the human ability for developing knowledge itself, finding new paradigms, theories or ideas (a process that nowadays can be done by lots of interconnected dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants, something that carries a lot of systematic collaboration that is free but requires also certain adaptation to the structural rules of open source development). And on the other hand there are the individuals whose access to information (and the knowledge it carries) should have total freedom to find, choose and appropriate the means of education they need in order to develop themselves. When this individuals, ideally, have the knowledge and the mental predisposition to think also about human knowledge and the paper they can play for developing it, and also how their role is important as a part of it, it's maybe the moment of connecting both worlds, and individual freedom and wisdom can be a part of humanity freedom and wisdom. Probably the popular education in the 19th century tried that combination from the very beginning, making people (specially in the working class) aware of their potentialities for changing the basis of that growing Capitalist system that nowadays determines the whole world, and they tried to do it so in a free learning atmosphere. But now it seems to me we live in quite different times, big discourses and ideologies are gone and individuality rules the offline world (and is still the main entrance for the virtual one), making things more difficult to be seen as a whole.
If we are living in a kind of new Era of Enlightenment, specially within the ICT domains, optimism should be maybe replaced with a type of realism that forces us to see things from this kind of perspectives.
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