EDUCATIONAL MISSION & PHILOSOPHY
My Mission as a Professional Educator
By: Edward G. Engh, Associate Professor, Management, & President Salt Lake Community College Faculty Senate
January 31, 2018, Salt Lake City, Utah
Faculty provide a service to civilization called education.[1] Education prepares citizens for their role in civilization, permitting them to function better than they could without it.[2] Functional citizenship requires critical thinking, which therefor becomes the primary object of education.[3] Civilization is a process developed by humanity to efficiently provide necessities, and thus reduce risks.[4] In a psychological sense, education sharpens the collective perceptions with which civilization perceives the reality around it.[5] It that sense education must teach how to avoid errors.[6] Hence the necessity of error-detection (or critical thinking).[7] Without education, the other institutions of civilization offer little hope of raising culture and society to superior standards.[8]
Civilization may also be seen as a fruit or a seed of education, a thing to consume, or a germ to be planted in hopes of something better in the future.[9] Some civilizations are not content with survival, but also strive for evolution.[10] Not in the accidental way of natural selection.[11] Not at all. Education may deliberately change the nature of civilization, by improving its ability to interrogate all things, including itself.[12] A civilization may suffer from many forms of delusion, and education is the one tool in the universe for healing such an illness.[13]
Civilization is not something specific to one culture.[14] It is omni-cultural in the sense that it is a tool to be used by all cultures and societies. A culture that soldiers on, blindly stepping over the rubble of prior civilizations, is not likely to benefit from the lessons of history.[15] Moreover, a culture that uncritically allows itself to bloat upon the limited resources available to it will not benefit from the lessons of peaceful coexistence.[16] It will become a reckless, game minded, war-minded culture.[17] That is not an effective mind for a civilization, because war is the most expensive way to acquire anything.[18]
The tools of education include language, logic, quantitative reasoning, memory development or temporal collection and assessment, extrapolation or projection into the future, enhanced perception, but also security, the peace of mind that comes from physical well-being.[19] To educate well requires expenditures of precious (because they are finite) resources, but also training, time, energy, and structured physical space, but this is changing. Educators, in the flesh are a direct cost of the process of doing it well. They are also a deliverable product of education (speaking in economic terms).
Automation is expanding its roles in civilization. A system or process of education delivers educators and other resources to students. The old necessity for school buildings, classrooms, offices, and furniture is declining, and so is the need for supporting staff to manage a complex physical site. Education is increasingly done at a distance, and because of automation it is potentially done with less and less human involvement. Yet if done well, digitally delivered education is perhaps more intimate and of higher quality, to the mind of the students, in a well educated civilization. Who knows how much intimacy is possible with an AI (artificial intelligence)? Indirect-support processes for education are allegedly easier to automate than direct educational methods. If buildings, parking lots, large staffs, and textbooks are artifacts of the past, why is the cost of education climbing?
I foresee a time, perhaps not too far distant, when artificial intelligences (AIs) assume the role of faculty as educators. Educators in the flesh will increasingly be digital systems administrators. We cringe, but it is likely to unfold sooner than we think. Biological evolution is a probabilistic game, but now with the potential for human guidance of the outcomes using technologies such as Crisprcas-gene editing. Reasons of distastefulness aside, philosophically, "gaming", (or the acceptance of risk) is becoming more common in modern civilization. Modeling and gaming are also becoming powerful tools in the hands of educators. Education is thus evolving and the rate of change is accelerating. It may be distasteful to propose that a single teacher could provide excellent education digitally, with no physical interaction at all. Other things may be more distasteful. If contemporary education were seen as a digital network, with no physical space whatever, why not then consider the absolute redundancy of classrooms, offices, administrators and their staffs, and eventually even teachers-in-the-flesh? Educationalist-networks can be very efficient, and offer very high levels of quality assurance, which can be assessed digitally. I do not think it necessary to drag the baggage of antiquity along with us into the future. As educationalists become AI monitors, I foresee their remuneration rising in correlation with the increased management complexity of educators?[20] Remuneration is increasingly becoming a function of the complexity required to do the functions well. Life is a function of complexity, not just material substance. Intelligent life is even more complex. Educated life is a product of complexity; and this level of complexity ought to correlate with the remuneration for those cultivating this complexity in students; e.g., the remuneration of the teachers.
NOTES:
[1] Dewey (John)
[2] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/education
[3] Bentham (Jeremy), "Utilitarianism"
[4] Malthus, Thomas, "Population"
[5] Heraclitus; Empedocles; Parmenides of Elea; Democritus of Abdurra; Dewey, John
[6] Lucretius, Marcus; Epicurus; Democritus of Abdurra; Freud, Sigmund; Spencer, Herbert
[7] Wheeler John Archibald; Schrödinger; Bohm, Einstein; Dyson; John Von Neumann
[8] Toynbee, Arnold J.; Spengler, Oswald; Gibbon, Edward
[9] Chateaubriand, Rene Francis; Alexis de Tocqueville; Dewey, John
[10] Darwin, Charles; Smith Adam; Spencer, Herbert; Marx, Karl, “Profane Existence of Error” (PEOE)
[11] Mill, John Stewart
[12] Dewey, John
[13] Freud, Sigmund, “The Future of an Illusion” (FOAI); Marx, Karl, PEOE, Ruskin “The Veins of Wealth”
[14] Tawney “The Social Organism”; Spencer, Herbert
[15] Taylor, Frederick; Fayol, Henri
[16] Gandhi, Mohandhas K.; King, Martin Luther
[17] Freud, Sigmund (FOAI)
[18] Plato “Republic, Aristotle “On Government”, Heilbroner, Robert, Tawney, R. H.; Veblen, Thorstein
[19] Dewey, John
[20] Respect should be correlated with the level of effort necessary to achieve quality. Salary should correlate with both. Excellence should be correlated with the level of effort necessary to achieve pre-eminence, and salary should equate to both. Salary should not be based on title, or on a position, or on untested assumptions of power. Who would be able to prove that the stress on a teacher (with a partner and dependents) who is fearful of losing their income (in a hostile work environment) is less stressful than the stress on a highly paid executive (or administrator with a budget of 2 $billion, and responsibility for 5,000 employees)? I have been in both positions. I would urge the former as more stressful, i.e., the teacher with (partner and dependents) fearful of losing their income in a hostile work environment!