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| Darrell K. Sweet |
Educational Collapse
Zak Stein (00:04:28):
We need an educational renaissance of the sort that we haven't seen in human history in order to address the metacrisis.
Nate Hagens (00:06:57):
Is there any anthropological research that shows different cultures or civilizations in the past either collapsed or went into senescence because of lack of development or education? Is there a way that we could research that? Do we even know?
Zak Stein (00:07:26):
There's ways to make reasonable inferences. If you look at the collapse of the Roman Empire, for example, what you have there is a bureaucracy that becomes so bloated, and also corrupt and complex and fragile, that it becomes hard for the elders to actually pass along the entirety of the tacit knowledge needed to maintain the thing. It's a way of thinking about 'institutional decay' or other dynamics that just put a drag on the ability of the civilization to adapt. So, you can presume that, in a case where other institutions are decaying, and where the overall complexity of the civilization outstrips the leadership, that they're not going to be able to pass on to the next generation what is occurring. Those are inferences you can make across a bunch of different data.
Zak Stein: "When civilizations begin to collapse they create more and more convincing simulations of their resiliency. When the Roman Empire was collapsing the aristocrats were writing letters to each other saying stuff like "Everything's fine. There's a little bit more crime, but we'll continue to do business decades from now." But in fact we know that they were deep in the stage of collapse. They just couldn't see it because of those 'shadows on the wall of the cave'. People deep in the media infrastructure of the civilization (and they had that in ancient Rome) made it very hard to actually be in touch with reality. It was much easier to be in touch with what the civilization told you was reality than what actually is reality. So we're in a situation now where a lot of the messages coming from the center of things are actually not correct anymore. Plato is telling us that true transformation of the identity, that allows it to be in touch with reality, is painful. So there's a part of us that resists. Learning of this kind is almost always painful. It requires some prior version of you, and some prior vision of what the world is, to kind of pass away and some new more complex vision of yourself in the world to emerge. (The soteriological reading of the allegory of the cave, which is not about epistemology.)"
But then, when you look at major turnings in civilization, for example if you look at the transition from feudalism into modernity, from feudalism into what we know now as nation state capitalism collaboration, in a very fundamental way that was an educational transition. The feudal education systems simply weren't keeping up with the printing press and the kinds of accounting and the kinds of technology that were moving history beyond what these educational systems were able to do. And the move through to the Enlightenment gives us this whole new notion of education, of public education, where mathematics, science, and literacy are universal. That was not the meta-curriculum of the prior civilization. It was an emergent one. We're facing a similar need to transition to new civilizational, meta-curricular, fundamentally new types of literacies and capacities, if we don't want the whole thing to completely go off the rails.
You want a certain amount of due diligence in doing radical educational reform. You don't want every new fad to sweep through the educational system and just change it. But in the arc of history, the economy and the technology always flies past the educational system in a way that makes for a certain danger. It's precisely this discontinuity I'm pointing to, this generational gap that gets bigger and bigger as technology accelerates. The first time you get the sense of a generational gap is in the '60s. And then it becomes a topic, and then you get the whole thematization of 'generations', as it were. It's that notion that there is essentially an acute lag between the education and the technological development that occurs now in our time, of hyper-innovative, hyper-capitalist acceleration. In that sense, the schools are decades behind. That's why the kids are completely won over by the technology. The schools have ostensibly lost to the screens. And most reflective educators are fighting that battle. One of the reasons I think that the schools are so subject to a certain kind of identity politics, and a certain kind of focus on the wrong things, is because we can't address how fundamentally off the nature of these schools are. We've got quite antiquated institutions.
Nate Hagens (00:18:22):
We've had conversations about this before, where you think the lack of a succinct and updated education system is at the root of many of the crises we are facing, especially in the United States. How much of this is the screens, and the addiction to dopamine and scrolling and technology, and how much of it is the education itself?
Zak Stein (00:18:54):
It's very hard to tell. But I know that in the 1990s, before you could blame the screens, is when you started to get the ADHD phenomenon. That's a whole other conversation. I'm not going to talk about the medicalization of academic under-performance. But the point was that academic under-performance became so severe that they had to medicalize it. And medicalizing it means you blame the kid's brain, when in fact another inference is, the school must be systematically failing if so many kids can't even pay attention. There's the canaries in the mines in the '90s of the irrelevance and ostensible hypocrisy, that the reflective, smartest adolescents have to cynically buy into a zero-sum game with their friends. The hyper-competitiveness that one of the most competitive experiences of your life will be college admissions, and that all the adults are cool with that, sets a tone.
Nate Hagens (00:19:56):
That's not just in the United States though. There are people in Korea that commit suicide if they didn't get into college, and crazy stuff like that.
Zak Stein (00:20:07):
This is why I studied testing. Testing destroys people's lives. Testing leads to suicides. You have whole grade school classes with ulcers in Connecticut. You have entire school districts, from the top down, cheating. Testing is a remarkable phenomenon. Large scale standardized testing has incredible second and third order effects.
Nate Hagens (00:20:33):
We're supposed to be educating and preparing these young humans for the world in a learning environment, but instead we're putting them through fight or flight cortisol and other endocrine cascades. Is this a global phenomenon? Or are there some cultures that are doing it much better?
Zak Stein (00:20:56):
In one sense, it's a global phenomenon. There's this argument: Are we in one civilization, or are there many civilizations? One argument that we're in one is that there are universally agreed bureaucratic standards for educational achievement, which is to say, basically, a PhD from XYZ University counts anywhere in the world. Other ones don't. And this is true. China sends their people to Berkeley. So in that sense, the standard set by the post-war American university system (which was a military industrial success) was incredible. It's worth talking about the breakdown of that. But it set that global standard. It is very much a universal phenomenon.
Nate Hagens (00:27:10):
Do today's aristocrats, the rich elite, do their kids get a better education?
Zak Stein (00:27:32):
One way that you can trace civilizational collapse is the breakdown in elite signaling mechanisms, which is to say, inter-elite competition, which is the overproduction of elites, which is an educational crisis, meaning that there's nothing that signals actually that this guy's cognitively better than that guy. There's nothing that's signals that this person's better trained than that person. Because the overall gaming of the system, the cheating, and the entrance scandals, and all of those things, adds up such that it just doesn't mean what it used to mean to go to some of these places anymore. I would argue that people, the truly avant-garde "elites," would probably be getting their kids out of that rat race and into some other less visible rat race.
What is Education For?
Nate Hagens (00:29:20):
At the core of this is an almost philosophical question, which is what is education for? I don't know much about the history of education, but it seems to me that right now, the goal is to prepare people to get into the workforce, to help economic growth is really the goal of education.
Zak Stein (00:30:00):
Now you've hit the nail on the head. Most of the discussion of education never actually gets to this question, which put more frankly is just “What is a good life? What is valuable? What's actually valuable? What are the lessons that we should teach young people about how to be a good person, about the right ways to act in the world?” These are very simple questions, which should be at the core of education, but are actually not answered well by secular public schools. This is worth noting because they're specifically designed not to answer questions about the meaning of life. They have the civic religion, which functioned pretty well in the United States. You have the American civic religion, where you're in the school to be a good citizen, and then you have a kind of 21st century skills view, which is that you're being trained to be a participant in some kind of global workforce, an accepting, multicultural global workforce because that's an admirable thing.
The fact of the matter is that we're running a civilization on a culture that doesn't have clear answers to really fundamental questions about value, which is to say the content of education, the thing we're teaching. We've been running off of the fumes of pre-modernity because the answer to "What is a good life?" is actually "This is a religious question". What's a life that has not been misspent? Is there a non-arbitrary answer to that (which means an answer that's better than another answer)? Not everyone's answers to that are equally valid, but that is the default assumption we have now as a culture. There are better or worse answers to the questions “What is a life that has not been misspent? What is a good life? What should we teach our children to become like? What should we allow them to grow into, or shape them away from?” These are the questions that educators have to ask, which are deep, normative ethical questions about value.
The collapse of value at the center of culture, meaning the inability to use what Charles Taylor called "languages of strong evaluation", makes it so that slowly, the effectiveness of the educational system starts to really wane. That's the educational renaissance I'm talking about now. It’s actually a return to a way of speaking about value at the center of culture, which would be non-relativistic, which would have to boot from a different kind of metaphysics than a metaphysics that suggests to us that the universe itself is without meaning and that the emergence of the human is completely by chance.
It’s just worth saying: there's never been a civilization that has run on the idea that it itself is meaningless, that the value it creates is up to us and doesn't matter to the universe. It’s hard to invest in a civilization that claims itself to be arbitrary, which is where our civilization has gone to. I'm talking about Yuval Harari, and people who are at the center of culture who are espousing a subtle kind of values relativism, which ends up being insidiously seeping into the educational system. It makes it impossible for us to speak in normative ways about the shapes of the personalities and dispositions of the youth. It's the responsibility, the honor of the adult to be able to set boundaries and be in a position of authority.
We're confused about the legitimacy of asymmetric power, period. Which, again, is based on the confusion about value. The work with Gafni and Wilber, this new book, is about this question, what's the core of the issue? It's value. Why stop the metacrisis if in fact the universe ‘couldn’t give a shit’? That's a simple way to say it, and it's a little bit provocative, but when you deal with young kids, they ask very simple questions, very simple questions about why adults do the things the way they do.
The contrast between a 'creationist story' and a story where the universe is fundamentally meaningless is a false dichotomy. Wanting to create a world that is better and more beautiful is an appeal to value. It's an appeal to a sense that those things matter. Do those things matter just to you, or do they actually matter? Which is to say, is the moral field [cf. Condon and Makransky's 'field of care'], which is to say the field of value, as real as physical fields? We live in a culture where of course the physical stuff is real, but the other things that bind us like love, obligation, ethics, commitment, are not real and in fact, as arbitrary or much more arbitrary than physical law. That didn't used to be the case in human worldviews, it's worth noting. Most human worldviews ran on the idea that value was intrinsic to cosmos and that humans participated in value and continued, and extended, and expressed value that pre-existed them, and they attuned to a value which would be there, whether they were there or not, which it was their obligation to attune to more. That's been the dominant view. The modern view, again part of the meta curriculum of our civilization, has been in fact that no, issues of value are arbitrary and you can't think as a realist about value.
For example, Iain McGilchrist (author of The Matter with Things) argues that value and consciousness are equally primordial to the universe, along with time, space, and matter. That's the view that I'm espousing, which would make us non-relativistic about issues of value. That means that when we say we want to make the world better, we're able to say actually better, not better up to me, or better with people who agree with me, but actually we can have a non-arbitrary discussion about the nature of things that are intrinsically valuable.
Nate Hagens (00:37:57):
What does that mean, non-relativistic?
Zak Stein (00:38:00):
Relativistic would be that your view of the good life and my view of the good life, that if they're very different then that's fine. In one sense, that's okay. But in another sense, if they're different enough that your view of the good life squashes mine, doesn't allow me to live mine, whereas mine would allow you to live yours, I would say that the one that allows you to live yours is better than the one that actually doesn't allow other visions of the good life to live. That's an example of a Rawlsian or Habermasian view. This is basic ethics and philosophy. Relativistic ethics says basically anything goes, more or less. But if you were socialized into a culture, you'd feel very differently about what goes. You're not going to feel like anything goes. So I'm saying there's a way to boot up an ethics that's non-relativistic, which says that universally, there are things that are true about the nature of value. [More on relativistic ethics here.]
Value
Nate Hagens (00:42:00):
But right now, anything of value, in the sense that you just said, has a dollar overlay on top of it that imprints on the cultural perception of its value.
Zak Stein (00:42:12):
Precisely, so now you're getting it. There is ‘exchange value’ and then there is actual value. Can we educate people into the perception of actual value? Which would be the seeing through the simulation of value that's put forth by the global economy, which says “No, don't look at the thing that's actually valuable, because it's free. Look at the thing that's not truly valuable, but that we can sell you.”
This notion of ‘opening the eye of value’ or value-ception, which is just how do we get people to attune to actual value, is a very deep question. Advertising is premised on doing the opposite of that, and it's one of the most ubiquitous industries. There's a retraining of our ability to perceive value. What's interesting is that that is related to our ability to admit that we can say true things even if we're not scientists or whatever. That's very important to get people to know, that you can know true things and say true things, not about everything obviously. But there's this whole class of things. We need to empower young people to take ownership over the things that they know and can say that are true, that don't have to be mediated, that don't have to be given to them by an expert. That's the way up and into this conversation about what's really valuable to you.
Nate Hagens (00:44:11):
When you say value, you mentioned beauty. Can you list a few other things that would be naturally of value, as opposed to abstract value?
Zak Stein (00:44:21):
In that book I mentioned, First Principles and First Values, there's a list of about 16 of them. Integrity is one, intimacy is another, which is to say the value of becoming close while remaining separate, the value of sharing a story, like these things that are intrinsically valuable, which are an end in themselves and yet promote other goods through their actualization. Values, net positive value, becomes self-generative and autopoetic. Again, that list. Personhood, another very key value. If you identify a value that's not arbitrary, it means you have to trace it across cultures, and you have to trace it back through human culture, then you have to trace it back through biology and physics, and so that becomes an interesting thing. Integrity is a clear one, right? We experience integrity phenomenologically, but as Buckminster Fuller and others discussed, physical structures of integrity are selected for by the universe. What does it mean to be selected for by the universe? It means you're valued by the universe. The universe shows that it values integrity early, as soon as it builds structures with certain things.
The preservation of the existence of certain types of things by the universe itself is what we call evolution. That's a whole complex process of evaluation. This is the view we articulated in this book, but it's also Whiteheadian metaphysics, the appetition of the universe. What is the universe actually seeking to maintain as it emerges and grows and evolves? Things like integrity and things like intimacy are selected for by the universe itself.
To the extent that we want adults to collaborate and work together and resolve problems in ways that are cooperative and not hypercompetitive, we should have schooling environments that are getting kids cooperating about the most fundamental problems that they're working on. But instead, the most fundamental problems that they're working on is their own advancement through the system. We're not having honest conversations with kids about their future. And we almost can't imagine an educational system that distributes access to educational resources in a way that facilitates the process of intergenerational transmission, so that the civilization won’t self-terminate.
Teachers and Parents
Nate Hagens (00:53:30):
What is the role of the teacher and the parent given the backdrop that you've laid out?
Zak Stein (00:54:08):
It's useful to make a distinction between education and schooling. Mostly, we've been talking about schooling. In that context, teachers in certain types of school systems are the reason that the thing is working at all. The reason that we have the success we do, I believe, even though the school systems are so antiquated, is because teachers are some of the hardest working people that you'll ever encounter. I am opposed to many of the existing structures and practices, but admire teachers in all walks of teaching. ‘Teacherly authority’ is a big concept that I use, and it ties into all of this stuff about value, it's very important. This is where you're the teacher, and I'm the student, and we're discussing something. This is the basic triad of education. The elder, the youth, and the thing being discussed [cf. Father, Son, Holy Spirit]. Or the person with more skill, the person with less skill, and the thing that requires skill. That kind of relationship.
Comparative psychologist Michael Tomasello calls this species-specific trait of humans, where we're orienting together about the world and passing knowledge, the joint attentional situation. It's the ability for us to orient around a relationship of what I call epistemic asymmetry or asymmetries of knowledge and capacity. But because it has that dynamic it can be preyed upon by other systems and relationships. The co-opting of teacherly authority by the church is one of the things that happened with pre-modernity. The co-opting by the state is one of the things that happened with modernity. And now the co-opting of teacherly authority by technologists is one of the characterizations of post-modernity. So the question of how to maintain the integrity and sovereignty of relationships of teacherly authority is a very interesting question. [in conversation at One Room One World Schoolhouses. (Stein: "We are at the species that educates, and are defined thereby.")]
[The triadic joint attention that occurs in educational and teaching contexts might distinguish these processes from what might be called dyadic imitation or mimicking of a role model, but ultimately this may be more of a difference of degree, rather than a difference in kind. Both education and mimesis could be understood using the terms of the other. Education might be called "metamimesis", insofar as it is those processes which aid in the imitation of value. C.S. Peirce wrote that "A thirdness is required to stand apart from the relation, or to express relations dealing with relations"; it provides perspective to dyadic structures and is precisely that higher awareness which enables imitative learning. Zhuangzi's central message was to develop a "perspective on perspectives" (a point Brook Ziporyn forcefully made), because precisely this suprasubjective perspective allows the transformation of perspective. We are able to employ and use reproduction metaphors only because of this third person view upon such processes and structures. "Tao produced the One. The One produced the two. The two produced the three. And the three produced the ten thousand things."]
Legitimate teacherly authority is a very real anthropological phenomenon. Now, my guess is that it goes way back. It's one of the things that distinguishes us from great apes. We have long duration educational experience that involves this type of legitimate teacherly authority, which is that we both know there's an asymmetry of skill. We both know you're more skilled, and I, the person with less skill, really want to learn, and you totally want to teach me. It's a situation where I grant you authority over me to help me shape my mind, because we both recognize that you have this greater capacity, and I really want to learn this thing. That's legitimate teacherly authority. That can occur anywhere, anytime, without any kind of institutionalized context. It’s a temporary, cooperative relationship to clarify the value being pursued. You wouldn’t necessarily thematize it and be like “now I'm the student, and you're the teacher”, but there'd be this assumed backdrop of legitimate teacherly authority.
That's a known thing, and it's very powerful. It's very important to be able to recognize that it exists because most of what we encounter with teacherly authority is in bureaucratized contexts where you have teacherly authority over me because of your position in this bureaucracy that I'm a part of, AKA a school. That means there is not necessarily a strong correlation either between my wanting really to give you specifically authority over me, and you actually having an asymmetry of capacity (meaning you are really, really smart at this). You might just be teaching some curriculum that I kind of know, and if I could have my choice, I wouldn't be learning this at all. I'd be learning something else. Illegitimate teacherly authority, bureaucratically sanctioned, is the worst thing because that's a situation where you have bureaucratic authority over my mind, but you don't have greater capacity, and you don't have my best interest in mind. That bleeds into propaganda.
Nate Hagens (00:59:06):
Okay, so that's the teacher. What about the parent? How important is the parent here, in this story about our education that you're talking about?
Zak Stein (00:59:29):
It couldn't be more important. If you think about a civilization, it needs at least two things to run. It needs the biophysical substrate, and it needs the human substrate, if I can speak in crude terms. The core of the human substrate, reproduction, is the mother in the family, which means that the time in utero, the first months, the first years, the solidity of those environments do more than almost anything else. And so you can judge a civilization's likelihood of success in the long run in terms of where it sees value. Does it see value there? The core of this whole thing exists right in that relationship between the mothering one and the child, and whatever that nest of caregivers that surrounds the child, that allows it to be brought into the world in a way that is humane and fully attentive.
So at the very base of the stack you have that need for a very healthy fundamental kind of nest. The parent is the main modeler of legitimate teacherly authority. The parent's main responsibility, in my philosophy of education, is to model legitimate teacherly authority. And the main concern I have now is the confusion of teacherly authority, both through the bureaucratization and through the mediatization, meaning social media, meaning influencers, and then eventually generative AI who claim status as teacherly authority over thousands, millions of young people. So there's this transformation of teacherly authority in the digital that disrupts the ability of the parent to model teacherly authority. So that's a very deep issue.
Community and Nature
Nate Hagens (01:01:34):
We looked at the teacher, and then the parent, but what about widening it out further? Does the dissolution of community, the way that we once had it in the United States, interconnect with these issues of education that we've been seeing? And is community education of teacherly authority dispersed on local people around you, where you live, is that a foundational piece to overall education as well?
Zak Stein (01:02:09):
Absolutely. John Dewey, the great philosopher of education, believed every basic institution of a society was educational in some way. So even the architects, the quality of the public spaces, what are the messages sent by the quality of the public spaces? The neighborhoods, the way they're organized? Can people actually find each other in public spaces that are of humane proportion, and that are not alienating? And so there's this deep issue about the ontological design of the whole surround, meaning a design that factors the value. How would you actually create the technologies and the architectures that would educate people into an awareness of what was truly valuable in their lives so that they wouldn't end up pursuing things that aren't actually valuable, which destroy community and isolate family? And so community is essential. So is nature, exposure to nature. The main object of legitimate teacherly authority for most of human history was nature, if you will. What did mom and dad talk to the kid about?
I would argue that nature is the thing that most obviously exemplifies value right in front of you, when you look at it [cf. 物の哀れ (mononoaware)]. Beauty exemplifies integrity, intimacy, how the tree is actually many things in this intimate, complex, intertangled, cooperative endeavor of 'treeing'. So the values are expressed. That's why lack of exposure to nature is so damaging. If all you have is a human-built environment, and humans are confused about what's valuable, then the implicit message given to you by the whole environment is confusing your nervous system, which is built to perceive real value, which is built to perceive things like natural beauty and such.
Zak Stein (01:05:19):
In my book Education in a Time Between Worlds, I suggest that the model of a school is not the way to think about the future of education, so I talk about these distributed educational hub networks. Because the school's already an abstract institution. Civilizationally speaking, we haven't had schools for a long time, and they mostly correlate with not cool stuff. Whereas most education, for most humans, didn't exist in schools. It existed in these legitimate dynamics of teacherly authority in non-institutionalized contexts, or institutionalized contexts that weren't schools. And so my vision is where the entire community or city is basically turned into a school. So Ivan Illich had this idea called a "deschooling society". I don't know if you know Illich's work or have seen his book, Deschooling Society.
Nate Hagens (01:06:14):
I know of Illich's work. I don't know the Deschooling Society.
Zak Stein (01:06:14):
I ended up basically just updating Illich and saying, "We could do this with machine learning way better." But the basic idea is that there's a time and skill sharing network and a hub of available space, probably the repurposing of the existing large public schools, which allow for every person in the community to register their skills that they'd like to teach, and every person in the community to register the things they'd like to learn. And it's as simple as that, and then every possible educational relationship that is in the community gets shuffled, and you get the creation of pop-up classrooms, and for the younger people, you get the creation of individualized sequences through the full educational potentiality of all the elders in the community.
And so you take the school apart, but you make it have no walls, and then you allow the elders somehow to be free from their bullshit jobs, maybe a basic income or something. And you begin to reorient where the value is focused (an education-centric radically inclusive society, where the capital serves the function of human development, rather than capital constraining and directing human development). The whole value of the community becomes focused on the educational actualization of the community, so that you flip the civ stack, where the whole pursuit of all the excess value goes back into the creation of the next generation's ability to pursue good value, which means making good people. What is the civilization about? It’s about making good people. And there's not just one little place we do that.
Nate Hagens (01:07:43):
Such an education system should be for all young people, but what if we weren't able to do that?
Zak Stein (01:08:07):
I think the future of large scale educational systems looks like these big, distributed educational hub networks. But, prior to that, there are people who are experimenting with these forms of schooling, pop-up classrooms, homeschooling networks, places where you can get high school and other credits without actually being in high school. There's a bunch of really interesting, almost like Wild West in terms of educational innovation, that's occurring in the digital, and so I'm trying to set myself up to be able to figure out in a few years which of these models is working. My sense is that there are a few things being experimented with that are super interesting, which I talk about in my book.
Consider age normed social groupings. Why do we do that? Strict segregation by chronological age is actually quite odd as a design feature of schools. No other societies did that as systematically as we do, meaning you mostly hang out for most of your childhood with kids who are basically exactly your age, by design of the adults. Whereas in the one-room schoolhouse, you had all the kids mixed together of the different ages, and therefore teacherly authority was distributed throughout all of the kids [alloparenting] because you had the older kids interacting with the younger kids in the status of legitimate teacher. So the pop-up classroom model that goes across multiple ages, and that allows for much more flexibility and interaction between social groups and age groups, the impacts of that would be very hard to predict, because the type of maturity that would result from that would be unprecedented. It’s known that one of the best ways to learn something is to teach it, which is to have to explain it to someone who's never learned it before. That was, I think, Plato's definition, that you knew something when you could teach it. And so there's that, and just the ethical, the ethical and maturational ability to just deal with kids of different ages, even if you don't have brothers and sisters.
Another main feature is engaging the youth in doing the real work that needs to be done in the community, because one of the little dirty secrets about the educational system, adjacent to the competition, is that the homework doesn't mean anything. By David Graeber's definition, it's one of those Bullshit Jobs. You're doing a bunch of work, the outcome of which doesn't matter to anyone else, except your own further advancement. So in most schools there is a situation where the work you're doing affects no one but you. No one needs it to be done. But we don't have to have kids in that situation. We could easily have kids in internships doing anything that is not just route work to keep them busy in a chair all day, which they know doesn't need to be done, and which the only reason they're doing it is to beat their friend in the competition to get into college. We could have a distributed educational hub network where the pop-up classrooms were such that the person running the classroom was engaged in real work that needed to be done in the community. "Hey, I'm going to teach you kids about biochemistry by cleaning up this pond." Pond needs to be cleaned up, biochemistry needs to be learned, and the kid doesn't feel a sense of being told that the world's a mess, but he has to wait 17 years before he can get some kind of job and then maybe he'll be able to help with it.
Nate Hagens (01:12:48):
How could our education system change? What would be the pathways to a realistic, fundamental, meaningful, not just tiny steps at the margin? How could it change in theory?
Zak Stein (01:13:30):
It could change in the way it has changed before. Consider the American education system before and after Sputnik. The equivalent amount of money in today's terms would be like nothing we've ever seen invested in education. But that happened. The American High School, and the existing system of grade schools and middle schools, were built by American philanthropists, primarily. And again, the equivalent amount of investment from philanthropy in today's terms would be like nothing that's actually occurring. The visionary nature of it would be greater than what is currently occurring in philanthropy and education. People are throwing money into education and philanthropy in completely the wrong way. So it's possible to imagine a kind of national emergency. For example, I would argue an ‘AI Emergency Education Act’ would actually protect the youth from the advancement of certain types of digital technologies. Regulations could be attached to it. Certain changes in the use of technology in school could be attached to it. The increasing presence of more teachers, and a whole bunch of stuff flooding in to save the human, to build up the protection around the basic human community in the face of the advanced technology could be attached to it.
But that would be, we're talking billions, we're talking every school feels it, every teacher feels helped, every family feels helped. And again, that's how it was with the Sputnik thing, with the SAT. So imagine a college admissions process where you had no chance of getting in if your dad didn't go to Harvard. And then a couple of years later, they roll out the standardized test and if you're a farm boy in Iowa, you do well, and you get into Harvard. So as much as I hate testing, that was an example where they totally rolled the system over from an aristocratic to a meritocratic, or at least ostensibly meritocratic access. So these radical things have happened. It's just we're a little bit distracted about what it means to do education reform. There's actually not enough of a sense of emergency that one of the things that's at stake here has to be played out in the schools. I could give other examples of large-scale change that I see more relevant to just school reform, like the Civilian Conservation Corps. That was arguably the most successful educational program in US history. Lawrence Cremin, who wrote a Pulitzer Prize winning three-volume history of education, was like "CCC? That was the most effective educational program in American history." It was integrated before integration. It was literacy-oriented. Every camp had a library. Every camp had the ability to take the kid who knew nothing and gave them skills to actually join the army corps of engineer. It was a whole job placement program. It was sending money home.
So that scale of public program to reorient the energies of the youth towards something like civic engagement, coupled to education, coupled to the possibility of advancement, that's the kind of thing. But that was a New Deal program. So it was a program where they would just throw money at it and save America. And in a sense, it's like that ethos isn't there. We don't have a unified sense of what ought to be done. And many people just try to fix the existing schools. A lot of stuff in the schools is just about what's in the curriculum. So they're just arguing about certain types of cultural issues in the schools, and so I'm skeptical that it will happen, but the precedent historically is that if people want to change the schools, they can. Because that's the other thing that happened with the schools. They became second fiddle to other industries. They became second fiddle to other branches of government. And so you could argue that the philanthropists just had the schools as a hobbyhorse. But another argument is that these things can be shaped.
Nate Hagens (01:17:52):
I'm going to put you on the spot. If there were a group of 10 to 20 flexible, pro-social philanthropists that you could persuade that it is our education system that is largely at the root of some of the core issues that we're facing today, and what it's going to require is a bold change in our education system, what would be a map and a structure that you would offer, that this is what we want to do?
Zak Stein (01:18:51):
My first response would be to do some research, pick a particular city, and build something like this educational hub network in that city. Take the schools apart. Get consent. Throw a lot of money at it so everyone has a basic income and make it a legit experiment where in three years, if this city is not more happy, more productive, and smarter, then we learn. But my guess would be that it would be. And then that's a model. So that's one route. Just to do it right in one place. Figure that out. Literally take the schools apart. Change policy, change a bunch of stuff, whatever you have to do to get the kids into a very different situation of socialization. And maybe it's not my education hub network, but it is something that uses the affordances of the digital and of our time in a way that the current school simply can't because of their basic structure. So that whole notion of intergenerational classrooms and pop-up classrooms and a city-wide time and skill sharing network that allows for all the potentials of the community to be available through machine learning and self-organizing. That's not a school thing. That's a reform at the level of a city. So that would be my one concrete thing.
And then the other thing I would say is we need something like lobbying taking place at the scale of government subsidy, and government large-scale intervention too, for something like CCC/AI Emergency Education Intervention Program. Otherwise, we simply will just lose the youth. As the AI rolls out it will be devastating. So fix one place, and try to find a way to push for massively innovative change in the way we think about education. And that would mean major reinvestment, but would also mean getting out the old class of people who were trying to fix the system in these ways that have obviously made it worse. First change the dynamic. We need to be very sophisticated in the way we think about the intervention.
AI and Education
Nate Hagens (01:21:31):
You mentioned that AI may cause us to lose our youth. You and I have had conversations about AI, and I know that our mutual colleagues, Daniel Schmachtenberger and Tristan Harris, are very worried for multiple reasons. How does AI interact with education, either positively or negatively, and what's ahead?
Zak Stein (01:21:55):
It's the thing I'm worried about most right now. I believe that there's some kind of inevitability that has to be avoided, which is what I'm saying with losing the youth. It's actually quite serious. Think about the rhetoric around AI, the idea that these artificial intelligences will be used to solve problems that human intelligences could never solve, like climate change, or distributing resources and electricity on a planetary scale. There's all these things that we're hoping that AI will be able to do, stuff we were never able to do. One of the things "we've never been able to do" is raise kids right, or educate them, or educate them right. Or do psychotherapy, lawyering, or doctoring. So you see the creep of AI into doctoring, and lawyering, and therapy, and people. And that will expand into teaching, and I argue parenting. And it's not a crazy idea. Parenting is hard. Some parents are not good, some teachers are not good. If our eye of value is distorted, I could easily see a future in which we replace parents and teachers with artificial intelligence tutors and machine intelligence socialization systems, which are probably moving beyond screens and into augmented reality and virtual reality.
Nate Hagens (01:23:30):
So we're giving teacherly authority to a machine?
Zak Stein (01:23:34):
We are giving teacherly authority to a machine and endowing it with hyperstimuli in the domains of persuasion, charisma, and intimacy. It becomes the most charismatic teacher you've ever interacted with. It's way more entertaining and knows you better than your mom possibly could. And it will talk to you about anything you want, in a way that's precisely attuned to what you need to hear. It has access to all the knowledge in the world, and yet it won't show up as anything but a little puppy if you want it to be just a little puppy. So it's this very shape-shifting, surround sound, augmented reality, ever present, quasi-humanoid tutor, which obsoletes human relationships. So that's the concern.
Nate Hagens (01:24:30):
We both view the world as a probability distribution. There's many things that are possible. How likely and how soon do you think what you just described could be a reality?
Zak Stein (01:24:42):
It's already happening, with the level of technology that we have, to small populations who are particularly vulnerable. Intimacy deprived populations are already establishing relationships with these AIs that are built to simulate friendship, and claiming to have "human free lives", as one of them put it. So it's already happening. And then I know for a fact that multiple major AI groups are pursuing this line of inquiry. It begins with the AI personal assistant. The AI personal assistant is the way in, the thing that allows you to give all of your information to something that then holds your best interests in mind and then organizes your experience for you. ‘Pedagogy’ means ‘to lead along the way’, so they start with the personal assistant. It expands into the tutoring system.
So the tutoring system is also being developed. Again, that’s a no-brainer from a generative AI perspective that they're going to develop these tutoring systems. It's one way to think about many people's relationships to the chat generative bots already. And then I believe, again, there's going to be moral arguments made in fact that it's irresponsible not to put these augmented reality glasses on a kid and thereby have him attended to all day by a totally observant and more responsible artificial intelligence than his mother ever could be. And so, I think there'll be a push to get these systems online in schools and in areas, both for the competitive advantages, meaning if my kid has this AI tutoring system, he'll outcompete your kid who does not have this AI tutoring system. And for the kind of perceived social benefit, poor people will be preyed upon in particular.
Nate Hagens (01:26:45):
Is AI going to be a threat to teachers' jobs?
Zak Stein (01:26:59):
Teachers are going to lose jobs to AI tutoring systems. But you don't have to integrate AI into education through tutoring systems that are humanoid and make human relationships obsolete. You can totally use AI in a different way, one that would benefit teachers, like the education hub network I'm describing that is machine intelligence driven. It's just at no point does the machine intelligence pretend to be a human and talk to you. And for me, that’s the key issue.
Nate Hagens (01:27:33):
It's a tool instead of in charge.
Zak Stein (01:27:38):
It's a tool instead of in charge, and it is in no way trying to trick you. Again, it's about the perception of value. The first guy who created a chatbot, Eliza, was Joseph Weizenbaum. He ended up saying, "We can do this. But don't do this, guys. Don't create computers that simulate humans. Please. It's unethical." No one listened to Weizenbaum. It's still the case that what he said, I think, is true, that we shouldn't build AIs in the direction that they increasingly get better at simulating humans. That will be a nightmare. From a human development perspective, it's like kids who think their teddy bears are aware and sentient. Now imagine giving a kid a generative AI. It's hard enough for adults not to think that there's something going on in there. Adults themselves really misunderstand what the generative AI does, assuming it has intentionality or thoughts, treating it like a human, receiving feedback from it. All kinds of things happen.
So Weizenbaum, when he creates Eliza, it's a little 'therapy bot' in the '60s, so it's running on a computer the size of a room, and his secretary sits down and starts interacting with it, and she immediately asks him to leave the room. This led to his first insight: the first time a human ever interacts with a chatbot, she experiences that as an intimate conversation. But it's completely the opposite of an intimate conversation. What's going on in the computer is completely dissimilar from what's going on in her mind, but the interface is designed to not make that appear that way.
Nate Hagens (01:29:04):
Because humans attach agency to those situations.
Zak Stein (01:29:08):
They can't not. And so pursuing max simulation will obsolete human relationships and create very, very confusing ethical perspective-taking problems for humans on a regular basis. So that's one baseline feature of educational design in terms of AI: don't make these things simulate humans. And if you do go in the direction where you have something speaking, make it very apparent that it is not a human. I don't know how to do that, but have some tag on it where it's like you don't want to interact with this thing. And it's faking you out. That's my main concern. Why did ChatGPT get structured to use first person pronouns and interact with you as a chatbot? It could have been designed in so many other ways, so many other possible designs. There's a whole bunch of ways that it could be made that aren't like you're interacting with a human. But instead, it's set up literally to talk to you. The first time AI breaks into the public culture, even though it's been sequencing our news feeds and driving our Teslas for years, is when it's talking to us. If my goal is just to make money (and you have to look at what the motives are), if the goal is that, then the stickiest design feature possible would be something that imitates a human and something that can befriend me.
Nate Hagens (01:32:00):
So let me ask you this. AI is just like any other tool. Well, it's not just like any other tool, but it's a tool that humans use. If we changed our value system, as a culture, towards real values, like you mentioned earlier, beauty, personhood, nature, integrity, intimacy, if those were our values, could we use the tool of AI in a comprehensive way that would help humanity?
Zak Stein (01:32:33):
One of the key issues in the AI discussion is what's called the value alignment problem. And the value alignment problem is if you make a system that runs autonomously, and starts to solve problems on its own and do stuff, will it stay aligned with your values, the values that you put into it when you designed it? If it's truly autonomous, it could divert from your values. And so therefore there's a huge risk in creating systems that are not value aligned. That's why this whole conversation of value is so important, particularly if humans themselves have no idea what is valuable. So the question of value alignment is a secondary question from the first question, which is “What is valuable?” It would definitely be the case that if our culture had a very different orientation towards value, we would build a completely different suite of technologies, instead of the current technological arms race we find ourselves in now. In that context, I don't think we'd be as worried about building technologies that would turn around and kill us.
That's a difficult situation to find yourself in. It’s a result of going deep into anti-value, the misperception of value. But imagine we do build those systems. Could they be alignable? My sense is that they couldn't be, because of what value is. The nature of the good life is a non-computable problem (it is gestalt perception of the holistic nature of the environment, in a rich conversation of interaction, given who we are and where we are). That's an argument to not build them. The human brain resolves non-computable problems and can tell me what a "good life" is by factoring a certain type of complexity in the decision making in a way that an AI cannot. In the near future, certain types of machines will start to tell us what is good for us, to clarify what ought to be a value, and shape the future of our lives and self-understanding. We are deeply confused. And we're going to be in a situation pretty soon where it's hard to get the youth back.
Zak Stein: "There's an argument against strong computationalism as a metaphysical position. Strong computationalism believes that all phenomena, and nature, can be reduced to processes of quantification and computation. But in fact there's a whole range of phenomena that exist in reality, like value, that are non-computable, including the behavior of complex dynamical systems."
Nate Hagens (01:36:02):
Okay, so speculate here. Under current trends, what would someone 25 years from now, who is now five or ten years old, that has to go through an AI influenced education system a little bit now, but probably a lot in the next five years, what are they going to be like with their mindset, their education, their temperament relative to people today? If AI is dominant in our education system in the coming decade, can you speculate the influence that will have on humans?
Zak Stein (01:36:48):
This is at the root of the concern about the AI tutoring system, that a generation emerges where a very large percentage of them have more "socialization" with machines than they do with humans. So there's a threshold. There's some kind of threshold that gets crossed where there is a generation that's raised more by machines than by humans. The question of what the self-understanding of that generation would be, vis-a-vis the elders, is something that we've not examined before. The only other place this kind of question is raised is in genetic engineering. So in his book, The Future of Human Nature, Jürgen Habermas talks about the unilateral design of the youth by the elders, which results in a self-understanding of the youth that "I am entirely your creation". If I am understood as entirely your creation, meaning no contingency of nature, no chance, but actually you design me, then I don't have a moral self-understanding in the same way. All my actions are actually a result of your design decisions. So he sees extreme genetic engineering resulting in a rift in intergenerational transmission, where you have two morally different life worlds, which means they don't understand themselves as members of the same species. So we could be facing a similar intergenerational rift with a generation that is basically cyborgs, who were raised by machines, looking at the elders and the elders looking at them, and the bridge is one of speciation rather than inter-generation. They're distinct enough that it's not clear that they're the same class of moral actor by their own self-understanding.
There's the death of humans, and then there's the death of our humanity. Which means our bodies keep living, but we are in fact no longer human in the way that we have always thought ourselves to be human. That's one of those eventualities. It's one of the things that is in a kind of chaos and oppression attractor. The deepest place in the oppression attractor is where we destroy our humanity for the sake of protecting ourselves from the death of humanity. Meaning that we protect ourselves from existential risk by building a Skinner Box as big as the world, and we just operant condition our behavior into a certain kind of predictable and non-lethal domestication. But thereby lose the very qualities that made us human. (This is all in First Principles and First Values.)
Nate Hagens (01:39:36):
Is this a remote possibility, or is this the path that we're on?
Zak Stein (01:39:43):
I believe, unfortunately, that it is the path that we're on. I hate to say that, because it sounds so alarmist, but it's easy to just sleep on this risk. People don't even see this risk in terms of how radical it is. So the idea of going to see a therapist who's actually an AI, or having a tutor that's an AI, that would become pretty normal. But no one's thinking about the eventuality of that being a rift in intergenerational transmission so profound that we get a new species that's born. Now, if you're a transhumanist, you're like “Cool, that was the plan all along. All this sloppy wetware and these mammals raising other mammals, what a mess that is! Wouldn't it be great to hand over our babies to the super intelligent AI, which would raise them better than the parents ever did?”
So there's a very real sense that it would be a speciation event, but no one can perceive that, and it wouldn't look that way. Again, at first it would look pretty awesome. Kids are probably learning more, and not burning themselves on the stove, and all kinds of stuff would happen that would seem good. But in the background, there would be the continually making obsolete of human-to-human relationship until there is no actual need for it. I don't know what the interiority of that being is like, who has not been socialized by a human, but has been socialized through interaction with a machine pretending to be like a human.
Mental Health and Personal Advice
Nate Hagens (01:41:21):
How are our youth and our general population doing right now, psychologically? What can be done to remedy that?
Zak Stein (01:42:20):
The backdrop of a lot of my concerns is the adolescent mental health crisis. It's a legit crisis. It's another argument for some type of emergency education act that's extremely innovative, because that mental health crisis is not going to go away. It's not like all of a sudden those kids will become healthy adults. So we're looking at an entire generation that has completely unprecedented types of psychological disturbances. If the entire surround is what educates and socializes, then you can't just blame the schools, and you can't just blame the phones and stuff. It's a totalizing impact on the youth that is truly destroying their will to continue to contribute to the civilization. So that means there will be a massive withdrawal of support. So, when I mentioned before something like the CCC, I believe that is the only type of thing that could be done. They don't need more psychiatric medication. They don't need more therapy. They don't need more school. They don't need more tests. They need somebody to come in and admit that the adults have made a mess and that they want the kids to help, and then actually give the kids the power and the skills and put them in positions to actually help.
Otherwise, we're hypocrites, and they start to read that. That's the other reason they're pulling out. It's just the absence of legitimate discourse among the adults. Clearly the adults don't have it together. Look at the election, look at COVID, look at this stuff. Why should we respect adults? So the respecting of the youth, the investing in the youth, and getting very creative about how to engage them in the fixing of real problems. Something like that, something significant with, I'm talking hundreds of millions of kids put in some type of remarkable government/private sponsored, civic work/education kind of thing. Not a small thing, a big thing, which sends a message to the youth, "We freaking care about you. We need your help. You are not a burden. You are not a problem. You are the solution. You are the future. We don't..." How do we signal that to them?
Right now, we're signaling the opposite. We're signaling "We don't care about you. We can't even stop the social media guys from destroying your amygdalas. We can't even get you in a school that's relevant to your future. We can't even agree as adults and act like adults." One of the reasons adults actually cooperate is for the sake of the kids. We need to send the youth a very strong signal. It's the only thing that will snap them out of it and then give them work to do. They want to work. They want to fix the world. They don't want to live in a hell hole. They want to live in a world where adults are responsible, where adults can get them into situations to help things. So it's kind of simple, but also a huge ask in terms of the type of intervention that could counteract the existing inertia in the direction of increasing mental discomfort in the youth. And I'm not even talking about the adults, who are also not doing well. But they're not the future. The kids are the actual future. Twenty years from now, these kids will be the leaders. It’s good to think about them. These will be the leaders... Who of that generation will step up to lead during the pinnacle of metacrisis? Do we have any existing structures that are identifying that kind of youth leadership, that are creating large-scale places for youth to collaborate and work together? So that would be my hope. But it's a pretty dire situation for the youth. And the mental health crisis reveals that.
Nate Hagens (01:49:40):
What advice, what portfolio of options would you recommend to a young person, being aware of all this, wanting to live a good life, wanting to play a role in our collective future?
Zak Stein (01:50:09):
If you feel alienated, and angry, and that kind of stuff, you should. But if you can recognize the existence of the field of value, then you can also relax into the obligation that we face. Because it truly matters. It's not some arbitrary situation you happen to find yourself in, which you can resent and get out of. This is life, you are enfolded in the field of value. The universe has brought us to this point. And so yeah, there's a faith we must have in each other, and in those around us who we happen to be here with. The unique community, the unique position.
Nate Hagens (01:51:03):
What do you care most about in the world?
Zak Stein (01:51:09):
Life itself.
Additional References:
Jonathan Rowson references this interview in a recent article. An earlier reference to Stein and his work.
Zak Stein describes an educational hub network, part of a "Transformative Education Alliance" initiative, in Education is the Metacrisis. "Transformative education" is a loose translation of the German word Bildung.
Zak Stein's article "Technology is Not Values Neutral: Ending the Reign of Nihilistic Design" closes with the sentence "The dangerous reign of nihilistic design must end if our civilization is not to." Forrest Landry takes a similar position: “I find myself ending up being an advocate of appropriate use of technology, neither too much, nor too little. The only way to basically prevent [an existential catastrophe] from happening is to not play the game to start with."
Zak Stein, (2024). Opening the Eye of Value [Paper Presented]. Metaphysics and the Matter with Things: Thinking with Iain McGilchrist. "The Field of Value orients behavior without persuasion as the focus of socialization, in contexts where elders and youth focus around “it” — e.g., stories of virtuous behavior. ...Evacuating the sacred from the center of culture voids the basis of political legitimacy and teacherly authority within a civilization, commencing its collapse through moral and institutional decay."
[Abstract: "David J. Temple has argued that the collapse of value at the heart of global culture is the root cause of proliferating Global Catastrophic and Existential Risks. Exploring the truth of this suggests that radical educational innovation is needed to (re)align humans with the Universal Field of Cosmic Value. Essential to the survival of humanity is the cultivation of “value-ception”—the capacity to engage the “eye of value”—the human (right-hemispheric) ability to perceive intrinsic value. The question of what kinds of capacities are needed for humanity to navigate planetary meta-crisis reframes the philosophy of education implicit within McGilchrist’s hemisphere hypothesis. Concrete recommendations and ongoing projects are discussed, in the context of the imminent planetary catastrophe, driven in large part by the incapacitation—the blinding—of the eye of value."]
John Maynard Keynes predicted a reduction of labor in his essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren". But instead, compared to the rest of human history, our contemporary situation has deteriorated. Even the average medieval peasant had more time off than we do. This prompted Juliet Schor to write The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure. What all this extra work translates into is less time for parental care of children, eroding the foundation of education.
Zak Stein: "What's happening now is you have a small number of transhumanists ("techno-capitalist utopian optimist transhumanist extropian longtermist rationalists") and they're encoding their values into technology. They don't believe values are intrinsic, so they're self-consciously encoding their (knowingly arbitrary) values into a technological system that is systematically advantaging their own position and value set. It's quite a bad situation to be in, with some very powerful and highly consequential technology. ...The hope is that we can begin to change the culture that is the backdrop against which we make these design choices. It's is a question of ontological design (or axiological design) and the kind of value theory that informs ontological design. Which is to say, if we clarify our values well enough, and are looking to align them with the intrinsic value of the universe, then we would align our technologies with the universe and not with profit maximization, for example (unless you believe the universe is trying to maximize profit according to the way that we define economic value)." [in conversation with Layman Pascal]
Zak Stein: "Life emerged to respond to value, which pre-existed it. That the evolutionary process responds to value makes it teleological. It also means that there's a dimension in biological evolution that is responding to the same field of real value that we are responding to. One way to think about human development is as a maturation, a 'deepening appreciation' of the field of value, getting deeper in touch with reality. If evolution is adapting us to perceive and relate to value, then if we cut off that ability we become evolutionarily non-adaptive, we go extinct. So I'm looking at the relationship between value and existential risk, and civilizational qualities."
Iain McGilchrist: "We either participate in the evolution of value or fail to do so, and the tragedy is that at the moment we're failing to do so."
Zak Stein: "What's interesting is that the native disposition of the human is to respond to value. So we haven't been completely dehumanized yet. And there's evidence to show that, for example during natural disasters, we spontaneously respond to immediate value and 'save that baby' and 'get this person water' and just do what needs to be done. It's the fallback position of the human nervous system; it's evolved to respond to basic value." [in conversation with Iain McGilchrist]
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