Elitism and Education - A Conversation with Conrad Hughes

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

What we're doing in schools is we're actually developing the human story, and therefore to say we want a society which isn't as brutal and hierarchical. So it's really, are we in a deterministic universe that leads to what's called the just world belief? So, oh well, this is just the way it is and suck it up. Or are we going to try and create a world, a human world, that isn't like that?

Hi again, welcome back to the podcast.

Today's episode is a fascinating discussion with Konrad Hughes, who is the campus and secondary principal at the International School of Geneva La Grande Boissière. He has been school principal, director of education, IB diploma coordinator, and teacher in schools in Switzerland, France, India, and the Netherlands. Konrad, who is also a member of the advisory board for the University of the People, senior fellow of UNESCO's International Bureau of Education, and research assistant at the University of Geneva's Department of Psychology and Education.

He also teaches philosophy.

Conrad is the author of numerous articles in peer-reviewed journals, and as Director of Education at the International School of Geneva, he led the publication of Guiding Principles for Learning in the 21st Century with UNESCO. He's been chief editor for special editions of Springer's Prospects journal. Conrad has also published Understanding Prejudice and Education: The Challenge for Future Generations in 2017, Education for the 21st Century: Seven Global Challenges in 2018, and most recently, last month, he published Elitism and Education: Challenges and Opportunities. You can connect with Konrad on LinkedIn @konradhughes or on Twitter @konradhughes0.

Hi Konrad.

Hi Tim. Hi, how are you doing?

I'm fine and you?

Good.

Yeah, very well. All right.

Well, thank you.

It's such a pleasure to have you speaking about this with me. And it's a really important topic. I think this topic of education and elitism and having just written the book, which you've just published. Fantastic. And I'd love to get into some of these. I mean, it's a big topic right now, but I think it's a really important one, as I said, especially for international education where we've got a really, a lot of very internationally minded, engaged educators in a context where there is quite a lot of privilege and elitism, or, you know, in, in this space, it's quite an interesting tension perhaps between some of those things. So just love to start then with, as you say in the book, to discuss education and elitism is to discuss the way that the population of the world has structured itself and what direction it's taking, which is quite a thing to take on. I'm sure you'd agree. So what was your spark to think about and write about that?

Well, I've noticed two things. One is just how polarised this discussion around access and elitism, or if you prefer, social justice on the one hand and a type of conservatism on the other, just how polarised that discussion is. And so I thought, wouldn't it be interesting to draw the different positions together in an analysis that is as objective as possible and really weighs up both sides of the equation? Another spark, if you like, or imperative to write this book is deep-seated. I suppose it goes all the way back to my own education, which started in an all-boys Catholic school in South Africa, where there was corporal punishment. And there just seemed to be a huge hypocrisy between the mission of the school and what was actually happening on the ground. And it occurred to me that this tension, at best, or schizophrenia at worst, has sustained itself for decades now. And it's really a a shadow between discourse and operation. And therefore I think it's important to put that on the table. And that university, I think, is an issue in itself, you know, what you say and what you do.

Yeah, no, there's definitely a lot of highfalutin language and discourse around education generally, but certainly international education, and then how that translates into practice in terms of access and, you know, all these important ideas. What you do in the beginning of the book, I think, is really interesting and important because there are— there's a lot of emotion in this discussion, as you say, around social justice and conservatism, and some of the terms are also even a bit contested. So perhaps we could just think about some of the terms first, like elite or elitism, meritocracy, meritocratic, plutocracy, and cultural elitism. Maybe we could just give us a little bit of a run-through of some of those, because I think those are the really core ideas that we're talking around. The rewards that you get for hard work, or, you know, and the views that different groups in society have about who should make the decisions and where the value is.

Yes, well, these are contested terms and they're hot terms, as you say. Elitism is very interesting because, you know, it comes from the Latin to elect, essentially. And what you find quite quickly is a difference between the usage of the word elite so an elite sports club, and, you know, elite doctors training center, which tends to be positive. And elitism, which tends to carry critical connotations with it. And the real difference is elite suggests a group that is somehow gifted or in a better position than others. And, you know, we could have a philosophical discussion about that, but let's just sort of say it's out there. Elitism is this notion that such a group should be propagated and sustained through time, and that all sorts of social structures should actually support this hierarchy. And of course, you know, what I point out in the book is that elitism as a philosophy is incredibly ancient. You go back to the origins of education, they are essentially elitist. And it's only very late in the 1800s that we try to break away from this and to create an education for all, and the idea that there are some universal rights that are accessible to everybody, that's a very recent idea. And in the 21st century, perhaps we forget that almost in our DNA, there is this tendency for hierarchy. So elitism and the elite are interesting terms to differentiate. Now, what I say in the book is that there's essentially 3 types of elitism. One is plutocratic, which essentially is around money, wealth. And so that's largely a description of a power structure that's built on capital. I talk about meritocratic elitism, which is the idea that talent should be rewarded and we should create social systems that allow gifted individuals to progress. It's seen as something that's fair. And the meritocracy is therefore this notion of allowing the best and the bright to get to the top, if you like, in inverted commas, or at least to have access to what they somehow deserve. And then the third type is cultural elitism. So this is the notion of high culture versus popular culture, which might sound like quite a conservative, stuffy notion, but it's— I think it's contemporary, and it seeps through educational discourse and many of the debates that are taking place. So on the one hand, you've got the idea that there's a kind of central high culture, which tends to be Eurocentric. And on the other, you've got a mix of modern popular mass culture, and then these alternative movements, which are trying to deconstruct the whole idea of cultural elitism. So I use these three focal points throughout the book, and I keep coming back to them: elitism in terms of money, elitism in terms of talent, and elitism in terms of culture.

Yeah. Nice. It's really interesting. And I like the phrase that you quote from Joyner, situationally elitist, because I think, as you said, even in regard to the term elite and elitism, you know, in certain contexts, you know, we want highly qualified, highly competent surgeons to look after us when we have critical medical needs. You know, we want an elite in that situation, but perhaps in other situations we will be unfavorable to it. And perhaps in a, you know, a cultural setting, we have different views. You know, I suppose it's connected to that idea of inevitability of elitism as well? That you said it's kind of, maybe it's in our DNA to have hierarchy. So is it that it's just contextual and actually elitism is kind of inevitable in certain contexts or desirable in certain contexts, then in others we should be trying to flatten that out?

I think essentially what we're talking about is the difference between an empirical philosophy and a normative philosophy. So an empirical philosophy describes what is. And of course, we've known since work on the Gaussian curve in the 19th century, that human behavior and output tends, in fact always does, fall into a distribution curve. And that you will have individuals who are performing on whatever task it is at a higher level than others. Now we can get into a huge sociological debate about what the metrics are and what do you mean by higher. But, and you know, some cultural conservatives take that argument very far. Jordan Peterson, he argues that there's a kind of natural biological hierarchy that is embedded right through the animal kingdom. And, you know, he talks about lobsters—

from lobsters all the way up, yeah, from lobsters all the way up.

So that's all fine, and if you like, it makes sense that the ancient Greeks, who believed that an 'arche,' you know, the 'arche' for the ancient Greeks was this central movement of the universe that explains everything. That the archi would put, as Aristotle says, you know, the bird at the top of the tree and the stone on the ground. That's the way things should be. So when Plato writes on the entrance to his academy, "Let no one ignorant of geometry enter," or Aristotle speaks of this human gift we have for a good life that some can access in a more virtuous way than others. These are very aristocratic positions, but they are completely empirical because by looking around, this is what they saw in the animal kingdom, in human behavior and human social organization. Now that's all empirical. But the normative position, it's not what is, it's what should be. And that's where you say, well, hold on, you know, human beings are not just animals. We do have this ability to think creatively, to ideate, and in fact, to create social situations that are not merely describing natural tendencies. And that's really the whole history of education. It's counterintuitive knowledge, you know, things like numeracy, writing, not spoken literacy, which actually comes to you naturally, just, you know, by by listening to your environment. But, you know, what we're doing in schools is we're actually developing the human story. And therefore, to say we want a society which isn't as brutal and hierarchical as what we see, you know, in a pride of lions, that's where you get this whole idea of egalitarianism, of equality, and then into more contentious issues such as equity. So it's really, are we in a deterministic universe that leads to what's called the just world belief? So, oh well, this is just the way it is and suck it up. Or are we going to try and create a world, a human world, that isn't like that?

Yeah, that's brilliant. And I actually think personally that we have to. I think it's an imperative. I don't think we have a choice anymore in the sense of the history up until this point has not allowed us to make strong normative decisions, if you like, about the limits, the planetary limits, the ecological limits that we are now clearly exceeding. And I think there has to be— we can't just keep describing what we see and just replicating what we see with some justification that it's some naturalizing picture, because actually we have these very significant and clear limits that are coming closer to us. They are really forcing us now to make strong choices about what should be, what could be, rather than just what is.

That's right. I mean, if you look at economic theory, and let's start with theories of capitalism, so Smith, Ricardo, late 1700s, they're in a very different universe, one where the concept of the environment as this finite place that we occupy didn't exist. And so that whole sort of free market doctrine, you know, was easy to entertain at a time and place where we had a different understanding of the world. But interestingly, of course, interestingly, it's Keynesian economics, which prescribes government intervention and some sort of curtailing of the market. That seems like a wise solution that we had until the 1980s, really, where the whole Chicago School, Milton Friedman, the totally deregulated economy, it took off. And what we're seeing now is the backwash of that, which is, as you've pointed out, exhaustion of planetary resources, and also huge inequalities. I mean, greater inequalities than we've ever seen. I mean, that's a complex discussion to have, because the poor are marginally richer than they were several decades ago. But the gap between those that are trying to access wealth from ground zero, and those that can make capital out of inherited wealth, that is spinning out of control. And so our children, you know, Gen Z, are facing some fairly bleak prospects. And I would argue that that's tied up with an economic model that has in its free market ethos this notion of another type of elitism. It's not quite plutocratic elitism, but it's a type of confidence in the market that has actually created a very exacerbated elitism. And feelings of outrage that these small groups that are incredibly powerful can dominate the world scene so easily. It's ironic that capitalism has really gone hand in hand with democracy for a long time, but now it seems to have taken over democracy, creating a new type of despotism. So, you know, everything's interconnected.

No, it's an incredibly complex discussion, isn't it? But at the heart of it, so if we, you know, if we bring it back to education, obviously that's what you and I are both very passionate about, So I'd love to get onto obviously the role of education in tackling some of these things, but also one of the things that you say, I mean, related to this plutocratic elitism, the education market itself. So we are primarily here talking about the private sector within education, although perhaps, I don't know whether you would argue that it strays into the public education market as well in terms of house prices in certain areas anyway, but the education market plays on the psychology of human perception very strongly. And that's linked to this idea of the scarcity principle, that there are certain scarce resources that we have to compete over or protect.

Hmm. Okay. So, you know, if you look at the work of Basil Bernstein, Michael Young in the Institute of Education, and this goes back some time now, they pointed out, and it's a very interesting thesis, that what you actually see in selective elite educational structures is a creation of knowledge. That is in a funny way a type of tacit agreement that will distinguish the in-group from those outside it. So learning the classics, being able to quote Homer in Greek or large passages of the Aeneid, I mean, to be brutally pragmatic and utilitarian, that's pointless, it's meaningless. But the reason why it's there is precisely that. It's abstract knowledge that is actually built to distinguish one group from another. And along with that, you have the sort of clubbishness, the references, all of the social mores that are essentially what distinguish, you know, for want of a better term, an upper class from lower classes. And so it's the hidden curriculum that you'll find in elite schools that does this. And if you probe a bit further and you look at some of the research on grammar schools, independent schools, private schools, you'll find that the intellectual value added, the actual test score value added, if you like, is not particularly high. And in some cases, there's less value added than there is in government schools. So what this shows us is that the whole construct of private education, it's a sociological phenomenon. It's not a strictly educational phenomenon, education in the sense of, you know, what you learn and how intellectually agile you are. And people are willing to pay a lot of money to be in a social network and to be, if you like, in inverted commas, better or different to others. What they're actually learning is not actually that important. Now, these are sort of sweeping generalizations, because if you look at, you know, top-tier universities, they are academic intellectual institutions. But the whole market that's geared towards them, it's about brand, it's about kudos, it's about having that stamp on your CV. It's not, I want to go and study at an Ivy League, because I'm absolutely passionate about some very specific piece of knowledge. That's what it should be about. But in fact, it's more, I need this brand, I need this power. And that's what's perverted, I think, the whole structure. And the whole Varsity Blues scandal in the States was showing that. This had nothing to do with an improvement of character or intellect. It's a cynical race to get into a club. And you know, there is this propensity, at least in, let's call it, late capitalist Western culture. I mean, maybe it's biological and it's been with us forever, but to constantly be in a group that's above the others. So, you know, the gilded pathway, if you like, will be to get into a reputed independent, or to use the British terminology, public school, maybe an international school, then to get into a top-tier Oxbridge university, If you're in the UK, you might even bother about the college that you're in, or the type of pass that you get. And it can even go down to sort of what clubs you took part in. So there's sort of ender circles of elitism within elitism, with this constant desire to somehow stand out and be better. So it's a deep cultural phenomenon. And when you look at it, it's not actually about pure academics, it's about sociology. That's what's fascinating.

Yeah, absolutely. No, it's definitely about networks and clubs for sure.

But I mean, networks, networks of course are actually really important, and I think we're realizing now, particularly when, you know, the world falls apart as it has in COVID, if you don't have connections and networks, you're in a lot of trouble. So there is, I mean, there is a kind of practical agenda at work. Yeah, very much so. That's hidden and not actually in awareness as well.

Yeah, no, so I think it's very much a practical decision. You are, you are not necessarily, as you say, buying buying with a private education, the quality of the education, you're buying the network that comes with that quite often, the old boys' network, right? In the, in the kind of clichéd phrase. But I think also, I think connected to that, if we take it down a level, because you know, we're talking at top, top level, there's the comp— the competitive element as well, right? Because we're, we're obviously competing with one another, with families to make sure our children have the best possible, as you say, gilded pathway, access to that pathway. But I think also there's a level of, and I've seen this, for example, working in Tanzania, there are many families who will strive and stretch just to pull together whatever resources and finances they can in order to pay for a mid-level private education, because it's still seen as the route out of poverty, right? The route out of the situation they're in and the way to better themselves and thereby their family and their network.

Well, this is the other side of the spectrum, because don't forget, we're trying to look at this with some objectivity. The massification of education, the lack of adequate funding, you know, on average under 4% of GDP going into education, the type of investment that's needed to lift most government systems is not in place. And therefore, what you're getting is a ghettoization of government education in many countries, not all. And who can blame families for wanting to give their children the best possible chance? We have a problem with teacher salaries. We also have a problem with the belief that parents have in their children that is self-propagating and comes from either a vicious cycle of poverty or a virtuous cycle of wealth. I mean, there's fascinating research showing that in numeracy, children from middle-class backgrounds tend to do better, not because they're exposed to elaborate numeracy at home, but because their parents tend to have more belief in their capacity, as do instructors. Whereas when they're in pauperized ghettoized circumstances, there's a much more fatalistic approach. And so, you know, the whole psychology of learning is affected by this as well.

Yeah.

You know, wanting to get your children the best possible education, what could be more natural than that?

Exactly. And that was the other thing that as you were talking there about, you know, MIT and Yale and all the, you know, the big Ivy Leagues or the Oxbridge, they do validate a very particular type of education. In terms of, you know, so technical or a skills-based education, vocational education is not seen in those same terms as this gilded pathway, as you say, this abstracted knowledge. You know, this is a much more instrumental and utilitarian idea of skill development that takes you down a different pathway, but it's, it's not still, I think, seen as the elite pathway.

Well, it's interesting. It's interesting because, you know, that Bernstein view of an elite education being a classical sort of grounding. That's been challenged, of course, with post-Cold War acceleration of STEM. And you see a lot of these elite schools are actually technical schools. You were mentioning MIT. If you look at the Swiss system, you know, we've got some of the best technical schools in the world, EPFL, ETHZ, you know, they're ranked in the top 20. And, you know, obviously jobs like being an engineer, medicine school. These are examples of what you could call practical grounded knowledge being hoisted into this elitist framework. So, you know, things have changed. And obviously, you know, as we look forward, it seems increasingly difficult to imagine that the products of this so-called top education will be walking around citing Greek and Latin. I mean, that's not going to be the case. I think they'll be speaking a new language, which will be, you know, kind of creativity, 21st century skills, concept-based understanding, a lot of the constructs that we all recognize are necessary in education. You see, with the massification of education and also the democratization of knowledge, it's much more transparent now. And that creates, I think, a pyramid, a social pyramid that's, it's very bleak and daunting. And so straight away we get into these questions of access. How am I going to get up there? What do I need to do?

Yeah.

If I don't have the money. And so, well, there's scholarships. Well, who's eligible for scholarships? And, you know, a lot of these top institutions are making huge efforts now to go in the other direction. I read a report the other day that Oxbridge places have never been as low as they are today for students coming out of some of the so-called top public schools like Eton. And getting into a place like Harvard, some would argue, and this is maybe the sort of anti-social justice crowd, that perversely it's become more difficult now to access these if you come from a historically privileged background because of a quota system and a scholarship program. So that's created a new tension.

Yeah, but that's that normative idea again, right? Or the state intervention, or that there is a way that we should and can proceed to make certain decisions to enable less of a stark wealth inequality hierarchy, etc.?

Yeah, look, I think I talk about it in the book towards the end of it. You need a whole ecosystem change. You need a highly developed infrastructure at a macroeconomic level. So one of the best examples is Switzerland. If you look at Switzerland, what you've got is the following: You've got an extremely robust school system. Now, it's challenging. And by the time students hit basically middle school, they have to take a test. And if they don't perform well on this test, they can't continue into the, the matura or the maturité, which is essentially the sort of academic program. And so they go into a professional stream. But the interesting thing is not only is that not a problem, because it leads to employment, and it leads to a lot of success, but most Swiss children actually choose that. It's not that they have to do it, they choose it, because the country Switzerland has managed to get to a place where polytechnical institutions and that whole professional pathway is seen as extremely prestigious. And on top of that, all universities are free. And when I say free, I mean not just for Swiss or even EU citizens, for anyone.

Okay.

I mean, they're normally free. There's a very, very low fee. So I mean, that's a pretty strong model. Fascinatingly, despite that, you have the highest concentration of international schools, and some of them are the most expensive in the world in that same country. So I think what we're looking at, it's, you know, you can't very well bulldoze everything and create a kind of 21st century socialist state. That's not going to work. And you know, there's this appetite to destroy public schools, and previously it was about getting rid of grammar schools in the UK. That's not going to fly because you're going to do a lot of damage if you do that. I think you need to improve the public system. There needs to be massive investment in education. And if alongside that you've got private education, which is not just about hierarchy, but also about alternative views, maybe, you know, an independent pathway a different way of approaching education. Those two can coexist quite well. It doesn't have to be an either-or. It doesn't have to be sort of, you know, a communist state on the one hand and a complete sort of neoliberal wild west on the other.

Yeah. And I think that's what hopefully we are learning as a result of coming out of this pandemic. As you said, in a way it's kind of challenged a lot of our understandings about the way that people interact, the way that people can interact when things change drastically, the importance of networks, the ability to connect with all sorts of people all over the world. Therefore it's not an either-or anymore. There's a huge kind of diversity of possibility in between these false polarities. And as you say, nothing, nothing's going to come from just destroying, bulldozing everything that's there. But I wonder then what, what you feel about, because obviously you are working in one of these highly elite private schools in Switzerland, in that context you've just been describing, what do you see as the role of your institution, kind of morally and pragmatically, in that context?

Very good question. Well, there are two answers to that. The first is, okay, how can you open access to the educational provision that you have to more students? And the obvious answer, it's around school fees and scholarship programs. So we have a scholarship program, we have some students on a full ride, but you know, I think that's quite short-term. And in a sense, what you're doing is fueling a system that at a, at a kind of superstructural level is quite flawed. Okay. So the other approach, and this is something that we're doing, and I'm very excited about this project, is to rethink what human flourishing is. Because at the end of the day, we do want a society where people who are good at things are recognized and celebrated. You don't want an environment where talent is not allowed to flourish. But what kind of talent are we looking for? So the spinal cord of education for about 5,000 years really, which has been numeracy and literacy, Of course, that has to remain in place, but it is a predictor of social background, of the type of elaborate code that children are receiving at home. And what about all of these other skills, competencies, and types of knowledge that young people have? Can we not validate and include those? And if we do that, and we're working on this at my school, we're creating what we call a learner passport, which takes competencies as credit areas and is going to allow students to load into those credit areas, not just academics, but non-academics too. If this type of design proliferates and becomes more globally recognized, it breaks a lot of social barriers. Because if you go into a low-resource school, you'll find straight away what we're looking for, what we're trying to tap. It's not just these academic skills that are enhanced by the virtuous circle of wealth or damaged by the vicious cycle of poverty. But it's things like your appetite for lifelong learning, your self-agency, your ability to be an active member of your community, how you communicate and actually collaborate with other people. So I think we have to broaden our understanding of human flourishing. And this is a discussion that's been going on for a long time. It goes back to intelligence testing and the notion of natural intelligence into more inclusive ideas such as Robert Sternberg's Triarchic Theory of Intelligence, where he says, well, there's also practical intelligence, there's creative intelligence, and there's analytical intelligence. And we know this, and we've known it for many years. But the problem is we're still in this very unimaginative straitjacket of academic skills. That in itself is a problem at so many levels. So we have to open that up. And I think that type of thinking will make schools more interesting for young people, more inclusive, and will also allow us to recognize human flourishing that isn't predicated on social background.

Yeah, that's brilliant. And I think coming back to that idea of the regenerative economy and the doughnut economics, that is also an interesting area where, as you, you're questioning, what does human flourishing mean? And I think human flourishing cannot just be an individualistic concept by definition. It has to be a collective concept to some extent, right? I mean, ultimately globally collective because of the limits, ecological limits. But I think there's some, there's some very interesting questions being asked of organizations, businesses, et cetera, and we'll include schools in that, about how they contribute to this new kind of regenerative economy. We need to move towards that ultimately because something that the current paradigm just is clearly unsustainable, but it's an interesting point in terms of what organisations then choose to do, because actually there are so many benefits, as you described some of them, to making that choice to be a generous organisation. It doesn't just mean you're patronisingly benefacting to marginalised groups, because actually, yeah, that idea of being a generous organisation has multiple benefits in all sorts of ways for the organisation as well as for the wider community.

Yes, I think, you know, looking at different concepts of what it means to be human than these classical economics individualistic ideas is one way forward, absolutely, a type of Ubuntu. I mean, there's another thing that we have to talk about briefly, it's the statistical significance of ranking systems. If you look at PISA scores, for example, and the statistical significance of differences between first, second, third, maybe fourth, fifth, sixth No one's talking about the 6th best, but everyone was getting excited about numbers 1 and 2. And so they've become the kind of model. And there's something similar, I would argue, in the QR ranking system of universities. And you find that it's a cultural phenomenon. It runs all the way into the way we run sports competitions, the Olympic Games, gold medal, silver medal, bronze medal. Whereas if you actually look at quality, the 8 runners, or if it's a marathon, however many there are, that they're all actually accidents. And so wanting to be number one or number two as the planet is verging on 8 billion people, it's just not possible.

Yeah.

So we have to kind of rewire our thinking about what that means to be at the top. And as you're pointing out, I think there are a number of ways of getting there. One of them is to be much more critical and sophisticated in our, in our understanding of power and the sociology of information that's selected as I think that's important. The other is to maybe think about getting rid of some of these ranking systems that are very pernicious. Now, again, these are sort of tweaking at the edges. I think the deepest change we can make, it's really the substance of what it is that allows someone to progress and how open-minded we can be about that. And I think we're moving in the right direction. There's more understanding of implicit bias. There are efforts to decolonize, for want of a better term, curriculum and to diversify the business place. The problem is if it's done superficially, it becomes a type of political correctness that will make a lot of people very cynical, and maybe rightly so. So we have to be careful about doing it properly and for the right reasons. And that's why we have to have a more objective and less emotionally charged discussion about this topic. I mean, some of the publications out there, if you look at them, one of the first things I noticed is that the books that are written on elitism in education, I mean, there's no book on elitism in education per se, but but there are books on universities and schools.

There is now.

There is now, there is now. But you know, the books that describe the university system and the school system, I'm not going to mention them here, but I talk about them in my book. They all have these extremely polarized positions. It's, you know, either we want to, we want to blow up the ivory tower, or, you know, society is being dumbed down. There's this sort of mass culture and groupthink that is threatening, you know, what it means to be excellent. And, you know, I don't want my a brain surgeon to have been chosen through a lottery system. And those are two extreme positions. I maintain that we can have systems that allow both, and actually give six different examples in the conclusion of how we can do this.

Nice. Yeah, it's that idea of, as you said, success, what that means, but also quality and what that means. And having a more expansive definition that allows space in both of those things. What's a successful life for human flourishing, and also But what's quality? Because we don't want dumbed-down quality as people, as you say, in the polarized discussion talk about, but at the same time, there has been unarguably, I think, a monopoly on the definition of that quality and who has access to, or first leap at getting to that quality, if you like, because of their starting point. So it is, I totally agree. I mean, it's such a polarized discussion and such an emotive discussion. For so many people, but I think we need a more unite, a higher level uniting focus to gather around, to kind of cohere around, because at the moment it's just a Twitter war of, you know, factional interest. And actually there's, there's a lot more interesting stuff happening, as you said, and what you are doing around the, the passport and things that do begin to open up this possibility of being recognized for attributes which historically have not been.

Absolutely. You know, one of the problems with globalization is that we are looking to this monochromatic third culture that has become a platform for everybody. And if you turn to the French sociologist Émile Renan, what he said a long time ago was that if you take any culture and you look at the artifacts, the expressions of that culture that become sublimated to the point where they're almost divine, you know, a fantastic like song or dance or cooking, a wonderful piece of architecture, whatever it may be. These become universal by virtue of their quality and the ineffable message that they send out to just about everybody. And I think that we need to go back to acting locally and celebrating local structures because we can't all be trying to get into the same places. In the same countries, and you know, there's sort of two dozen of them, and that's it. It's not sustainable. So you look at Africa, you're talking about Africa earlier, there are a number of excellent universities that sprung up after independence in Senegal, in Uganda, and some of them have closed. And you know, the whole sort of tertiary sector in Africa is something that is suffering. That needs investment. Governments need to invest in tertiary education. When you get to a situation where a country has good universities and students want to study in those universities, you're already moving in the right direction. But you have to be careful. You look at India, the science universities in India are so competitive that it's actually created a social problem, including, you know, suicide, that the stress levels are untenable. There have to be many institutions of quality in the public sector that'll at least spread out opportunity and allow for human flourishing to take place in a way that's mutually beneficial. I think this globalized approach to education is actually quite pernicious. And so, you know, I talk in the book about global citizenship, which, you know, what do we mean by that? I think there's a positive way of looking at it, which is what you were talking about, you know, planetary renewal, sort of feeling responsible for our actions across the globe, understanding that we're all interconnected. But there's a negative side to it as well, which is, you know, a type of mega-elitism that is cast over the entire globe, which becomes a sort of dystopia.

Yeah.

So a lot of the answers I think are quite simple and they're at the level of building up what's around you. And so hence, you know, school principals need to work at what's happening in their schools. Universities need to think carefully about who they're admitting and why. Governments and those involved in the education system need to look at the local parameters. It's not as if they're not doing this already, but I think a lot can come from those types of discussions. Yeah.

Yeah, and that the scarcity principle again, it's like, as you say, it is globalized. There is this globalized education market, but actually there is still a very specific coalescence around particular nodes in that network, right? Like, as you say, the Ivy Leagues, et cetera. And actually what we need to do with, kind of an idealistic framing, but we need to take the learnings from the pandemic about how a distributed loosely connected network can function and actually create amazing value in all sorts of unexpected places through new people connecting in different ways and actually allow that to happen more often, more locally, but also acknowledge that real quality can come from those points rather than always coming back to this idea. But yeah, it's, it's nice what's happening here, but actually I'd rather send my children to there because that's better. And it just pulls back into the psychology of the scarcity principle again and again.

I mean, absolutely. Indices on on things like sort of human flourishing, or what you could roughly call sort of wellness, they tend to show that countries such as the Nordic countries, and we can get into some of the problems about using them as models, but countries that have a strong public system and are essentially social democracies tend to have a less elitist stigma attached to education, whereas countries that are in the throes of a privatized neoliberal economy, for example, United States and the UK, there you'll find that this sort of race to the top is much more accentuated. So it does come back to what we discussed right at the beginning, which is the way that human beings organize themselves. And fascinatingly, you know, formal education really starts with the agricultural revolution, with this idea that, you know, there's land that is owned, that we have to build an army, we have to take stock of things. If you can push back you go back earlier than that, and there are very few records, you find some of the traditional indigenous knowledge systems of hunter-gatherers were much more communal, much more sustainable. They were less sort of violently hierarchical. So in a peculiar way, I think, these thousands of years of human activity are leading us to this conclusion that in many ways we had it right, right at the beginning. How are we going to get back there? That's maybe a another conversation.

It is true. And the language is difficult as well. And that kind of backward-looking idea, like somebody quoted this Māori saying about walking backwards into the future, which I thought was quite cool. But also I think there's also challenges there, right? Around the kind of romanticization of traditional belief systems. And actually there was all sorts of brutality and everything that was going on there. Also, actually we just need some, we need to learn from everything that's happened before and actually be part of the development of the things that are already there to develop something new in the future. Rather than— yeah, anyway, it's a fascinating discussion. So I appreciate it. I would love to pick it up again, maybe over a beer sometime. But yeah, thank you very much, Conrad. I really appreciate it.

Thank you. Thanks.

Cheers.

Bye.

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