What Kids Can Teach Us

Yesterday, I came across this article via metafilter, and it is easily one of the most interesting pieces I've read in a very long time. In it, two teachers describe how their elementary school-aged after school kids went from playing with legos to deconstructing capitalism over the course of a school year.

Certainly, the ethics of teaching social justice in an elementary school classroom are up for debate, but I'd rather not focus on that here. Instead, what I found striking was the amount that these 8-year-olds were already a product of their environment. I think elementary school interactions socialize kids in broader ways than merely helping them form interpersonal relationships. These kids were clearly savvy to their societal environment. By the age of 8, many were already products of capitalism, completely accultured to the socioeconomic system in which they were growing up. Moreover, as I read further into the article, I realized that they were speaking in terms that were already defined by that system. For American schoolchildren, inequality is a natural way of life.

Back to the ethics of teaching social justice. In college I took a class on the Cold War in which we read a number of texts relating to propaganda. One of the texts discussed how social values are promulgated in small children. One of the most striking examples was how math texts are used to surreptitiously convey values to children. Look at an American high school or grade school math textbook. Look at the word problems. They almost always talk about buying things. Even when people buy them together, they rarely split the cost evenly. This isn't the case everywhere, and it certainly wasn't the case in Soviet Russia, where most math texts involved sharing or producing. So regardless of what teachers do in the classroom, children are constantly being instilled with social values in the classroom.

Medical Econo-ethics

Two recent articles got me thinking about the interplay of economics and ethics in the field of medical research. "The Right to a Trial" is a deeply moving discussion of the ethical problems involved with allowing or refusing to allow terminally ill patients to participate in clinical trials of new disease treatments and the regulatory issues at work in the debate. I found myself torn between my desire for improved access to medical treatment and my general belief in regulation of corporations to protect people.

The second article, written by Columbia University professor Joseph Stiglitz, concerns Intellectual Property rights when it comes to medical breakthroughs. Stiglitz proposes a medical "prize system" funded by industrial nations to encourage medical innovation while keeping the cost of vital pharmaceuticals low. It's not exactly a new idea, but Stiglitz provides some specifics as to how exactly the prizes would be funded and awarded.

Medical ethics is a particularly sticky field because it regularly concerns life-or-death situations. Our general desire to see hard work rewarded is tempered by our compassion for others. It seems impossibly unfair to say "medical researchers ought to make money off their innovations at the expense of human life when patients can't afford their treatments," but it is also difficult to imagine financially rewarding Pedro Almodovar for his cultural innovations while withholding those same rewards from scientists who make consistent breakthroughs in cancer research.

Back to "The Right to a Trial" for a moment. Imagine you're 31, you have two kids under age five, and you've been diagnosed with late-stage ovarian cancer. You've tried every traditional treatment to no avail, and because you are also diabetic, you are ineligible for Phase III clinical trials for a drug that had an 80% effectiveness rate in Phase II trials. You've been given a year to live, tops. If you were willing to take chances with an experimental drug because it had a good chance (or so it appeared) to save your life, wouldn't you have trouble understanding the importance of "regulation"? On the other hand, if you're a company that has produced a promising drug with the potential to seriously lower the fatality rate of an extremely deadly strain of cancer, would you really want to risk losing FDA approval because you had to list "pancreatic failure" as a possible side-effect? And would it be worth it for the thousands of other patients who could be helped?

Antiseptic technology

I'm reading Emergence by Steven Johnson right now, and it's set me thinking about how we sanitize the future. At the start of the book, Johnson talks about Jane Jacobs' theories of urban development and how neighborhoods form. But as the book progresses, he only briefly touches on demographics and associated issues of class and race. At first, I didn't think it was a problem. In fact, I barely noticed it. But as Johnson moves into what eventually starts to look like technophilia and the idealization of emergent software, some of his examples give me pause.

One of the central tenets at the heart of emergent behavior is the idea that acting locally produces global results. If enough people walking along the sidewalks of the Lower East Side interact, the sum of their interactions is a self-regulating system. What's missing from this analysis, aside from one chapter analyzing the history of how the "lower classes" have fit into theorists' understandings of emergence, is a set of social "mirror neurons"--as Johnson starts to discuss emerging emergent technologies (hee), Emergence loses a lot of its socioeconomic value and Johnson's argument gets sanitized. Johnson talks about every TV coming with TiVo (or something similar) and connecting to something like the internet to create TV "neighborhoods" based on individual and global user preferences. In the midst of this argument, he refutes the idea that TV and the internet contribute to user isolation based on the fact that the technology aids communal emergent behavior.

So what's the problem?

If you don't have money, you won't have a TiVo. The communities that could potentially form won't account for the impoverished, and entertainment will continue to alternately misrepresent, ignore, insult, and exclude the poor. While media may be tailored to certain "communities" through TiVo, the same groups who have traditionally been excluded by the top-down system of the networks will still be excluded by the bottom-up system because they won't have access to the technology required to form their own communities, and thus the impoverished (and possibly other groups, this is just the obvious one) lose what little grip they had on media solidarity.

I'm still enjoying Emergence, don't get me wrong. But I'm concerned about the blanket sanitization that today's zeitgeist chasers exhibit. Just talking about technology's potential to shape thought isn't enough. Neither new technology nor bottom-up self-organization is inherently ethical. It may be useful, but many of the social problems that were around before bottom-up technology will still exist during and after it. Focusing on the technology without moral discourse draws attention away from those problems.

Even my beloved Star Trek, which early on incorporated race, rarely explores issues of class and never concerns itself with sexual orientation. Looks to me like technology glosses over social problems rather than fixing them. Hmm.

EDIT: Here's something entertaining and mildly relevant! The blog software I use, greymatter, has quotes on just about every page you work with. In the "preview" page, this quote came up:

"The future is not something we enter. The future is something we create."—Leonard Sweet