Solving for pattern: treating the individual as a whole
When so called ‘solutions’ to so called ‘problems’ deal, not with the whole problem, but only a part of that problem, further problems will surely result.
In agriculture in particular, what seem like spectacularly successful projects, invariably have disastrous side effects – unintended consequences – chiefly because the whole system of food production was not considered when going ahead with ‘improvements’. If goals are too sharply defined without taking into account the full range and panoply of interconnectedness of all the factors, then any action to achieve those goals will be accompanied by spectacular failures in those areas that are not taken into account. Look around at the world and the things that are happening right now. What can, on the face of it, appear rational, achievable, even desirable goals – an increase in food production by an industrialization of farming – can be gained only at exorbitant cost to the environment – the biosphere – to consumers, to the soils in the fields, and to water and land resources, and to people.
As it is with agriculture, so it is with any facet of life and how we gain what we need to live. If education is aimed only at certain specific aspects of people, it will fail in ways that, although may not be readily observable, nevertheless do fail the person so educated. In failing one, education fails all. Individuals live in communities; communities make up societies, and societies are a part of the total population of the world.
An individual’s needs are not confined to the need to earn a living, although that is a pressing one. All our needs contribute to what makes us human; we are a species that must eat, drink, and breathe to live. Maslow has illustrated this with his Hierarchy of Needs, and yet here we are educating our young people as if they only had three of them.
Howard Gardner has identified our various forms of intelligence: literacy, numeracy, relational, kinesthetic, artistic and musical, and yet how many of those are addressed by formal education outlined in a curriculum for learners.
Setting goals that are too vaguely defined or too sharply, excluding factors that need to be included, could lead to a sort of one dimensional person. How many of us have never been encouraged to do the things that we feel are essential to who we are? How many of us have actually been actively discouraged from following some pursuit on the grounds that we would never be able to get employment doing it.
Is it any wonder, then, that people despair, overcompensate for a lack of the fulfillment of a felt need? I believe that the outward signs of success are flawed, and take no account of people’s true selves or their real need to express themselves.
Our main way of designating success is money; if we have more of it, we are deemed more successful; less of it, less so! Taken to its nth degree, as it can be, a billionaire is held up as a paragon of virtue; with how he came by his fortune having no bearing on how he is viewed by the rest of us supposedly less fortunate individuals.
Invariably, a person worth billions never becomes so wealthy on the fruits of his own labours; he may be chairman of a corporate company, itself generating billions and billions.
We call such a company successful without really knowing much about how it operates, what it does, what effects its operations have on local communities or the environment. Yet we are expected, in a sort of sentimental variety of capitalism – almost amounting to a faith – to believe that everything that it does is beneficial, whilst overlooking everything it does that is detrimental.
We never solve for pattern; not in education, in agribusiness, industry, and nor do we do so when assessing success. The roots of our problems – our global problems and our local ones, are firmly grounded in this refusal to solve for pattern – preferring instead to ignore what is inconvenient, and to focus on what we are educated to focus on.
Robert L. Fielding
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