Steph and Grace on how education affects collective organising & action
2024-08-22 18:15:00 +07:00 by Mark Smith
I enjoyed listening to the latest The Rest is Money Podcast episode where Steph talks to economics author Grace Blakeley. One part that stood out to me was when they were talking about education and how it has a big impact on the values the people that end up in leadership positions have.
Grace outlines her education journey:
I went through various private schools, and then through to Oxford and especially at Oxford I found that the economics and the politics we were studying were pretty irrelevant to the way that the world actually works, but also you are constantly fed this idea, never explicitly, always implicitly in terms of the activities that you are encouraged to signup for, and the way politics and political societies work, you are fed this idea that there is this hierarchy, there’s this natural hierarchy, where the powerful, the successful, the inginuitive, the intelligent, naturally rise to the top, and the only good way to run a society is to make sure that those people do have all the power and get to tell everyone else what to do. And I think that this subtly figures in a lot of the politics that we have today and the way that politicians understand the way society should work. [...]
There’s this inherent suspicion, amongst people who have been trained to believe that there’s this natural hierarchy in society, of any forms of collective organising because, they are like, those people are just a mob, they can’t be trusted with power cause they will abuse it [...] it’s based on this elitism that certain people are in charge and some people should obbey. And I just don’t think that’s how a functioning society works.
Steph then compares with her quite different experience:
I am someone that grew up in the North East. I went to state school in a very deprived area. Kind of defied the odds to do what I’m doing now. What’s interesting on what you’re saying is, for me collective action should be in education. It shouldn’t be when you are in your job. As much as you were taught you can rise to the top and everything, but for me in state education in a deprived area, half the time was spent just trying to teach us how to survive as much as anything else, so there wasn’t time for all this leadership and how to speak publicly and how to do all these amazing things, it was about how do we not end up in crime.
How we collectively organise and take action is changing, and we need to realise that there is quite a lot of variety in how we’ve all been brought up and educated. That can be a good thing. We need to understand each other so we can integrate and all meaningfully contribute and feel part of society.
Personally I love the idea of collective organising and action, but there are a lot of situations where it effectively does turn into a mob that bullies individuals not part of that specific mob. And with technology and AI if we are not careful, that could lead us into a situation where we are all in some way bullied by the mob.
The whole episode is worth listening to but I thought this was a particularly endearing and eye opening back and forth.