*Please send information about new diseases to cannon@indo.net.id
You probably think that educational development is a theoretical construct that exists “out there”, don’t you? Let me assure you that educational development has life; it lives and dies, and experiences bouts of robust good health and debilitating disease like other living organisms.
In human beings, "disease" is often used to refer to a condition that causes pain, dysfunction, distress, social problems, and possibly death to the person afflicted, or similar problems for those in contact with the person.
My first encounter with the disease concept as it affects education was from an illuminating paper by one of the doyens of medical education, Stephen Abrahamson. In this pioneering work, titled Diseases of the Curriculum, Professor Abrahamson identified 13 pathological disorders, many of which, despite recent advances in treatment, remain today. Not only that, they seem to have spread to the broader field of educational development and, in particular, to the field I now work in, which is education in developing countries. There are striking parallels between developing educational quality in a university and in large educational systems.
What follows is a light-hearted description of my observations of diseases in the field of educational development, but with a serious intent. The focus is largely on the systems meant to be supporting development – the donors, project implementing contractors, development centres, academics and consultants.
In development work, Blurred Vision is best summed up as not seeing the wood for the trees (or vice versa) or having a distorted perception of reality. Philip Jones makes the important point in an analysis of commitments to enrol all children in school by asking what is the value of getting kids into really poor quality schools that may actually damage children’s experience of learning (Jones, 2008). In other words, the apparently sensible ‘vision’ of enrolling all children in school is blurred by a failure to consider what is actually going on in so many of them.
Blurred Vision was common in the early years of higher education development. It manifested itself in many ways. In universities, often unsupportive of the idea of improving learning and teaching, some educational developers’ vision became blurred as they sought to build acceptance by a tendency to focus on either too many things at once or the wrong things exclusively, leading to weakened capacity, perceptions of irrelevance by others, and even to the death of at least one educational development centre.
An extraordinary faith in educational technology at that time was manifested in the vision that if only everyone would use the OHP[1] properly, the quality of lectures would improve and, ergo, the overall quality of university education would improve! That disease appeared to have been cured with the demise of the OHP only to reappear again with the spread of PowerPoint.
Pragmatic Language Impairment (PLI) is a disorder where people face special challenges with the semantic aspects and appropriate use of language. It can display as pathological talkativeness, deficient access to vocabulary, and atypical choice of terms.
Language is fundamental to communication. But academics are often not clear in what they are communicating in educational development. It is as if language has mutated into some kind of verbal ‘ritual dance’ among an increasing number of specialists. It is well to remember, as my English teacher was fond of saying, that the word ‘jargon’ derives from late-middle English where it meant a twittering or gibberish.
Now working in Indonesia, where English is not the first language, but nevertheless used extensively in education, encouraging the use of clear language is essential. It is a sad loss to development that so much written English these days does not communicate its meanings at all clearly to huge numbers of potential readers here. I really do not understand why professional educators write such convoluted material that clogs too many journals today, effectively rendering them completely inaccessible to non-native users of English. At a time when much attention is given to the idea of inclusion in education, far too much written English excludes potential audiences. This phenomenon is linked to Development Schizophrenia (see below).
PLI is a disease that afflicted me early in my academic career. A vigilant editor committed to the extraordinary goal of clear writing effectively treated me. Brief bouts of recurrent PLI emerged a little later but these were firmly dealt with by uncomprehending medical educators who, at the time, had an aversion to language that included such awful educational jargon such as ‘behavioural objectives’ and ‘cognitive’. PLI is like contracting malaria; you can recover but will sometimes experience a relapse.
My treatment regime for PLI was so effective that I set out on my own campaign to publicly denounce the inappropriate use of the term ‘pedagogy’ in higher education, insisting that writers desist from using it because of its etymology and sexist connotations (Cannon, 2001). I have to report that in this campaign I was a spectacular failure, as the increasingly frequent use of ‘pedagogy’ in today’s literature on teaching in higher education testifies.
PLI, sadly, often occurs concurrently with blurred vision. This results in individuals and organisations, not knowing where they are, where they are going, and completely incapable of asking for directions.
Often found to co-exist with PLI, Development Echolalia is the repetition of vocalizations made by another person or the repetition of nonsense syllables and acronyms. The development community finds practitioners doing the same in response to information overload. Having myself just grasped the idea of ‘knowledge sharing’, I now find this may be an outdated concept already supplanted by the new idea of ‘knowledge translation’ (Knowledge Translation, 2008)! It is, of course bad academic practice not to explain acronyms, but please excuse this brief list normally encountered on any working day in educational development in Indonesia: PAKEM, SBM, SPM, SISWA, SWAp, MGPBE, BEC-TF, MoNE, MoRA, BERMUTU, POM, PAM, PIM and a few rather ordinary ones you may know about such as ADB, UNICEF, UNESCO, JICA, GTZ, EU, EC, AusAID and USAID.
Sadly, Development Echolalia has been known to lead to paralysis. This point is illustrated by the wonderful Indonesian interpretation of the acronym that summarises all this nicely – NATO: ‘No Action Talk Only’.
A good medical dictionary will tell you that those afflicted with Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) are self-centred, exaggerate their talents, set unrealistic goals and may take advantage of others to achieve these goals. There is an inability to recognize or identify with the viewpoints of others - particularly those with specialist training and experience in the field.
Given high levels of school participation these days, almost everyone seems to know exactly how to manage education, construct curriculum and how to teach. Opinion pieces in The Australian newspaper often demonstrate evidence of NPD in the alarming confidence that journalists have in their own judgements about complex educational issues such as curriculum and performance ranking of schools.
Government Ministers of Education suffer from this disease acutely and, according to reports, so do some Vice Chancellors and their Deputies. Incredibly, NPD is transmitted instantaneously when a prime minster allocates ministerial portfolios following an election. It astonishes me that no one has ever thought to do research into this instant acquisition of expertise. Think of the time and money to be saved on education if we could exploit the transmission of this disease. Instead of the inconvenience of going to school and university, students would be inoculated with NPD to become instant experts. It adds a new dimension to the idea of the ‘inoculation theory of education’ attributable to Postman and Weingartner, in their book Teaching as a Subversive Activity, Penguin, 1971.
Atherosclerosis is a disease in which blood vessels that carry oxygenated blood from the heart to other parts of the body, become narrowed, and calcified. As the flow of blood to the affected organs is restricted, heart attack or stroke may result. Observation suggests a strong similarity between this medical condition with occurrences in various educational and development organisations. Administrative Atherosclerosis is a disorder in which the management processes of an organisation - the rules, regulations, processes, and accountability requirements - form a plaque of unread reports, submissions, budget documents and strategic plans. This plaque eventually blocks the whole administrative process, causing disease and possible death to the service-delivery organs of development implementation that the bureaucracy was actually meant to be sustaining in the first place. Ultimately, the whole organisation is weakened and dies. This disease is particularly prevalent in universities and countries like Indonesia. It is thought that the condition may be a clinical reaction to an over-dose of mistrust and otherwise well-intentioned administrative actions to improve governance, planning, budgeting, monitoring, accountability, occupational health and safety, knowledge sharing, performance management, good practices, professional development and equity. Whether the primary cause of it in Indonesia is heat or corruption is not clear. What is clear is that there is a very strong link to Blurred Vision (see above).
Development Hypochondriasis is described as a condition where an abnormal anxiety about the health of education is manifested in frequent trips to the ‘doctor’; this is also known as Development Dependency.
This disease has two forms. One is at the institutional level. In this form of the disease we can see signs in the number of reviews of higher education in Australia. An interesting research exercise would be to count the number of higher education reviews by government since the Murray Report in the 1950’s until the present Bradley Review. In Indonesia, we found in a recent review conducted for the World Bank (Cannon and Arlianti, 2008) that there had been 35 different projects to improve the quality of basic education since 1998. Another measure of Development Hypochondriasis is that just one donor among many, the Asian Development Bank, had funded 20 different projects between 1975 – 1992 to the tune of US$981 million. The Bank has also been very busy since then deepening the dependency.
There is evidence of Development Hypochondriasis occurring at the personal level as well. I am sure that anyone who has provided support services to academics will be familiar with the small number of people who make frequent visits to centres to check up on their teaching or this or that issue that has emerged and who also usually attend most workshops. Remedies for this disease are unknown. It is believed that research to investigate the condition is systematically blocked by interests wishing to ensure that things remain exactly as they are.
Then there is Development Schizophrenia, which is the breakdown between thought and behaviour and withdrawal from reality. A bad case of this disease was identified in a development project in Indonesia designed to demonstrate ‘demand-based funding’ in a bottom-up, decentralised context. But this project then actually gave money in a top-down, centralised manner for expenditure on items strictly specified from the top!
And finally, Development Diarrhoea is a disease worthy of mention. An incredible outpouring of publications, many of dubious quality, manifests this disease. Not content to treat Development Diarrhoea, educational institutions and development agencies seem to be actually encouraging it by demanding ever more ‘reports’, pouring larger amounts of money at it, and even promoting staff on the volume of their productive efforts.
I can conclude these light-hearted musings in no better way than to apply two serious points made by Stephen Abrahamson in his analysis of disease. The first point is that there is no systematic data collection of development efforts in Indonesian education and related pathologies. In the absence of data, the space is filled with internal reports, opinion, and rhetoric aimed at sustaining treasured points of view, and defending the status quo. With accurate data we begin a process of a more reasoned approach to giving kids the chance of a better education.
The second and final point, as Abrahamson notes, is that humankind survived millennia without understanding diseases and their causes. But in today’s knowledge society it is no longer acceptable to plough on without a sound, research-based understanding of the pathological processes of educational development, processes for which we all share some responsibility.
References
Abrahamson, S. (1996). Diseases of the Curriculum. Chapter IV, in: Essays on Medical Education. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, pp. 39-59.
Cannon, R.A. (2001). Pedagogy: A Point of View. Teaching in Higher Education, 6, (3), 415 - 419.
Cannon, R.A. and Arlianti, R. (2008). Review of Education Development Models. Report prepared for The World Bank, Jakarta, 30 November 2008. (Available from the author.)
Jones, P.W. (2008). The Impossible Dream: Education and the MDGs. Harvard Educational Review, Fall, 34 – 38.
Knowledge Translation; A Research Matters Toolkit. (2008). IDRC, Research Matters and Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation. Ottawa. Available: ww.reseach-matters.net. Accessed 3 March 2009.
[1] For those too young and innocent, an OHP or Overhead Projector, is a device for projecting images onto a screen behind the teacher.
