It's Who You Know

An interesting book is Social Capital; Key Ideas by John Field (ISBN-10: 0415433037), Director of the Division of Academic Innovation and Continuing Education at the University of Stirling. Social Capital is a term which has been popularised by the American political scientist Robert D. Putnam, who defined it as:

“features of social organisation, such as trust, norms and networks, that can improve the efficiency of society by facilitating coordinated actions”

What does this mean and why are you telling us this I hear you say ? It came up in conversation the other night with a young writer Eleanor Ball who was discussing all the aspects of what it is to realise as a writer, including financing. Inevitably the discussion bumped against the old brigand is it 'not what you know that counts, but who you know'...?

It so happens that I have been reading through a book which deals explicitly with these matters, it comes highly recommended. A particularly pertinent and lucid section from it is worth quoting:

“Modern organisations are governed by rules. There are accepted procedures for making or appealing decisions, and responsibilities are usually defined clearly in terms of a position rather than a person. But when they want to make something happen, many people will ignore these formal procedures and responsibilities, and set off to talk to someone they know.

Important decisions almost always involve a degree of uncertainty and risk: if someone is looking for a new job or planning to appoint someone to a job, if they are looking for someone to service their car or mend the washing machine, if they are thinking of moving home or introducing a new way of organising the office, or if they want to find the best school or hospital, using the formal procedures is no guarantee of success.

To make things happen, people often prefer to bypass the formal system and talk to people they know. Calling on trusted friends, family or acquaintances is much less stressful than dealing with bureaucracies, and it usually seems to work faster and often produces a better outcome. Peoples networks really do count.

As the cliché has it, it is not what you know that counts, but who you know. More accurately, it is of course both what and who you know that comes in handy. And just knowing people isn’t enough if they don’t feel obliged to help you. If people are going to help one another, they need to feel good about it, which means that they need to feel they have something in common with each other. If they do share values, they are much more likely to cooperate to achieve mutual goals.

Formal systems – combining impersonal order and hierarchical rules – are often an attempt to control the excesses of mutual informal cooperation, which can lend to forms of indirect discrimination against others who do not belong in the charmed circle.

Some networks like the 'old boys networks' that are said to dominate parts of the British Civil Service and business leadership or the family based Chaebol business networks of Korea, cooperate with the aim of keeping out those who do not wear the old school tie or come from the same kinship grouping.

George Bernard Shaw, in a preface to his play The Doctor's Dilemma, famously said that all professions are a conspiracy against the public. Social relationships can sometimes serve to exclude and deny as well as include and enable. People's networks should be seen, then, as part of the wider set of relationships and norms that allow people to pursue their goals and also serve to bind society together.”

Free Audio Books

Here is one internet address I trully enjoy - Librivox. Being a particular fan of the spoken word, it was amazing to me when I found that I could get free audio books from this website. The project is one that I think is trully worthy of support.

Francis Bacon, Dorothy Parker, Lewis Carroll, Charles Dickens, Gertrude Stein, Oscar Wilde, Louisa May Alcott, Emily Dickinson, Thomas Henry Huxley, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mark Twain, Scott Fitzgerald, Isaac Asimov; the range of audio books is extensive and inspiring.

This is another example of the internet providing a fantastic foundation for great public projects. Check out their website and possibly contribute if you have time ! I know I always want to be able to listen to more great books as well as read them.

What's it all about Brian ?

So, what's the Ragged University all about then ? Well, sometime back, whilst sitting in the pub with friends, I realised that that was what we did; swapped stories, shared facts, related things. What is the nature of knowledge ? What I experience is a good place to start.

What is the Ragged University all about then ? Well, sometime back, I thought that the Ragged Schools movement was immensely successful and they had less available to them then. Imagine if they all had access to a printing press, paper, pens, librarys, tuition.

There is an interesting question about whether you would rather live as a millionaire a hundred years ago or on an average salary now. A hundred years ago you would not have your ipods and your mp3 players, your mobile telephones, or any digital trappings.

I also like the ending of H. G. Wells' The Time Machine; "Which three books would you have taken?". These ideas all carry a 'what-if' element relevant to what we already have. This is a project which I would like to ask what if we could do something just as good.

Business and Community

We live in interesting times. When attending a conference on how businesses can become involved in their communities, I was impressed at the interest that the business community has in 'putting something back in'.

So many questions are being asked as the economy goes through all of it's changes and adjustments. For many it is a time when belts are tightened and prospects seem uncertain. We are being asked these questions by our circumstances and being pressed to come up with solutions.

Often, life is oversimplified to a two dimensional rhetoric which is unhelpful for those seeking resolve to problems. Sometimes 'business' is categorically dismissed as mercenary and uncaring; sometimes 'social enterprise' is dismissed as fluffy and lost to ideals.

Of course neither is true as in reality we must dispense with absolute statements and contend with life on a case by case basis. Sometimes business loses it's way and disconnects from the communities which make it thrive, and sometimes social enterprise falls victim to it's own zeal forgeting how commerce and economy is a fundamental element of community.

How do we reconcile our society with our times ? Without having answers, I turn to the experts. Experto Crede. Society is built upon the loam of generations. We would be stupid not to utilise all the great thought available to us in libraries and archives.

We are doomed to repeat what we do not learn from. This can be said on an individual level, a generational level and a societal level (for want of...). For all the cynicism we can encounter and endorse, my feeling is one of optimism. What can we do ? We can study history and historigraphy, we can study economics and logic. These things by proof are not beyond us humans, and by store they are laid before us. Thinking we can change our futures.

What if Aristotle had a PC ?

I have been thinking about the technology available today in context with the libraries available. It makes me wonder about what some of the people of the past would make of it all. If we consider Voltaire wrote over seventeen million words in his lifetime, or the remarkable range of works created by the likes of Aristotle, what would they have managed with a personal computer. Everything was painstakingly done by hand, often through many drafts.

When we consider the progress of technology and the increasing sophistication of information tools, the computer is pretty bloody awesome. Considering the legendary status of the library of Alexandria and book collections such as that of the Library of Congress or the famous Bodleian library of Oxford, what is available through open access on the internet is obviously priceless. Great collections available to search in our own homes, what amazing potential.

Some examples which make me think positively:
The University of York Librarys and Archives
Directory of Open Access Journals
Public Library of Science
Project Guttenburg
PubMed Central

Where to Begin ?

I have been thinking about what to make the first entry of my Ragged University Blog. Since the start of this project I have enjoyed the fact that it compels me to find out about all the people in the world who have been great teachers, learners and thinkers. Learning about learning if you like. But what an infinite task. Do I take the great famous names still studied today for their contributions? Do I look to marvelously motivated people who invented or innovated ? Do I look for the people who have taken the time to develop me as a person, advising me and giving that all important constructive criticism and support ? Do I look at the awe-inspiring collaborations of countless individuals who form great institutions and libraries enriching, the whole of society ?....

Well, without arriving at any specific answer, I am adopting an 'all of the above' default. I want to look to the people and works which inspire me and share them with others under the collective heading of learning. Not in several lifetimes can I, a team, or a city of people scratch the surface, but we can get an idea of the magnitude of what human beings are capable of through culture and society. I personally always stand impressed when in a good library. I can think of any question and then approach finding an answer within those walls. Often I think of books as listening to another person; an interpersonal universe I share in, a lifetimes knowledge revealed.

So where do I begin with this Odyssey ? It starts with the people around me, the people who have developed me and mentored me through their kindness and philanthropy. The great realisation in life for me was that in each person I meet there is something unique and passionately developed. I have been privileged to know many people throughout my life, two of which I feel are directly pertinent to the Ragged University, Mrs Eileen Broughton and Mr Leroy Wilsher.

These people have helped me understand that learning and the exchange of knowledge represent part of the foundations of a healthy society. For the purposes of this context, I shall call it learning exchange. It is found all about us – throughout entertainment, industry, and academia – and is an innate part of our behaviour. Indeed both Eileen and Leroy have been natural didacts and demonstrated the inspiring truth of the vocation of the teacher – themselves having worked in the formal education for some years prior to retirement.

Through knowing them both as friends, and helping where I could, I found that doing a little thing like showing them a function of their computer opened up a generosity of spirit which I was not fully aware of previously. Eileen, having been involved in the study of Economics insisted on making some remuneration for my time. I suggested that, in exchange, she could teach me something: Delighted, she became animated and said “Joan Robinson, a famous economist in the 1920s said that when she was asked why she taught economics as a subject she replied – I teach economics so that people can know when an economist is telling them a lie”. From this moment onwards we enjoyed a buoyant relationship where she would share with me insight into a subject I had all but written off as 'boring'. Through her love of the subject and her passion, knowledge has become alive and fun rather than a chore, crystal clear rather than obfuscated. The conversations and time spent together are still so vivid that I would say she still constantly enriches my day to day experience. (Nessun dorma (In English: None shall sleep) is an aria from the final act of Giacomo Puccini's opera Turandot. She first introduced me to Operas; this is the music by which I shall always remember her.

Leroy Wilsher, similarly a retired teacher, inspires much of the same feeling. Roy has managed to enliven history, literature, educational theory and so much more. His introduction to Marc Bloch's The Historians Craft started me looking at the subject of history in a light so different from the early perception which I had of it as a dusty lifeless subject. He has helped transform it from a subject of obsoletism into something of perpetual vitality - something more akin to Sir Francis Bacon's conception of it as one of the main branches of human knowledge (to paraphrase; history being the knowledge of memory; science the knowledge of mind; and art the knowledge of imagination). I never tire of being introduced to something new and enlightening when it comes from someone so genuine and engaging.

It is a privilege to share the company of such great people, and my life is – in so many ways – created of them. I could name the great thinkers who have influenced me, but many of them you will find in no book or film or memoir. We are surrounded by the genius of people everyday, all the time, and it humbles me in a time of celebrity culture, where cult of personality gets mistaken for quality that people will share their genuine passions for things.

It is the most basic of human interactions for people to learn and to share knowledge; I also believe that it is a philanthropy of humanity which bears great fruit. These things I am going to explore through this blog and through the Ragged University project. I invite everyone who is of a similar view to also be a part of this great journey retracing the steps of free education and the triumphs of the Ragged Schools. It is an appeal to reason and fun. If there is not an answer today, tomorrow there shall be one. I do not feel things insurmountable when they are approached pragmatically. Studying and learning about something is attainable. For these purposes I shall lay down one of my favourite quotes from a great educationalist called John Amos Comenius:

“If, in each hour, a man could learn a single fragment of some branch of knowledge, a single rule of some mechanical art, a single pleasing story or proverb(the acquisition of which would require no effort), what a vast stock of learning he might lay by.”

This speaks of Aesop's famous hare and tortoise, it speaks of practically achievable things which amount to something which is inconcievable without actually doing it. I assure you though, by simply doing one thing a day, by learning one thing a day, it will be surprisingly soon that you look over your shoulder and are shocked that it adds up to more than you ever thought was possible.