Kali Tal

September 27, 2006

Dropping Knowledge -- Dropping The Ball

There was a tremendous amount of press about a recent event in Berlin called "The Table of Free Voices," hosted by Dropping Knowledge last month. This table featured over a hundred notables answering "the most important questions" facing the world today. It was certainly an interesting group of people, spanning the spectrum from shamans, to musicians, to scientists, to theologians, to NGO workers, and I'd have to say that representation was truly global — a rarity even in organizations that claim to be widely diverse.

I wound up at the dinner the day after the event in a sideways sort of fashion: my boyfriend's mother was one of the "Voices," we live in Berlin, and so Yaro and I went as guests. Because it's a small world, I ran into a couple of people I know there (other "Voices") and it was quite pleasant. The participants seemed to enjoy themselves and to feel that the "Table of Free Voices" had been quite a successful event. Coincidentally, another friend and colleague wrote to me a couple of weeks later asking if I'd attended, and saying he was going to be participating in the Dropping Knowledge web site discussion. I hadn't known about the web site, and so I went to check it out. It was a serious disappointment.

The site is pretty techno-spiffy if you have a fast connection and up-to-date hardware and software. There is a nifty graphics function that allows you to surf through the "topics" and sift down to the particular questions that were asked over the past months, and out of which the "100 most important questions" were chosen. For a visitor, however, the information is both overwhelming (in the sense that there are thousands and thousands of questions and answers) and disappointingly sparse (very few questions are well thought out, and almost none of them are answered in anything more than a superficial fashion).

The project is swaddled in the kind of rhetoric about the "unprecedented democratizing power of the internet" that seemed so exciting in the mid-1990s, but the process by which "knowledge" is "dropped" is of questionable utility and it is hard to see its potential for human improvement or liberation, or its practical application to social justice causes.

The categorization system is arbitrary and sometimes downright foolish: "Animal Rights" is a top level category, as is "Gender," but "Racism" isn't a category header at all and seems to be scattered and buried under various sub-headings in "Ethniticy & Culture," and "Justice and Civil Rights." Likewise, there is no entry-level category header for "Education," while "Democracy and Freedom" floats right at the top. While ideological bias may be unintended (and is certainly unacknowledged), it nonetheless is embedded in the structure of knowledge presented to the public.

Practically speaking, the forum is also disappointing. To follow a discussion, you have to keep coming back and checking in to each Q&A, without any system of notification when a new answer has been posted — a courtesy we've come to expect even from old-fashioned web-based bulletin boards. Furthermore, variations on the same question are asked again and again in different sub-sections, and so the answers ("knowledge") are scattered to the winds, and can be harvested only if you are a diligent, informed, a patient user of keywords, and willing to scroll through the often incoherent questions and comments that surround the very limited collection of useful answers.

The biggest problem, though, is the pedagogical model on which "Dropping Knowledge" is based. It's elitist education at its worst: the money comes from corporate and individual sponsors (i.e., the rich — however well-meaning they may be). The participants are picked on the basis of either name-recognition (how famous or "interesting" they are), or on cronyism ("I know a person who would be great for this...") at a first or second remove. The presumption is that the public can ask (carefully filtered) questions, which the "important" people can answer for them; hardly a liberatory paradigm of education and one that Freire, for example, would despise.

I felt, walking around the enormous dinner "round-table", and talking to participants, that they had all really enjoyed themselves, and enjoyed each other's company. This isn't a bad thing if we're talking about a dinner party, and multi-million dollar parties aren't that uncommon among the super-rich. The celebrities were enjoying themselves because they had the opportunity to meet "interesting" people without being inundated by press or autograph hounds, while the "interesting" people got to meet and talk to celebrities they'd always admired. Both groups got to feel like they were doing this for "a good cause." This is how the rich and famous mingle, but it bothers me when such socializing is couched in the language of leftist politics and progressive causes, and when the public is told that they will benefit from such mingling.

Given the quality of the answers (transcribed from the videotaped event) to the "100 questions," I have to wonder what might have resulted if a requirement for participating in the Table of Free Voices had been to think rigorously and answer even a fraction of the questions in a prepared, concrete, and truly useful fashion. I believe that at least some of Voices would have agreed to that request (and some may well have been glad of it). The fault lies not with the participants in these situations, but with the event organizers. Perhaps they were afraid to scare their celebrities away with requests that went beyond simple appearance and lending their names to the project. In any case, the Q&A format was seriously flawed and resulted in the production of nothing more than sound-bytes and feel-goodism, the simplification of inherently complex questions, and the impression that progressives are very, very sloppy thinkers.

Educating the public is a lot of work. The biggest challenge is not producing content (there is more good content out there than we could ever utilize). There are two central challenges: 1) People must be convinced that the pursuit of education is in their interest, and that it is an essential part of building free and humane societies. 2) People must feel an investment in, and a responsibility for their own educational process; a goal that cannot be achieved without building educational systems that truly serve the whole population, rather than serving the middle- and upper-classes.

Top-down education is often oppressive (and can replicate and reinforce repressive social structures). In the West, the top-down model has met the consumer model. When kids don't see a connection between their education and their "real life," they cut classes, drop out, and avoid school work as much as possible. That's why we have truancy and compulsory schooling laws. Adults often don't have to continue their education and often Western cultures encourage them by making education "fun." But too often, "fun" means that education isn't rigorous, doesn't encourage people to think deeply, and avoids anything smacking of critical thinking because critique can be uncomfortable and even painful. Consumers will avoid products that make them feel uncomfortable or inadequate.

Dropping Knowledge seems to buy, without question, into a consumer model of top-down education and is careful to make both its questions and its answers vacuous enough to be inoffensive (and also, uncoincidentally, ineffective). Although the group of participants was diverse in terms of race, nation of origin, gender, ethnicity and sexuality, it did not appear to be diverse in terms of class. It was a distinctly upper- and middle-class group, and — by the answers they gave — very out-of-touch with the concerns of working people and the poor, with some notable individual exceptions. The classes that were represented are specifically those to whom top-down educational models most appeal, and who have a vested interest in believing that they are the possessors and potential bestowers of knowledge.

The problem is a lot more obvious if we turn the Dropping Knowledge model on its head. What if a group of powerful and influential celebrities were invited to ask questions of a large and diverse group of grass-roots and indigenous community workers, and to listen respectfully as they answered at length in their own idiom? What if they were charged with turning their wealth and power to serving those communities without being in charge, without being "authorities," and without being asked for their opinions on the topic? It's a bit hard to imagine, isn't it? The idea that those with the money and the fame should dictate answers to the "nobodies" has been thoroughly naturalized in Western cultures (and Dropping Knowledge certainly springs from Western roots — European and U.S.).

I am struck by the difference between the methods and the results of Dropping Knowledge and an organization like Tostan, described recently by gUaVa jAm in her blog. Through community-based education, TOSTAN managed, in a period of about three years, to allow women in Senegal to take charge of their education, and to educate themselves and each other about their bodies and health. The women responded by building an indigenous movement to eradicate female genital mutiiation in Senegal — an organization effort so successful that it's believed that in a year or two the practice will have almost entirely ceased throughout the country.

Like Dropping Knowledge, Tostan relies on donations. Unlike them, they don't throw fancy dinner parties where famous men and women can come and praise each other. Nor do they have a fancy web site or, as far as I can find, a web site at all. What they do have is people on the ground, working to empower communities by providing free education and information to those who need it and want it.

Some might say that there's room for both organizations like Dropping Knowledge and like Tostan, but I don't think so. It seems pretty clear to me that there's a limited amount of progressive money out there, and events like The Table of Free Voices suck money out of the pool for the gratification of people who really don't need another fancy dinner or the wonderful free Robbie Conal posters and shirts that were available to all participants. (And yes, I have both the shirts and the posters. I think Conal is a great political artist and you wouldn't believe how expensive t-shirts are in Germany, where they tax the hell out of imports from countries they think don't have fair labor practices.)

Posted by kalital at 1:14 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack