Educating for Emptiness
A dialogue between David Graeber and Brian Eno
Editor’s Preface. The anthropologist David Graeber sent the ensuing dialogue to me for publication several months before he died, abruptly, in 2020. He cheered the idea for this magazine and pledged to become a principal contributor. I’ve posted on the site an essay recollecting what David’s friendship meant to me—and what his social thought still may mean. This dialogue, with the English musician and composer Brian Eno, gives another reminder of his capacity to offer trenchant analyses about education, work, and culture in a way that doesn’t close down further discussion. The current attack on our schools makes criticism of their sclerotic condition all the more imperative in rebuilding a future. —John Summers
David Graeber: Is our educational system designed to create pointless people? Answering yes could explain why a system originally designed to train factory workers has changed so little over the last half century, despite the rapid decline of industrial employment. These jobs have not been replaced by service jobs as much as by clerical, administrative, and supervisory jobs that confer upon their occupants an overwhelming feeling of pointlessness. Some surveys estimate that as much as 40 percent of workers in wealthy countries believe their jobs make no meaningful contribution to the world, either because they do nothing at work—nothing that benefits society—or because they feel the world would be better off if they weren’t doing it. Fifteen percent report they are actively trying to do their jobs badly for this reason.
For some years now, Brian Eno and I have been talking about how to make sense of the education systems in Britain and the USA. These systems don’t make a lot of sense. They are founded on an industrial model, clearly designed to train future factory workers. But they are jumbled together with the results of periodic reforms that are designed to inject freedom, creativity, democracy, or radical individualism back in—as if we can never complete make up our minds whether we want to train poets or machine tool operators—and end up trying, and largely failing, to produce both at the same time. What follows are some snippets from these conversations, as well as some of our broader conclusions.
Brian Eno: The way education works now in England, it starts within this wonderful freedom of the Montessori and learn-through-play and so on, and within, say, six or eight years it passes to “pass the exams.” So it funnels down to this terrible quicksand of the exams, which destroy all creativity. What we have as a result is a highly successful system for producing useless people.
David: Yeah, I ended up coming to much the same conclusions: it's obvious we're not really training people for factory work any more, so why all the empty ritual? And why this obsession with memorizing things to pass the exams when everyone can just look stuff up on Wikipedia anyway? Then it occurred to me: maybe the pointlessness actually is the point.
I’ve noticed how since I went to college, it's become almost taken for granted everyone has to have a “real job” while they're in college, even if they don't really need the money, which now you usually do. But what they mean by “real job” is actually a fake job. Because what you normally do in college is actually quite goal oriented: your job is to pass the exam, or to complete a project or to write a paper; you figure out the most effective way to achieve the result; you're assessed on the quality of the product, if you try to bullshit your way through a paper, you'll probably get in trouble. And the same goes for most of the things you might do with your spare time in high school or college, whether it's starting a band or growing pot plants.
So why do they insist you should get a taste of the “real world” by making you rearrange bottles behind the counter at the student union or fill a chair as an administrative assistant? Well, because real work in our society is fake work: they want you to learn how to spend time that doesn't belong to you, and that isn't goal-oriented, how to seem cheerful when you're bored and how to look busy when there's nothing to do. That's “reality.”
Brian: Do you know the musician Robert Wyatt? Did you know he was paralyzed when he was in his twenties? Fell out of a window. And one of the results was he started smoking, a lot. (Not drugs, cigarettes.) I asked him about that one day and he said:
I think the point of smoking is to reduce your health to the point to the level at which you are able to exercise.
So his idea was if you're too healthy, your body has too much energy, so you reduce your health to the level you can handle; you make yourself iller to the point you can fit in the place that society has selected for you—as a paralyzed man (who used to be a drummer by the way). He reduced his health to suit what he was now capable of doing.
I think that's what education is doing, at least to a large extent. When you look at kids, in their early years, they're so creative and so chaotic. They're learning machines. Society as it presently exists has no place for people like that, or very little, so we tamp it down, teach them to instinctively feel learning is a painful experience.
David: Yes, like the way kids are always asking follow-up questions: “well why do they do that? Well why do they do that? Well why...” Which can drive you crazy, but one day, I had this realization: a lot of adults drive you crazy in the opposite way. They never ask follow-up questions.
I noticed that in grad school when I would have conversations with my mother. I'd throw out some idea, and she'd always just say “oh okay, well I have an opinion about that too....” My mom was an extremely intelligent person but she'd only had one year of college, and I notice with people who hadn't gone through a lot of intellectual training, conversations would often feel almost like ping pong, “well I think this!” “Oh yeah well I think that!” “Oh yeah well I think this!” They'd never say, “but why do you think that?” or “but wait if that's true wouldn't that also mean...?” So at first I thought well, maybe grad school really is good for something. But then I realized, wait! 5-year-olds do that all the time. It's all they ever do! Somehow it's getting knocked out of people, and then we maybe put it just halfway back in higher education.
Brian: I always say when I'm talking about this that kids are born creative and it takes 11 years of education to completely knock it out of them. Perhaps the easiest way to diagnose the problem is imagine what education would be like if we actually did want to prepare children for a society in which most work had a purpose, and everyone felt there actually was a good reason for them to be trying to achieve it—almost exactly the opposite of what most people experience at work today. Consider this four-point program:
First of all, I'd say we'd want to leave children alone some of the time. There's this crazy notion that someone has to be entertaining or occupying or monitoring you all the time. But most of my best memories of childhood were making up elaborate games, or hiding somewhere and reading books—it's actually quite extraordinary how many books I managed to read in my early teens. [David: yes, in the summer we used to go to the beach and there was this ground-cover then called bayberry, if you look at it from up close it's just like a forest, with hills and dells and clearings... I spent lifetimes in that stuff.]
Second: 'starting from now.' For some reason they teach history from the earliest time onwards, so you start by memorizing things which make absolutely no sense to you. What if they were to start by asking an eight-year-old to write a history of the 1970s, ask their parents what it was like... they'd get a sense of what was actually at stake in such things.
Third, if you're going to assign a task, assign one that actually makes a difference. Kids can tell when something's bullshit. So if you're teaching economics, why not have them try to actually organize the school lunch program, balance the books, see what that really entails, or if you're teaching about democracy, have them actually decide something about school policy and abide by their decision..
David: Actually I think this relates to what I was saying about opinion ping-pong. In the U.S. we do have the idea, it goes back to John Dewey, that we should train people not just for industry but for democracy. So they're always asking students, even fairly small children, for their opinion, which it's my impression they don't really do in, say, India, or France. But it has occurred to me that an “opinion” is what you have when you don't have any power. The Prime Minister doesn't have opinions; she has positions and policies. Opinions float around, baring teeth with nothing to bite into. So, they often take on an extreme, expressive quality—“I say let's just nuke 'em”—that no sane person would hold when expecting to trigger real-world consequence. That makes for a vicious circle. The actually powerful people say, “we can't have too much democracy because most people, their opinions are really extreme.”
In this way, a system supposedly set up to create democratic sensibilities has the opposite effect. We look over our shoulders at our neighbors and say: “Thank God that guy doesn't have any input—or we'd really be in trouble.”
Brian: We're not trained how to think together. We tend to teach a set of techniques, rather than cultivating the mind, which necessarily means cooperation, listening, deliberation,
David: In anarchist-inspired consensus training, we set up mock debates. Three or four people set forth positions, and then just when the speaker thinks she’s supposed to set out her own position, we say, “all right, now summarize what the second speaker was trying to say.”
Brian: England invented two great educational systems. One was Art School, which is all about freeing the mind. In Art School, there's never a right answer. It's always, “Think again. How might we see that from a different perspective?” Whatever the box, we try to see how many different positions there might be outside it. The other great system, I think, that came out of England was called something like “the greats”—I always forget the proper name for it, but it came out of Oxford University and it's essentially the study of the philosophy and literature of the ancient world. And it's kind of completely pointless, unless you're going to become a teacher who teaches the same thing. It has no 'real world' application.
David: I see: so it's only point is itself. But isn't that kind of the opposite of 'starting from here'?
Brian: It is, but it also comes much later. One of the interesting things about Bletchley Park during the war—you remember where all that Enigma decoding was done, the place Alan Turing worked—was that a lot of the people who worked at Bletchley Park came out that program. In either case, arts and greats, it's all about cultivating imagination. So let's say you're studying the Second World War. They randomly decide: you're Winston Churchill, he's Goebbels, that one's Hitler, this is Stalin, that is Montgomery, and the rule is you have to argue from their position where you give that person maximum credit. What would have been the best possible explanation for his decision to start a war, what had happened to him that would have made him thought that a purge was the best thing to do. And I thought: what a brilliant idea that was. That is like your example, saying “would you please present my position in the best possible light.”
David: . . . which in turn is the exact opposite of what you're taught to do as an academic...
David: The point of Brian's schema—or, the point of our presenting it—is that these are all the things one would not do if one's aim was to deaden young minds to prepare them for pointless forms of employment, under someone else's direction. The easiest way of course to do this is to actually assign children pointless tasks under someone else's direction. Of course play could be considered “pointless” in the formal sense as well: but just as being able to make up the games that one is playing, individually or collectively, is perhaps the highest expression of human freedom, being forced to play a game not of one's own making is probably the ultimate expression of lack of freedom—this seems to be a large part of why those forced to perform bullshit jobs report themselves so miserable.
The harm of constant supervision is self-evident. But removing knowledge, both of past and future, from any sort immediate impact on a student's immediate conditions life can be seen as a subtle way of doing the same thing. It's not just to make a culture based on democratic deliberation seem impossible, or undesirable, by casting us all into the deserts of “opinion,” and ensuring we never learn the basic skills of listening and thinking that would be required to create a democratic culture. Obviously it is that. But it's also to inure us to the idea that the games imposed on them shouldn't be measured by any independent criteria at all—“I spend all day color-coding information from internal audit forms that no one will ever look at. Why are we collecting this information anyway?”
Some years ago, psychological anthropologists performed a series of experiments to try to determine whether all human beings are equally capable of basic logic. It was a bit of a silly undertaking. If someone was really incapable of performing basic logical operations, they'd probably be dead.
They gave a series of syllogisms first to a group of rural Africans who had attended primary school, then, to a group that had not. Sure enough the second group did much worse on the test. But when they analyzed the results, they found that it wasn't so much that members of the second group made errors of logic; they just wouldn't accept the framework. If the experimenter asked “the chief always gets upset when people drink cane liquor. George is drinking cane liquor. Is the chief upset?” members of the first group would tend to accept the terms and just say “yes.” Members of the second would be much likely to answer, “well, you see it all depends on what kind of drunk George is. If he's a belligerent drunk, the chief definitely won't like that. But if he's the type who just acts silly for a while and then passes out...” Or they'd assume it was a game of making up stories, and try to make it more interesting: “well, the chief might pretend it's George's drinking that makes him angry, but really this is just a ploy: really he's in love with George's wife...” What the first group had learned in school was, primarily, not to do this.
We believe this has profound implications. Above all, it suggests the main thing our current system of education teaches us is that we must accept that—when a figure of authority is present—we play no role in making up the story, and second of all, that the story doesn't have to make any kind of sense. If a man with a white coat shows up and starts asking you questions, you accept the terms as they are given to you. Even if what he's saying has nothing to do with observed reality, you know to just shut up and play along. Later perhaps you can exchange opinions about what happened. But that's about it.
This is perhaps the most important thing one learns in grade school. This is why the industrial elements in education have barely changed, despite the decline of factory work, and why more and more education in the US and UK has been oriented to passing tests. It is the perfect preparation for a life of bullshit jobs.