Tuning Our Clocks
People move about and live their lives within social contexts and institutions, not as lone individuals—not ever as lone individuals.
The standard opinion in Western folk-epistemological thought (and, thus, in "professional" educational thought) is that teaching, telling, assessing, correcting, listening, following, deferring, etc., are all instruments (or byproducts) of authoritarian control. Given this ideological environment, it is only natural that people in education routinely cast themselves as the heroes of Pleasantville—they will help the next generation find their voices and express their individuality and save the world!
What is frustrating about this thinking is that it is so far down the treatment path at this point that it seems impossible to suggest that the diagnoses (premises) were wrong—really wrong—in the first place. But that is the case; the premises were wrong. People move about and live their lives within social contexts and institutions, not as lone individuals—not ever as lone individuals. Not only that, but—as is often pointed out online—the idea we are contending with here (that teaching, telling, assessing, correcting, listening, following, deferring, etc., are all in the same league as some kind of infringement of psychological freedom) contradicts how we came to know about it: via telling, listening, assessing, correcting, deferring, etc. The lily-white faux-wise book-of-mormon goobers that make up the educational big-church influencer circuit in the United States use all the tools they despise to maintain their community and promulgate their ideas. They have to. Because the instructional orientations they do espouse don't work. (And they don't care, which is at least consistent.)
What we have here, from Knowledge by Agreement, is yet more about why they are wrong.
Take a simple aggregate of clocks. Each clock has its own degree of 'individuality', that is, its own characteristic speed of moving its pointers. Of course, as long as the clocks act independently of one another, we have no analogue of social life, and no analogue of social institutions. Social institutions have the function of reducing divergence, and of increasing similarity of output. In the present case we can imagine more than one way in which divergence can be reduced. Suffice it here to mention three. The 'way of the single authority' is to have all clocks linked up to one master clock. And at regular intervals—measured by the master clock itself—the latter resets all other clocks to its time. After that the clocks again diverge. The 'way of the single average' is to have all clocks linked up to one consensus-forming mechanism. At regular intervals (measured by some arbitrarily chosen clock) this mechanism simultaneously calls up information about the current times of all clocks. The mechanism calculates the average of all the readings it receives and resets all the clocks to this value. After that the clocks again diverge. Finally, according to the 'way of the multiple but local consensus', we allow our clocks to move about freely, without being linked to any kind of master device . . . However, the space in which they can move about is limited, and thus they randomly collide. Whenever two (or more) of them collide, they are able to perform the following operation. They calculate the average of their times, and reset each other to this time. After that they again follow their own speed, and continue to move around until they meet with some other clock(s) . . .
The third way models the situation of a social institution in which no member has access to the actions of all, and where conformity coexists with divergence. Indeed, only under very special circumstances will all clocks in the third scenario momentarily show exactly the same time. Moreover, it is the third way that is most significant for understanding how social institutions both determine and are determined by interaction. The time of each clock is adjusted only in one-to-one encounters, and yet it would clearly be wrong to claim that these encounters are primary with respect to each clock's relation to the whole population. For what each clock brings to the one-to-one encounters has been fixed by earlier encounters with clocks of the same population. . . .
Note that although universal coincidence of times will be rare in the third model, frequent random interaction among the clocks guarantees that their times will all move within a certain bandwidth . . . Our communal belief that £1 coins are money is a bandwidth-belief. That is to say, each one of us believes (as one of us living in the United Kingdom) that these coins are money—but in a slightly different way. The respective way depends on our expertise in identifying forged coins, on our experience with sudden loss of confidence in money, and on our profession. Second, unless communal beliefs had this bandwidth-nature it would be difficult to understand both how institutions change, and why the monitoring, correcting, and sanctioning of other believers is important.
