Niall Ferguson disses Media Studies in the City of Marshall MacLuhan

Media studies guru and one of Canada's favourite sons, Marshall McLuhan

The Munk Debates were held at a packed Roy Thompson Hall in Toronto last Friday where the motion to be resolved was 'Does the 21st Century Belong to China?' Henry Kissinger, 88, took this opportunity to promote his new book and debated in public for the first time in his long career.  Joining him in the 'con' position was CNN personality Fareed Zakaria. The statesman and the journalist squared off against the scholars, Harvard economic historian Niall Ferguson and his partner, Tsinghua University international economist David Liu (李稻葵). As is standard for Munk debates, a pre-debate tally of audience opinion was taken with 21% undecided on the motion and the 'cons' at 40% were only one percentage point above the 'pros' at 39%. The audience was overwhelmingly open-minded with 96% stating they would be willing to change their outlook based on the outcome of the debates. It was going to be interesting.

And it was. All the main issues were brought up, the widening gap between rich and poor as the downside of China's meteoric rise, China's recent military activity, demographic problems, growing geopolitical importance, domestic infrastructure challenges, African investment etc.. The interaction was engaging, professional and scholarly. At one point though, Ferguson may have gaffed and gaffed badly.

In driving home his point regarding increasing innovation in China (which he gauged by the increasing number of patent applications) he also mentioned the vast population of Chinese students that are studying abroad.  Ferguson paradoxically tried to defend the Chinese nation as innovative by implicitly claiming that Chinese will learn innovation through their careers at Western universities. He then began listing the types of degrees that would be of benefit to China, engineering, and hard sciences mostly, and finished off before sitting down by stating dismissively, "And not a PhD. in 'media studies'".

The tone seemed to suggest that media studies as a field was somehow not useful when it came to promoting innovation. Worse yet, he said it in such a way as though he were passing off the idea of 'media studies' as a joke unto itself. Ferguson laughed a little at his own joke as he took his seat but I think even he was aware that the Toronto audience my have been clapping but it was not laughing with him.

It's safe to assume that Ferguson is not particularly aware of the history of media studies (though he borrows the distinctly techy term 'app' in his new book) or he may have known that Toronto has played a major role in that history since its beginnings. In 1963, the grandfather of media theory, Marshall "the Media is the Message" McLuhan established the world's first ever media studies programme at the Centre for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto (where the charitable foundation of event host, Peter Munk, established the Munk School for Global Affairs in addition to the Munk Debates).  Doubtless some members of the audience studied at that institution. Some may even have had PhDs. and they are acutely aware of and proud of the role both the University of Toronto and the city itself have had in forwarding media studies as a respectable academic endeavour. Famous for his research skills, Ferguson really ought to have known this about media studies before slighting its capability of contributing to practical innovation and doing this in the city where it first became an academic field.

When Zakaria offered his rebuttal, there were several points he could have addressed but it seemed he had read the crowd's non-reaction to Ferguson's attempt at humour and only discussed that point. He mentioned research and development expenditures of Microsoft and compared it to that of Apple. The R&D expenditures at Apple are significantly lower in both absolute and relative terms because rather than hiring strictly software engineers and computer scientists, Apple's approach is all about design and focuses on how humans interact with the machine interface. "Exactly the kind of thing one learns with a PhD. in media studies," concluded Zakaria before sitting down to thunderous applause. So, in addition to possibly offending members of the audience by poo-pooing media studies in general, Ferguson was also apparently wrong about the source of innovation in the IT industry and Zakaria took both factors and went straight for the jugular with them.

Though the debate was argued well on each side, an initially very undecided audience voted heavily in favour of the 'con' position in the end. It's impossible to say how much an effect Ferguson's mini-slight on media studies may have had on that outcome but if it cost the 'pro' side even a little bit, it does prove McLuhan's own axiom that "A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding."

On The Importance of Ritual in Time Management for Today's Student

Confucius 孔夫子- one of the greatest educators in history.

How relevant is a word like 'ritual' to college students when less than 30% of them in the US don't sleep regular hours and the vast majority don't eat a well rounded breakfast. The short answer is, not relevant or important enough.

As important as it is for us here at Neopaedeia to make sure the most appropriate educational solutions are found and applied to reflect the needs of today's students, this is not something that is done by reinventing the wheel or actively ignoring the past. In fact, many of the most important lessons are found in the oldest of texts. The value of these texts have proven themselves if only by their ability to withstand the test of time if nothing else. These are ideas that are as relevant to the human condition (of which education has always been a large component) when they were written thousands of years ago as they are today.

Being able to effectively use time has been an issue for some members of the population since the invention of the plough ushered in the agricultural revolution freeing large parts of the population from the burden of food production so they could do other things like invent writing systems and the State as well as philosophies and legal systems and wage war. In China, the Confucian scholar gentry class (士- shi) would have been one of the first to deal with the problem of a flexible work day as the nature of their work was different from the other social classes in ancient China. Peasants (农- nong) had their work day dictated by the rising and setting of the sun. Their work was physical and honest as was the work of the artisans (工- gong). The reviled merchant classes (商-shang) shared in common with the gentry, a work day that was not physical but the biggest distinction between these two occupations, respectively at the top and the bottom of the Confucian social hierarchical system, would have been on the importance of 'li' or rituals observed by the Confucian scholar and barely understood by the merchant.

The Confucian classics dedicate much space to the importance of 'li' (理) or 'rituals'. Much of it does not necessarily read in a way that is immediately accessible to the modern student but as old ideas are recycled and repackaged as they are in this article in a Harvard Business Review blog, the most immediate benefits to developing rituals become more obviously applicable to people in the 21st century.  The examples of rituals provided in the article are set up for business people with families but the principle of developing "highly specific behaviors, done at precise times, so they eventually become automatic and no longer require conscious will or discipline" are as important to the 21st century student as they are to the business person. In fact, they become doubly important to students because they are important to business people.

Education should not only be seen as the epistemic transfer of knowledge in its most abstract sense, it should be about the incorporation of practice for developing skills and behaviours required to be successful in the professional, cultural and social climates of our times. Though it requires discipline to develop these rituals into habits, once they have become behaviours as such, the rituals are observed as a matter of course. Like drilling in sports, ritualised elements in other facets of life become effortless and automatic when applied. They are the basis upon which civilisations grow and make possible what otherwise might not be.

"People's natures are alike, it is their habits that carry them far apart."
- Confucius (551-479 BCE)