Odyssean Education Plays the Coronavirus: Ideation and the Immune Institution
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Odyssean Education Plays the Coronavirus: Ideation and the Immune Institution Mike Neary 1 # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Keywords Odyssean Education . Communist Science . Covid-19 . Pandemic . Institutional
immunity . Herd immunity . University . Dominic Cummings
Communist Science Against the Pandemic Before the coronavirus crisis, academics in higher education were preparing for an intensification of the culture wars, when left-wing academics are denounced by right-wing politicians and their supporters as purveyors of communist propaganda (Dickinson 2020). These attacks are often personal and avoid intellectual engagement with communist science. This threat has not gone away. The misrepresentation of Marxist theory in public debate undermines the capacity of a society to respond effectively to the many global emergencies facing the planet. While Marxist theory is a basis for academic research and teaching in higher education, it rarely gets the opportunity to show the power of its exposition in public debates. In this paper, I want to express the qualities of communist science as part of a contribution to dealing with the coronavirus pandemic, showing how communist science expands our capacity to deal with social dangers. I will do this by engaging with an essay by Dominic Cummings, ‘Some Thoughts on Education and Political Priorities’ (2013), where he sets out his vision for Odyssean Education (OE). Cummings is Boris Johnson’s Chief of Staff. While I disagree with Cummings, his essay contains many significant scientific ideas. I want to use Cummings’ essay to enjoin colleagues in a battle of ideas, acknowledging the power of ideation. Odyssean education organises its curriculum around finding solutions to the world’s grand challenges. The content of the curriculum is interdisciplinary: mathematics, statistics, computing and quantitative methods, the natural sciences, as well as political economy and philosophy. The epistemological framing is complexity theory, cybernetics and adaptive systems thinking. The key to this way of teaching and learning is to look for integration and connectivity between disciplines for students and politicians to
* Mike Neary [email protected]
1
University of Lincoln, Lincoln, UK
Postdigital Science and Education
gain an understanding of the life-world system as a whole, so that seemingly intractable problems can be solved. OE does not include any meaningful engagement with the social sciences. Cummings essay has been described as ‘part treatise part sprawling set of notes’ (Lambert 2019), as well as ‘semi-scholarly’, and that Cummings’ ‘reputation as a thinker about education... [is]... undeserved’ (Kernohan 2019), while others think the document might be ‘an intellectual tour de force’ (Collini 2020). Cummings frames OE around a review of science and scientists he is interested in, but his methodology does not have the capacity to challenge his own basic assumptions and, therefore, remains at the level of non-science (Popper 2011/1945; Engels 2017/1877). The OE ap
