A Childhood Memory

What’s all the fuss about the global shift and a new paradigm in knowledge? What is Dino really talking about? If you’ve been wondering, this vignette might provide a valuable clue. It’s intended to serve as a parable.

I can’t recall how I ended up in that meeting of our school’s pupils’ committee. It must have been a mistake; I never had much interest in committees and politics. But there I was, seated in the last row of a classroom filled with pupils, each representing their respective classes. In front of me, presiding over the meeting, was a teacher who knew me or knew of me because she was a math teacher, and I had successfully represented our school in a math competition.

So, she decided to honor me by assigning me a chore: I was to interview the school’s director and present a report on pupils’ self-management in our school at the upcoming May 1 celebration.

In Tito’s Yugoslavia, where this event took place, self-management was considered a political innovation of the highest order. The means of production, and more broadly, economic and political power, were not to be controlled by an elite or a communist state but by the people themselves. How was this concept implemented in our school?

I interviewed the director, and all I received were the political clichés that one could hear in political speeches and on television. None of it made sense, and I had nothing to report. I was in trouble.

But then I decided to take matters into my own hands and investigate the question myself: How did pupils’ self-management operate in our school?

To my surprise, I discovered that it didn’t. The members of the pupils’ committee, who were supposed to be the representatives of the pupils, were not elected but selected! They were good kids from good communist families, handpicked to be groomed as members of a future political elite.

And so I had my story! The final class before the May 1 celebration was gym; I recall sitting in the locker room during the break that followed and jotting down notes. And only minutes later, I was presenting my proposal to an astonished audience of teachers, parents, and students: To implement pupils’ self-management in our school, the pupils’ committee will need to be elected, not selected!

My intervention seemed to have sparked some controversy. After the holidays, each teacher would begin their lecture in our classroom with a monologue discussing the pros and cons of my proposal. I never understood why. The entire concept was a proven and, in any case, trivial theorem. And in the end, a new pupils’ committee was indeed elected.

Looking back, I can see how much I lacked what is now called “social intelligence”. Nobody expected me to propose a system change and genuinely implement pupils’ self-management. Certainly not on a May 1 celebration! I was given a chance to join the system by quoting the school’s director and putting him in the spotlight; and to put self-management and the pupils’ committee in the spotlight, and be in the spotlight myself.

I misread the situation and missed my opportunity.

Or did I?

I am recalling this because now, as an academic researcher, I see myself doing something closely similar.

But on a much larger scale.