uses the COVID-19 pandemic to emphasize this point, claiming “that privacy and trust must be balanced with the need to fill the huge gaps in our knowledge about COVID-19.”
Her claim is that economic independence has hampered our collective ability to deal with crises. This is because “one important source of increasing returns is the extensive experience-based know-how needed in high-value activities such as software design, architecture, and advanced manufacturing. Such returns not only favor incumbents, but also mean that choices by individual producers and consumers have spillover effects on others.” The pandemic has made it harder to justify such approaches:
Just as a spider’s web crumples when a few strands are broken, so the pandemic has highlighted the risks arising from our economic interdependence. And now California and Georgia, Germany and Italy, and China and the United States need each other to recover and rebuild. No one should waste time yearning for an unsustainable fantasy.
This realization creates, according to Coyle, a need to rethink economics – as “what affects some parts substantially affects the whole.” And one can make the same argument using climate change as the example.8
How Theory Extends to Practice
The question that thus arises is: does this theoretical work extend into practice? It appears so, because it is within actual practice – in academics, in media, in politics – that a person hears the controversy, the anger, and the rage surrounding this notion. It is within practice that a person hears sides being taken in the “cultural wars” and views being expressed on such issues as free speech and academic freedom, scholarship and bias in scholarly research, woke-ism, social justice (equity and anti-discriminatory practices against race and gender), cultural appropriation, and cancel culture, among others.
Academics
It seems only natural that the theoretical debate over the legitimacy of individualism first find practical expression in education – particularly, higher education. It is in higher education that professors engage in scholarship, publishing, and debate – and then turn to use their findings to educate students. We saw some sample products of this natural evolution in some of the arguments made through publications cited above. But it would be a mistake to assume such practical expressions find expression only in higher education. As we shall see, these practices extend well into elementary and secondary education. But let’s start with higher education.
The consequence of such debate finding a home in higher education is both logical and obvious: those faculty, students, and staff who are proponents of this approach demand administrators not only support their research and study but embrace practices which disseminate findings to students – actions which can range and have ranged from simply viewing this new approach as falling in line with traditional scholarship and academic freedom to calling for “decolonization” of the curriculum, issuing “anti-racist” pledges, advocating for embrace of “critical race theory,” engaging diversity-equity-inclusion (DEI) training of staff, demanding removal of statutes on campuses and/or names off buildings when ties can be made to oppressive practices or practitioners, divesting of stock invested in companies engaging in oppressive practices, acknowledging oppressed peoples and cultures, and providing free tuition to students of color as a form of reparation, among others. And it is here that issues arise, for not everyone agrees with the more contemporary studies or assessments.
A great many faculty and staff – many would argue, the vast majority of faculty and staff – have been trained and continue to believe in the western canon’s Eurocentric approach. They argue it is the western canon that has brought us liberalism and progressive values
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