In the 1960's, John Bennett was convinced that a 'revolution' in education was immanent. It was his hope that education would move more into the higher levels of mental operation. He conceived of a 'market of the mind' in which new products would be created in which people would be much less passive than before. What actually happened was not expected. The situation we find ourselves in today is an intricate interweaving of even more gross passivity than ever before with faint strands of active mentation. No one could have anticipated the emergence of the internet, for example, nor the ways in which people have utilised it.
Structural communication was centred in consciousness, and paralleled the development of systematics. In doing so, it followed on in the path of Gurdjieff who insisted that the 'third room' (consciousness, understanding, self-remembering, etc.) was crucial in managing the influx of creativity into the conditioned world.
In this method, there are two streams of communication. One concerns the data, or 'information' in the usual sense of the word now being studied under the discipline of toponomics. The other concerns the form in such information, or the 'pattern' by which we can understand. In this pattern resides the orientations, intentions, perspectives, etc. which are usually wrapped up in the stream of information. Thus, people speak to each other in such a way that it is difficult to distinguish between what they say and what they mean by it. If we were able to separate the two streams, the pattern from which we are speaking would be apparent. We could then understand why someone might speak as they do.
Gurdjieff pointed out that we people in our communications are constantly using words in different meanings and never stopping to take this into account. Two people could talk together about the 'world' but be talking about two different things. To establish the variant meanings would require that we bring into manifestation not only the particular word, but other words designating the pattern that informs us.
John Bennett made a great deal about what he called 'the separation of consciousness from sensitivity'. He said that in the ordinary state we live in, consciousness is 'collapsed' into sensitivity. This gives us our ego sense, but makes it very difficult to understand anything. It is consciousness that can recognise patterns. The sensitivity can only carry information, such as items of knowledge or sense data.
Structural communication is an artifice designed to help in the separation of consciousness from sensitivity, and of pattern from information. It requires a suspension of judgement (just as in dialogue) in terms of right and wrong to enable a finer capacity to develop capable of seeing.
Structural communication was devised in the 60's, mostly by John Bennett and Tony Hodgson, as part of the research initiated by Bennett through the Institute for the Comparative Study of History, Science and Philosophy. It led to the development of a teaching machine (the 'Systemaster') and the formation of a company (Structural Communication Systems, ltd.). A series of textbooks using the method appeared in the late 60's and examples of the technique were shown in the Harvard Business Review. Joint ventures with Westinghouse and IBM were launched (at the time when Federal money was still pouring into educational research).
A whole issue of the journal 'Systematics' was devoted to structural communication in December 1967. The method arose as a response to the challenge of conducting a learning process at the level of conscious energy [see section on Mental Energies], i.e. concerned with understanding rather than knowledge, through automation. The model for the process was the university tutorial, in which tutor and students interact through a technical language and explore multi-value interpretations (of history, science, etc.). At the time, there existed only the most primitive devices for learning, mostly based on multiple-choice.
Multiple-choice can, at best, allow for operations at the level of sensitivity. The aim was to allow for operations at the level of consciousness. Such operations can encompass wholes and alternative viewpoints.
The system was composed of the following components:
| THE INTENTION | The intention of the piece of study would be stated. |
| THE ARRAY | This was a set of 'items', each of which was a piece of information relevant to the universe of discourse. These might be factors in a historical process, aspects of a scientific theory, components of a case study, etc. The number of items was 12-30 (by coincidence, approximately the same as the range of membership for a dialogue group!). They were usually arranged in a two-by-two matrix, for convenience. Each item was ascribed a number (e.g. from 1 to 20).
All the exchanges taking place were based on the array of items. When an 'answer' was called for in response to a question, it was made in the form of a selection of a sub-set from the total set of items in the array. In this way, the 'conversation' was conducted always through the prescribed 'language' provided. This entailed that a 'student' had to know the meaning of each of the items. More importantly, it meant that he or she had to be able to make sense of combinations of them. Handling combinations would display the student's understanding. |
| THE TEXTS | The subject matter would be introduced and discussed. The substance of this material could range as widely as one liked. It might consist of whole books. It could include pictorial, graphic, etc. information. The material would relate to the array of items and provide enough to enable the student to know what they meant. |
| THE QUESTIONS | Each question would pose a challenge. No question could be answered simply by knowledge of the content of the texts. Each question would invoke a viewpoint, or an intention, or an act of interpretation. For example, in understanding an historical event, the questions would ask for the student to adopt a variety of types of explanation (such as economic, political, environmental, etc.) each one of which would draw on its own specific sub-set of items and minimise the remainder.
To answer a question would require the student to bring to bear more than he or she was told, some factor of insight or judgement, etc. The answer to a question would consist of only the numbers of those items the student considered relevant. By answering in this way, the response could then be analysed according to a pre-prepared set of diagnostics. |
| DIAGNOSTICS AND COMMENTS | The diagnostics consisted of a series of 'tests' following simple logical operations. The main types of diagnostics were of the following kind:-
If included m of the set s(x) of items then go to comment P If excluded n of the set s(y) of items then go to comment Q This schema could be made as complex as one liked by combining such simple tests. The comments were written the mode of a tutorial response to invite the student to reflect further. In an automated application, this could mean making another attempt: the student would not know the content of the test which had led him to any particular comment. When the method was put into a text book then, of course, the tests were visible. The writing of the comments was no easy thing and it was always recommended that extensive field trails were run with live groups to refine them, as well as checking them out with knowledge experts. |
| OVER-VIEW | A final text would integrate the content of the questions and answers into a deeper view of the subject. It would be quite right to say that the 'structural' exchange gave some guarantee that the over-view in depth would be understood. |
The original title for Ouspensky's book illuminates something of the process. The items in the Array are 'fragments' while the 'view in depth' represents the 'unknown teaching'. In this kind of approach, explanation is 'suspended' until it can be assimilated. The core simplicity of understanding would come only after an excursion into complexity.
Besides the standard form of structural communication described above (called Form A), two other forms (B and C) were proposed. Form B could test for order. Imagine, for example, a process in which the order to the various steps would be significant. Form C allowed the student to produce whole answers in his or her own words, which the student would then compare with a 'model answer'. Neither of these was ever implemented, largely because of the increased demands on anticipating possible responses. In Form B, for example, the variants according to order would be at least an order of magnitude greater.
At the time structural communication was invented, there were no PC's; not even pocket calculators! The teaching machine developed was electro-mechanical! What is now a trivial piece of programming was then a burdensome task. It may well be possible now to explore the technique for use through the internet. The DuVersity is planning to do just that.
What can never be reduced to any mechanical system is the original production of the material, in particular the Array, the Questions and the Diagnostics. The company set up to exploit the method failed largely because it was too difficult to find and/or train people to produce structural communication materials. What is encoded in such materials comes very close to a 'recording' of a whole thought. The significance of this may come to outweigh the intellectual 'cost' of using the method.
It is now possible to envision the implementation of the method through electronic means. However, a different development arose in the 70's using magnetism. The idea for this arose from the practical experience of interacting with groups to produce the reference Array in the first place. This came to the fore when the method moved form the domain of schools to that of business.
Groups of mangers could be brought together to discuss a problem, in the process of which, they would assemble their own Array in their own language. By setting such a group to come up with a total, shared Array, they would have to communicate with each other. The Array could then be used to articulate points of view, problem areas, mission statements, etc. In this way, the more rigid system of questions, answers and diagnostics became more plastic and simplified.
The key technology turned out to be the employment of magnetism. The 'items' of the array would be written on plastic hexagons (for ease of fitting together) with a magnetic backing. These could then be placed on a board having a metal backing, when they would stay in place. As a discussion ensued, it could be monitored and recorded by clustering the magnetic hexagons ('items') into groups.
This method has certain similarities with the 'mind-mapping' of Tony Buzan. However, it is much less fixed into an hierarchical 'tree' of associations. It is being developed by a number of people including the Centre for Management Creativity based in Yorkshire, UK.
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