Visual Hygiene

This is edupunk.

It doesn’t make any sense to clutter our sights with arcane signs and notations whose origins and usage are not explained nor motivated. Visual clutter does not contribute to learning in any way.

The idea behind visual hygiene is simple: when we’re being asked to learn new concepts that include visual cues we have the right to question what we’re looking at and why these cues are there. Visual hygiene is an attitude which has to be learned. Visual hygiene in schools is rare and it certainly isn’t being taught.

There are many things visual, including written language, signs, notations, charts and graph so the visual hygiene attitude forcefully has to cover a lot of ground. Visual clutter is used by dominant regimes – also in education – to demonstrate who is in control and who isn’t. The visually abused are not afforded with any defensive measures – at least no official ones – against their visual torturers.

Tax forms are notoriously inaccessible. They are designed to be visually complex, nonsense and hard to navigate. Only experts know how to handle them correctly yet those experts depend on their working relationships with the bureaucracies that issue these visual disaster areas. The experts are obliged to the bureaucracies as are the citizens who need to comply with the inaccessible tax code.

The visual hygiene attitude won’t take visual clutter issued by dominant organizations for granted. Instead, people with the visual hygiene attitude will discard the official visual clutter and create their own alternatives. Visual cues are much more social than the spoken word because they can reach much more people. The culture of visual clutter reaches billions of people every day while visual hygiene is scarce but could be abundant if want it to. Striving for visual hygiene is thus striving for social hygiene: an attitude or condition where old structures of social power are not automatically taken for granted.

Bureaucracies and other institutions which derive their social power from their social status prefer to overcharge our visual senses as their favorite means of intimidating us. Visual hygiene is thus a very important attitude because it’s the most invasive way to shift the balance of power between us and impersonal institutions.

The most important aspect of visual hygiene is that it’s personal: you may prefer other visual cues than I do but by playing with each other’s visual preferences we can more easily accept each other’s differences and start working together. Visual hygiene requires and is a conversation.

In education the worst offender is probably mathematics, that is mathematics as interpreted by educational institutions. We force our students to absorb and take for granted the invasive visual clutter of school mathematics. There is no room for honest conversation in mathematics. It’s no wonder that by the time students get out at the other end they can no longer learn, only mimic.

If you want to learn more about the visual hygiene attitude I encourage you to read these two sources:

• A Mathematician’s Lament (PDF), about two hours of reading, very readable. I recommend you read this paper first.
• The Gutenberg Galaxy (Google Books), a 293 page book published in 1962, a bit more challenging to read but well worth the effort.

(turn the volume up!)