Redundancy of Mentors

Definition

Redundancy of mentors is Jane Jacobs's principle of cultural transmission: cultures pass themselves on not through efficient delivery systems but through "the natural redundancies to be found in their communities: varied individuals who have varied ways of fitting into the culture and contributing to it" (Jacobs 2004, p. 159) — "storytellers, skilled tradespeople and craftspeople, musicians, bird-watchers and other nature hobbyists, artists, adventurers, feminists, cosmopolitans, poets, volunteers and activists, chess players, domino players, moralists, life-taught and book-taught philosophers — visible in a community, but invisible to the young when community becomes invisible" (pp. 159–160). The principle's formulation is deliberately anti-efficiency: "Nurturing and instructing human beings in a complex culture demands redundancy of mentors and examples. Redundancy is expensive but indispensable. Perhaps this is merely to point out that life is expensive. Just to keep itself going, life makes demands on energy… that are voracious compared with the undemanding thriftiness of death and decay. A culture, just to keep itself going, makes voracious demands on the energies of many people for hands-on mentoring" (p. 159). Even poor societies could afford it, "because people in their communities fill those roles by the way, while enjoying themselves or earning their livings by other means" (p. 159).

The concept's negative pole is the efficiency doctrine applied to nurture: "When human beings are nurtured, efficiency and economies of scale don't apply. Helping individuals become acceptable and fulfilled members of a culture takes generous individual attention to each one, usually from numerous people" (p. 158). Its catastrophes are named: credentialing's scale-processing ("many elementary and high school students had been processed, presumably efficiently, in large lots, but processed so inadequately that they needed remedial work," p. 159); and, at the limit, "Perhaps the greatest folly possible for a culture is to try to pass itself on by using principles of efficiency. When a culture is rich enough and inherently complex enough to afford redundancy of nurturers, but eliminates them as an extravagance or loses their cultural services through heedlessness of what is being lost, the consequence is self-inflicted cultural genocide" (p. 160). The historical image is the Dark Age's rationing of nurture: "Redundancy was rationed as an extravagance when there wasn't enough of it to go around. A fortunate few got tutors and cultural mentors. The rest went without" (p. 160). The concept grounds the book's education pillar (credentialing) and its community pillar (community-resources): the mentors are the community's invisible infrastructure — "invisible to the young when community becomes invisible" (p. 160).

Key Thinkers

• Jane Jacobs — the concept's author: redundancy as transmission's economics; efficiency as its folly; "self-inflicted cultural genocide" (2004).
• Paul Goodman (not yet paged — see log) — Growing Up Absurd (1960), the mentor-starvation literature's classic, cited in Jacobs's notes as apropos (p. 213).

Related Concepts

• credentialing — the institutional form redundancy's loss takes: processed students, robot-gradeable tests, gypsy faculty.
• mass-amnesia — the mechanism redundancy prevents: transmission by example is what actually carries culture; mentors are its bearers.
• community-resources — the sociological container: the mentors are the community's third, intangible category of resource made visible.
• dark-age — the stakes: eliminating redundancy as extravagance is how a rich culture kills itself.
• self-policing — the professional register: "Like children, professionals need to be taught right and wrong, and why" (p. 158).

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Dark Age Ahead (Jacobs 2004) — the principle and its catalogue of mentor-types (pp. 159–160); the anti-efficiency formulation and the life-energy analogy (p. 159); the remedial-work symptom (p. 159); the Dark Age's rationed tutoring (p. 160); "self-inflicted cultural genocide" (p. 160); the efficiency register (Eli Whitney, Henry Ford, "economies of scale," pp. 157–158); Goodman and Moore in the notes (p. 213).

Source Support linking rule: All entries in this section must be wikilinks to source note pages in wiki/source-notes/ using the source-notes/ path prefix. Never link to raw files — raw files are not wiki pages.

This page requires fuller treatment — created at the Dark Age Ahead ingest; awaits apprenticeship and craft-transmission literature, and the wiki's design-studio-pedagogy cluster as its educational neighborhood.

Open Questions

• Is redundancy of mentors an economic claim (cultures require expensive, non-scaleable inputs) or an ecological one (transmission is a diversity-dependent process)? Jacobs's life-energy analogy suggests the latter; her "expensive but indispensable" phrasing the former. Does the distinction matter for policy?
• The concept predicts that a culture eliminating mentors "as an extravagance" will suffer "self-inflicted cultural genocide." What is the observable signature of mentor-redundancy loss — the 1960s student protests Jacobs cites, the remedial-work wave, or something not yet measured?
• The wiki's studio-pedagogy sources (Ross Smith's "mentor, guide, and provocateur") describe a redundancy-respecting education. Does the concept give design education's small-studio economics its theoretical justification — and does it explain why studio teaching resists MOOC-scale "efficiency"?