The problem of the invention of education

The problem of the invention of education

The invention of education, we are always told, involved the gradual resolution between two competing traditions in Classical Athens. On the one hand, there was the tradition of the sophists. These were teachers who plied their teaching for pay, and what they taught was the knowledge and skill needed for politics – the rhetorical abilities for participation in the political life of the city. Athens was a participatory democracy, and oratory was considered the highest art required for the highest duty of a citizen. The sophists, in other words, offered learning that was of instrumental value. It was a form of vocational training, particularly for those young men who aspired to leadership.

The competing tradition began with Socrates, generally considered a sophist, though he did not teach for money, and what he taught, he viewed as a good in itself, and not as a means to an end. This didn’t prevent ambitious young men from seeking out his teaching, even if they did so initially for utilitarian reasons; the argumentation that he taught might turn out to be a politically useful tool nonetheless.

Socrates and his philosophical heirs, then, were concerned with questions that went to the value and point of life itself; what was the Good Life, and what was the good society? Their first concerns were with ends, and not with the means to them.

Several critiques of the pursuit of the political life are very clear in Plato’s Republic, and stand as a challenge to the purposes of his politically ambitious followers. The first comes as a result of Socrates’ announced assumption that to understand justice (or, we might say, morality) in the individual, we must first consider a just society. Having described such a society, he then points out that those best equipped to govern it would not want to do so.

The second challenge arises from his account of why it is that a just society would not remain just beyond a generation, but would deteriorate over several subsequent generations through democracy on the way down to tyranny. Here it becomes clear that participating in politics will not even be an option for the good person. Their problem will be to find some shelter against it.

The standard doctrine about the invention of education is, then, that it was born out of competition between these two traditions, the philosophical being represented initially by Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, and the sophistic tradition being represented by the greatest of the sophists, Isocrates. It is in the history of this competition that the birth and evolution of the concept of education supposedly lies, and over the course of time it is the sophistic tradition that has won. The philosophical tradition – the quest for understanding what might be involved in living well – has come to play the minor part of what education has long been understood to be, and our histories and practices reflect this conclusion.

My suggestion is that this is a massive and incongruous “reading back” of our later world-view into the circumstances under which the idea of education was invented – particularly our modern one, with our elaborate institutionalisation of schooling on an extraordinary scale,  our reduction of the idea of education to that institution, and our confusion of education with vocational training.

The distortion here should be obvious. The competition between these two traditions is not over the concept of education at all. It is over which of the traditions would come to dominate in the institution of schooling – which now dominates us. If schooling was what the competition was going to be about, there is no way that the philosophical tradition could hope to win, because there are just so many human utilities that schooling can serve. Schooling costs money, and money is always available when preparation for careers seems to require that something be taught. Even more money will be available when the possibilities of using schools for social engineering are appreciated.

The value of coming to understand the Good Life, or the good society, are, on the other hand, in-valuable – perhaps beyond price. You can’t put a dollar on it. Such intrinsically worthwhile learnings, however, always fall down in the priorities of schooling because they don’t attract money –  unless the possession of them becomes a mark of culture, civilisation and social status. Then, it might be thought worth buying them to impress other people.

To make things worse, Plato’s Republic – the major work in the philosophical tradition about the nature of education – is not about schooling as the locus of education at all. It identifies the educational domain with the whole community and its institutions, instead. This is, of course, exactly what we would have to do if we were to take good living as serious and problematic, rather than merely conventional.  Moderns find this very peculiar, nevertheless.

That the competition wasn’t over the concept of education at all should also be obvious just in the shared assumption that here was, indeed, the occasion of the invention of the concept of education, because there is nothing about the sophistic tradition that could have contributed to that invention.

The point of the sophistic tradition was the point that all schooling and teaching had always had, and still largely has – the provision of skills for high status positions (or middle positions for wealthy merchants and artisans). Or (viewed more anthropologically) it is a simple mechanism that serves the reproduction of the key institutions and convictions of the culture – sometimes as a means to ends that are taken-for-granted in the culture; sometimes of the taken-for-granted itself.

The origins of school, those thousands of years before, lay in the value of mathematics to astronomical observation. Priesthood, in Mesopotamia, required it, and this is where Western schooling was born. The sophistic tradition in Classical Greece is merely a variation on this theme – the knowledge and skills useful for politics instead of priesthood. There is no conceptual invention here at all.

With this in mind, it might be wise to look again at the beginnings of that philosophical tradition, with its real invention of something new worthy of being called “education”, and do so with new eyes. What we have here, and what is readily available for us to look and see, is the work of Plato – particularly, but not exclusively, in the Republic. Perhaps there is as much here about the invention of education as there is about the invention of social philosophy and the philosophical problem of good living. Perhaps we cannot even begin to understand these latter two, without renewing our appreciation of the former.

It might be useful, for instance, to ask whether there is something intimate and important about the relationship, for Plato, between doing philosophy and being an educator. In our eyes, Plato is a philosopher who (secondarily) had some interesting things to say about education. It is worth considering whether our relative dismissiveness of education here says more about us than it does about him.

Education, for us, is a relatively simple-minded utility – a clumsy and applied field with little worthy of much intellectual attention. It might, however, be our own educational indifference and sloppiness that leads us to be irritated by his practice. In our reduction of education to various kinds of compulsory schooling, we are too over-schooled to grasp what he was about.

Plato wrote in a dialogue form – a dramatic form – and that has always been viewed as somewhat peculiar. Philosophers so often want to struggle their way around this difficulty – his great inconvenience for us – to get at “Plato’s view” – the philosophy that Plato believed, and no doubt intended to teach us. (I saw a philosopher remark recently that if he were Plato he would have ditched the dialogues and written it all out straight). It is quite annoying that he should have presented these ideas within a fiction that we have to “deconstruct” in order to get at his real views.

The fiction all centres around the character of Socrates, an annoying fiction, too, because everyone has always known that it isn’t the “real” Socrates, even if we often give up and treat “Socrates” as Socrates. So does that mean that Socrates is merely Plato, and the character of Socrates is the mouthpiece of Plato? Or is it somehow important that Plato’s “Socrates” is not the real Socrates, while also not being Plato?

In the Republic, Socrates offers the well-known “Platonic” theory of forms, and this theory is used to attack art. All of the features of our world that we experience are “appearances” of the ideal “forms” that underlie them. They imperfectly represent the forms in various accidental ways. Art, which consists of the representation of the stuff and happenings of our perceptible world, is thus twice removed from reality. It is an appearance of an appearance. One art that he singles out for attack in this way for its divorce from reality is – drama.

We are told this in an art form – a dramatic dialogue from the mouth of a character who we know imperfectly represents the person it is supposed to represent. What a silly mistake – or set of mistakes – for Plato to make! Not nearly as smart as he thought he was.

And that seems right, if we are to measure Plato’s work against some sort of philosophical dissertation that presents and defends a thesis. We might, however, recall all that we have considered elsewhere about experience; about its educational importance, and the inadequacies of our educational implementations to address it, about art and experience, and about obliqueness and indirectness in the cultivation of experience educationally. (These matters are discussed at some length here An “educational” system at odds with the educational: The incompatibility of purpose, here Authority and ego in teaching . . . and the cult of leadership, and here Personal experience and public performance: the two sides of a genuinely educational practice)

What if Plato isn’t always telling the “truth”, as he understood that to be? What if, instead, his attitude is educational? What if he might have been offering Athenian youth something like this. “I am not here to tell you the truth. This is not only because I am not at all sure that I know the truth, but also, even if I thought I did, I might, In a year’s time, have changed my mind anyway. It is you who are responsible for determining the truth, and you must learn to think and judge well for yourself in order to do so, because your lives and your minds are at stake. What I can do is challenge you to think about these things, not to supply you with ‘the answers’ at all, as if I am claiming some knowledge and authority that I can’t pretend to possess”. What if his purpose is entirely different from a presentation to the American Philosophical Association, or the Philosophy of Education Society?

His Socrates, however, is in dialogue with ambitious, probably aristocratic young men who find his company – because of his conversation – addictive. He speaks their language, and does so about  issues out of their lives and experience.

He doesn’t set them reading, and they don’t ask what will be on the test. There isn’t going to be a credential at the end, or a graduation party. Indeed, though they came to learn things that might advance their careers, they keep coming back just because they find him interesting, stimulating. There is something  about the experience. The process awakens in them a new eros – not just desire for fame and power and reputation – but the eros or desire of the pursuit of “truth”.

The pursuit.

Well, it isn’t the best of discussions, because Socrates seems to do most of the talking, and not much time listening. But this is art, and these are made-up characters. Plato isn’t reporting, and if it was just a reporting of extended conversations among the kids, and not tweaked up as it is by the character of Socrates, and led by him, we probably wouldn’t still be reading it.

While the conversation in the dialogues is stacked in favour of Socrates-the-character, we have no way of knowing that this is what daily discourse was like in Plato’s Academy. It is, hypothetically, unlikely, since Plato seemed to have such a good sense, in writing his dialogues, of just what the young men might say and respond to. He may well have done a lot more listening than the dialogues suggest.

After all, in all the complexity of this artistic creation, “Socrates”, the character, isn’t just in dialogue with Athenian youth. He is in dialogue with us, or Plato wouldn’t have written it, and it is part of the experience of the art that we need to engage in that dialogue ourselves, in some way.

It is art. But it is educational art. It is educational work with philosophy, and so there is a deliberate obliqueness, and indirectness in his engagement with us, because he isn’t attempting to “transmit”, or fill empty vessels. He is working in and on experience. We are, indeed, witnessing the birth of the idea of education, and with a sophistication that so few, in our “educationally sophisticated” age, are yet able to grasp.

It may even be a mistake, in our time, to think of “the Socratic method” of teaching as a teaching technique at all, rather than as an artistic device. As a “teaching method”, we drift back to the idea of “teacher-as-authority”, and if we stand back and look at what Plato is most likely doing here, it is probable that he wouldn’t approve of that. If we use such a method, we are apt to forget that we are being paid, and the character, in the drama, was not. They sought him out. He didn’t advertise, or offer scholarships.

When we use the “Socratic method of teaching”, the agendas, once again, are ours. But this shouldn’t be the effect of reading the dialogues, unless we are slavish. Socrates may appear to have agendas – leading us to “doctrines”. More likely, though – more consistent with the art, and more useful to our philosophical development – is not that we are “led” to agree with him, but that our understanding is challenged by him. He leads us into difficulty. That doesn’t mean that Socrates wasn’t always telling us what Plato believed the truth to be. It doesn’t mean that he was, though, either.

And so, when we read the Republic, we experience a work of art – a dramatic dialogue – containing figures who are experiencing this dialogue in artistic time. We have an experience of fictional people who are undergoing experiences, and creating external conditions of experience for each other. In addition, Socrates, in this work of art, tells stories and myths – works of art within works of art that are to be experienced by the characters – and by us. Where is “reality” in all this? How many layers are we removed now?

Hence the story that is the context of the whole dialogue – the dinner party. Then there is the story of the ring of Gyges, the story of a society that might satisfy pigs, the myth of the metals, the myth of the cave, the whole story of the republic itself that is to be created to achieve justice, the story of its decline and fall. Finally, there is the myth that ends the Republic – the Myth of Er. At the beginning, he had been challenged to explain justice in the individual, and he had said he first needed to give an account of the just society. When he completes that task, he tells us how it won’t work. And then offers us the Myth of Er. About the individual. Perhaps the answer. Finally.  After all that.

But if this myth does anything, it doesn’t do that. What it does do is shows us the difficulty of choosing, and what is at stake. It is, itself, a challenge. Your business is to mind your own business; the business of living your own life well. Doing yourself justice. Choosing how to do that is very, very hard, as is learning to do so. But learning to live well is the most important learning of our lives. So where is the recipe for that?

No recipe. Just the probing and the challenging, and putting up of examples and stories, and taking them down. Comparing practices and experiences, and proposals. Infuriating us. Getting under our skin. Making us itch. Showing how scratching will give us no real relief. Prodding us to examine our lives, until we go away from him, going over and over our own lives on our own, talking to ourselves about them. Arguing with his “Socrates”. Changing our minds.

Well over a thousand years later, the second great book of Western educational theory was written, clearly inspired by the Republic, and in response to it. Rousseau’s Emile.

It was a novel.

If this was the true invention of education, and not the competition between philosophers and sophists over the content of schooling, what became of that invention, as our preoccupation with schooling and teaching came to be more important than the idea of education itself?

Because of our own obsession with schooling – the reduction of education to schooling that we have inherited and taken to such great heights of bureaucracy and social engineering, we inevitably look back and see education through our own, so very well-schooled, eyes. We see bits of the idea of education co-opted into “schooling theory”, and mistake these borrowings for the real thing.

One of these elements is the sense that education should have intrinsic value – that it should somehow be pursued for its own sake. Tired vestiges of this exist in “learning how to learn”, being “life-long learners”, and “having a love of learning”. Noticeably, just the sheer fact of learning at all is concentrated in these slogans – in our anti-intellectual societies, in which we leave schooling behind with relief.

Like most people today, wealthy young men did seek out teachers to help advance their careers, and where these teachers were not philosophers like Socrates, Aristotle and Plato, the students were willing to pay for it. Unlike most learners today, however, they acquired a taste for it, even after it had ceased to have career value.

This became clear when Philip of Macedon and Alexander conquered Greece, and thereby destroyed political life. When politics collapsed, part of the culture collapsed. Engaging in the political could no longer be an aspiration for the better young men. It fell out of the prescribed Good Life, which had to be (modestly) reconstructed.

Since there was no longer a career path, it was pointless seeking out teachers in order to gain those career skills. But unlike our societies, these aristocratic young men had acquired a “love of learning”, and continued to seek out this knowledge and skill anyway. While good oratory had no doubt always been enjoyed and appreciated aesthetically, as it was engaged politically, this enjoyment was all that was left, but it was enough to come to the fore. Oratory and the literary skills now came to be valued in themselves – as marks of one’s class identity, and of the cultivation that was expected and admired within that class. They became men (and – in time – women) of “letters”.

It is important to notice that other intellectual pleasures had long been appreciated within the culture – the drama and poetry produced by leisured aristocrats, and the scientific and mathematical reflections that preceded classical philosophy. That is, a variety of studies “for their own sake” were already a part of an aristocratic, elite culture; already appreciated as goods in themselves that were features of a larger good – the good life that was culturally defined through the approval and practice of the better classes of people. Then, as now, the hierarchical scale of class and privilege announced what good living was, the more clearly so, the closer one came to the top.

Thus we can say that schooling was now doing something intrinsically valuable. For the first time in its brief existence, higher schooling was not merely a means to extrinsic ends. It appeared capable of being “educational” – of taking advantage of the claim to intrinsic value that only the philosophers had been able to make.

The difference, however, is crucial. In the case of “schooling as education”, the only way in which this intrinsic value can get into schools is through representing the conventional values of the pre-existing, privileged culture. That is, it is to take a conventional, fashionable recipe for the good life and confer the value of things pursued for their own sake into the purposes schooling. Schooling is not merely the means to attaining the value of the privileged elite, it comes to represent, express and transmit that value.

Again, there is no educational invention here. This is precisely the cultural transmission that unthinkingly prefigured education all the way back in the history of the species, far beyond the invention of schooling. It vanishes from sight into prehistory, and is evident in all cultures everywhere. If there is any novelty here at all, it is in the capture of intrinsic value, through this conventional and ubiquitous anthropological process, by the new higher schooling which (the philosophers aside) had largely been developed in Athens for instrumental purposes.

We should note, too, that this novelty is limited to higher schooling only. Lower (“primary”) schooling was in existence in these city states before the appearance of the classical philosophers in Athens, and its focus on literacy was to give access to the poets as the repository of stories and information about the gods and heroes. An interest in Homeric literature was not unlike later interest in the Bible – for conventional religious reasons, and cultural familiarity. Your effectiveness in any sort of conversation or decision-making depended on your knowledge of this stuff. Access to such teaching was at a cost, of course, which not everyone could afford, and access to handwritten text no doubt cost more.

In view of this we might even note how anomalous it was that sophistic higher education was so exclusively instrumental – so career driven – during this period. And the answer surely lies in the particular priority that was given to politics in the brief life of Athenian democracy. As we have seen, other vocations existed and were valued by the elite for their intrinsic worth, but here, the value of being a politician stood out so far as to create a peculiarly narrowing of cultural transmission through schooling; one that was, for a time, exclusively instrumental. Taking any larger view of the history of schooling – before or since – it would be usual to expect it to be an ambiguous amalgam of the transmission of culturally approved and taken-for-granted means and ends.

This incorporation into higher schooling of a very vague notion of intrinsic value, which is kept deliberately vague – almost unintelligible – to mask its real role in unthinking cultural transmission, has been the downfall of the idea of “education” in our own time. We are now sceptical of the value of the pursuits of privileged elites and their recipes for good living, particularly when these are bundled up with so many injustices and abuses of power as we have inherited these today. The idea of initiation into conventional tastes and pleasures for no better reason than that they are  widely approved expressions of the cultural fashions and tastes of those in power is now rightly regarded with the deep suspicion of indoctrination.

The crucial difference is that the intrinsic value inherent in the pursuit of the philosophers when they self-consciously distinguished education from instrumental learning, is that, for them, the intrinsic value lay in the learners themselves – in the value of their lives, and not merely in things that some people, finding them pleasurable, have the power to bring others into conformity with their tastes.

These agendas are masked by the deliberate vagueness of the conventional explanation, and the fact that it appears to defy further attempts to explain it – such as through “the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake” (a more common version in our day would be the idea of “love of learning”). To the extent that such expressions have any intelligible meaning at all, they involve imbuing breath-takingly open-ended things that are treated as external (“knowledge”, or “learning”) – with intrinsic value, as if value lies in those things, but outside of us.
This is to reify intrinsic value – as if “knowledge”, or “learning”, exist in some kind of abstract way, out there in the universe, possessing value inherent in them, and we “pursue them”, by chasing after them and trying to catch them. It doesn’t take much reflection to realise that some knowledge is pointless – worthless, just as much learning is simply harmful, and shouldn’t be loved.
It is vital that these conventional, cultural assignments of intrinsic value are kept entirely vague; never spelled out. If they were, it would become obvious immediately that they are there to mask cultural prescriptions that would otherwise be difficult to justify. Yet in schooling-language such evasions ring down thousands of years, always applicable in their abstraction despite the different cultural interests displayed at different times.
Again, the mission of the philosophers was quite different. It is quite easy to pursue philosophy for the pleasure of it. Many have, and many do, and for this reason there was no difficulty, in the Hellenistic world, to include philosophy among that bundle of intellectual pleasures that gave “education” its intrinsic value, sustaining its ambiguous presence in schooling. The educational quest of the philosophers was not about its pleasures, however. It was about its power to save lives – not in the sense of preventing physical death, but death of the spirit, at least on this earth – of discovering how to make life worth living, and living it well.
Value is something each of us must confer. When we confer intrinsic value on some pursuit, we are assigning a value for our own sake, and this value that we assign is a part of our reckoning when we choose what to do in and with our lives. This is the process by which we give value to ourselves. When we give up on these processes, and defer to the approval of others on such matters that are central to our self-respect, we give up on ourselves.
Here, then, we have a quite different, and robust understanding of the intrinsic value of education that contrasts sharply from the adoption of prevailing intellectual fashion and the ideology of the age. Instead, it starts with the human person itself, its value, and its worth. It understands that value, and its possibility and potential, in terms of its construction through learning, of its potential capability as a knowledge-maker and a value-maker – the maker of its life.
As such, it is has the potential capacity to improve its grasp of its condition through doubt and personal challenge, and through whatever power of reflective and deliberative thought it is able to achieve. From here, it entertains the task of living well as a challenge, something of first importance about which we should be unsettled.
It is important, too, to give some thought to the continuing role of vocationalism. We have already seen that, though politics had been the highest calling, it hadn’t been the only one, or there wouldn’t have been, for instance, a classical theatre. In addition to being politicians, the ancient aristocrats showed a strong enthusiasm for being generals and admirals as well. As we move from the Hellenistic period to consider Rome, we find that this “intrinsically valuable” education also turns out to have all kinds of vocational benefits – not only for generals, but for lawyers, doctors and the many administrators that the Empire came to require.
This is, of course, another aspect of that muddying of value in schooling that we saw when the idea of intrinsic value was co-opted to schooling in Greece, a feature that persisted throughout Western history, where that intrinsic value of “education” has always been in competition with the vocational.
Thus schooling co-opted a weakened reflection of the idea of education – through the idea of the intrinsic value of its pursuit. It did so by settling that value on what had become of intrinsic value in a certain social class position, where to display one’s skill with letters was something much admired, and set one apart. When that “good life” includes various “teachable” accomplishments, then the schooling process can be seen to be a pursuit of something intrinsically valuable.
This kind of “intrinsic pursuit” contains deep ambiguities and ambivalences however. As a pursuit of a good life for its own sake, when that good life is conceptually connected with a privileged life of a ruling class elite, then the schooling becomes identified with that class. This becomes especially important for those endeavouring to enter it, if they are not born to it, or fully socialised in harmony with it. It becomes a means for social mobility, for social climbing and social proof.
The distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic value becomes muddied here, as this sort of schooling always is, even at its best. The intrinsic valuing is presented as being represented within the system, and not in the mixture of reasons that individuals – teachers as well as learners – have for engaging with it.
Just as the primary vocation of the free and leisured citizen of Classical Greece was politics, as a part of the intrinsically valuable and conventional “Good Life”, so, throughout European history, it has always been important that the leisured aristocrat do something “useful”. This was a matter of honour and duty. It was, in other words, part and parcel of the class-based conception of the worthwhile life. Self-respect demanded it.
Though this vocationalism was plural, in contrast to the overriding importance of politics in democratic Athens, we still see the elite seeking out trade-schools in much the same way. These are, however, often mixed up with the kinds of studies that supposedly have intrinsic value, because just as with the ancients, a familiarity with letters turns out to be useful to administration, law and diplomacy, to generalship and high office in the church, as well as to displays of appropriate cultivation at court, in the great halls and the salons.
At the same time, intrinsic and extrinsic become confused in other ways, because though “education” is supposed to be of intrinsic value, there is sufficient variety in this conception of the “Good Life” to suggest that any particular “intrinsic value” among the elite was not entirely obligatory, and many had little to do with schooling. Being unlettered might have diminished your chances of being a diplomat on a serious mission, or a tactically astute general, but it didn’t get in the way of hunt’n, and many an aristocrat was content with the damage he could cause with his sword from his horse in a good melee, even if the honours of generalship passed him by.
As always, the true balance of these motives would, of course, depend upon the circumstances and the life-plan of the learner who sought the learning, and not on the intentions of teachers. How well their contact with “letters” facilitated their decision-making about good living is an open question, particularly since vocational decisions, like marital decisions, were largely predetermined.
Thus, though it is clear enough that any perceived competition between the philosophers and the sophists over schooling was resolved in the ancient world in favour of the sophists, the co-option of the idea of education was never a clean resolution of this conflict at all, but simply a reassertion of dominant class values. All that occurred was a slight change in the nature of traditional enculturation or socialisation into the values of the ruling class ideal, in which the study of popular subjects of the day – the ones fashionably available for display in the public and private lives of the cultural elite, were considered to be worthy of study “just in themselves”, for no better reason than that they were valued that way in the conventional ideal.
This notion of “education” has therefore persisted in uneasy competition with sheer utility throughout Western history, with the significance of the competition muted by the fact that many of those subjects that had been held to be of intrinsic value also proved to have considerable vocational advantages. In our time, however, the fragility of this superficial and incoherent understanding of intrinsic value has turned out disastrously for the idea “education” in schooling for two reasons.
Firstly, the range of academic disciplines and studies have proliferated – explosively so in the last two hundred years – with each becoming more and more specialised. Do they all have intrinsic value? In what respects? What happens when we try to reference them to a conception of the Good Life? If we can’t reference them to such a conception (and our modern pluralism should make this impossible), what does their intrinsic value amount to? If it all comes down to their instrumental value, how do we make sense, now, of the ends to which they are to be put, when those ends no longer have an overriding conception of the worthwhile life to guide them?
Secondly, in our time there has been a strong turn against the idea of an intrinsically valuable ruling-class life, inherited from the European aristocratic ideal. When “education” is stripped of this, however, it will still need some sort of publicly promoted conviction about its worth that will provide a widespread reason for undertaking it. To be continuous with tradition, this perception of value must be one that is endorsed by the elite – one that they clearly appreciate in their own lives and admire in each other, while also being capable of becoming a widespread popular aspiration, as universal schooling requires.
To see such an ideal we only need to look to the lives and conduct of those who receive the most status and power, and whose questionable behaviour is the most quickly forgiven. In our case, these are likely to be the most affluent and privileged, the most well-protected by law, and often, seemingly, the most capable of securing their own privacy. They tend to be the ones who fund politicians, rather than being politicians themselves. They represent an ideal of life; their attitudes, aspirations and undertakings announcing what is most worth achieving. They, more than any others, define “success”, and “merit” as these are understood in the meritocratic role of schooling.
What is intrinsically valuable here is not just the enjoyment of material luxury, but the enjoyment of the possibilities of what money can buy, which are not all physical “things”. Neither is it just “that we possess it” that provides the motivation – the intrinsic value – but “that we deserve it”. This enables the “merit” of meritocracy, a merit that even conveys a certain entitlement to rule and decide for others. Though people may step off the meritocratic escalator at various points in its rise, these are the heights towards which it tends.
We can see the presence of this “deserving” in the endless daily torrents of superficial injunctions that most of us receive about the virtues of character and the satisfactions in our little victories that are apparently required in order to be good teachers, leaders, or entrepreneurs, or in any other ways to “realise our dreams”. This sort of positive self-talk now seems endemic in schools. Indeed, we ought to be able to notice that the undemocratic virtues of leadership – the paternalism and the vision that we are supposed to have for the lives of others – is arguably more important now than the virtues of character that democratic equals ought to possess.
It is hard to see any of this intrinsic value as being available within schools themselves, however. It is not a model based on current satisfactions, but on the idea of eventual reward for effort, and thus it is entirely instrumental. It seems quite ludicrous to suppose that any of the intrinsic pleasures of the rich and powerful are enjoyed by the young in schools as they work their way up the meritocratic obstacle-course in pursuit of such success. It is supposed to be difficult, or there would be no effort, and hence no merit. The powers of the social goods – the ultimate cultural capital – come after school; when one may hope to join the elect.
The irony is that such an agenda of schooling is offered to the world, and taken up world-wide, as if it presents a kind of neutrality before the problem of good living. With starvation or poverty haunting us from behind, what other direction could any of us proceed, but in the direction of wealth and power according to our merits, regardless of our identity in terms of gender, ethnicity or religion?
The transmission of these intrinsically worthwhile agendas of the rich and powerful start with the anxieties that parents have about our futures, and are constantly represented in public; continually reinforced by schools, and then employers, and always by politicians. They come to us as a universal answer to our problems of good living, overwhelming our “petty” differences.
The cultural transmission here is almost invisible to us, appearing simply as normal and neutral, just as did similar conventions of dominance in Ancient Greece, or Rome, or under the European aristocracy of birth. We do ask questions of these conventions, but our questions are idle, and ultimately involve us in a kind of acceptance and surrender.
There is no education here.
There was only one invention of education, and the idea is more important today than it has ever been, because, supposedly at least, we share deep convictions about the equality of human worth in diversity, and the right to our personal agency that underpin our modern ideas of democracy, even if they are poorly implemented in them. It is no accident that this invention occurred in an ancient democracy. The scale of the practical human implications are vastly more important today, however, because these aspirations are global, and not limited to the confines of a slave-holding city. It is no accident either, that this invention was perverted, and largely died as ancient democracy died.
The ancient philosophers questioned good living and challenged conventional “wisdom”, attempting to expose its thoughtlessness. They understood the Good Life, and the intrinsic value we might seek within it, as being radically problematic, and that we are denied our own lives when our thinking is given over to others, or to “the prevailing view”, just because it prevails.
Truth isn’t pursued apart from the people doing the pursuing, and it is here that the intrinsic value will lie. If there is any meaning to the idea that “knowledge should be pursued for its own sake”, or that we should cultivate a “love of learning”, that meaning is only given in answer to the next questions that need to be asked. “What knowledge is of most worth? What learning is most beneficial to our lives?”
We must not leave these questions to be answered by the fashionable pleasures of our day that are cultivated by sophisticated marketing, and chased after without much thought. Nor must we leave these questions to “experts”, for they will make the decisions for us for their own reasons, no matter how well meaning, and this will make us their creatures. We must each ask such questions with a determination to find answers about our own quest for purpose, for meaning and fulfillment in life, each for ourselves, and we must ask them more than once, learning to pursue our own best answers with skill.
When we do not beg the question of the value of the knowledge and learning, but ask serious questions of them, we must do so with a recognition that this value will rest in the value that we give to our lives.
And that is where we should always begin.

© R. Graham Oliver, 2019

• Readers wishing to explore further the destruction of the Western idea of a “liberal education” in our time here A liberal education – exit stage right. Part I: the attack
• For a discussion of the ultimate inadequacy of that tradition and the need for something much better, see here A liberal education – Part II: why it needs replacing