Part 1: What is Education?

Chapter 1 .

Introduction: What is education?

This chapter explains the difference between education and schooling. It proposes that the purpose of education to to enable learners to develop their own good life, which inevitably has much to do with defining a good society. Anything less than giving priority to equipping people to take charge of the worth of their own lives is little more than preparation for hi-tech slavery. Democracy and education are intimately bound together. When schools fail to be educational, democracy suffers, as does any chance of respecting our humanity.

Education isn’t the same as schooling. Schooling need not be educational, and perhaps rarely is. So what is education that it differs from schooling?

 Schooling is the easy bit. We all went through schooling. It is such a huge, dominant institution and it keeps coming back into our lives. But it is the idea of education, and not the idea of schools that people have all the trouble with. Education isn’t tangible like a bricks and mortar school, or even an on-line school. It is an idea, an ideal; a purpose that gives direction to actions and decisions – much like words such as justice, or democracy.

You don’t learn about education by being “shown one” – like being shown a school, just as you don’t learn much about justice by being shown a court, or a judge.

And one of the big problems with the idea of education is that it is so obvious. Because it is obvious, people assume they don’t have to think about it. They take it for granted because they take so much of their lives for granted – as we often must. They don’t inspect the idea, don’t unpack it and analyse it, or work out what applying it should involve. Not in any detail. There is a whole field and profession called “philosophy of education”, in which people will do anything except try and work out what “education” should mean. They dabble on the edges of it, but do little to refine it, and certainly don’t draw the world’s attention to it when its principles are violated.

Education should be about doing people good by enabling or equipping them to live good, or worthwhile lives, to flourish as human beings, so far as learning has a role to play in that.

Well, that was a shocker! Now that we have got that clear, and it is all so simple and obvious, perhaps we can all go home!

But of course the problem is – who is to decide what a good or worthwhile life is? Or better – how is that to be decided?

We each have a different opinion about that, and I don’t dare to tell you how to live your life, just as I will very likely get offended if you tell me how to live mine. Consider, too, how much harm – the damage – that has been done to people in the name of doing them good. Doing them good is the first line of excuse of tyrants, and megalomaniacs, religious cultists and technocratic policy-makers and administrators – in fact just about anyone who thinks they know better than anyone else. Adults used to beat children black and blue to do them good. We aren’t allowed to beat up their bodies any more. But what are we doing to their minds?

On the other hand, it can’t all just be a matter of personal opinion either, otherwise the very idea of education loses its point. Your two year-old’s opinion is then just as good as yours, and the issues of education simply evaporate in the face of that. Not even you, in your most radical relativist moments,  are going to accept that. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the educational problematic could be resolved so easily!

So is the answer, then, to reduce education to the level at which we can all safely agree about good living, and avoid anything that might offend anyone? That would explain why our ideas about the purpose of education are so vague, and why the content of schooling seems so obviously right to all of us. Well – you have to learn to read and write! Well, you have to learn to do some mathematics and science! Well, everyone has to learn the skills to get a job!

Now we have set the bar so low, though, that it doesn’t even reach the level of the living of a worthwhile or meaningful life at all. Because this is the level we would set for slaves in a reasonably high tech, slave-owning society. Given what you would buy slaves to do these days, this is the schooling you would have to give them.

Interestingly – and alarmingly – very few people even notice this. What schools do is just so obviously right to them that they don’t even notice that it doesn’t even put people on the bottom rung of being free.

So we need to go back to that idea – education should be about doing people good by enabling or equipping them to live good, or worthwhile lives, to flourish as human beings, so far as learning has a role to play in that – and we need to see that it is only the starting point for some real and serious thought and invention.

Getting a practical picture of what education entails requires a lot of careful thought and discussion about its purpose, and the solution of a lot of particular difficulties. It requires a lot of analysis, a lot of criticism, a lot of information and understanding, a lot of practice with examples . . . before we can even begin to be sure how educational principles might work, and know when we are acting properly; acting on educational judgment.

The vagueness that we live with, and that we pretend justifies our decisions and practices just won’t do. And I don’t even know of any educational professionals who have ever done this seriously – except for some academics who master one of the few available and rather peculiar educational theories, but that never appears to make any practical difference either.

How much does all this matter, anyway?

When I asked university students to come up with ideas about education, they were sometimes frustrated and wanted to look it up. Well someone must know! Someone in Wellington! (in other countries you can think of your own seat of government. Someone in Washington must know! Someone in London, or Edinburgh, or Berlin, or Paris, or Rome, or Moscow!). I used to smile inside when they said this, because that is what I believed when I was at their stage. I spent years “looking it up” before I gave up that route, became a philosopher, and got on with the job myself.

Human beings are learners – perhaps even before birth. We are distinct in that, among the animals. Most animals get going very quickly – get on their feet and sort out the basics of their world instinctively. In comparison, humans begin for a long-period quite helplessly, and have a long period of dependency, where they slowly build complex minds through learning. What becomes of them depends heavily upon what they learn.

They not only learn to do things, they have the capacity to learn to reflect on them. This makes them enormously malleable, plastic. It makes them open to a huge variety of purposes and intentions, and it enables them to choose among them.  What human beings are, and what they can become is heavily dependent on their learning possibilities.

Their choices might be idle, whimsical, habitual and governed by the choice of others in the past. But the potential is there, too, for them to be sophisticated, thoughtful, reflective, and informed by all kinds of understanding that they can develop and pursue. Because of this they can be novel, too, and independent, and personal.

As they enter our world, these new entrants participate in environments set up by us according to the way our culture is working, and the place of their families within it – the political and economic systems, institutions, current manufacture and invention, the traditions and expectations and so on.

The home and family is, of course, the first environment, and all that comes later is built on what is learned there. The infants construct themselves out of that world – their understanding of themselves and their world and what they can make of it in and through their activity and interactivity – through play and the caregiving that sustains them. They are learning and constructing meaning all the time.

This is the primary educational context, and continues for as long as they live. I call it the educational context, because it is the context within which education can take place, but the environment, and what they learn in it may not in fact be educational at all. What they learn and what they construct may not be beneficial to them. It may be harmful. It may not have to do with them coming to live good, or worthwhile or meaningful lives at all. It may corrupt these possibilities, manipulate them, exploit them for the benefit of others.

Most of that environment, insofar as it is humanly contrived, could  be educational, if it was contrived so that beneficial things are learned, or contrived to facilitate the construction of beneficial learning. But it might be contrived with no thought to beneficial learning at all – overwhelmed by the desires of adults around them, or by social structures that have little interest in the good of these particular young people.

You might, for instance, be born into a family where there is no consistency of rules or caregiving, and that is rendered unsafe with violence or abuse. Language may be used to hurt or demean or manipulate. You might be born into a society that denigrates people of your kind – according to class or skin colour or gender or ancestry, and your family may have accepted these realities.

You may be born into slavery, or into institutions that use you as man-power or woman-power like horse-power to create wealth for others. You may be born into systems that want you to be cost-effective, or to generate a good return on investment. We know a good deal about how people learn from participating in activities, and how their learning can be different, depending on how we set up the rules. This knowledge can be used to do harm to people, just as it can be used to do good.

The key to all this is that education involves making value judgements – what we should be doing and what we shouldn’t be doing – when we set up institutions, develop policies, design infrastructure; when we make laws, draw up housing and neighbourhoods, create markets, employ labour – when we do anything that establishes authority and power. The judgments to be made are about the learning consequences – in terms of their potential harm and benefit to the people who are affected by all these practices and circumstance – who will participate in some way.

The harm and benefit should be decided in terms of the ability of the learners to make and live good, worthwhile and meaningful lives for themselves, so far as learning is involved in that.

In the past, and across the globe, the question of what is a good, or worthwhile or meaningful life was decided by tradition and power. The answers tended to be those that supported prevailing religious authorities and political establishments. People tended to be born into a conception of the good, or worthwhile, or meaningful life.

This only works well where there is an established monopoly. Difficulties begin to emerge if there are alternative communities pursuing different conceptions near at hand, and if these communities share some institutions. Trade among communities has traditionally brought people into contact at the individual level, and when this happens, the personal contact introduces challenge into the lives of all parties. Questions of what is good living, and are we living the best life, become more open.

Two strategies that tend to develop are, on the one hand, to protect our way of life, defending it from the influence of those others with whom we have to deal, or on the other hand to dominate, and perhaps convert the other communities, suppressing anything that is incompatible with our conviction that we know better than anyone else. Both of these approaches create problems if you also have to share and cooperate with these people on other levels.

To the extent that contact and interaction among communities of difference increases – as they are driven more and more together, and as they share more institutions – beginning with trade and production, but progressing to shared infrastructure, entertainments, political, military, health and so on – the conflict either becomes intolerably violent and destructive of those institutions, or attitudes of toleration have to develop and extend to the increasingly common institutions themselves.

We come to appreciate that we are never going to reach agreement and settle on one point of view that gives meaning to life, that makes it worthwhile or purposeful, and we are never going to allow other people to impose theirs on us. We may learn from each other, but we must be allowed to do so freely. Morality comes to be dominated by the idea of “respect”, and it is a respect for each of us as human beings, and as human beings who are entitled to self-determination.

It is from here that the answer to the question “what is good, or meaningful living?” . . . . acquires an important condition  . . . .

“whatever a good or meaningful or worthwhile life is, we each have to decide that for ourselves”.

The educational agenda must move from imposing a conception of the good on each person to equipping them to choose, to develop one, for themselves.

So we are born into this world, and through our learning in it, and through the various understandings that we begin to construct as we attempt to “make something of it all”, we are to put together our own conception of good living, we are to discover or invent a purposefulness for our lives; we are to make something worthwhile of ourselves, for ourselves. We are to make our lives our own.

How do we do that?

Our culture might continually announce the importance of self-determination, but that does not mean that the culture has been arranged in such a way that we can actually learn what is necessary to achieve it. In the beginning, we have a few models of good and worthwhile living – our caregivers and their friends and associates. They will represent to us what they think – and sometimes what they pretend – to be good living. They will show it in their actions and reactions.

But they might not be very good judges. Indeed, the best that they might be doing could be drug-abuse, anxiety and defeat. Among them we will first learn our core concepts and the foundations of our reasoning and critical thinking about life, since we learn to reason through internalizing the give-and-take of discussion.

This discussion might, of course, involve a lot of worrying, fear and rational self-deception. It will doubtless involve a stance towards politics and religion, family, work and success, foolhardiness, wrong-doing and reconciliation, exclusion and acceptance. We also learn routines of self-maintenance – cleaning our teeth, toileting – as these are roughly followed in our community. And we learn the normal end-points of most inquiries . . . . that the meaning of life is a joke, that some people deserve to be poor, that you can’t change society, that involvement in politics is pointless, and that the national team are heroes.

It could be much better than this, of course. You might grow up among people who think well about life, who have extensive resources from the history of thought, and a range of academic disciplines, who are rich in experience, well-informed about trends and developments and who talk about life thoughtfully and critically, as well as self-critically; talk through and around its issues and questions with equally sophisticated partners and friends, mutually seeking out blind spots and working to adapt in the light of what they learn.

They might encourage and coach your participation with them, so that talking about life and its possibilities and difficulties is natural and normal, and the usual exclusions of age are minimized. They include you in their talk. The dinner table and the barbecue might be places of fun and laughter, but also of intelligence, thoughtful and sensitive challenge and the sharing of insightful stories.

But as the young person increasingly goes out into the world beyond his or her family of origin, to what extent will he or she move into an educational world that facilitates his or her abilities to conceive of a good life, and to live it well? Will he or she encounter a world that has been arranged with thought to what is educational; or will they encounter a world that is a wild wood of indoctrination?

Very likely they will encounter a world in which authority is abused – in which government institutions and corporations protect themselves against private individuals, taking the path that is most convenient for the institution, hopefully (from their point of view) short of attracting unwelcome media attention. They will encounter a world in which the citizen is infantalised; hedged in with so much risk-management and health and safety that we aren’t even competent to play in our own back yards, and fed boiled down tips on how to live well from authorities set up to know better.

Are our systems of production and consumption educational? Our workplaces are as likely as not to be mentally and emotionally toxic places that challenge our self-respect. We worry at the weakness of people at Christmas for getting into debt, for succumbing to the pressures that their children put on them for presents, as if all that extravagant marketing is just a natural force, like the north wind, or gravity.

We wring our hands at child poverty, as if the parents of impoverished children aren’t impoverished too, in a world we have made in which ten percent of the population have been allowed to capture sixty percent of the wealth, and wage increases have fallen behind the cost of living for decades. When we distribute wealth, we distribute minds –  powers of thought and feeling and competence, and perceived as well as real opportunity and self-esteem.

The Twentieth Century was the first century of the great age of mental manipulation. Extraordinary technologies of mind control were invented – so powerful that their promoters indulge in the vanity of thinking that to understand a computer is to understand a mind.

Alongside the technologies came the psychology of mind control, with its great guru, Joseph Goebbels and his ministry of propaganda, laying down the model for subsequent generations of development in the advertising and public relations industries – industries that dwarf the high-end budgets for schooling in most modern States.

Economists, despairing of the (hardly surprising) bad choices that people make, place their hope in algorithms that will use the massive data that is accumulating about us in order to apply the new technologies to “nudge” us in the direction of the choices they deem right for us to make. They (it must be assumed) are unaffected.

A part of the success of all this is that we think and act as if none of this makes any difference, while Western –  and now global –  affluence becomes associated with conspicuous consumption, depression and suicide, the fracturing of relationships, drug dependency, obesity, diabetes, and anxiety.

If the young person did grow up among intelligent discussions about life in their domestic world, the chances are that these discussions will wither when they leave home unless they can maintain connection with the thin vein of educational awareness and thoughtfulness in the wider community. More generally, knowledge is what you get at the end of a Google search. Decisions are what you make in your gut. Life and its conversation are negotiated by cliches and platitudes. Let go of it, get over it, move on, you will know it when you see it. Look after yourself. You deserve it. Work it off in the gym. There is always comfort food.

I have so far said little about schooling, except to mention what a huge industry it is. This is because everyone expects the answers to education to be about schooling, whereas all that schooling, about which we are so obsessed, is on the side of advertising, public relations, production and consumption and political manageability.

It takes decades of schooling to get a good job. But schooling has little to say about living a worthwhile life. That appears to be something that we can make up readily enough for ourselves, with almost no help at all. Like those other institutions, its message is that living well is simple, there is little to learn and little that needs to be said.

Domestic conversations about good living aren’t enough, however, and in a world where people have to be in charge of their own good living, there is a great deal that would have to depend upon semi-formal and loosely institutionalized but carefully disciplined study, some of it in depth. Schooling, as we know it, isn’t a good model for this, not only because its current purpose is wrong, but because it stifles intellectual and emotional independence.

At the core of educational practice, moreover, there has to be a special kind of rigorous discussion which is largely absent from schooling – and public life. In addition to some serious study of human beings and the world they inhabit – though more refined and targeted in terms of the issues of life than the humanities, social and physical sciences as these are transformed into conventional school subjects – there need to be disciplined forums in which our inherited and received assumptions, beliefs, convictions and judgments are challenged and tested in the pursuit of better understandings and decisions.

This process has to be collaborative, but deeply personal. To do this properly we must be prepared to submit our own thoughts to challenge, and change them if necessary. We must also be willing and capable of improving arguments and ideas that are opposed to our own. Our own ideas tend to be only as good as the ideas they have surpassed.

If our lives are to be our own, if we are to be intellectually and emotionally independent and self-determining, then we must have some way of getting beyond being the mere carriers of the convictions, judgments and assumptions of others – our caregivers, our mentors, our teachers, our celebrities, our culture. And this re-working has to be more than just the superficial tinkering that mostly goes on as we casually revisit our beliefs throughout life.

In the absence of serious and sustained reworking, we remain children in a world where we are expected to be the grown ups. Without this you can endlessly study in the academic disciplines and still be an intellectual dependant with – at best – a posture of independence, like a rebellious intellectual fourteen year-old.

One glaring example of this problem is the typical situation of most citizens in contemporary democracies. This matters, because democracy is supposed to be the system that acknowledges the self-determination of its citizens, and makes that self-determination possible. It is founded on the fiction that we are governed by our own consent – that we, the people consent in the system and the foundation of its constitutional and legal processes.

The legitimacy of this system depends upon this fiction of consent, but it is a fiction, not merely because the political and constitutional processes that we have are poor in representing that consent, but because most of us are born into the system and can only take it deeply for granted.

We are simply the carriers of the ideas and principles of the system – carriers, like the carriers of disease, asleep to its presence and the way in which it organizes and controls us. We don’t really know why it won out over other systems, or what is at stake when democracy is corrupted and denied, except at the level of folk-tales and fairy stories, the sanitized propaganda of hindsight.

If we were to have a genuine democracy, if we were to be true citizens in it, this consent that is manufactured simply by being brought up to it as a cultural taken-for-granted would have to be transmuted into a genuine consent – a consent that is our own, a set of conclusions we had arrived at uncoerced and without manipulation. The history of its development would need to be reawakened, with its old opponents, and its current opponents, being given their best shot. It would have to be talked through and tested among skilled peers, without being steered in the “right” direction by a teacher/representative of the system. To be given a chance of genuine consent, our automatic consent would have to be deeply challenged as a problem, and worked through.

Such an approach is not likely to achieve an entirely unbiased result, of course – given people who have grown up among democratic assumptions. The deck will still be stacked in favour of democracy to some degree, not least by the willingness and simple honesty of opening democracy itself up to serious challenge and free but disciplined debate. Paradoxically, just how far each citizen would be able to go towards making their choice free would, at the same time, be limited only by the robustness of the challenge. But it is the only way of squaring the fiction with some sort of reality.

And the impossibility of achieving a kind of pure and absolutely unbiased process isn’t why we don’t do it, of course. We don’t do it because we don’t trust our learners. They might reach the “wrong” conclusions. We don’t have education, because the powers and authorities in our so-called democracies are afraid of being challenged; that genuine self-determination would undermine the status-quo – and their power. It might, indeed undermine the civil order and perhaps that ultimate horror, cause a hiccup in the economy.

These fears, and this educational failure are measures of the extent to which we don’t have genuine democracies at all, and of our preference for subservience, manipulation and indoctrination instead. We are cowards, depriving our young in turn of their self-determination and consigning them to sleep-walk in the dark. Our cowardice too is our educational failure and a measure of our own darkness. We bring them up as we were brought up.

How important is education – equipping people to design and develop for themselves a worthwhile and fulfilling life – compared, say, with equipping them for a job? Well, how to earn a living involves a set of decisions that are subordinate to the larger task of developing a worthwhile life. Vocational education is therefore a subordinate enterprise that must not be subversive of the larger project of which it should be a part; particularly if it is to benefit from the association with being educational. It must not give priority to an employer, or to those who would reap profit from this eventual worker who is currently compelled into school.

How important is this education?

Well . . . just how valuable is a human life?

This book began in my emerging awareness and surprise, over fifty years ago, that the enterprise that we called education had no clear justification in anything with  ethical integrity at all, and in my growing appreciation, as I studied, of just how important the whole domain is to who and what we are, as individuals and as people, right down to our consciousness; right down to what we are, and could be aware of.

The implications of education far outreach anything that we conceive of in its name, and its ethical importance overrides almost every other ethical concern we might have. It was not until I was in my thirties, and studying for my doctorate at the University of Illinois, that an approach to a genuinely serious justification of education occurred to me.

This approach to a comprehensive and ethical justification for whatever we properly should be doing in the name of education may not be the best that we can do. It is just the best that I have been able to identify and build. But at this stage in human history, it does not need the claim that it is the best that could be done. All it needs to be is the best that we have available to us now – far outstripping any other alternative currently available to us in power, in comprehensiveness, in its ability to guide research, practice and policy, and in terms of the ethical high ground that it stands upon.

When I began building it, I paid little direct attention to conventional schooling, because justifying education must begin at points of principle that are prior to decision about where or how education should be undertaken. The justification needs to inform those decisions, and not simply presuppose them.

Once I began, I did, of course, become acutely aware that conventional schooling was unlikely to emerge as particularly educational. I watched and observed the work done by my many colleagues in related disciplines of educational research as they developed an abundance of sophisticated critiques of schooling, and engaged in many critical studies.

I pondered the bases of the value judgements that they made in all of this research – value judgements that were there to be seen, but were rarely articulated. This was of interest to me, because if the critiques seemed forceful, but the value judgements diverged from those that I was using to ground my positive justification, then here would be an anomaly, or a challenge. If they converged on the values I was articulating, then here would be more evidence that I was indeed tapping into a widely held ethical core. The value that emerged in common across all of this work was respect for the equal intrinsic worth of the human beings who are to be the learners.

This is important, since broadly grounded ethical agreement is highly desirable in such a justification. It is essential if the theory is ever to achieve widespread support. Such a widely available ethical consensus holds the hope that, where there is disagreement, it should be possible to lead the discussion back into the commonly held core from which we might still find a resolution. I touch on the extent of this common core at many places through the book, and the last, historical part of this book proposes my own sketch of how this core came to be, and how and why we still fall so far short in implementing what we almost universally profess to believe.

For many decades, I kept my analyses somewhat aloof from the issues of schooling. My initial reasons were compounded by the fact that my students’ progress in educational thinking was always limited by their own obsessive preoccupation with schools and their automatic tendency to reduce everything we discussed to some sort of application to them.

In the end, however, this aloofness became unsustainable, as I began to look more closely and specifically at the ways in which the educational principles might be implemented. Then, I had to speak more directly about our conventional ways of doing things, and come to terms with the profound respects in which our practices violate educational principle.

I have always been sympathetic to the good intentions and the dedication of classroom teachers. I have been there myself. The educational inadequacies of schooling are systematic and institutional. They are not their fault. But the institutions that they are bound by are profoundly destructive.

Many teachers know this, and what I have to say will not hurt them. It will affirm their knowledge and suspicions and help them to understand their frustration. But people devote their lives and their careers to institutions like conventional schooling, and such criticisms will also often go to the core of their own commitment, even their identity.

My hope is that even these will persist in a genuine effort to understand the complex thing that education really is, and that they will nevertheless search for ways to ameliorate the damage that schooling inevitably will do, because there are ways to limit the damage. There is no way, though, that schools, as we understand them, can be reformed into educational institutions, but that does not mean that people in schools cannot be leaders in standing against the harm, and in standing for the development of an entirely new way of institutionalizing education.

The structure of this book is not linear. It will shift in level and perspective on several occasions. This is because it is designed, not just as a sequential “argument” or thesis, but is intended to be an experience; a larger and hopefully coherent experience made up of a number of smaller experiences involving views of the educational problematic from several different standpoints.

It is, to use a conventional cliché that would be better grounded in the work of Thomas Kuhn, an attempt to bring about a paradigm shift.(1) To do this it must initiate a large change in our way of seeing. And it must also be, in a sense, emotional. It must not only be an attempt to raise educational awareness, it must raise educational sensitivity, a sense of education, a depth of feeling about why and how much education should matter to us all. That where education is concerned, our very lives are at stake.

I have not attempted to offer a design for a new way of organizing formal education, because that is a task far beyond the scope of this book, and it would take much other work and, I believe, collaboration. I have only attempted to offer enough to show that such a thing could be done. The justification of education will not, however, stand or fall by these suggestions. In any event, so much lies outside formal education that I am concerned that the cultural obsession with schooling  will lead readers back, inevitably, to an over-emphasis upon the formal.

It is the core value of the respect for the learner that everything else should stand on, or fall together with. I am sure that, if we grasped that value properly, including its priority, and understood the learning implications that follow from it, we would not be stumped for ways to implement it. Rather our minds would explode with creativity and possibility, breaking down the bonds that shackle them at present.

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1. Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2nd ed. Vol. 2. International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, Number 2. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962.