Chapter 7:

“It’s all too big!”

Faced with the big picture of education, many people experience overwhelm. It is all too big! But that is what climbing out of a box involves. Abandoning comfort. We can only enjoy that comfort by hiding from the serious disrespect that restricting education to schooling enables; the Wild Wood of indoctrination in everyday life beyond school. Our avoidance, though, compromises the life of each person. Perhaps we should get more uncomfortable with our failure to live up to the values we lightly and freely espouse. The discomfort of climbing out of the box might then be the lesser of the two.

Sometimes, when I talk to people about what education really involves, and I stress the point that it is not just about what schooling does, but about understanding all of our institutions as educational institutions, they balk at the big picture of education that is opening up before them and their minds just shut down. Their reaction is that what I am talking about is all too big to contemplate.

A related reaction is to think that all this is so far removed from what they are used to under the name of education. Even if they entertain all this learning as potentially important, they complain that there must be some other word for it.  They just can’t square the idea with the conventional reduction and limitation of “education” to “schooling”. They want to keep the equation of education with schooling intact.

Let me begin by telling the story of how this all began for me. I was in my second or third year of teaching, in a small semi-rural school, and the boy was about eleven years old. He was understood to be very bright, but a behavioural problem, and very erratic. At one point in my programme I began teaching the class to write simply haiku poetry, and this boy came alive. He wrote wonderful stuff, and we spent special time together talking about it. He came to school with new pieces he had written of his own volition. All his school-work improved. His attitude was reformed and he became dependable, willing and enthusiastic and a joy to work with.

Then one day he came to school a changed person – wild, angry, uncooperative, disruptive, full of hate. He couldn’t do anything right and neither could I. He settled into this mode, and I never saw the other boy again. In time I came to realize that he was already known to the police.

I talked to the school principal about what had happened, and he said that this was just what happens with him. Been like that for years. But why . . . do you think? Something has happened at home, he said, and it always does. And he shrugged.  Our ability to do anything ends at the school gate.

That is what puzzled me. It continued to puzzle me long after I left that school – left elementary teaching and went to graduate school. It made me feel that I didn’t know what I was doing, or why I was doing it. It made me feel that if I was enrolled in education, as a teacher, then what were we really supposed to be doing if this lay outside of it? What we were doing didn’t seem to be enough – or even relevant, somehow. What was education really about? What should it really be about?

There was this boy, growing up – learning things about what life was and how to live it. Not random accidental things, but deliberate things, things for which people were responsible. Either the parents were responsible for what he was learning, or those who created the social environment that facilitated such homes – –  were responsible. And haiku poetry and all the other topics and subjects and processes of school didn’t really stack up against the other things he was learning, was learning to be; the things he was learning about himself, and life, and what was to become of him.

This little island of “education” in his life that was the school, dealt with – comparatively – the trivialities of his destiny that learning was setting up for him. Within the matrix of things he was learning, that were being nourished in him – his caring initiation into adulthood in our world, by our people – the schooling was going to be the inconsequential part. His relationships to friends, to future partners, to other members of the community, to the law and institutions of authority, his career prospects and satisfactions, his future parenting – these things were all unfolding, and the schooling bit wasn’t going to make very much difference at all to what would count most in his life-trajectory.

In fact the school was going to be preoccupied mostly with his behaviour – with managing it, domesticating it. And all this would achieve would be that he would be relatively compliant in the workforce, which could use similar techniques to control his behaviour, but the rest of his life would very likely be pretty dysfunctional. All that control of his behaviour would simply mean that his dysfunction, his stunted aspirations, and his disappointment, perhaps at the way things were turning out, would be invisible to most of us – unless he came to the attention of the law. If education really mattered – if living a life well was at stake – then there had to be a big picture of education; one we were somehow missing.

Let me be clear . My concern wasn’t that the school should somehow have the right to intervene in the private life of the family, if that was where these issues lay. It was that the school seemed to be only concerned with the lesser part of education. What seemed to be important educationally was much bigger and more significant than what the schools were doing, or could even hope to do.

I put this now much more clearly than I could have put it a the time. But I had no doubt that whatever it was that was happening to that boy out of school was as much a part of his education as anything that was going on in school. Well, clearly it was a larger part. But in trying to consider this, I couldn’t find my footing there, and nothing that I turned to in all the talk of education could find its footing there either.

All of our real education-talk was about schooling.

Why did education end at the school gate?

Years later, I became aware of the “hidden curriculum”. Students learn things in school, just because of the structure and practices of the institution, the written and unwritten rules, the structure of the language used; hidden, because it isn’t the overt curriculum that is written up in workbooks and plans. Very often it isn’t even noticed by learners or teachers. This isn’t a new idea. Plato was aware of it over two thousand years ago.

The idea, though, became very important in understanding indoctrination in gender, and class and race, because sexist, racist and status judgments and attitudes are passed on just in the culture of the school, its organization, and the attitudes and dispositions of teachers.

But what is particularly interesting is that the “hidden curriculum” clearly doesn’t stop at the school gates either, even if that is where it ends in the discussions of educationalists. If you can analyse the “hidden curriculum” in schools, you can analyse it in just the same way in any institution – the workplace, the media, the home, the government department. It is, in fact, the same thing. The only thing that is odd, out there, is describing it with a schooling word – “curriculum”. But it isn’t odd to call it an educational problem – because that is precisely what it is.

Schooling might end at the school gate, but education and its problems, certainly don’t. The stuff outside the school isn’t the “background” to education. It is more like the foreground. It determines more. It is also subject to human decision, because all those institutions out there were made by people like us, including the “hidden curricula”, good or bad. Being the outcome of human decisions they are available for evaluation and criticism and potential change. We can figure in the effects of those decisions on human learning just as readily as we can figure in their financial implications.

All of that educational world out there will continue to exist and exert its enormous power to shape experience and habit, opportunity and identity even if there is no schooling, or whatever schooling tries to do. All of that world was there before schooling was ever a twinkle in anybody’s eye, and people with power and authority have always been manipulating it to encourage the learning they wanted to achieve.

All of that world. Our political world, our nationalism, government institutions, our financial institutions, our workplaces, our infrastructure, our architecture and its purposes, the design of our streets and living spaces, our technologies and what they are designed to achieve, our works of art, our practices and collective enterprises, our humanities, social sciences and sciences, media and entertainments and things we advertise as fun, our sayings and exhortations, the things we sanction, the things we profess to believe, the things that we do that are at odds with what we say, the things collectively held to be practical, impractical, to be courageous about, or afraid of. The structures of power, and authority and its legitimacy, of the availability of information and knowledge, and who gets it, and who doesn’t, and how, and why. The rules we make, and follow . . . and break. Our language – the very words themselves with their built in judgments; of worth, of racism, of sexism and sexual preference, of social class judgment, success and failure, praise and blame.

To repeat . . . all of these things are the way that they are as a result of changes and developments in practices which, when brought into focus, into awareness, can be considered as human choices. They could have been different, could be made differently, and hence can be made matters of human responsibility. All of them have learning potential for those who participate in them, use them or are affected by their use according to more or less predictable reasons for their engagement with them. All of this potential learning falls somewhere on the scale between potentially harmful learning and potentially beneficial learning.

Oh, but that is too much! We can’t be held responsible for all of the things people might learn from all of these cultural elements!

But before you evade the issue so easily, go through that list and brainstorm examples where we already do manipulate each of these elements, from the largest down to the finest, deliberately, and with the intention of favouring some sort of learning over others. Where we place the water cooler. Who gets to interact with whom when we design the streets and the zoning this way, and how they get to interact. How we craft this bit of speech, or that. We can’t be held responsible?

We act self-consciously and intentionally with regard to these things already. We do acknowledge the learning possibilities and implications in our multitudes of practices. We know that we learn from doing, and that the rules of the game structure what we do. We just fail to own up to the educational implications. Isn’t it odd that we don’t really explore all this to see how this larger cultural world might enable us to learn to spell, to use language better, to do maths better, to examine our deeper assumptions about life and to reason more carefully about it?

If we think about these things at all, we just think in terms of shallow propaganda or manipulation – as if we were advertising.

Not only this, but our humanities and social sciences have been studying these things for many decades, aware of them for many centuries. What is wrong with us that we can’t make a solid connection between them all and the idea of education, but continue to reduce the latter to schooling instead?

But . . . phew! All of it?

It’s all too big!

This reaction is simply a reflection of how novel it seems now to us to glimpse the big picture. The fact that we have this reaction at all is an indication of how primitive, how immature our educational judgment really is. How intellectually cramped into a little box we really are.

If the larger educational point of view, the whole educational ecology, was as familiar and natural to us as it should be, the idea that it was all too big simply wouldn’t occur. If we learned to work with this point of view, then our contemporary small thinking is just the sort of thing that would be looked upon as incredibly quaint in several hundred year’s time.

Of course we might fail to take up the challenge. There are plenty of pressures and incentives to continue to think small. Including who controls the funding – who pays for our services. We say we want to solve social problems, heal painful and destructive lives, have a better and fairer democracy. But we are used to these social problems, these empty and destructive lives, this lack of democracy, this lack of justice, this impoverishment of human potential. We are used to the modesty of our efforts and successes. We have built up and been taught very limited models of practicality, and the more power we have, the more fiercely we cling to the existing channels of power.

If education is too big, then economics is too big!

Suppose that economics was reduced to, say, the financial transactions of retail businesses. We point out that, to even understand what is happening in these institutions, we would need to understand commodity trading, government economic policy, how governments spend their money, taxation, interest rates, and even international financial markets, and the behaviour of big financial institutions in the major capitals of the world. And they say – no – look — that is all too big. I just want to understand why so few people are buying my stuff, and why I’m not making a profit because my costs are so high. We would have to point out to them that economics isn’t only about them – that it touches everybody’s lives at every point, and they certainly can’t understand how the money flows in their businesses without some understanding of the whole. That is why economics is so big. That is why we talk of macro and micro economics.

But of course it is very hard to make sense of this example, simply because we are used to the bigness of economics, and its day-to-day relevance. We know that the way massive financial institutions are regulated can result in you being homeless. Every public and most private decisions are examined for their economic implications these days. Few, if any, are examined for their educational implications, though almost all could be.

Actually, economics is somewhat downstream of education, and subordinate to it. Clearly the nature of economics depends upon the education of its practitioners in its larger sense – not only how economists are schooled, but also the cultural world they have inhabited and inherited since birth and what they have done with their own personal trajectories. The field of economics – how and what it studies – has been conditioned  by these things, including the limited appreciation of education that the rest of us share. Economists have placed a lot of emphasis on various players as “rational choosers”. You can’t even understand “choosers” without an understanding of education, and their lack of understanding explains much of what economists do wrong.

Recently, economists have discovered that “choosers” aren’t all that “rational” at all – at least not as they have habitually understood rationality. The school-girl howlers that flow from their discovery are indicative of just what we should expect where educational understanding is lacking. Rather than asking the hard educational questions, some have reverted to the ancient, pre-democratic inclination of political and ecclesiastical powers and now advocate “nudging” the irrational masses to make the “right” decisions. By some magic, they, apparently, can make the right choices themselves, and their superiority gives them, somehow, the right to make our choices for us. They allow themselves to succumb to these contemptuous attitudes by failing to understand the fact that education underpins choice. This entire consideration of choice is a glaring symptom of educational failure.

The only way that we can intelligibly reduce education to some small sphere, like schooling, is to reduce education to merely some aspect of a human being, some bit of what makes us whole people and human – such as our vocational lives, or our religious lives, or our technocratic literacy, or our consumerism. If we educate the whole person, then we must consider all aspects of their being, and all contexts in which they live and learn.

Giving serious consideration to what these things involve should disclose for us how completely we have failed to grasp the educational problem and properly conceive it. It should disclose how fully we have failed to understand ourselves as human beings. And it should explain why we are always dissatisfied with our educational effort, and – unless we get the big picture – why we always will be.

Indeed, though we cannot say how far an adequate education could solve our social and personal problems, we can at least recognize that the potential for improvement is huge. Compared to what we could be capable of, compared to the potential improvement in our condition, we are primitive. We can make no real sense of human potential, no real progress toward understanding how much better our lives and communities could be while we continue to fail to grasp and address the full educational situation in which human beings live.

The scale and significance of education lies in startling contrast to the scorn with which we view the cheap little pandora’s box into which we have attempted to squash it. To go into education, when you could have gone into a real science, or politics, or the law, or finance, or medicine or the arts is to really give your life away to a derivative world of low intellectual status. Schools are always set apart from real life and their inhabitants are viewed accordingly. Those who can do, those who can’t teach.

Oh, yes, we admire the very few great teachers, and we laud the sacrifice of those that make something of a teaching career. But always somewhat patronizingly. High achievers nobly turn to teaching to “put something back”. Many, many people really do enjoy and learn from the teaching that they do – often as an adjunct to their real achievements. Huge numbers also find satisfaction in it, and in administering schools, as chosen careers, but this makes no difference to the low status that is accorded their choice.

But heck, it’s not as if there is anything we really need to know about education anyway! We all know about education, without any special intellectual effort. Didn’t we go to school? And in school nobody even raised the idea that education might be a legitimate field of knowledge that we should attempt to master. This shows that even they don’t think it is worth much. We are just as likely to put a commission of education into the hands of someone whose success lay in managing forests or supermarkets, as anyone who actually knows anything about education. Because there is nothing much to know, is there? It is just like any other business you might manage.

When I and my education colleagues were taking graduate courses in the philosophy department, I recall one philosophy student turning to my friend and saying – “you are really good! You should be over here!” My friend replied that he thought the philosophy student was good too, and that he should be over with us – in education.

Genuine educational understanding is big, it is complex, it requires sophistication. It is not the little, paternalistic, teachery, kiddy, infantilizing, over-romanticized field we always reduce it to. Indeed, it underlies every other academic discipline, because all of our later learning has its origins, and is conditioned, by our earlier learning and experience and continues to be conditioned by the culture around us. This is the point that Jean Piaget acknowledged when he tried to invent the field called “genetic epistemology”.

Educational understanding has huge requirements. It requires an insight into developmental psychology with particular emphasis on cognitive development and understanding conceptual change. Out of this must grow a strong developmental sense. It requires sociological, anthropological, historical and political understanding – particularly for understanding indoctrination and the obstacles to education, as well as what there is to make decisions about. It requires a grasp of literature and philosophy – to understand our attempts to gain some insight into the human condition, and good living. It particularly requires philosophy – to fight through until we get some better, more profound and clearer educational concepts and intellectual strategies.

 Philosophy too, to understand the deep ethical character of education. Philosophy, finally, to understand knowledge and reason – to wrestle with the problems of what knowledge is of most worth, of what gives standards to knowledge. Philosophy understood historically – intellectual history, so that we can grasp the theories and concepts that have become built into us – how they were built, how conditioned by their times they were and how peculiar to, and in, our own times they now are.

We must understand religion, as well – in order to better understand how many people have and still seek meaning, but also to see how and why some continue to be so willing to control the minds of others. We must understand science, not simply to see how we so commonly seek to wrestle mastery of our world and our lives, or to understand the conflict with religion that still shapes our contemporary educational situation, but also to rid ourselves of the new forms of superstition – the delusions of scientism.

But in addition, there is knowledge of life, gained from living it – from the experiences of actually achieving a life, and from learning from others who also achieve one – and from those who don’t. There must, moreover, be a rich and effective interplay between any academic knowledge and the living of the life. And all of this, finally, must be turned to educational understanding and awareness of ourselves. It is not self-applying.

None of these areas of understanding automatically qualify us. Indeed, if we think of education as a derivative field, say, as applied psychology or applied anthropology, or applied philosophy, we miss it altogether. Because the educational standpoint is one from which all of our institutions, including the intellectual ones, can be critiqued. We draw from all these fields and experiences, filter and transform it through the educational problematic, and then turn it back again. Philosophy, for instance, needs educational awareness if it is every to get reasoning straight. So, of course, does psychology.

When we begin to get even an inkling of the enormity of educational understanding another excuse can arise for not pursuing it. When I was committing my life to trying to find a better account of the purpose of education, several colleagues reminded me that this was not for the likes of people like me. This was “grand theorizing”, and it would require the genius of someone like Plato, or a great figure like John Dewey – people of sufficient quality to only come along once or twice in a millennium.

In the meantime, I guess, we were to resign ourselves to the educational sand-pit. My concern was that when these great men or women finally came along they would go through our schooling and turn their attention, instead, to other apparently great and sexier issues of their age. They would, perhaps, disappear down the rabbit hole of higher mathematics, or save the world by inventing a new operating system, or they would realize it wasn’t worth saving, and bend their genius to capturing the world financial markets. It always seemed to me that, at the very least, someone needs to keep a hopeful candle lit in the window.

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© R. Graham Oliver, 2018