We need a Copernican Revolution in our educational thinking if “education” is ever to be worthy of the name. We are obsessed with schooling. Education and schooling are spoken of interchangeably, despite the fact that everyone knows that there are other institutions in the educational domain – the family, for instance, or the workplace. But the school occupies the educational centre, and all the rest is a sort of background educational hum This is a catastrophic conceptual mistake. What should be at the centre? The learner. It may turn out that schooling isn’t even the most important educational satellite.
The need for a Copernican Revolution
in educational thinking (1)
In this chapter I want to encourage you to begin to think outside the square, outside the box of education. The box, the square, is schooling. We reduce education to schooling, and pull the lid down after ourselves.
The biggest problem that I have ever faced in trying to get people to think effectively about education has been the reduction of the idea of education to the idea of schooling. This is an ideological reduction. People should know better.
Usually they can be brought to agree that education is much more than schooling quite readily enough. They at least recognise that families are involved. But even when you get them to agree that education is more than schooling, and if the discussion about education carries on at all, they will be talking about schooling again within five minutes or less as if the two are the same. They just can’t help themselves. Try it. Set up a discussion and listen.
For some years when I was teaching philosophy of education I would establish a ban, a moratorium, on referring to schools or using schooling concepts such as “class”, or “teach”, or “course” or the “curriculum” for the duration. If I didn’t do this, every time we opened up something interesting, one or more students would get excited about how they could teach a unit on that! When I explained the ban I pointed out that until they broke their bad habit and got used to thinking about education in ways that were not always reduce education to schooling and the practices of teaching they could not expect to make any progress in educational understanding at all.
We have huge social and political problems, and huge productive inefficiencies – things we despair of, often putting them down to fundamental flaws in human nature, when they are really educational problems. But we can’t see them as educational problems because they just aren’t the sorts of things that schooling and its teaching processes happen to deal with, or ever could deal with very effectively. So we dismiss education as having no significant part to play, and hence miss the full significance of our powers of learning, and our abilities to manage them. We look at what should be staring us in the face all the time, and look straight through it.
This is, perhaps, the biggest single obstruction to any hopes that we might have for educational improvement. It is the sort of thing that, if aliens came to our planet, and we explained education to them, they would fall about laughing. In fact it is probably our best defense against extra-terrestrials. They would die laughing at the lengths we go to in order to deny education, and lock it away in a very little, very expensive box. This is one of those things where, if we looked back at our era in several hundred-year’s time we would scarcely believe people could think that way. It will resemble a medieval absurdity. If, that is, we ever manage to make any positive social progress at all.
We need a Copernican Revolution in our educational thinking. The revolution in scientific thought that Copernicus brought about was the realization that the earth wasn’t at the centre of the solar system after all. The sun and the planets didn’t revolve around the earth. There is the same problem with our educational thinking. The school isn’t the centre of education, with all the other institutions – the workplace, the family, the church, the economic and political institutions, the streets, the entertainment and advertising industries all revolving around the outside in its penumbra, as a kind of background educational hum.
This should become obvious if we attempt to get clear about what the purpose of education should be and go back to basic assumptions. I am confident that the conclusion that we are likely to reach is that education should be about equipping learners to develop worthwhile, or meaningful, or fulfilling lives for themselves. When we do that – when we concern ourselves with the full human being and the worth of their life – it seems inevitable that we must be concerned with the whole of that life. Education isn’t merely a preparation for life, firstly because learners in school are already living their lives and to think in that way is to trivialise those lives, and secondly, because learning to live the life isn’t something that can end whenever learners step outside the school gates, or when life-after-school begins. It is continuous with the life, and every part of the life.
Having decided that it is about equipping the learner to develop a worthwhile, or meaningful, or fulfilling life for themselves, we need to unpack the equipment. We need to figure out what knowledge and skill and attitude and ability to think and examine and relate and seek they are going to need. And then we are going to have to ask where and how they can develop these things, or – if the context isn’t properly educational – where these things are being harmed or dumbed down.
And then we are going to notice that a very large proportion of the experience and learning that matters is not going to be learned best by being taught, let alone being the subjects of classes and lessons. More than this, we are surely going to notice that when things often need to be taught they are not always best taught by official and designated teachers. What we would be wise to decide would be that schools should concern themselves only with the things that can be taught there most effectively – after having exhausted the other possibilities. We should only come to schools after wrestling with the rest of the educational world. We will gradually come to recognise that school learning isn’t effective for a huge range of learning that is humanly important, and the price we are paying when we reduce education to schooling will loom larger and larger the more that we see.
Why? Firstly, because schools are notoriously divorced from life. We will always engage better with life if we learn what we need to learn about life in the world where we actually live it, and as we need to learn it. Secondly, giving tasks to schools is a convenient and conventional excuse for not facing up to the issues in the world outside school, particularly educational issues. If the social order is bad, then one way of not fixing it is to give the schools the task of changing it. This way we wallow in the illusion that we have done something about it. It makes us feel good about doing something, while simply increasing the burdens of schooling.
One current example of this is the idea that we are somehow addressing the issue of child poverty (which is really adult poverty too) – by providing breakfast and lunch at school while we have transformed our social system so that ten percent of the population have been able to capture sixty percent of the wealth, and driven the bulk of the population down economically to achieve this. We don’t dare face up to the structural problem we have created, so we settle for cosmetic solutions. And the fact that we created child poverty in this way, along with the mantra of lower taxation, shows that it actually is in our power to address its real causes. We made this happen. We can unmake it.
Secondly, if we want education to be about living well, we don’t want schooling to become a surrogate for life. We want to get a life, not live out our lives in school, which we are increasingly doing. Having to put something into schools to be learned is often a sign of educational failure.
Back when the idea of education was born, Plato recognized that the problem of education was made problematic by the fact that people grow up and continue to learn in whole societies, and not just in schools. He went so far as to propose abolishing the family. Throughout the rest of time, and in most places, the family has been viewed as the key educational institution. Ask someone today where they learned the most important lesson or lessons of their lives – good or bad – and most are likely to say it was in their families – not their schools.
Through most of Western history the educational influence of the family was ruled by another institution – the church. Religious institutions have always had, and still do have educational agendas. Some of them are still able to muster enough passion, and enough material resources to start and sustain wars in the pursuit of these agendas. Schools can never do that.
We can see, since ancient times, the ways in which the architects and interior decorators of religious institutions have worked to manage our experience, to cultivate various kinds of learning – peaking perhaps in the great cathedrals of the West but just as evident in the televangelism of the early morning TV shows today. States, too, have not only employed architecture, and pomp and ceremony, but propaganda campaigns and laws to manipulate thought and behaviour. They are constantly “sending messages”.
In modern times, when work is no longer what you share with your relatives on the family holding, store or workshop – when it splits up families and relocates them around the country and the planet, the workplace has taken on a major educational role – teaching you who you are, what you can do and what you are worth. I’m not talking about the efforts of all those corporate training divisions. I’m talking about your experience of the rules, procedures, and management structures, organization of the workplace – the sorts of things that sociologists and good management gurus would speak of as corporate or management “culture”.
Since the beginning of the Twentieth Century, the media have exploded on the educational scene with overwhelming force – with advertising, yes, but also with “news-as-entertainment” and the worlds that it celebrates. The advertising industry alone has a bigger spend than schooling and it is exactly dedicated to changing and forming your mind.
This is only the beginning of a list of educational sites and enterprises, but it is surely enough, with a little reflection, to show how absurd is the idea that schooling is what education is about, and that all the other stuff is merely background that contributes to, or inhibits the true educational work, which is the work of schools.
And lest you think that all this outside stuff is some other domain, different from education – culture, perhaps – it is worth reconsidering the idea of the educated person, which has been central to the idea of education since its inception. The educated person might have got their start, traditionally, through some form of schooling, or through a tutor, but once they had some basic skills – particularly basic literacy – they took on the job of any educated person for themselves, which is self-education. They valued the learning for what it did for their lives and took responsibility for it. And to do this they availed themselves of a raft of institutions – libraries, printing shops, coffee and tea houses, salons and above all, perhaps, the courts of nobles and princes. They sought out and formed study and discussion groups and wrote copious letters to each other.
Yes, they might have gone to university – even sometimes taken up posts in them – but the university curriculum was always way behind what educated people were learning for themselves, discussing and doing. Universities were burdened with classical studies and the ancient curriculum. It was only quite late, for example, that the sciences entered into the university as acceptable subjects of study. Educated people had been developing these fields for centuries.
Yes, education crucially has to do with the wider culture, anthropologically understood. But everything and anything that goes on in the culture isn’t automatically educational, just as everything and anything that goes on in schools isn’t automatically educational either. Education is about making decisions about what is beneficial and good to learn in some setting – in school or the wider culture – and cultivating that good learning while eliminating the bad or harmful learning. That could involve changing the culture, creating it anew, and not just replicating it. Education is about making those crucial value judgments about how a person ought to grow up, how they ought to become equipped and what they might be disposed to do. It is has to do with the decisions involved in making people, and the ethics of that awesome task.
Many years ago, a writer compared the judicial system to the two worlds of Kenneth Graham’s lovely book, The Wind in the Willows. One world in that book is the world of the River Bank. There the creatures live the idealized domestic life of Victorian England. They engage in the recreational life of the river – swimming, picnicking, messing about in boats. They have suppers in their homes in the evenings, and doze in front of the fire in the winter. But over there, out there, is another world they don’t talk about much and take care not to visit. It is the Wild Wood. The Wild Wood is a dangerous place. It is tangled and easy to get lost there – and full of scurryings and skitterings and watchful eyes. Most of its evils are unknown to us, and that is even more scary, and we only refer to it all in hushed tones.(2)
Education has these two worlds too. Schooling, romanticized just like middle-class Victorian domestic life, is the life of the River Bank. It shelters and protects vulnerable and curious little children within its walls, with the art work, the music, the projects, the poetry, the murals on the walls, the eager, innocent minds, the smiling teachers with excellent intentions, eager to give them the great gifts of belonging and career opportunity.
Outside is the educational Wild Wood – eager for your mind. Out there, anything is fair game – so long as you don’t actually lie or defame someone. Out there, profit is king and persuasion that circumvents reason is the rule. Commercial interests push, manipulate and exploit everywhere with the Trojan horse of technology, and government and policy scurry along behind, eager to exploit the velvet glove of mental manipulation.
Schools, like the River Bank, are idealized of course. The truth is that any close examination will show that the Wild Wood is not just “out there”, but underneath – in the schools themselves. Schools serve the Wild Wood. The Wild Wood needs schools. It has been interesting, over the last thirty years, to observe how schools have become more integrated into the market-place, and without a whimper. Commerce has got more than a foot in the door now.
It is interesting, too, to see just how domesticated the schooling industry is – how quiet and compliant it is in the face of the Wild Wood. If education-so-called does not have the capacity to offer a serious educational critique of society, then it is not education at all. Except for the occasional complaint about how the ills of society defeat their efforts, teachers and other schooling professionals never do stand up and speak out about anything that doesn’t have to do with schools and schooling policies, though they claim professional status.
If our minds are to be whole, then education must be understood to be ecological. To be whole we must resolve the conflicts and contradictions among our experiences of life. One way of achieving a resolution of a sort is to divide ourselves into compartments and parts, creating barriers among our spheres of life so that they become deaf and blind to each other, ceasing to inform each other, creating hypocrisies between our schooling lives and our domestic lives, our lives of work, and religion and business and morals and recreation and love and friendship, and our parenting – each to live out its own little life in its own little ghetto or pen.
But our beliefs and convictions, our thoughts and imagination, our creativity and our choosing are supported or challenged by experiences – by what is learned – across our whole lives. They form organic systems and structures. Such a fragmented life could not be a full life, and the contradictions and competing interests within ourselves would trip us up and create anxieties and confusions – even at times about who and what we are, and we would become unreliable, untrustworthy to those close to us.
To be a whole person, to be a moral one, to be capable of the examined life and to have a planned and coherent one requires that we develop minds that transcend the artificial boundaries of institutional conventional. To understand education, and to attempt to make a real show of educational improvement, we must understand this, and attend to the educational structure of all institutions – with vigour – and not just with schools.
If schools aren’t at the centre of the educational universe, with all other institutions revolving around them, what should be? The Copernican revolution, after all, involved displacing the earth as the centre of the universe, and replacing it with the sun as the centre of the solar system. So what should be our educational sun?
The learner of course, and regardless of age!
If we are to understand education properly, the learner should be at the centre, and all of the institutions within which the learner learns – the family, the media, the workplace, the market economy, religious institutions, and, yes, schools – just one among them all – should be seen as revolving around the learner. We cannot hope to have much grasp of real human potential until we do this. That will require a true Copernican revolution in educational thinking.
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Oliver, R. Graham. “The Ideological Reduction of Education.” Educational Philosophy and Theory 30, no. 3 (January 1, 1998): 299–302. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-5812.1998.tb00329.x.
We reduce education to schooling, locking it in a small box that prevents us from seeing our most important educational issues and their solutions. A Copernican revolution is needed in our educational thinking
Author
Graham Oliver
Publisher Name
The Educational Mentor: making "education" educational
We need a Copernican Revolution in our educational thinking if “education” is ever to be worthy of the name. We are obsessed with schooling. Education and schooling are spoken of interchangeably, despite the fact that everyone knows that there are other institutions in the educational domain – the family, for instance, or the workplace. But the school occupies the educational centre, and all the rest is a sort of background educational hum This is a catastrophic conceptual mistake. What should be at the centre? The learner. It may turn out that schooling isn’t even the most important educational satellite. 
In this chapter I want to encourage you to begin to think outside the square, outside the box of education. The box, the square, is schooling. We reduce education to schooling, and pull the lid down after ourselves.
we might have for educational improvement. It is the sort of thing that, if aliens came to our planet, and we explained education to them, they would fall about laughing. In fact it is probably our best defense against extra-terrestrials. They would die laughing at the lengths we go to in order to deny education, and lock it away in a very little, very expensive box. This is one of those things where, if we looked back at our era in several hundred-year’s time we would scarcely believe people could think that way. It will resemble a medieval absurdity. If, that is, we ever manage to make any positive social progress at all.
