Chapter 21: It can’t be done

People react to my proposals for a reconstruction of educational thought and practice in what seems to me to be a very peculiar and contradictory way. On the one hand, they appear to have no quarrel with the general point of view that I have been advancing.  And it surely is almost impossible to disagree that education, in this larger sense, is absolutely fundamental to what we make of our human lives; understanding their possibility in terms of our human capacity to learn, and to wresting some control over our fates and fortunes with a view to making them good. 

It is surely unarguable that this is the scope and significance of the domain of education, and that it is also the educational problematic; that this is what education involves and makes it significant and worthy of our deep and considered attention. This management of our learning experiences is at the core of the very prospects of our lives. It extends into every corner of life where our learning and experience can be controlled and managed, and includes all of the means that might be available to us to do so.

Given the role of learning in the life of the human being, from conception to death, it is an enterprise of the highest human stakes. Our very survival and our physical health are grounded upon it, but so are the highest, most noble of our aspirations, and – somewhere in the middle – the possibility of our contentment in everyday life.

A recognition of the crucial significance and centrality of this educational domain and its problematic extends far back into what we know of preliterate societies, and indeed, to what we can glean of the pre-historic. It is a precondition of any other enterprise in which human beings engage, or have engaged. It underpins the possibility of hunter-gathering, but also macro-economics, or environmental protection, or the manufacture and sale of cell phones. It has always underpinned our attempts to make sense of our place in the universe. We cannot conceive of good living or the good society – or their problems – without it, because without it we cannot, or barely can, self-consciously conceive of our lives and our world at all.

All of this is, I think, unarguable. Most people will agree with very little thought, and their agreement will persist even after many years of deep reflection.

At the same time, however, and in the course of even the same minimal pondering, people will also agree that what we conceive of and pursue in the name of education today falls breathtakingly short of anything that could reflect the scope and significance of that educational enterprise.  They will agree that the educational domain is simply confused with the domain of schooling, and both that schooling could never encompass the larger part of what would have to count as educationally important, and equally that the purposes of schooling have little to do with anything much that could count as educational in terms of this large view, and what it might mean for our humanity.

They will acknowledge that a whole raft of other institutions matter educationally once we consider the formation of ourselves as human beings; once we acknowledge what is at stake, both for our own well-being and mastery of life, and for the well-being and effectiveness of our communities.  Comparatively speaking, the enterprise in which we invest so much of our resources and effort in the name of “education” is educationally trivial.

Most people, then, can see that the scope and importance of education, properly understood, embraces the whole world of of personal and collective thought and action, and is fundamental to their quality, while also seeing that our implementation of that understanding through our systems of schooling is unacceptably inadequate to it in any way that could match its human significance.

The deep, practical paradox is that most people seem capable of embracing both features of this contradiction with indifference; which is an indifference to the conditions that would be necessary to our chances – including their own chances – of imagining and living our lives well. The paradox appears, in some way, to be immobilizing. It is “one of those things”, the “way things are”, and the mind flits away to other matters that are somehow more congenial and real – usually the school, if we are going to continue any sort of educational discussion at all. It is as if there is not even curiosity about the possibility of bridging this enormous gulf.

Perhaps the general explanation for this might be along these lines. People generally can see the significance and the scope in the abstract, but they have had no experience of trying to think through practical educational solutions to educational problems for themselves. The only relevant experience, including intellectual experience, is their experience of school.

The broader intellectual traditions present in the world in which they grew up have shown no interest in developing anything more, and these traditions – that surround schooling and supply much of its content – make it quite clear that it isn’t really the business of the rest of us anyway. If educational understanding was important for you, you would have been taught it in school, and those of us engaged in the schooling enterprise are doing the best that we can, which is the best that can be done.

This is, of course, the tacit message of all of our schooling experience. It is a mixture of the expertise of subject matter, and a nervousness about what might happen if members of the public are encouraged to examine it all too closely.

Superficial consideration of the possibilities of education extending beyond schooling go something like this: clearly we all know that families are likely as important, if not more important, as educational sites, as the schools are themselves. But even though we are
sceptical of the educational quality of many of those families, we can’t regulate families with any form of educational management, and we don’t want to; indeed, we mustn’t start meddling in the family any more intrusively than we do already.

And so the education in families begins anew in every new generation, usually replicating, at least in part, the families that came before, and aided with self-help books, the advice of psychologists, and folklore, so far as parents pay attention to any of these things. Anything better than this could only be achieved – by schools; schools that would teach young people to be better parents, because the schools are believed to be able to do this without actually having to interfere in families directly. These efforts are, however, largely ineffective, but they are “the best we can hope to do”. When we apply our “educational thinking” to the family, we think of it as a little unregulated school with divided attention that we can’t get our hands on. Schooling is, after all, the only model of education that we have.

This problem then repeats itself with every other institution. How would we ever get our hands on all those other private institutions – churches, the workplace and the corporation, the sporting organisations and other associations – in order to manage them educationally without violating the rights and freedoms of all those involved? All of this is so obvious to us so imminently that, when presented with the larger and much more serious problems of education, the mind just has nowhere to go.

Why our minds are so immobilized, so incapacitated, is something that we need to understand. It shouldn’t be so difficult. The first problem is the enormous cramp that the “educational” obsession with schooling has put on our minds. Everything that is educational has to be viewed as a schooling-and-teaching problem with a schooling-and-teaching solution. The second thing is that understanding and grappling with the educational was never for the likes of us anyway. The history of our relationship to it is the relationship of dependency.

We were not brought up to make educational decisions for ourselves as soon as possible as a part of our growing into our rightful self-determination, and to the extent that we have to make educational decisions later in life, we have never been equipped to do so. We have very little idea what it would involve. That is partly why we will also be poor at making educational judgments in our families  and workplaces, and all those other settings.

Had we been educational practitioners for ourselves, and encouraged to be so with insight, skill and understanding for our own sakes, inevitably we would be educators in our families and workplaces. We would be educationally aware, alert, and skilled. We would raise the educational question everywhere. And we would also be natural educational mentors.

Our educationally incapacitated minds are at odds, too, with the impulse of modern management to harness the best powers of mind of the members of organisations – innovation, passionate commitment to a worthy purpose, collaboration and collective problem-solving. Rather, our experience of “education” leads us to be obstructive of these highly desirable developments, and turns us into poor managers when we are given the chance. Our experience of schooling contributes a great deal to our perceptions of how people can be “managed”.

Hence the inclination to suppose that the only available “educational” answer would be to take over all those other institutions and turn them into schools is simply a symptom of the inappropriate management of our experience, and what we have been encouraged to make of it. If the people who become managers had grown up to be in charge of their own minds, and understood how to cultivate them well – in themselves and others through all their experience of being properly mentored, and being mentors themselves – then creating and tending educational cultures would come naturally, and it would be the wise thing to do.

This reduction of the educational that has left us so disempowered in the management of our own lives, obstructive of efforts at better kinds of management, and limited in our ability to stand in support of each other, is matched by another piece of cultural ideology, or popular wisdom. “You can’t change society”, and it is unwise to try. The way in which this piece of popular wisdom sits so comfortably alongside the dependency that schooling cultivates is likely to be more than coincidental.

There is wisdom in not tinkering too readily with basic features of the social order. There is some merit in being conservative of traditions and institutions that have otherwise proved their worth over time, and we don’t want to discover that we have pulled key threads from the social fabric that may then unravel other things that we prize. We do need careful history, and careful analysis in order to understand how things were built, what is at stake, and what the risks are of change.

But we are not speaking here, of tinkering, in an idle and thoughtless sort of way, with our core institutions. We are speaking, instead, of a glaring enormity. We are speaking of an anomaly with our core values, of a failure of institutional development that goes back to the European Enlightenment. The Enlightenment prioritized science and reason over traditional authority, but it only belatedly issued in the widespread acknowledgement of human rights that we embrace today. It is understandable that thinkers of the Eighteenth Century limited their perception of whose reason was to count, and hence who was to be self-determining, and that they did not develop a proper conception of education for that reason.

But that is not our situation now. Two-and-a-half centuries later, it is the rational self-determination of the individual with regard to their best interests that we have put at the centre of our ethic, and our political practice – for all people – as they did not. The discrepancy between the original project of universal schooling and the requirements of the much larger conception of education was muted for them, since the larger social order was effective in placing people and eliciting their conformity in ways that were not incompatible with their understanding; though it is with ours.

For us, the discrepancy is indeed an enormity. We cannot both support the poor thing that we call education, and at the same time demand our right to self-determination, and all the human rights that go with it; not without incoherence. Nor can we, with any sort of conscience, blame people for the things that they do that create troubling social problems – from their poverty and welfare dependency, addiction or even criminality – lecturing them on their bad choices and irresponsibility on the basis that they are free people in a free society and  supposedly in charge of their own good. If we do not now face up to our overwhelming failure to confront an educational discrepancy on such a scale, we are hypocrites. In the face of the enormity of the discrepancy, there is no shred of respectability in the excuse that these problems come down to “human nature”.

This is not one of those occasions on which we should be reluctant to “change society”. It is not one of those things that fits the description; “if it aint broke, don’t fix it”.  The contradiction is fundamental; a fundamental disjointedness in our institutional organisation, and there are only two possible remedies; to abandon the idea of human rights and self-determination – of being in charge of our own good – or, alternatively, of bringing our culture into educational alignment with these things. The first of these alternatives is, I suggest, not only unacceptable, it is unthinkable that we should return to that.

But the problem is our inertia, our motivation to address this problem, and our sense of our own impotence in the face of the need to change fundamental institutions. The task seems too much. We retreat into our diminished lives because what we have now appears more comfortable, and somehow reassuring. As so many of us got past school, we “put it behind us”, forgetting the power that schooling is supposed to have. We get more comfort from the fact that school is out and over for us, than we have disquiet at the harm that it may have done, the harm that likely persists in us. That just now seems historical and theoretical; not a part of the fabric of our living present. We come to terms. Reconcile ourselves to ourselves.

Why would we want to risk what we have, or even to rouse ourselves and put our effort into yet another thing? The “enormity” seems just like a bad dream. After all, people always want to over-dramatize. Blow things out of proportion for effect. Our lives aren’t so bad. We can dissolve “what is at stake” like the morning mist (even if it is true) and turn back to the practicalities of making the best of our lives. Get over it and get on with it.

But we will still acknowledge that education should really be about learning how to develop worthwhile lives for ourselves, and that schooling isn’t.  We will acknowledge that education should put the learner first, and that schooling doesn’t.  We will acknowledge these with such ease that we wonder why you bothered to raise it in the first place. Everybody knows these things.

We all “know” that the schooling industry and its support systems are “essential to our collective way of life” regardless of what is taught in them, or whether they do learners any real good. We “know” that the baby-sitting functions that they provide are essential to the reproduction of our population – the workforce – both physically and mentally, while their parents are out at work. As our systems of production and service have been allowed to evolve, we need that baby-sitting function.

We all know, for instance, that a number of the moves that have been made over time to raise the school leaving-age have had more to do with masking the unemployment that would otherwise exist than it has anything to do with compelling the young to acquire truly worthwhile knowledge. In any event, tertiary schooling has become more and more “compulsory” by default, as the importance of credentialling has been promoted throughout employment without needing the same formal or official compulsion. In the process it saddles learners with debt, which has a role in keeping them under control while also serving to conceal the unemployment that would otherwise exist if they weren’t kept occupied in the classroom.

There is a whole system of masking here, because employment and unemployment are more important than the well-being of our people, and the unemployment figures provide the most vivid measure of the successful management of our societies – not the suicide rates, or the depression figures, or the drug and alcohol dependency, or the obesity and eating disorders, or our treatment of the frail elderly, or the domestic violence, or the numbers of people we incarcerate, or the numbers sleeping rough. And those vocational certificates that “justify” all that tertiary schooling don’t exactly cash in with the conviction that would make their justification plausible, either.

More than this, the entire schooling system, in its cultivation of intellectual dependency, its failure (or inability) to do anything serious about critical thinking, its lack of attention to anything that would be the content of an education for a free people, its induction into the existing nexus of production, consumption and meritocracy, (and the fear of unemployment that goes with these) and the compliance that its factory system requires; all serve to enable a semblance of law and order, and of acceptance, if not consent, for societies that only show a facade of democracy. It makes such societies possible, and does so effectively to render their further development into genuine democracies the unattainable dream that we have abandoned.

We all know this. There would not be the depth of political cynicism, the acceptance of the abuses of power, the contempt for, and the contemptuousness of, political behaviour, and the almost universal despair that is held for “human nature” if we did not know these things. We “know” that “they” will never allow these institutions to be changed to equip the population properly to pursue worthwhile lives of their own. They never have. The powerful never want to give up power. As we subside into our “them-and-us”, we give up our sense of ourselves, and we particularly lose sight of the larger and more powerful “we” that we are. Of course we are just mimicking the “them-and-us” that “they”, in turn, define us with – as “they” always have. We are “their” victims. And it is just human nature.

And so we will say that significant change is simply impractical. We will ask you for an alternative to the present system, and unless it is some small, classroom innovation – the sort of thing that will come and go, like every other schooling fashion (to be served up with a new lick of paint to the next generation) – we will shoot it down in an avalanche of “practical” objections. It will cost too much, other institutions will resist it, there will be too many health and safety issues, business will object, parents will object, we will always need teachers, it won’t work with our students, young people need guidance – because “they don’t know what they don’t know” (like we do).

Every objection will come out, just as it did for the women’s franchise, or for their equality in the workplace. Many will come from “educational professionals”, because we are practical people, and have given our whole lives to being practical about education. Perhaps that is why we never stand up for it; just wanting some sort of internal tinkering. Having given our lives to the existing way, we certainly don’t want to see it discredited now. Not going to take a peak outside this box.

Many of us may even have studied some of the critiques of schooling, back in our training. It was interesting stuff, but you can’t get on with the job and continue to take it all seriously. We learned how to set it aside, and accept.

From time-to-time a student would say to me that they intended to change the system “from the inside”. Whatever they did, they were never heard of again.

After years as an academic in the field of philosophy of education, and aware of the critiques of schooling that were developed by philosophers and our colleagues in history or sociology of education, and the other fields that, in the United States, they call “Educational Foundations”, I eventually became rather angry. I have no quarrel with the quality of the work done by all those people, but I became dismayed, over time; dismayed at what seemed to me to be a deliberate isolation.

They talked and wrote for each other, and they taught the work in the Foundations courses – perhaps just one isolated course in a teacher training degree. But they were publicly invisible. Other academics speak up all the time – scientists, medical researchers, economists – but when did you last hear an historian or philosopher of education speak out in public for what we all know is wrong – the system of schooling that is everywhere in Western societies?

This is very likely because they are so compromised by the way they get to be employed at all. They are always tied in to the State schooling system in some way – usually because they are hired into Schools of “Education”, and serve in teacher “education” programmes. They know how their bread is buttered.

This is not an unreal fear. When I was hired into the academic world, I was in an education department detached from the teacher training institution, but partly dependent on it, serving courses in the teacher preparation degree. At the outset I was shocked at the scorn shown to my field by the teacher-training staff. I understood that people don’t usually grasp the place and value of philosophy, but this was anger and outright hostility from people who didn’t know me or what I did, beyond “philosophy”.

Students, apparently, needed practical stuff to know how to cope and survive in the classroom, and philosophy was not only irrelevant and useless, it was getting in the way of the real stuff. There was real moral outrage here. Welcome to your job.

I spent thirty years fighting to retain the right to teach my field, and over several years I even lost it altogether. Quite frequently, I felt that I had been hired on false pretences – hired because the department needed (in those days) to be seen to have a philosopher, but with no commitment to my field such that my job might be viable without a continual fight. I finished slightly surprised that I had survived so long.

At one stage, the government changed the training from a four-year degree to a three-year degree. Something had to be deleted. Do I need to suggest what it was? But by then I could garner enough students from social science and humanities. Indeed, a shortage of students was never my problem. It seemed that students would gravitate to a course that was about their lives, if they had the freedom to do so.

In the UK, philosophy of education had not only been alive, but exciting when I began at graduate school, but some time, perhaps about the 1990s, it was formally abolished in teacher-training programmes in that country. The philosophers in place quickly re-defined themselves as educational policy analysts. That isn’t something that is likely to hold a field together beyond a generation.

It is, therefore, unreasonable to expect academics, so readily compromised, to stand up and speak out, and if it is unlikely for them to do so, it is unreasonable to expect professionals in the schools to do so either – even if they have had serious contact with the critiques, which has become less and less likely now. And more than the critiques are needed in order to stand up for education. We do need a viable alternative.

I believe that I have offered one here. But otherwise, what are the prospects of one emerging, without collective or institutional support for the effort? In New Zealand, at least, there is no way that such research could be funded.  Funding is only available if it serves government policy. Does that matter?

These issues of will, of caring enough to do what it takes – and not questions of practicality – are key to our arrested development.

Practicality isn’t the issue. The practical issues are quite ordinary, and we have an abundance of resources and tools with which to address them. The problem, which parallels the similar problem that is faced in almost every area of human rights, is to get people to care enough about respect – about the equal value of human lives. Ironically, this one, which appears to be so hard even to notice, goes underneath them all and has a good deal to do with the possibilities of respect in any other area. The extent to which we can be roused about this one is the extent of the possibility of deep and significant human rights ever being realized.

It is interesting that, in many areas of human achievement, and particularly for the career-hungry, but also in entrepreneurship and in sports performance, considerable attention is paid these days to the management of mind, with the cultivation of visualisations of success, stress-reduction and the minimization or eradication of negativity and self-doubt. Now that professionalised sport has become so expansive and a part of the entertainment industry and there is so much at stake, particularly commercially, sports psychology has developed as a field and has become integral in coaching. Positive psychology has emerged more recently, extending this attention into life generally.

There is such currency to the idea these days that “you can do whatever you put your mind to”, and so much encouragement to “dream big”, on the understanding that the scale of the dream itself is a defining limitation on the possibility of what could be achieved. You may as well dream big, since you are unlikely to achieve beyond what you envisage.

Anecdotal evidence of the wisdom of these injunctions abounds, of course, and it is probably impossible to reckon the scale of the role of survivor-bias that is represented in these stories. Whatever we might want to say about the wisdom of the advice that we receive in these ways, it is surely clear that the problems of conditional self-esteem and confidence that we explored in Part 1 represent major limitations on the possibilities of personal achievement in the decisions people make when they develop and pursue their life-plans.

Clearly related to this, too, is the probability that the advice we are generally likely to receive in response to our dreams is to moderate them. People, by and large, advise on the basis of their own conditional self-esteem as “experience of life”. From loved ones and friends, this no doubt tends to be well-meaning. They fear that we will be disappointed and hurt, and they are trying to protect us.

The alternative motive is to maintain a sense of community. We might not want to be left behind in a competitive world – if you succeed, you will leave us, but your success may also draw attention to our own inadequacy. There is a “crabs in the bucket” effect, where lower crabs will pull down those others that are showing a greater likelihood of climbing out. The popular advice is to be very cautious about who you share your dream with. Most of the people you know will discourage you and try to bring you back to earth – as they see it.

Most examples of ambition that are used as illustrations, or that are of the “if I can do it anyone can do it” variety, fall within fairly conventional boxes and recipes for success – entrepreneurship, the arts, food, sport, the helping professions. Occasionally, across and within all this, are stories of people who want to change society, or the world – business coaching and the helping professions seem highly represented. It isn’t all about getting the money.

The point that I wish to draw attention to, however, is the limitation on “changing society” or “changing the world” that seem characteristic of almost all of these larger dreams. The intent to “change society” doesn’t appear quite literal. Not in terms of our basic institutions. They just express a hope to reach and influence a lot of people from within an unexamined, larger context of “the way things are”. The basic institutions – of capitalism, our constitutional forms, our systems of justice and law and order – and, of course, our systems of education – never really come up. In a sense, they can’t of course, because those people with their dreams almost always latch on to a facet, or a trend. Social theorizing is never their strong point. They have almost never undertaken the significant work of trying to reconceptualize a basic institution.

This could suggest a limit to the possibilities of achievement, or at least to our perception of it. You can do whatever you put your mind to, except effect a change in our basic institutions. You can’t, really, change society at all. That is always to aim too high, and we can make a joke of it.

Nevertheless, It may be impossible to calculate the extent to which the social problems that we wrestle with so vainly are intractable, bringing our efforts to so little, simply because the purposes in our fundamental institutions are so conflicted and out of kilter with the values that we profess to give priority. But we should guess, as we can from our educational situation, that we pay a high price for not daring to think so big.

There are, then, three ways in which our educational imagination is impoverished:

1. Changing society is not, generally, what people have in mind when they say that “you can do anything if you put your mind to it”. “You can’t change society”, is a piece of folk-lore that stays intact, largely because that is thought to be just too big a dream.

People are changing society all the time, of course, and it could almost be a theme of human history. Nobody does it on their own, either, but that is true of most big dreams.

The big social transformation in my life-time was the neo-conservative revolution of the mid nineteen-eighties with Thatcherism, Reaganomics and, in New Zealand, Rogernomics. The bulk of those most active in the world today were born into it, or too young to know any better, and so it is “normal” and “the way things are” for most people. Though it has been the cause of so much socioeconomic harm, governments now only move to repair the damage by inches. We have a long way to go before adequate health care and infrastructure will trump the absurdity of “tax breaks” or “lower taxation”.

2. Where education is concerned, the reduction of education to schooling, and the fact that we are not brought up to participate in the educational decisions about our lives means that almost none of us are equipped to think about education. Deciding which career to pursue, or which college to apply for, or which courses to take when you get there is not to be confused with educational thinking, of course. It is simply to be engaged with the recipes and little boxes, and to play into the contrived supermarket of schooling. It is why you will be called a “consumer” of education; “education” being what those factories produce.

Throughout the whole process we have long been discouraged from believing that there is any role for us in thinking about our education at all – which is to say – in thinking well about our own lives or best interests. In that long process over many years, absorbing the best hours of our days, the one lesson that we all learn regardless of how badly we do at the others, is that schooling is education, and that this sort of education is necessary, right, and the best we can do. Hence we can’t get our minds around the idea that there could be any alternative to the institutions that we now have, however wrong they may seem to be intuitively. Our intellectual dependency and incapacity is most transparent when we come to consider the educational domain than it is in any other.

3. We fear education. Any suggestion that the mass of the population should be brought up to think critically about themselves and their society, evokes in us the fears possessed by our masters and mistresses. We never doubt our own ability to be reasonable people, but we seriously doubt that other people could be, and we see evidence of their inability everywhere in our daily lives, particularly in the larger segments of the population lower down.

This is an ancient fear; the fear and contempt that the ruling class has always had of the mass of the population. It is a hold-over from pre-democratic times, and it is to be understood in terms of the fierce reluctance of aristocratic societies in which the ruling classes were born to do the thinking, and the masses were not.

That fierce reluctance can be seen in the determined resistance to expand the franchise in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, even as the merchant-industrial classes struggled and bought their way into the gentry, eventually displacing most of them. They didn’t make themselves in that way just to give over power to “the people”, and sacrifice the privilege that they had gained.

The torch of fear and contempt was passed to them, and they resisted true democratization just as fiercely as the gentry that they married their way into. Universal, compulsory State schooling was being pre-figured, ultimately institutionalised, before the franchise was extended and detached from a property qualification. Only for a small elite of students was any thought given to an education that might equip the mind for questions that were larger and more fundamental than their own compliant labour, political docility, and consumption. This was the “liberal education” tradition that was fit only for the secondary school elite, and those who might advance to university. Universal, compulsory State schooling domesticated the mass of the population for pseudo-democracy before even that much had to be conceded.

Thus, when we, of the general population, balk in fear of education – of what “they” might do if they were provided with an education that would equip them to think – we reveal ourselves as the bearers of sentiments of earlier ages, inappropriate to our modern humanitarianism, and our commitment to human rights, and mutual respect. This is the medieval in us; the bit that defers to aristocrats and our betters. We carry these views and pass them on; as forms of self-hatred that mean that we do not stand up for a true education for our offspring, either.  Our children will have to make do with a reasonableness just like ours, and we will pass it on to them.

The irony is that most of us who perpetuate this fear, are the feared; for most of us who are descended from the waves of immigration into the US or Canada, and certainly into New Zealand and Australia, as well as our indigenous peoples, came precisely from those classes who were not to do the thinking. The achievements of our family histories, of our levels of training and the complexities and social responsibilities in our vocations apparently aren’t enough to falsify these older perceptions of our mass depravity and incompetence. Nor do the similar achievements of our peers in the general populations of Europe today. None of us are to be trusted with freedom that a true education would enable. “They” would never allow it.

“They” would never allow it? But “they” have shown themselves to be properly susceptible to the advance of determined public opinion. They “go along with all this”, just as we do, and “they” would change as quickly as we changed our minds, if they thought it would turn into serious opposition to “the way things are”. Any astute politician will ride that wave. Any good entrepreneur would find a new way to make a buck as the wind shifted.

Many years ago, I came across an idea called the “discount hierarchy”, devised, apparently, by Jacqui Schiff, Dawana Markov and Falcon River to analyse the levels of resistance to acknowledging a problem – originally, family and domestic violence. It is a stage-theory, from total denial to a qualified but uncommitted acknowledgement.  Anyone looking for an excuse not to do anything about education might consider starting here.

To move up the hierarchy is to gain increasing awareness of the problem, but also to use each new stage to bring out a further excuse, or set of excuses appropriate to the level of denial. I have reinterpreted the original to reflect our educational interest.  It goes like this:

• Existence: There isn’t a problem

• Significance: Other places maybe, but not here

• Solvability: There is a problem, but no solution

• Self: Well, maybe there are solutions, but there is nothing I can do about it

I have constructed these educational interpretations simply as a summation of reasons I have heard. There is nothing systematic, let alone scientific about the way I collected my observations. I think that you will see how it works, all the same. And the scope of the passivity that it represents.

Those familiar with stage theories, such as that offered by Jean Piaget, or Laurence Kholberg many years ago, will appreciate the impossibility of changing any of these views by presenting reasons at too many stages above the ones that a person finds initially compelling. People at the bottom two levels won’t respond well to reasons for acting to solve a problem they struggle to admit exists, though those at the highest level might. Conventional wisdom from those other stage-theories was that people can generally understand reasons at one level higher than the level at which they are operating and able to argue. That is why I don’t think that the significant issues are practical; they are conceptual and imaginative. People need to see and care about the issue before it is worth addressing the practicalities.

The sequence should even suggest to us why, in many discussions, it actually might be unwise to address practical questions until these problems of denial have been worked through. If those still at the first two levels are asking for practical solutions, they are most likely doing so simply to heap upon them the scorn of impracticality. Even the higher levels aren’t likely to be very receptive until they have moved up to the point of strongly believing that something needs to be done.

But it surely turns out to be promising that the core problem is a matter of denial; a problem of imagination; a congruence with respect, and a commitment to it. We are educators, aren’t we, and this is basic in our experience and our effort. It is a matter of bringing people to see the world differently, to bringing about awareness, of consciousness raising. Here we are treating anomalies and contradictions that can be exposed in all kinds of ways. It is clearly in the domain of “we can do anything that we put our minds to”. To the extent that this change of mind can be achieved, it involves little more than returning people to their core values with the abundance of experience, evidence and examples that are available to us, and enabling them to recognise their implications. It can be solved. Then the world will simply explode with practical possibility.

Whenever I am in a high place over a large, urban area, I find my mind returning to a habitual reflection. It might be that I am on a hill, but more likely that I am in a viewing station on the top of a sky-scraper, or even better, in a window-seat of an aircraft climbing out of a city airport, or descending into it. It is preferable; more vivid to me, if it is at night, and the dwellings are lit, the streets eerily marked out in dull streetlamps, with the lights of isolated cars moving in the back-streets, and swarming in the thoroughfares.

It isn’t the high buildings of the commercial districts that hold my attention. Beautifully lit they may be, but I imagine them largely empty, except for the cleaning contractors. It is the apartments and single dwellings that capture my imagination, stretching in every direction to the horizon; a horizon that is distant at my altitude; the fairy lights of a great city and its multitude.

I imagine that these dwellings each represent, perhaps, two people on average, and the thought of the diversity of experience and interpretation, the uniqueness of the personal histories and the individual making-of-it, multiplied among all those dwellings, strikes me with awe.

Perhaps I wouldn’t want to sit at the feet of most of them on just any topic or opinion. But at least my experience of sustained and thoughtful discussion in groups, of familiar things put in unexpected ways, of the unpredictability within them, of the uniqueness of the detail even amid the patches of predictability, of the fluidity of group reactions – these things always come alive in me again when I see the potential of so much humanity spread out before me.

My eyes track across this potential population awake to the sense of privilege at having sat in on so many discussions undertaken by the comparatively small numbers of students who found their idiosyncratic way to my groups; privilege as a witness to the understanding they built together, the knowledge and feeling they created. Here is the sort of pool from which they came; from which so many could come.

My groups were almost always beginners, and we never did have very long together. As beginners, there were predictable things that they invariably had to traverse; the conventional, the vague, the well-worn. But they were never closely predictable, and the group dynamics would be different enough to make the actual course always unique, so that I benefited from the novelty – of the course of contribution, of the examples and stories, different contexts of origin and experiential histories creating epistemological dramas like works of art. And here, from my high window, so many such people living our their lives and drawing their conclusions, making something of them as they go. Such a potential resource for human understanding, and for each other, twinkling out to the horizon in all directions. Hundreds of thousands. Millions.

And not just conclusions about life – the “outlooks on life” – the cultivated and barely cultivated tastes and aversions, the inclinations to believe or doubt, the thoughtfulness and thoughtlessness – but also the potential passionate interests and activities themselves, within careers and without.

The huge treasure laid out here, of why various pursuits and undertakings might matter. The human fund of what there is to care about and why, and – with the right prompting and the right willingness – what there might be to say or ask or show about that caring. Of the freedom in it, or the compulsion. Of the quality of choice, the unthinking adoption, the intellectual and moral contagion. Of the struggle for some sort of emancipation, and from what.

Suppose that every fifth household contained some advanced skill or knowledge or insight into just one activity that could enable someone else to be better at it, or more thoughtful about it, or someone in that household had asked one unique question that others had not thought to ask, or had asked an old one in a novel way. In all that bejewelled carpet of human proximity we would immediately expect much “duplication” of knowledge, of course, but insofar as it was knowledge that was continually pursued and modified in some sort of practice, as we are entitled to think, we should also expect to find novelty, diversity, the stuff of challenge, tucked in with so many of these familiar things. To see that landscape, as I do from a height, is to consider it a landscape of experience. A landscape of epistemic potential.

How do we harvest this knowledge, and put it to use? How does that happen, within that landscape, each to each and together? What would a “knowledge society” be, if it ignored all this? Is the only harvest here to be that made by researchers, pollsters and reporters? Is the knowledge that these small coteries of experts play with for their peculiar agendas the true sum of the potential knowledge scattered out there? Is the possibility of all that knowledge lost to the rest in the very world in which it resides?

Where does education stand? Gazing at that twinkling urban landscape, the schools of all kinds seem puny – because they are. It would take a long time to sift through all that vast landscape to find the few schools scattered through there, and when we did, we would discover not merely that hardly any of them are there for the adults in any event, but that they exist to provide inputs from even more remote and esoteric sources that are not even local. They are not, in a sense, public or open educational facilities at all, but closed off with their own closed and guarded security, and closed altogether when most people in the surrounding community are at home.

It is not their job to draw out and harvest the knowledge that exists here among all these adults and young people, let alone to enable all these people to draw upon it from each other and share it in forms that they can use to advance their own understanding of their own lives, and what they might do with them.

The forms that we call “educational” largely ignore all that life and potential that we can imagine from our high window – and if they do pay attention at all, they are most likely to consider it a problem. So what sorts of institutions, resources, processes and facilities would nurture that landscape as an educational landscape that could invigorate the knowledge and understanding that it contains, enabling its refinement and improvement, its clarification and filtration, the accessibility to it, the social construction and reflective, personal reconstruction of it. Twitter? Facebook? Google?

We do better with water reticulation, or electricity. We do at least as well with cars, filling stations, repair shops, parking lots. We are looking at an epistemic or educational field of diamonds, but in terms of the harvesting and processing of the knowledge and experience for the sakes of the people who live there, it may as well be a desert.

Some of those who are in denial about the need for a genuine education will speak of the critics of such a system as “too idealistic”, or “utopian”. But to gaze upon all that humanity, and realise the poverty of our epistemological and educational institutions, the loss and wastage of life and experience that it represents, is to invite the possibility that what we are gazing upon here should properly be called an educational dystopia.

I am not, of course, inviting the idea of an educational dystopia as some others might, when gazing on these marching suburbs. Wherever I have lived, and with all of the people I have worked with, I have been impressed with the knowledge of my neighbours and workmates. Among them I find myself to be wrong, misinformed, or having reached undeveloped conclusions far more often than I have been right, and where these discoveries are made in a setting of decency, I have found the challenge to be reassuring that my approach to life can be invigorated by these discoveries, as well as better-honed. Time spent alone has its advantages, but the lack of such a contribution from others is not one of them.

Another might gaze out of the window of the aircraft, however, and see, not the landscape of potential knowledge and experience that I do, but a wasteland of a population locked into intellectual and emotional boxes as well as dwelling in physical ones. They might be more aware of how much of that landscape might be peopled with shallow recipes for life perpetuated through schooling-without-thinking, by communicative numbness, by powerful tools of manipulative marketing, and by the political institutionalisation of contempt and fear. They might see the habitation of ants, toiling in acceptance of an endless cycle of production, consumption and wealth-creation for purposes that seem to have little to do with them at all.

They might see a population rendered intellectually dependent, dissatisfied with the way that the recipes are working out, but powerless to believe that they are capable of doing better, or deserve better, or even able to question what might be wrong. A population that has been taught to be anti-intellectual, and to believe that critical thinking is for pointy-headed people that they rather despise. A population for whom the thought of pursuing knowledge and understanding for themselves out of an alive curiosity simply makes them feel tired. They have had enough of teachers. But self-education is hard. A population always falling back on the trite answers, complaints and forms of blaming and excusing that they have been encouraged to adopt in the polluted streams of ideas from which there is so little opportunity to escape.

No matter how economically impoverished the neighbourhoods down there, they might say, each dwelling will have its TV and cell phones or electronic devices, sometimes endlessly streaming. What these observers will see when they look from their window will not be a landscape of epistemological and educational possibility, but a landscape of poorly-tested, low-grade opinion.

If we combined the impoverishment of the educational institutions, facilities and resources in that large scene, with the quality of the landscape that it serves, we would, for such a viewer, indeed be gazing upon an epistemological and educational dystopia. And perhaps there is some truth to such a view. Politicians, civil servants and academics are constantly complaining about what those people down there believe, and how poorly too many of them behave.

If there is indeed any truth to this, it would show us how much we stand to achieve for all our sakes, if we took education seriously.

Anyone who has read through to reach these final remarks will have gathered that I have little time for neo-liberalism, or neo-conservatism, or libertarianism.  But there is a mantra or banner that all of these fly that will open yet another window on our educational failure, and what we might stand to achieve if we took education seriously.

Limited government. There is too much government, it is too paternalistic, creating a “nanny-state” of welfare provision that cultivates a dependency of unacceptable proportions, and because such big government costs, this in turn creates an invidious cycle of “tax-and-spend”. They claim that the faulty, reflex solution to the woes of our society is to throw money at every problem. It is my money. I earned it, and it shouldn’t be taken from me and applied to all these people who should be looking after themselves (as I do).

I am not going to dwell on the atrophy of the idea of the person that is represented in these last remarks; the atomistic individualism that impoverishes social theory. Nor am I going to expand on the partiality that this narrow self-interest represents, serving particular classes of people at the expense of respect for all – how neo-conservative policies have reduced taxation for those on higher incomes, passing more of the burden to those lower down, or those other policies that have served to widen the gulf between rich and poor. That widening gap exacerbates social problems, and when we then determine to cut spending in order to reduce taxes – most effectively for the well-off, our crumbling infrastructures and social provisions just make the situation so much worse. And the poorer you are the more crumble there tends to be around you.

My concern here is with the educational situation that is key to the professed aims of neo-liberalism, or neo-conservatism, or libertarianism, but that they – perhaps more than any other group – have shown so little understanding of that key, let alone willingness to address it. In failing to understand the role of education, they fail to grasp the problems of freedom at all.

Consider what one hundred and fifty years, more or less, of universal, compulsory State schooling must mean in this debate when that schooling is confused with education, and driven by fear and contempt for what the mass of the population would think or do if its powers of thought were developed. Consider the effect of such schooling, extended gradually beyond elementary school to high school, and now well into tertiary education, when its content and process is fit for little more than the preparation of slaves.

This is an “education” limited to vocationalism and the moulding of conventional good behaviour, the nature of which is determined by established authority obsessed with a wealth-creating cycle of production and consumption. When Ivan Illich, in his De-schooling Society, published in the 1960s, compared the continued expansion of schools to an arms race, he was also predicting the over-schooled, over-taught future in which we now live, and the inabilities that we now possess. (DSS)

The efforts of historians and sociologists who attempted to discern the purpose of conventional schooling through studying its practices, clearly showed that it has nothing to do with creating free people who can think effectively about their own good. Nor does it have anything to do with enabling citizens to give critical and challenging thought to the good society that they might seek and support in order to enable their own flourishing, as well as everyone else’s. These things, both of which are the hall-marks of free people, and denied to slaves, have never been the business of our modern schools.

Consider how any State would have to be governed where such a conception of education-as-schooling creates intellectual dependency and conformity to the whims of commercial fashion, cultivated by a vast marketing and advertising industry that is integral to the cycle of production and consumption. The advertising and marketing industry spends more on the manipulation of mind and behaviour than the State can afford to spend on the schooling system, a system within which advertising and marketing are now deeply embedded. Schooling is, of course, one of the State’s largest budget items.

In this schooling system the learner participates very little in any genuine decision-making about the content and processes they undergo, and very unequally, if at all, in the authority under which they live and learn. This is a preparation for life, and the life to be lived reflects that preparation.

Such a population will, if the schools have any success at all, inevitably be dependent. The State will have to be large, managing that population in ways appropriate to their dependency, their inability to negotiate their lives with each other, and their lack of initiative. It will have to manage these people in ways that perpetuate that undemocratic authority, making decisions for them, but also, in order to provide at least a semblance of humanitarianism, supplying many of their needs – as  such a form of paternalism would have to do for an infantilized population. As school prepares learners for life, the culture of government must perpetuate the culture of school.

If you do not want to have a thinking population because you fear what such a population might do, then a large “nanny State” must be built to manage and serve the needs of that large mass of the population that you have deliberately rendered so manageable. Large State management is inevitable. Indeed, given the model of authority that has dominated in schooling from around the age of five – or even earlier – until well into the twenties for most citizens, the State will have to manage this population in much the same way that a school does. Being dependent – which means lacking in the genuine responsibilities of citizenship – necessarily requires, under contemporary conditions, a large and intrusive State. With such a large schooling system enclosing so much of the lives of the young for so many years, then it is impossible not to conclude that the purpose is a preparation for the State-as-school.

The effect of introducing universal, compulsory State schooling was not to make democracy possible, it was to limit its possibility. Where monarchs were often thought of on the analogy of parents – as fathers or mothers to the nation, the paternalism of the traditional national family simply morphed into the paternalism of the nation-as-school, with its principal and deans, its teachers of varying degrees, and its prefects, a term that is familiar in the systems of law and order in a number of States.

The role of the State-as-school has been continuous in its happy ambiguities – in its paternalism, in its reach into our private lives, and in its enthusiasm for teaching us lessons, and not just to the poor and the unemployed. Even the elections which provide a way of maintaining a facade of democracy merely represent a routine rearrangement of the staff-room.  The continuity persists into the love-hate relationship government has with the print and broadcast media, peopled as these often are with wannabe teachers who often see their educational role in terms of national instruction.

If neo-conservatives, neo-liberals or libertarians ever seriously intended to dismantle the “nanny” State and significantly reduce the size of the State as a whole, then the only way that they could have done so without exposing their hypocrisy would have been to advocate the dismantling of our excessive institutionalisation of schooling-and-teaching and its authority-structure. They would have had to argue, instead, for a thoroughgoing development of a genuine education for all our people, an education that prioritised the self-determination and personal responsibility that is supposedly the hall-mark of neo-liberal and libertarian politics, or at least its facade.

But this political cluster is noteworthy for its absolute silence on educational questions. One might even say that it is outstanding in its determination to avoid any mention of the educational problematic at all, and plants its flag firmly on a total denial of what is so well known of human development and learning, with the exception, perhaps, of instructing others how to think. Indeed its only acknowledgement of the idea of education lies in the vigour with which it has attacked the liberal education tradition. (SEE ARTICLES ON-LINE) It is surely no accident that it is in our years dominated by neo-conservative ideology that the public and popular decline of the idea of education itself has been so comprehensive.

We have already explored the conventional, distorted understanding of the nature of reason that harks back to the Enlightenment and beyond, raising the problem of rational fundamentalism and the way in which people so often have difficulty grasping that the development of reason is an educational problem – that it has to develop out of the blindness of babyhood and infancy, and that in doing so it is dependent upon the nature and quality of experience, particularly social experience.

We saw this, for instance, in the absurdity of the idea of “the age of reason”, as if, at a particular point in youth, “reason” somehow switches on, unconditioned by earlier experiential development. Anyone who is captive of such fictions will find it impossible to grasp the profound way in which the first question of human freedom is mental. And anyone who thinks that the shackling of the body is the ultimate loss of human freedom should try losing their mind.

This is why claims about human freedom, coming from neo-conservatives, neo-liberals, or libertarians are deeply hypocritical and so lacking in any intellectual credibility. Educational understanding, in this quarter, is a wasteland. In contrast, the best claimants to maintaining the concept of education have been conventional conservatives, for to the extent that they advocate preserving well-tested and tried tradition, they tend to be supporters of the ideals of a liberal education; perhaps its last voice.

Unfortunately, since that tradition is deeply embedded in the old European ruling class, it is part and parcel of that pre-democratic fear and contempt for the mass of the population. This meant, as it continues to mean, that the liberal education tradition is bound up with conceptions of authority that do not democratize well. 

Traditional conservatives are equal heirs to those traditions that most resisted the franchise, reaching back to monarchies, and ultimately to divine authority.  Here, the fear of educating the entire general population continues to rest too comfortably, and for this reason, traditional conservatives are happy enough with the role of conventional schooling-and-teaching in maintaining the separation between those who should do the real thinking, and those who should not.

The left tends more to educational innovation. It is the left who are more likely to be caught up in the occasional efforts at alternative schooling, and alternative models of teaching within them, including efforts to make schools more democratic. They are heir to those working class traditions that naively conceived of schooling as a vital path to freedom, and to political participation, and in their desires and efforts to “raise people up”, educational activists of the left have often been ambivalently coopted into the rules of meritocracy. They are all too happy to fall into the equation of education with schooling, compromising the power of their own social critiques just where it matters.

Meantime, neo-conservatives, neo-liberals and libertarians show themselves to be perfectly comfortable with huge schooling systems that indenture students and transfer the taxes of workers to the employers in the form of heavily subsidised vocational training. They have no qualms with the content of any of this, or the massive system of social engineering that the process and content of schooling involves, being somehow able to disregard completely the fundamental incompatibility with the principles that they profess to espouse.

What they do quibble with is that this system should continue to be run so completely by the State. Rather, it should be converted, as far as possible, into a source of private profit. They argued for independent (charter) schools, a competitive market, and even (initially) for a voucher system to better enable the competition. The State, in other words, in gathering up all that tax money, should offer it to learners in the form of vouchers for which private education providers could then compete; thus combining the notion of the ubiquitous factory school with the superficiality of the supermarket, in which the educationally illiterate consumer could exercise their trivialized choice. This has represented the depth of their educational thinking.

What would “limited government” look like, if we could achieve it? I do not know – just as none of us who have grown up under conventional schooling, and who have lived our lives in social worlds drenched in indoctrination, can know how we would have thought and felt, and what we would have done with our lives had we grown up in properly ordered educational environments.

But something can be said about what would be involved in moving procedurally towards a genuinely democratic government so far as education would be concerned. That would, of course, be the way that we should go about it. We should move our practices into closer and closer conformity to the principles of respect, rather than attempting to imagine and engineer the whole outcome for ourselves. We are too compromised for that. Those whom we have properly equipped will be closer to the problems and solutions we cannot yet see,  and we should trust the process, and them.

“Limited government” – a limited State sector – would have to depend upon an expansion and extension of self-government in the citizen population. To move towards a sophisticated and enlightened self-government at the individual level would also be a move toward being governed, more genuinely, by the will of the people.  While this should give us reason to hope for a smaller State, it would also serve to ground the State in a greater legitimacy. This would, I suggest, only be possible on the condition of a thorough-going cultural alignment, throughout all institutions, with educational principles of the sort I have been proposing. People everywhere within the society would need to be constantly in contact with social forms that met appropriate educational conditions, so that their proper educational development was as inevitable as the idiosyncrasies of personal experience would allow.

Whatever we might want to consider in terms of forms of organisation in civil society, and through private associations, that might alleviate the heavy-handed, paternalistic over-management of the conventional State, allowing it to be smaller, this would firstly have to be rooted in the self-government of the members of the general population themselves, and their capacity for dialogue and collective decision.

Self-government and disciplined association is impossible, however, while the dominant educational theory and practice has to do with creating dependency, and a compliance and manageability that reduces living well to vocationalism and manipulated consumption. What we now do leaves too much of the population out of touch with social arrangements and relationships which make good living possible, and renders them poor social thinkers and actors. These existing educational practices generate costly social problems and require extensive and expensive management, both of which, under current conditions, render limited government impossible.

If we want to rectify this, we must bring our people up in forms of sociability that are rich  in diversity and capable of challenging that diversity with a disciplined respect; enabling them to create and remake ideas and experiences – and even themselves. These forms of association need to have those qualities of ECOis that mean, on the one hand, that each can experience the value and power of their own minds, while also supporting and affirming each other, building their own authority without dependency on authority imposed arbitrarily upon them.

The experience of such groups both fuels critical and creative energy, and suggests to each of us that we stand to lose too much should the opportunities and skills of respectful collaboration begin to founder, or be withdrawn. Our young people will come forward as true democrats, experiencing the power of democracy as they grow up, and in the natural discovery of its value; not just in narrow, individualistic terms, but in the expansive richness of a collective intelligence.

They will come to adulthood eager and proud to exercise their independence in democratic self-government, and expecting to play their part. Given a society with a generous freedom of information, and arranged to facilitate self-organisation, we should expect that much of the problem-solving of formal institutions will be pre-figured in the larger community that is currently held in contempt, and dominated by a model of competition and compromise.

There are, of course, those who will agree with the importance of respect in the abstract, but claim that the possibilities of the human rights that many of us now enjoy are dependent on wealth creation, and that this justifies maintaining it as a first priority. Intelligent self-determination – our duty to ourselves to live good lives – is a wonderful aspiration in the abstract, they will say. But they will claim that we will lose even the self-determination that we currently possess if we put it ahead of the essential vocationalism.

This fear is not only misplaced, the assumptions on which it is based are outmoded. The prosperity achieved by the nineteenth and early twentieth century factories are now behind us, because their systems of management and their dependence on manual skill no longer represent the circumstances of wealth-creation in our time. The practice of instiitutionalising our populations and accustoming them to the formal authority of conventional schooling-and-teaching, and its background decision-making, might have been thought of as congruent with production and wealth-creation in earlier times of industrialization, but it is quite misaligned with the direction in which production and service is moving, and holding them back.

It is now becoming more and more important to productivity to harness the mental powers of workers, collaborating together. Unlike manual power and skill, which formerly had the priority, the power of the mind is not so readily distilled and treated apart from the rest of the life of a human being. Where it might have been possible to utilize the body while enslaving the mind, it is profoundly contradictory to try and harness intelligence, critical and creative thought, collective and individual initiative and personal passion whilst also enslaving them. The achievement of a proper democracy is not just ethically desirable, it is liberating of the true power and intelligence of modern labour.

The employees that management should now want will be those who have worked out well for themselves what they want to do with, and in, their lives, and they will have done so with skill and understanding. Management should want people who, on such a basis, can freely give their passionate commitment, their minds, their energies and the full expression of their self-respect to a purpose that the enterprise stands for unambiguously, and that is worthy. They should want people who come seeking to join collaboratively with others in undertakings that are also expressive for them all of good living, and not merely to trade their time or their experience for money or social status. To do this, to have a mind worth offering, they would have to have had the opportunity to develop one; a mind that is free, well-considered, and self-managed with insight and skill.  One that is worth being offered, knowing what it is doing.

But of course any advantage here will be lost if management can’t relate to these people, serving their interests as well as utilizing their powers and capacities, mentoring them into collaborative and productive teams. If managers are controlling, prizing their power or fearful in their authority, standing at the end of traditions that go back to Waterloo and the mills of the Midlands, any such evolution would be wasted, and free people would be frustrated until they could find like-minded and secure managers who are themselves team-members; who can build trust and depend upon it. It is not just about educating them, it is also about educating us.

Better still, when our suppliers are like this, and like-minded, we are more likely to get the supplies that we want and as we want them. Better again, when our efforts speak to clients who are like this too. If our efforts are aimed at improving people’s lives – addressing the real needs of thoughtful people who have an advanced understanding of good living in good communities, and we can do so in sustainable ways, then we will be able to develop a purpose worthy of good staff. If we are in the business of creating “needs” and trivial desires, and manipulating them for profit, just to expand the cycle of production and consumption, then we will likely have to depend upon compromised workers.

When I was young, and the Second World War with its atomic revelations still loomed close behind the backs of our parents and teachers, it was not uncommon for them to remark at how adept our species seemed to be at developing technology, and at how out of proportion this talent was when compared to our ability to manage ourselves socially – between nations, within nations, in our cities, towns and districts, and even among friends. This is not much mentioned any more, and yet the discrepancy ought to be even more obvious to most of us. Another one of those flaws of human nature? And yet it should be obvious by now that our educational arrangements can explain it without recourse to genetics. An educational theory that has any pretense to adequacy should be capable of explaining ourselves to ourselves, and not just announce what we should intend to do to our dependents.

It is important to notice how deeply ingrained is the practice, when speaking of education, to talk as if it is about them, all those ones out there who need it, particularly the young. We sit in our meetings and tertiary classrooms and speak about education as if it is something external to us. We speak about learners and students as “clients” these days. It helps to give a pretence that they have some sort of control, or some say in what is happening to them, and it sounds a little commercial – they are the “consumers” of education. Like shopkeepers and advertisers, we just “give them what they want”, and that helps excuse us from any real effort at justification. We even ask them to give spurious assessments of our work – assessments that gather dust.

But of course an older terminology was more accurate, and still is, since little has changed. They are the patients, and we are the agents. We do it to them. They are, in particularly important ways, incapable, and we are capable. This out-of-kilter perception that we enter into when we think of education parallels, in a spooky way, that condition in which we doubt the ability of others to reason well, while being confident of ourselves. It parallels the fear of education; the apparent danger in it. But the idea that we “know better” is a partial delusion. “Partial” because, in the uniqueness of our experience we always, in a sense, know more – and less – than each other. If a genuine education was built, and was a success, we may well find ourselves the outsiders, the bemused strangers, looking in.

We just don’t get it that as we speak of education in those meetings and tertiary classrooms, we too are in an educational world even then – if we are lucky. We should want to make educational judgments and decisions about ourselves until we die, and make them well, and this would not mean that we are incompetent, or “lacking”. It would mean that we are fully human. Before we would attend to the education of anyone else, we should first attend to our own, without an eager or impatient eye to some eventual graduation.

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Illich, Ivan. Deschooling Society. London: Calder & Boyars, 1971.

Oliver, R. Graham. “A Liberal Education – Exit Stage Right. Part 1.” WordPress. What Is Education? Articles (blog), n.d. https:⁄⁄whatiseducationhq.com⁄articles⁄the-attack-on-liberal-education-part-1⁄.

Oliver, R. Graham. “A Liberal Education – Exit Stage Right. Part 2.” WordPress. What Is Education? Articles (blog), n.d. https:⁄⁄whatiseducationhq.com⁄articles⁄liberal-education-why-it-needs-replacing⁄.

Cathy, W. “The Discount Hierarchy.” Up An Atom! (blog), January 27, 2016. http:⁄⁄up-an-atom.blogspot.com⁄2007⁄01⁄discount-hierarchy.html.