Education and the educational ecosystem

Education and the educational ecosystem

It is a commonplace to say that education should be about enabling learners to live worthwhile lives. What that would have to involve is never extensively explored, and this lack of a benchmark would help to explain why the idea of education-as-usual has no competition. This article is an introductory attempt to repair that omission

Whatever our disagreements about the content or conduct of education, there is one expectation which we all surely share; that education should improve people’s chances of leading good lives.

We are all aware that what we learn is vital to what we end up trying to make of our time here, and to the likelihood that our efforts will be successful. What we learn is crucial to our experiences of happiness, or fulfillment; to the recognition of the things that would make life worthwhile, and to our engagement in activities and undertakings worthy of our time.

It is only through the development of our capacities for language, thought and imagination, and through initiation into various traditions, institutions and activities that we are capable of identifying and creating choices for ourselves, and acting upon them, and thus of making our lives our own. Our chances of leading good or worthwhile lives are dependent upon what we can learn, and the sources of learning are as diverse as the activities, institutions and traditions that can come to make up a life, or which can play a part in its development.

The multiplicity and richness of the locations of relevant learning is one of the most important single realizations I have come to in the course of working on a theory of education which will give proper recognition in educational thought and decision to our primary interest in good or worthwhile living. That richness, and that diversity has caused me to re-examine my own understanding of such matters as educational content, educational control, and educational authority, as well as of concepts such as those of “education” and “indoctrination” themselves.

But the variety of potentially educational locations that such work discloses presents a problem for the presentation of such a theory. Education is frequently confused with schooling and formal teaching. Our talk about education is reduced to their issues. We become preoccupied with what schooling and institutionalised teaching require of us, and of what we require of them. To the extent that education and schooling tend to be equated, educational thought can only address those sorts of purposes that schooling and the teaching processes can hope to accomplish.

When education is thought of in this way, there is only a limited contribution that it can make to the development of the good or worthwhile life. Indeed, on this conception, the contribution which education can make to any profound or significant human purpose is likely to be limited.

It is the purpose of this article to show the inappropriateness of the reduction of education to schooling through a consideration of the educational requirements of good or worthwhile living. It is also to suggest that serious intellectual and institutional problems with considerable practical consequences must flow from this reduction. Our assimilation of education to schooling and teaching distorts our understanding and impairs our educational effectiveness, important though schooling and teaching may be. It also leaves us very unclear about what schooling and teaching can do best, and about what we should be trying to achieve through them.

It is taken for granted that the machinery of education relates to its purpose in an unproblematic way. We are often painfully disappointed that education fails to fulfill our expectations, but we rarely identify the source of our failure in the vagueness and confusion of these aspirations and their relation to appropriate means.

Problems with current schooling practice absorb our attention. We rush forward to argue for a school curriculum, or for appropriate teaching methods, as if it is obvious what follows for schools from an interest in a better life, and as if our educational problems are simply those of classification and administration, and of techniques, topics and themes.

The inappropriateness of this reduction of education to schooling will become vivid if we explore the kinds of learning that might be important to the choice and realization of the worthwhile life. Wherever we find that this learning can be controlled, or harmful learning minimized, we will have identified a potential sphere of action that is properly within the educational domain. In this way we can approach the question of educational means afresh. We can set out to discover the sorts of institutions that might have educational potential, instead of being prisoners of assumptions that have traditionally accorded some institutions a privileged positions in our educational thought.

Few of our explicit discussions of education are helpful occasions on which to learn about the relative educational contribution made by different institutions or settings, since the use of the word “education” usually triggers the reduction. The educational domain comes more vividly to life when thoughtful adults, unencumbered by having to talk self-consciously about education, explore what has happened to them in their lives — what opportunities were missed, what understanding came too late, or what fortuitous turns their lives took.

As they talk about their dreams (misguided or otherwise) and as they talk about their successes or failures, their joys, their pains, and the discoveries that startled them most, they reveal what has become central to their understanding of their good. When they start from the strongly felt concerns of their own lives they are often ready enough to talk about how this learning came about; how they came to feel and to value, to perceive or misperceive, to be ignorant, or to understand, and how they are still perplexed. They talk about how they might have acted or interpreted things differently, and what they have re-made of their experience over time.

It should not be surprising that schooling loses its conventional educational status in such discussions, and becomes just one of a number of contexts in which important things are learned. When people talk about what has become of their lives, they often talk about their preparedness to choose.

Sometimes choices were made without an understanding of the probable consequences. Sometimes they were made in ignorance of alternatives. Other decisions were made without any real awareness of why some options held great appeal, whereas others were unattractive. People talk about the overwhelming pressure that was on them in the course of their development to take one path, or pursue another, or of the powerful, popular images of how one should live which got in the way of their ability to choose for themselves.

People are more likely to think of their family than they are of their schools when they speak of the origins of their desires, expectations and outlook, or their lack of understanding when they came to make such choices. The circumstances into which we are born select and create the whole world that we are entering, in a way that the school could never parallel. We are born into specific arrangements in which the issues of our care are settled by particular adults. Who these adults are and how they resolve these issues establishes where we will live, and how and when our lives will expand into a larger social and physical universe.

As growing people we come to play our parts with, and alongside, other family members who are also living out their lives, and evolving as we evolve. On their own, however, families can no more explain education than schools. There is surely not only one educational institution; but nor are there only two.

Important though the family is in setting the terms under which experience is had, it is also true that our growing understanding outside the home brings new meaning to our experiences there. It introduces the possibilities of criticising the initial foundations. Our development ripples out from primary relationships of absolute dependency as increasing concentric circles of experience encounter the street, the internet, the worlds of work, commerce and recreation, the church and, yes, the school. Each new institution which is touched and explored by each widening ripple is met on terms which have continued to evolve in the course of that rippling outward journey. And of course, our parents’ experiences – which have such a role in shaping our lives – rippled out through these institutions too.

The larger ecology of education comes more sharply into relief if we follow the spoor of widely appreciated forms of injustice in our communities – of gender, or race, for instance. Few who care about these things are very captive of the idea that the crucial learning – either the learned harm or its corrective, can be understood simply by focussing on schools. Schools are implicated in the problems and their solutions, yes, but few would expect to achieve very much by restricting our attention to them. It is not just that discrimination occurs in the workplace, in politics and public administration, in the media, in commerce. It is what we learn from the experience of discrimination, and from its institutional support and maintenance, that does the deeper damage to people’s lives and identities.

Here is the window into the larger educational insight that we need. But we must not mistake this insight into the harm – into indoctrination – for the whole of education, either. Getting rid of these damaging processes and practices – getting rid of the negative – is not to create social systems that will facilitate the development of fulfilling, meaningful and worthwhile lives.

We could substantially simplify the problems of education and the worthwhile life by doing away with the task of equipping people to choose their own. We could do this as educators by making the important choices about the good life they should lead, either ourselves, or by appeal to some other authority. Appropriate virtues, passions and sensibilities, and worthwhile knowledge and skill will all flow from such decisions. Educators would still have to attend to more than just schools, or schools plus the family, if they were to hope to bring people up to accept and maintain even these simple lives, however.

The Amish exemplify such an approach. All the institutions which structure educational experience govern, and are governed, by the requirements of the conception of worthwhile living. School, family and worship, work and leisure equally sustain a total learning environment within which the whole of a life can be developed and maintained.

In other less satisfactory circumstances, where groups with similar aims are unable to regulate all institutions, they must centre life on those they can, and erect strong social and psychological barriers against the influence of practices which might undermine the educational process. Such prohibitions, inhibitions and defences have to become a part of the conception of life itself, and introduce a negative element that would be unnecessary in an educationally consistent environment. In either case, it is quite implausible to suppose that schools could manage the educational requirements of the good life on their own.

If, on the other hand, we are concerned that people grow up to be responsible for the determination of their own good, including the grounds of their choices – as would be required by the prevailing Western, and now global, ethic with the priority it gives to self-determination and human rights – then we will need to undertake a much more difficult educational task and accept a much greater complexity of educational processes and content. For this to be viable, the complexity of education will need to increase in two areas.

Firstly, it will need to enable access to a wide range of experiences of possible alternative conceptions and contents of the good, as well as adequate opportunities to entertain different interests and enthusiasms. It will now be undesirable that a common commitment to a single conception of the good run through enough educationally powerful institutions to render other conceptions ineffectual. On the contrary, a considerable diversity of conceptions will be essential, with a significant number of these being philosophically strong, and incompatible.

There will have to be personal familiarity with the practices and experiences that alternative ways of life involve — appreciated intimately enough to provide some concrete foundation for imagining what might be involved in living such lives. This access to other lives will need to extend to an exposure to the different interests, enthusiasms and commitments, disappointments and frustrations of real people — people who might be able to demonstrate why various undertakings may be worthwhile.

Unless there is some minimum of experience of these kinds, it will be difficult to envisage other ways of living that are not close at hand, and the basis for a critical examination of our own upbringing will be impoverished. The capacity for vicarious experience is partly dependent upon what we have already lived through. It will not be sufficient merely to try out a variety of different things in case some of them turn out to be appealing.

The second requirement will be essential in a world where the goods of life are plural, and where there are no authoritative conceptions of good living to provide guidance. Since the task of the growing person is to develop a good or worthwhile life, and not just any life, they will need to be able to evaluate conceptions and activities, and to seek adequate grounds for deciding that some of them are better than others.

This calls for the development of forms of critical reason appropriate to the tasks of life-choice, and it is the second area in which educational complexity would have to increase. Indeed, it may make education more demanding than traditional practice if the quest for the Good Life is not to founder in a cacophony of indiscriminate alternatives among which learners feel forced to pick blindly, or on the basis of dubious influence.

A person’s reasoning abilities must enable them not only to appraise different conceptions of the good and different activities undertaken by others, but also to imagine other possibilities, actual or potential, that are not represented locally. Since the person’s life is to be their own they must also be put in charge of their own thought. This means that they will have to choose among approaches to reasoning itself, being able to criticise and revise their own reasoning practices for themselves. This would have devastating implications for education-as-usual.

The reasoning abilities of learners must enable them to ask the sorts of questions that thoughtful and wise people have perennially asked of conceptions of the good in all kinds of contexts, as well as the sorts of questions that need to be asked in the midst of action. Identifying such question is one thing, of course. A more advanced requirement is that they address these questions effectively  in ways that ensure that the conclusions reached are indeed their own, that they discipline themselves to processes that they freely respect, and can take responsibility for.

Once again, the people we experience who ask such questions, and the occasions — in private and public — under which they ask them, will no doubt significantly influence the ease with which these processes become a natural part of our lives. Our models for these kinds of reasoning, good and bad, are everywhere. Good models need to be everywhere, available to the experience of everyone, if the process is not to lapse into doctrine and spurious authority.

As young people develop, and their experience ripples out from the circumstances of their first dependency, they reconcile their lives in various ways with people who are already following their own life-plans. The initial caregivers of the young have to contend with their own issues of income and accommodation, passion and spirit, meaning and accomplishment. Depending on the structure of the caregiving and the nature of the setting, it is likely that the growing person will increasingly have experience of the lives of other people, and of new activities. Our experience of the activities and interactions of everyday life are shaped by major and minor institutions and the rationality of their operation.

Basic economic arrangements create terms within which other institutions must operate. The organisation of paid employment settles who we are likely to meet during the day and the conditions under which we meet them. “Work” and “leisure”, “public” and “private” are distinguished in ways that take account of such requirements. At any one time we can find some basic commercial conclusions expressed in our social practices about the goods we should seek to produce together, how they should be produced, and how distributed and consumed.

These practical conclusions have an impact in turn on the social position into which we are born, giving a particular shape to the caregiving, and to the activities and the environment through which we will grow. Within this general structure, our community has organised and conducted systems of social service and national defence, of national and regional politics, of travel and communication, entertainment and sport.

Models of urban, suburban and rural design have evolved, and practices have been developed that largely determine the possibilities of public debate as well as the physical conditions under which we come together. All of these domains have their own modes of discourse through which purposes are refined, problems identified, enquiry undertaken and decisions made – and often they have ways of corrupting these things, including through the institutionalisation of power.

How esoteric the discourse is, how public, and the occasions on which it appears appropriate to engage in them will all be functions of the social organisation, and will establish the likelihood that people growing up in one setting or another will find them to be a natural part of their social and mental life. The growing person will therefore come to take part in activities that involve presuppositions about class, gender, race, religion, wealth and power, good and evil and useful knowledge. It will engage with objects and their accepted uses — from toys to electronic devices. The activity of such learners will need to be reconciled with adult work and entertainment.

Whether the growing person enters the forests, walks along the shore or on paved paths, every piece of its environment that becomes an object of attention will be conceptualised, valued and named by the community it is entering. The activities they come in contact with and learn through, and the commitments lived out by the people they meet, will be structured in part by the given physical, political and economic environments and their histories, by the histories and practices of the prevailing arts, sciences and technologies, and by the histories and aspirations of the various groups which make up the larger community.

Through experiencing its practices, the person will gain structures of belief and conviction, of questioning and doubting. If the underlying arrangements express unjust solutions to past conflicts, or harmful motives such as avarice or envy, then what is learned is likely to be contaminated. Where ideology and prejudice are used to justify exploitative social practices and are protected from scrutiny by a climate that reinforces ignorance, it will be hard for them to avoid being tricked out of their potential freedom.

The decisions that govern the evolution of this complex tapestry are just as deliberate as the decisions that shape schooling, and the individuals and groups who make them are just as capable of being held responsible for the moral consequences that are produced. All of these decisions could be taken with a sensitivity to the educational point of view; to the likelihood that any significant change to our arrangements will alter the experiences of those whose lives are conditioned by them.

Decisions of structure, of technology, of policy and of practice change the circumstances under which we learn — both what we learn and how we learn it. Thus decision-making across the spectrum of political, economic and social life can all be understood to have an educational aspect. The limits of the educational domain are the limits of those forms of learning that we can reasonably foresee and control. Education is a moral enterprise, that control ought to be exercised for a moral purpose. The limits of our foresight and control represent the rough limits of our moral responsibility. Educational responsibility extends far beyond the foresight and control of school learning.

The whole human environment provides the substance for our learning about the possibilities of our lives, and the processes of reflecting on these possibilities. It can be an environment that delivers us to a ready-made conception of the good life, or it can equip us to choose our own. It can be so impoverished that it can leave us unable to ask the minimum of important questions about our lives, or without a clue as to how we might seek solutions. It can be so vicious and brutalising that it is impossible for us to gain the sorts of attitudes and understandings that might enable us to lead a life which is more than minimally human.

The contribution which schooling and teaching can make are highly specialised and restricted when set against this background. They are dependent on it even when their aims are much more narrow than a concern for the Good Life. If the outside world is antithetical to science, science teaching is likely to be ineffectual. If it is linguistically impoverished, language teaching will have to accept only small successes. If, on the other hand, that outside world is rich in interest in science, or poetry, or even woodwork, people will say that they learned more of these things outside than they did in school.

In this sense we do not know what schools should teach, as a matter of policy, until we know what educational conditions should be secured, as a matter of policy, in the world outside. If this is true of the more narrowly specialised areas of traditional subject matter, its truth should be more obvious where good living is concerned. Schooling can make a very special contribution, but that contribution is entirely relative to the educational setting within which it takes place. If the setting is educationally impoverished or destructive, the efforts of schooling are likely to be similarly limited.

Overcoming our reduction of education to schooling and teaching may seem an awesome project, not merely because of the institutional investment which we have in thinking of education in this reductive way, but also because “practical” people often feel more comfortable dealing with tasks and problems which can be limited, and which give a tangible appearance of “doing something”. Engaging with the educational world beyond schooling, teaching and the curriculum may be seen as utopian and futile.

Yet that very awe at the power and apparent intransigence of mind-forming forces which lie beyond school usually contains within it a recognition that the forces of that wider world are routinely mustered by political groups, public relations enterprises, commerce and industry to form opinions, fashions and aspirations, and to control public debate or turn it into entertainment.

While educators shrink from addressing that domain, others are vigorously and knowingly acting in it. At the same time, educational researchers, policy-makers and practitioners have partially incapacitated themselves from participating because of the narrow way in which they have conceived of their enterprise, and hence developed their knowledge.

A commitment to the educational development of the worthwhile life would call for something like a Copernican revolution in educational thought. The centre around which all revolves at present would have to be abandoned in favour of a conception through which we gave more than lip-service to the idea that we attend to the worlds of the learners themselves.

Instead of viewing their lives from the standpoint of the school, or the requirements of teaching as a bundle of techniques and technologies, we should follow the development of learners as they move in and through all of the institutions with which they come in contact. We should observe and improve these institutions as we become aware of their educational effects. We should wrestle with the dominant structures and commitments of our collective ways of life, judging them from the educational point of view and weighing the importance of educational considerations in their design and further development.

It will be difficult to appreciate how revolutionary the shift in thought might need to be unless we understand the extent to which the reduction of education to schooling actually occurs, and why. Many people will consider such a revolution unnecessary, or potentially undramatic, because they already think they understand that “education is more than just schooling”, but they rarely allow the realization to come into proper conflict with their conventional thinking. They slide into the reduction instantly and quite unselfconsciously.[ 1 ]

Taken seriously, however – as it should be – the thought would cause us to overturn our entire way of conceptualizing education, and force us to rethink every aspect of our practice.

If we shifted our attention, and began to pursue the sorts of theory and research which would enable us to gain some grasp of the larger domain, we would have to do more than simply rid ourselves of some inappropriate intellectual habits. Basic educational concepts would have to be developed anew in order to expand the range of their application. The concept of “education” itself would need to be revisited, and revived, as would the concept of “indoctrination”. Our ways of conceiving of educational authority and responsibility could not remain as they are.

All sorts of individuals quite apart from teachers, schooling administrators and parents would be found to have educational responsibilities, and collective responsibility in education would come to seem even more problematic than it is at present. Our grasp of the nature of educational processes would need to develop considerably, and its emphasis would have to change.

Those wishing to make educational processes their special area of interest would have to decide where, in a huge field of potential educational activity they were going to focus their attention, rather than falling, by default, into the processes of schooling and teaching, as they do at present. The subject matter of educational psychology, for example, would be on an entirely different scale to the subject matter of the psychology of pedagogy. Similarly, those who are currently concerned with the curriculum would have to acknowledge their narrow interest within the broad field of educational content.

As we did this work we would probably find that the reduction has impoverished educational thought and inquiry inside schooling and without; inside because schooling is not properly intelligible and is unlikely to be effective unless we understand its place within an ecology of educational content and process; outside because such work has been undertaken adrift from long traditions of coordinated thought concerning human development, authority and good living guided by educational concepts and principles.

People conventionally within “education” are unlikely to have done the appropriate work, because of their preoccupation with being useful to schools. There will be those outside who have been working in education all along without seeing it as their subject matter, since they too have equated education with schooling.

If we were serious in wanting to do something about this reduction we would need to understand its origins and its extent. It is doubtful that we have paid it the sort of research attention necessary in order to be aware of its consequences, or to be able to explain it. Such a research enterprise should not be confused with the interest people have in “informal education”, or “non-schooling” education, or the “cultural background of education”, either, since all of these terms define themselves against an acceptance of the reduction, accepting their status as peripheral.

It would take a considerable historical and sociological effort to assess the scale of the ideological reduction in both popular and professional thought and to disclose the forces which hold it in place. We may expect to find that a fervour for making education “scientific” (together with a particular conception of science) has played a considerable part, and perhaps we will find it significant that colleges and schools of education in universities, where most educational researchers are employed, have almost exclusively been concerned with the preparation of schooling professionals. We need to be clearer in distinguishing between radical critiques of schooling which nevertheless continue to employ assumptions from schooling and pedagogy, and those few which are able to make the break. [ 2 ]

Only then will we be able to assess the political implications of the reduction with any adequacy — including the possibility that the reduction, and not just schooling as it currently exists, helps to ensure that citizens under modern states cannot grow up to be free critical thinkers. Educational questions and decisions become isolated and driven into schooling and teaching discourse as a form of an educational ghetto, mausoleums for social issues that are otherwise thought too hard to address. The reduction strips education of a voice in matters which have educational implications but which are currently “outside its jurisdiction”, ensuring that whatever educators say and do can only be of limited effectiveness.

When reductive educational thought is abandoned, and we take seriously all of the socially formed sources of human learning, educational thought and understanding will be able to begin to contend with the questions of who we are as a people, and as individuals, and what there is of value in our potential that we might become. As a field of inquiry its subject matter is human nature, interrogated from a point of view in which science and ethics must meet at the heart.

Our educational enterprise must clarify its purposes through taking a greater interest in the philosophical problems of the choice and pursuit of a worthwhile life. An ethical understanding of prospective good lives and their choice must, at the same time, learn from human development because any worthwhile life is necessarily developmental. Experience is characteristic of lives, good or bad, and continues to be while we live them. This is why it is misleading to think of education as a preparation for life, rather than as a dimension under which our lives are lived. [ 3 ]

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1. 1. 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.
   2. Even radical critics from Illich to Freire conceptualise their problems and proposals in terms which owe their origins to the discourse of schooling or teaching. Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society . (New York: Harper and Row, 1971). Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed . (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1972).
   3. Dewey, John. Democracy and Education. Radford, Virginia: Wilder Publications, 2008. p 51.