Personal experience and public performance: The two sides of a genuinely educational practice

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Commanding, questioning, recounting, chatting, are as much a part of our natural history as walking, eating drinking, playing [6]

What has to be accepted, the given, is – so one could say – forms of life [7]

It is what human beings say that is true and false; and they agree in the language they use. That is not agreement in opinions, but in form of life. [8]

I want to regard man here as an animal; as a primitive being to which one grants instinct but not ratiocination. A creature in a primitive state. Any logic good enough for a primitive means of communication needs no apology from us. Language did not emerge from some kind of rationcination. [9]

You must bear in mind that the language-game is so to say something unpredictable. I mean: it is not based on grounds. It is not reasonable (or unreasonable.
It is there – like our life.  [10]

Purpose

The game, one would like to say, has not only rules but also a point. [11]

Language is an instrument. Its concepts are instruments. [12]

“Purpose” now becomes a very significant concept. Language and its games evolve in all kinds of ways. Just as a part of any historical development, the inevitable innovation, the evolution of technology, cultural interaction, playfulness and fashion may form it, developing old purposes or even leaving them behind, and creating new ones without any clear decision or thought. But it is, of course, always possible to take charge of purpose, deliberately developing it, and with it the language to suit.

Academic disciplines, along with industries, arts, commerce, medicine, sports and war may be doing this all the time. Depending on the purpose, this may involve the evolution of all kinds of specialised language and linguistic activities that call for new agreements in judgment. The need for close agreement in judgment will be dependent on the nature of the subject matter, and the procedures that its pursuit employs. As we have seen throughout this project, education itself is in very deep difficulty because of confusion and incoherence over purpose.  Whatever else we might consider doing in order to improve our educational understanding and practice, we cannot expect to refine the instruments that we use, or improve our clarity over educational content and process unless we attend closely to the task of developing a clear and warranted purpose.

Our educational thought and awareness has been slack and ill-disciplined, however, regardless of the huge institutional and technological machinery it has come to involve, and this is due, in large part, to casualness and indifference over the employment of core concepts. Everybody has an “opinion” on the purpose of education, and the opinions are vague and low grade, allowing wildly unjustified, ethically dubious and ineffective decisions to be made in its name. This may not be altogether accidental, either. There may be a variety of reasons for our unwillingness not to look too closely. Fear. Power. Dependency. Effective indoctrination.

In contrast, we are relatively used to the search for precision as a virtue in the natural sciences – precision that can flow from widespread and adequate agreement about their purposes of understanding and mastery of the natural world. In science, the empirical methodology places a high premium on the replicability of studies. This in turn depends upon there being sufficiently high agreement in procedure and terminology for research to be repeated with enough confidence that the repetition will be a valid and reliable test of the previous results. It is important to recall that this is not just agreement in views about the proper procedure, it is agreement in judgment in the rules and applications of the language and the procedures themselves. This agreement must be close enough for us to be confident that we have replicated a study in all relevant respects.

The subject matter, too, can have sufficient stability, and permit sufficient control to allow close mathematical description. Sometimes, though, the precision that is sought, and potentially available, may have to wait upon the development of technology – means of observation or measurement that enable the high degree of linguistic agreement in judgment that the new kinds of descriptions and explanations may suggest could be possible. Our mathematical model may predict the position of a planet, but we might not yet have the tools to make the observation.

Specialised languages with high degrees of agreement in judgment are not goods in themselves, however. There is often a temptation for some fields of inquiry to attempt to “ape” the precision of measurement in the natural sciences in an effort to capture some of the prestige that natural science possesses, even when the subject matter does not permit such precision, or even require it, or where the possibilities of understanding are actually reduced by attempts to mimic the methods appropriate to the “hard” sciences.

There can be a cultishness about scientific knowledge which separates knowledge into “hard” knowledge (like the natural sciences) and “soft” knowledge (such as the humanities) when the true differences are qualitative, not quantitative. The precision of science – the agreement in judgment sought by science – is quite different from the precision sought, for instance, by the literary artist in the use of language and the power of literary expression. It would be absurd to suppose that the precision sought by the latter is any less demanding than that of the former. Its purpose, however, is quite different.

Similarly, the degree of close agreement in judgment required of a specialised language in a disciplinary field might render our everyday activities together impossible to carry out, if we tried to import these demands into our commonplace undertakings. High degrees of trained agreement in judgment that they would require of us all would likely be unattainable, particularly in view of the many different ways in which we live our lives, and because of the relative instability of the circumstances, where the variables are mixed and ever changing.

“Loose” judgment is often what enables diverse strangers to negotiate everyday activities quite readily. Often of course, we stumble even here, as language-games and agreement in judgment that are commonplace within some subcultures, classes and regions are not commonplace among all. What is he talking about? What is she asking?

We might think of something as simple as the task of defining and distinguishing tables and chairs. We might think of doing so by identifying their properties and uses, And we might think of practices, and the customs that surround these items of furniture. We think of ordinary things, and occasional things. Tables and chairs are so commonplace as to provide a trite philosophical example.

Imagine this scene. A bunch of us are gathered together having a discussion that matters to us. There are a number of chairs, but not enough for us all, so that some of us are sitting, but many of us are standing. One is leaning back against the table, and he hoists himself onto it, sitting on the edge. In many places, this would be an unremarkable thing to do.

Not in New Zealand. You don’t sit on tables, and if you do so, you may cause offence. Notice that this has to do with the definition of tables. Whatever else a table is, it is not to be sat on. It isn’t, therefore, a contingency about tables, like colour, or the stuff of which tables are made. Outside New Zealand, you could go for years and never engage with anyone where this disagreement in judgment might arise, and if you did, you might not be aware that it exists. On the whole, travellers try to adapt to local cultures, not impose their own.

Visitors to New Zealand might break the rule and not be aware (well, they didn’t know . . .) and so it might not even be evident that a practice has been disrupted (or they might quietly be taken aside). Where it does come up, however, it will be because of a difference in the training; the socialisation. And even here, having now learned about New Zealanders and their tables, there may be one small thing more that you know about tables that you didn’t know before, even if it never comes up for you in the language-games of tables ever again. In a tiny way, tables may be a little different for you now. Questions will be available, doubts will be available that may never have been available before. Your new knowledge of tables may set you apart from those around you.

This is, of course, a public case – a difference among communities and customs. Nevertheless, when we learn about tables and chairs, and we consider the training and the customs with the experiences that these involve, there will be all sorts of differences in the circumstances under which any of us learned to judge about what tables are, and their uses – the uniqueness of our histories will no doubt have involved different tables and chairs, all sorts of different practices surrounding their use; different times and places, different events that included tables and chairs, different levels of maturity when we learned them, and certainly different feelings and associations.

None of this will have any real bearing on the “definitions” of tables and chairs, on the agreement in judgment that the language-games around them require. But that is the point. We need now to talk, not about what the public agreement is, but what it isn’t. At the level of experience, it will have everything to do with what tables and chairs are to each of us, even if these differences only ever emerge publicly, if they do at all, expressed obliquely in our poetry or our art.

Beyond agreement in judgment

The publicity requirement of language is met when there is sufficient agreement in judgment among the participants to enable language-games, adequate to common and accepted purposes, to be carried through in the public arena; the arena in which all that is available is the outward embodiment of minds. Agreement is sufficient when nothing goes wrong with the games themselves – when nothing strange happens that suggests, or might draw attention to, the possibility that the game has gone awry, and intelligibility compromised.

This sufficiency of agreement – that no more is required than for the game to be executed without drawing attention to itself – suggests a “surplus” or “looseness” in judgment that, in principle, might have allowed closer agreement to be achieved, had the playing of the game required it. “Sufficient” agreement in judgment suggests a “space” in and around the agreement; a space in which there is room for “disagreement in judgment” without affecting the conduct of the game.

Equally, from the standpoint of the public language as it exists, and as the language-games serve existing purposes, this potential for new agreement is irrelevant, since all that matters there is the unproblematic playing of the public game; just the extent of the agreement that is necessary for the anticipated rules to be followed or understood by all involved.

Indeed, it is vital, in the public engagement in the playing of language-games, that all of these subtle differences in judgment be neutralised.  The playing of the language-game, as a joint activity, means that differences that exist in our judgment, and differences of experience that might be embedded in judgment, are cancelled out, unless something brings them to our attention, and we are willing to be sidetracked into extended discussions of the less visible peculiarities of our use.

But when a public game can be played, because custom and convention enable it through sufficient agreement in judgment, why does the “space”, the judgment that is not a part of the agreement, matter at all?

It is because, at the personal level, rather than the public, there is so much more to the judgment than the public alignment. It is this “more” that allows the games to serve us in our lives, because in our lives the judgments are based on, and bound up in experiences that we have had, and what we have made of them, as the people who make these judgments. Publicly, the playing of a language-game is a shared experience, to the extent that its playing depends upon the common thread of judgment that joins us together in the playing.

Personally, though, for all sorts reasons of our own history and experience, and the unique ways that our individual minds have evolved, we will each experience the playing of the game differently.  It is the embeddedness of our own judgments in our own experience that provides both the springs of our engagement in it, and the personal subject matter of it; the meaning that the playing of the game has for each of us, and the meaning that we make of it.

It is this unity of experience and judgment that also allows us each to use the games, make moves in them, and take charge of them, because we are animated by interest and experience to do so. The games are only employed by us, after all, because our own, personal, past experience inclines us to engage in them. They are played out in our experience, and our understanding of the experience is carried forward into future experience. This experience is not available in public unless we have occasion to try to represent it and express it – and to the extent that we can.

At the personal level, there are all the features of a real human life that go into the judgment but are not a part of what is held in common – the experiences behind it, the confidence with it, the history of it, the practice that has been undertaken, and the familiarity achieved, the likelihood that it will be invoked, and what it will evoke, and particularly the likelihood that it will be used in interpretation, reflection and perception. This “space”, in part, offers the possibilities for the revision of judgment – for the improvement of the game, or its evolution, or its problem-solving power – even for art. Writers, deploying this flexibility, can change our language as well as our experience – as Shakespeare did.

From the standpoint of renegotiating judgment, or of problem-solving when the game itself turns out to be a part of the problem, that space is exactly relevant, and is likely to prove its worth. That space between and around judgment contains the raw materials of experience, unique to the participants, out of which new questions can be asked, new proposals put forward, and new customs or conventions created and aligned in a social practice, or old ones realigned.

Then we are trying to find new bases for agreement, perhaps now interrogating our purposes, and wondering together what we should be about after all, or seeking new linguistic instruments – new rules and their judgments – to serve our new understanding of our common purposes. And in this we may wander in the confused terrain that looks, at one moment, like making mistakes in the playing of the old game, and at another, like not understanding the game at all. We must build new judgment, and contend with the effects of doing so.

It is the connection of the judgment, and all that surrounds it, with the whole life experience of the person who makes that judgment that is the place of language and thought in human life. It is not just a set of abstract processes or rules. And it is the role of that judgement in the formation of personal experience, of what we make of our experiences and our lives. Language-games help us to learn what we do from experience; to make what we can of ourselves.

It is only as we explore our personal experiences together – our perceptions and feelings, our understandings, interpretations, assumptions and presuppositions, our thoughts and reasons – that these differences in experience and their influence on our concepts have a chance to come out, to be expressed. But when we do so together, we are using public language-games to do it – and depending on the stability and shared agreement of language, even as we might sometimes fumble around the edges of conventional judgment in order to try and achieve human understanding together. We grope for the right words,  and might find ourselves using metaphors instead.

As people “make things” of their experience, perceiving and interpreting, deciding and constructing throughout the unique, personal trajectories of experience that have been their lives, this “rest of the judgment” – which consists of what our personal experience has packed into the judgment – is the detail that is not a part of the conformity with custom and convention.

It is not merely the uniqueness of the experiences themselves that means that each will make something different of their experience – because their experience is different – it is the uniqueness of their own judgment in the applications of the rules of the language-games.  It is their personal “spin” or “signature” in the application of rules, it is the place that their personal experience of judgment has occupied in the slack that custom allowed, and that, in varying degrees, has been impoverished, encumbered or enriched by their living.

This extra, this detail, goes beyond what custom requires for collective intelligibility, and it is rooted in the different ways that we learned the rules, understood them, and developed and changed in the light of our different experiential backgrounds and growth, giving them our own personal twist when we apply them in our own experience. These differences are alive in our own experience, even though they are cancelled out in the public arena. There, all that is required is that the demands of the customary agreement in judgment be met.

Language-games in the experiential stream

A great deal of what we understand to be our thought, and the powers of our thought, involves our playing of language-games on the inside. We “internalise” the social – the kinds of linguistic exchanges, activities and actions that we first learned to play out in the arena between and among bodies. Sometimes we experience this in a way that mimics the social processes themselves. We hear “voices” on the inside – experience things that seem like monologues, and even dialogues. “No, wait a minute! Perhaps that isn’t such a good idea after all!” There appear to be inner conversations in which much the same moves are made as might occur in a “public” space. The games are played in a “stream of consciousness”.

This is not the whole story, of course. Some processes are so internalised that, even though we may have explicitly learned their steps in the public arena, we do not take the steps in consciousness. If they occur at all, they occur outside awareness, and we are simply presented with their “conclusions”, or “solutions”, and even impulses without even an appearance of “steps”. Something of the game has been internalised to a deeper level. And this is true, even when we experience those “inner dialogues”, where thoughts and counter-thoughts present themselves in the stream with various degrees of conviction and conclusion. A thought just “arrives” on the occasion of another thought.

If we are at all observant of these processes, we stand to learn a great deal about the critical powers of our minds, and how they may be cultivated. With a little regular observation, for instance (particularly about decision-making or experiences that matter) we begin to recognise some of those voices by the sorts of things they say.

Our mother. Our father. Our siblings. Our school peers. Our teachers. Any groups or friends or companions with whom we interacted a lot, or experienced in a vivid way. Any members of groups who judged us, or people like us. The voices of any structure of authority or power. Voices in the stream will say the sorts of things that might often have been said, or would be likely to be said – and they will be accompanied by the feeling that will have gone with it – the experience of these moves. Indeed, as we have already seen above, the inner playing of these language-games will be rich with the actual experience that we had in learning them, and with the continuing experiences that we have as we continue to play them, even internally.

They will also be limited by the quality and influence of the games that were played, and the range of moves that were typically made (some moves may never have been fully understood, let alone mastered).

Negotiating life

Not all of this is good for us.

The discussion of language and experience so far has been an attempt to understand how it appears to work. It has not been to evaluate the potential for good or ill. It is educationally vital that we do so, however. Through the proper cultivation of language-games we can gain access to science, or history. We can develop all kinds of powers of critical thinking. We can build democracies, and hope to develop respect together. We can build skyscrapers, and launch vehicles into space.

And we can also cultivate hate, deception, and disempower people. We can corrupt the possibilities of cooperation, and divide ourselves into tribes and camps. We can weaponise language-games; the moves in language-games serving as instruments to hurt, disable, undermining self-esteem and humanity itself. We can haunt people, on the inside, with the emotional power our language-use can have over them. We can get drunk on technology, and glorify means over ends. We can destroy the environment of our planet. We can trivialise, and hide from ourselves and others that we don’t know what we are doing, or why. Customs and conventions and agreements in judgment are not automatically good.

Perhaps the most important way that we can approach this problem of distinguishing the good from the bad, the desirable from the undesirable is by looking more closely at the activity of inquiry, where this is not simply understood in terms of question and answer, but in terms of larger, more encompassing language-games within which language-games-embedded-in-experience are explored with a view to better understanding, better decision-making, and better choosing. Such undertakings are both enquiries into purpose, and into our means and our efforts toward the achievement of purpose.

Dewey might have described this as a process unfolding in experience, where, in the light of reflections on past experience, we decide what we will do in the future; and then, having taking action, and undergone the consequences, we reflect upon this experience that resulted from our decision in order to consider future courses of action.

Dewey felt that his sequential processes of experience, reflection, choice of action, undergoing, and further reflection on the consequences, was just as powerful and applicable to the development of ethical and other value judgment (such as the artistic) as it was to science. The key to successful enquiry, understood in this way, is the fullness of the process – the fullness of our appraisal and appreciation of past experience, the fullness of our consideration of future action, and the fullness of our appreciation of the consequences. He viewed his approach as an empirical philosophy, and it is worth noticing that when we speak of science as “empirical”, it is because we understand it to be a form of publicly controlled experience.

Through using our discussion of Wittgenstein, however, it is possible to approach this in another way, and that is to consider inquiry in terms of larger language-games played out publicly with the purpose of seeking the “truth”; better answers, or understandings, or interpretations or points of view pursued for purposes that are themselves open to the inquiry. These larger language-games of inquiry in turn regulate the subordinate language-games that are to be played as a part of  them. The questioning, doubting and challenging; the attempts at description and representation, explaining and justifying; the search for assumptions, or for reliable information; the offering of proposals, the inventing and exploring of cases and examples.

Where Dewey distinguished the internal and external conditions of experience, and considered reflection on, and arising from experience, moderating the interaction between internal and external, here we are considering that reflective ability in terms of public language-games that have evolved to explore that interaction, refining and controlling it. We have developed public language-games for reflecting on experience, and these have enormous significance, not only for the conduct of our lives together, but also for the nature and quality of our inner lives.

The importance of these larger language-games, as social practices, lies partly in the collective refinement of collective purpose that they make possible, and the improvement or refinement of collective judgment.  Equally importantly, however, they provide for the power of internalisation, for the quality and power of the inquiry each of us is able to incorporate and carry through on our own experience, in our own minds. We internalise the form of dialogue, the quality and likelihood of the moves, and much of their content.

Four things are important to the success of these processes. The first is a shared commitment to the “pursuit of truth”, where this is understood, not as the quest for some “absolute” or definitive outcome, but as an ideal that gives the direction in which we are all trying to head – to achieve better answers, understandings, interpretations or points of view, as has already been mentioned above.

The second important feature is the diversity and richness of experience that can be brought to the discussion. There is all of that uniqueness and diversity of experience present in the judgment, memory and imagination of the participants that can be brought to challenge arguments, on the one hand; but also the conventions and customary thinking, including the rules of the public game, that all of the participants share. Both are crucial to the fullness with which the processes can be carried through.

The third feature is the dialectical nature of the process. In the give and take of the language-games, there must be a constructive responsiveness to the moves that are made – the arguments, proposals and criticisms that are offered, which includes a willingness to recognise the force of a contribution, and to reconstruct a position in the light of it. There must be a capacity to concede, and to “change one’s mind”. There must be a willing and strong dialogue, not just in the public space among bodies, but between the internal and external as well.

Finally, there must be justice in the establishment of the activity that is the larger language-game, and not just a bare justice, either, but justice informed with a sense of decency. There must be a willingness to be generous and mutually supportive; a spirit of good will. Without justice there should not be an expectation of “truth”, because without it, experience will be suppressed, and this will distort that effort to achieve better answers and solutions. The pursuit of truth depends upon justice; just as justice depends upon truth.

These processes of collective inquiry, with their internalisation, are what critical thinking really amounts to. All too often, critical thinking is confused with (and reduced to) informal logic, a process of checking the validity of arguments, or checking the “facts”. Such an approach is hardly critical thinking at all, in any serious sense. It is a set of routines and processes applied to language-games to see if they have been performed properly. It is akin to mere grammar checking, or checking to see if an arithmetical procedure has been carried out correctly.

Public content, and private experience in education

Here, then, is a difference of fundamental importance to our understanding of education, and of how it may be undertaken, and this is the difference in the roles of public agreement and private experience, and the relation between them. If, somehow, the agreement in judgment and the public “playing” of language-games is of primary importance, and private experience unimportant, or even something of a nuisance, then our principal focus will be restricted to socialisation and the training of linguistic judgment.

If the role of private experience is very important, and the training and socialisation somehow secondary, then we will have to look to practices that help cultivate private experience in desirable ways, and these will tend not to look like training at all, and will probably call on the development of highly refined and sophisticated social processes – of dialogue – in addition to incidental bits of informal teaching hardly worthy of note. Such a balance may have occurred in the ancient world for instance, when leisured people who may have had quite modest schooling (by our standards, at least) then joined residential philosophical “schools” or communities in Hellenistic Greece, honing their personal and mutual understanding daily through disciplined philosophical conversation over many years.

If, finally, both custom and private experience are more or less equally important, we will be wise to seek a proper balance between them, ensuring that they are properly related and connected together, according them at least equal priority, and acknowledging the importance of quite different educational practices than schooling.

Since schooling-and-teaching can only really be concerned with public, linguistic transactions among bodies, focussing on and evaluating external performances, and is poorly suited to addressing private experience and even largely indifferent to it, conventional teaching can only address half, or less, of what is of human educational importance. If agency matters, if taking charge of one’s own mind and being responsible for one’s own beliefs and values, one’s conduct, and one’s good, are important to being fully human, then an implementation of education based largely on schooling is a denial of our humanity.

If democracy matters too, then an “education” based on schooling and teaching is a violation of democratic and educational principle together, and corrupting of democratic possibility. The forte of schooling is the achievement of agreement in judgment, conformity, the conventional.  It is the embedding of custom at the expense of those processes that could enable language-games to facilitate personal responsibility, the examination of life, the full power to make well of one’s own experience, and to form relationships with one’s fellows freely and with understanding.

Schooling arose initially, and was sustained for centuries, to fulfill quite limited educational services. The emerging technologies of literacy and numeracy, and their social value, were accompanied by very direct processes of teaching how to read and analyse text in worlds where the availability of text was itself very limited and dependent on copying.

Through the history of the Christian West, additional areas of teaching bonded agreement in judgment with agreement in opinion, in the inculcation of doctrine – to the extent that, as late as the European Enlightenment, advocates of schooling were proposing the creation and teaching of “catechisms” – memorization even at the expense of meaning – in agriculture and other areas of content that had come to be thought of desirable schooling for the poor. In a world where the meaning and purpose of life, social responsibilities, vocations and much of personal behaviour were dictated by accidents of birth and the authority of ruling classes and clergy, schooling was entirely fit for purpose. Life was custom, and custom underpinned political legitimacy and law.

Finally, with the rise of the nation-state, and before any real development of democratic sensibility, schooling became a tool of nation-building – a forge to build common national identity. For the melting pot to do the work, a mechanism was needed to do the melting – the melting of difference into a common nationhood.

But these old justifications for an elaborate method of creating nation-state conformity have eroded over recent centuries in the face of the emerging requirements of democracy, including massive global mobility, and this is partly from the need, not merely to tolerate diversity, but to embrace it and learn from it; living under conditions of mutual respect rather than group conformity.

The old national myths, so commonly promoted through schooling as creating our common bonds, now turn out to be at odds with the histories of our peoples, and destructive of respect and relationships. In addition, the requirements of collective problem-solving, and even of productivity, call for innovation and initiative, the freeing up of minds. The living of good lives calls for self-challenge, a critical understanding of life, and personal responsibility for beliefs, actions and conduct.

Just as the role of bureaucratic, factory schooling has expanded into almost every corner of our lives, and extended, as an expectation, well into adulthood, the contradiction between this “educational” institutionalisation and the dominant ethic of the West – and beyond – based, as it is, on respect for the value of each human person, means that our “modern” implementation of “education” through schooling is glaring in its inadequacy, and deeply at odds with our more important ethical commitments.

Schooling would, at best, only offer half of the educational experience that all of our learners require, even if schooling was indeed the best way to train people into agreement in judgement in the playing of language-games. It offers only half what is required, while doing harm to the larger project of developing strong and capable, self-managing people who are in charge of their own lives and learning while they does so.

By the structure of its authority, and its decision-making about content and about assessment, it violates the true motivation of learners, deciding for them what they will learn, and when they will learn it, in contempt of the personal interest necessary in order for them to make their learning their own. It encourages an intellectual dependency upon a dubious authority, and it offers a model of authority that is at odds with the need for learners to assume intellectual responsibility. It is not just that the process ignores experience as a nuisance; it engenders experience of precisely the wrong kind.

The experience of schooling is an experience divorced from experience. It is divorced from the natural and genuine experience of situations that matter outside school (for which school is supposed to be a preparation) in favour of an artificially contrived experience – experience that is a faked and distorted version of the conditions of experience that it is supposed to represent.

That schooling is separate and remote from life has been remarked on for hundreds of years, even before the Enlightenment. Schooling is now what “education” is popularly understood to be, and this seems to suggest that the learning that matters cannot be embedded in, or near, the experience that matters – the experience that is “real”.  We have come to believe that education is the learning of language-games, and that the learning of language-games must occur detached from the real-life circumstances in which the language-games are properly deployed “for real”. Learning to use the tools has been alienated from the contexts of their proper use. We have exaggerated the fissure between means and ends.

To the extent that the content of schooling is the learning of the public face of language-games that only have their true point when played outside, the occasion for learning them in school has to be contrived. Scenarios and activities are invented, the better if these contrivances for exercising the language-games can, indeed, be turned into genuinely entertaining “games” – to help solve the problem of engagement that is already inherent in the process.

We try to make the writing more genuine by having them write for each other; speaking more genuine by having them “report back” to each other. But these, too, are contrivances, as they very well know, and in this artificial way they all learn to “go easy on each other”, because their turn is coming soon. And because these things are mock, and fake, and poorly done, teachers falsely conclude that learners could never really teach each other, and need professional teachers all the more.

We create a problem, and then we bend our efforts to solve the problem inside the parameters that we have adopted that creates it. Tech will solve it. Psychology will solve it (we somehow don’t understand their minds). Studies will solve it (so long as we remember to do only that which is “evidence-based”). We are wildly excited about these possibilities!

And so the problem of motivation is compounded. On the one hand, what is taught does not arise directly out of the natural interest and curiosity of learners, but is firstly an expression of the planning of teachers, with their curriculum planning supervisors, their inspectors and auditors, and their policy-makers and politicians behind them. In addition to this, the content and occasion of what is learned is fake, a contrivance – roughly intended to resemble something outside (which often remains quite mysterious to learners), but also very likely in part to entertain, or amuse, or spark interest; “solutions” we must reach for because of these ways in which we have divorced this learning from its reality.

In any case, if we were to want to build proper educational arrangements, institutions, activities and processes, we would need to be very much clearer about what desirable educational processes should look like in both areas – both in learning the rules and judgments of important public languages, and in cultivating the development and management of personal experience. If we were serious, we would take such pains as are necessary to tease out the implications as much as possible.

We would need to do this, not merely because we want to develop the best in people that we can, but also so that we can avoid indoctrination, because these two realms of educational activity, and their interdependence, clearly open up whole new possibilities for understanding indoctrination, as should, by now, be apparent.

Our “educational” preoccupation with agreement in judgment at the expense of the illumination and management of personal experience is, in itself, a recipe and invitation to indoctrination. How much more so, when our means of bringing about that agreement is through the vast proliferation of an institution with the structure and paternalistic authority and contempt for the life of the learner that is the factory school.

Is schooling-and-teaching even necessary for achieving agreement in judgment?

Because schools clearly seem devised to achieve public agreement in linguistic judgment, rather than the illumination and management of personal experience in the interests of agency, it might be thought that the inevitable conclusion should be some extra institutionalisation outside schools, or distinguished within them, in an attempt to achieve the latter. It should already be clear, however, that the problems inherent in conventional schooling are too profound for this simplistic division to be helpful.

Instead of trying to divide up these two roles between two forms of institutionalisation, it would be better to think this through from scratch, seeing how we might build our institutions out of the combined need for achieving various sorts of agreement in judgment together with the illumination and management of personal experience. Each of these is necessary to the other. The more closely they are practiced and developed together, the more “whole” our experience is likely to be – and the less divided and inauthentic we will be, in ourselves, as human beings.

There are, of course, clear cases in which we would want some training in language-games to be separated from their contexts of use. We wouldn’t, for instance, want law enforcement officers to learn their gun safety and live-firing on the street, and we wouldn’t want novice stockbrokers practicing on the savings of clients. It doesn’t follow, however, that the classroom is the best place to simulate high risk activities. Firing-ranges are very different from classrooms and are designed closely to fulfill very specific purposes, just as working closely with a mentor or supervisor doesn’t require a classroom.

There has been a steady and disturbing trend, in the course of the last fifty years or more, to move as much vocational preparation as possible away from the locations of the activities themselves into the classroom, despite our appreciation of the inevitable gulf between the classroom and “life”.

To be sure, this is often claimed to be justified on the grounds that there has been increasing academic sophistication in the fields concerned, so that the trappings of academia need to be supplied, but such claims need close and critical scrutiny by competent scholars and skilled practitioners concerned to weed out the dross on a case-by-case basis.

My own experience of this is that most of it is faux – that it is, on the one hand, redescription of practice into an academic format with little, if any sophistication added – and indeed, the redescription itself is often laced with fiction. Low grade “studies” are rife, chasing fashion rather than leading it.

Trading on the apparent prestige of academia certainly isn’t a good reason for transferring “training” into the classroom. Much experience of actual practitioners under real conditions is lost in the process of extracting classroom-teachable content, with the trials, anomalies and hypocrisies of practice all too often being romanticised away by tutors who have thankfully escaped the burdens of the job itself for the false authority and satisfaction that formal teaching provides. Part of their job, after all, is to maintain and even promote the “virtues” of the industry.

Content derived from the sciences and social sciences is watered down – and apparently by people who only had cursory, and third-hand contact with it themselves, perhaps from an introductory treatment. Any genuine intellectual authority is so remote from its research-base that it is little more than popular science and pseudo-science. What remains falls under the mantra of “best practice” which is often impossible to distinguish from current dogma – certainly by the students. In the process, the mystique of academia suppresses the complexity of the practical site, with its numerous contradictions.

In addition to this, classroom vocationalism has extended across more and more years, to the point that there are even those calls for attention to vocational “education” starting at the kindergarten level. These extravagant extensions of vocationalism, imposed on students long before they can even imagine the conditions of earning a livelihood from their remote classroom locations, renders them even more vulnerable to fluctuations in the job “market”. Predictions of workforce needs are notoriously unreliable, and it is the learner who must bear the cost of their unreliability; not those who make them.

This should remind us of the proposal made by John Holt – that the time to learn something is when you need it, and not in anticipation of some speculative future “need”. In Part 2, I proposed this in terms of the application of the Toyota system (JIT) in education, and here is a further reason for doing so. It is in the extended preparation over time of strong, confident, curious and passionate learners who “know their own minds” and are capable of acute critical thinking that the much greater efficiency of just-in-time learning will ultimately lie.

Separating out the learning of the rules of the public language-games into classroom activities remote from their real application involves gambling that the connection between the two will ever occur. Equally, there is the likelihood that the motivational connection will be lost – the learner labouring through their learning much more slowly and ineffectively because they can’t really see the point.

More fundamental is the increased likelihood of a divide arising within learners between their learning of rules and conventions on the one hand, and their management of their experience in the application of them on the other – particularly their critical management of that experience. The greater the separation, the more difficult it is likely to be for learners to be critical and properly challenging in the learning of rules – when these are learned adrift from the real contexts in which they are to be applied. Instead, they must be more dependent upon “what they are told”.

Must agreement in judgment always be taught? Clearly not. We learn language-games as much by participating in them – albeit clumsily at first – as we do by direct teaching. Wittgenstein reminds us of this again and again. We can, moreover, teach ourselves many language-games by self-study – through books, through videos, through listening to  talks, through practicing on our own, through observation and mimicking.

The particular advantage of working in this way is preserving our agency. We choose to do it, and we get to choose each step, each means or resource, each authority. Just as we can make the general point that all of the educational decisions that really count are those that the learners themselves make about their learning, so the best method of learning anything is not whatever “studies show”, but the method that the learner will actually choose to use; the way that they decide to make their learning work. There is a vital difference – a fundamental one – between what can be shown statistically in the comparison of groups, with what is indeed happening in each case. learners may often be much better guided by their own experience and motivation than by what is probable. How well students have learned to exercise their agency in the process will likely depend less on how they have been taught to make such choices, than on how they have learned to think well about making them.

It will often turn out, of course, that within these efforts we will sometimes make a huge leap in progress as a result of a little discussion with someone who is skilled in these games. Just a few minutes may make a huge difference. This does not mean, however, that such a person must be a formally trained and employed teaching professional, not only because such a person may not necessarily be the best from the standpoints of skill or commitment, or the ways in which their practice as official teachers may have distanced them from the life of the practice itself, but also because of the status of the mutual consent in the relationship. Indeed, we may be safer and learn more quickly and  effectively from a peer, or from a more advanced learner or mentor who shares our interest, and in doing so, we may be escaping the artificiality of the conventional classroom as well.

Of course, isolated self-study is not the only alternative to being taught by a skilled practitioner either. Working with other learners not only introduces the pleasures of sociability, shared difficulty, encouragement and shared intelligence, it is also more likely that joint practice and replication of the language-game will not merely approximate the genuine performance of the language-games, but will, indeed, become real.

In addition, spending some time in such groups based on a common interest introduces the power of networking, which may increase the likelihood of access to a greater range of more skilled advisors, mentors, and potential informal teachers, depending on the systems that we can develop to bring together people with common educational interests.

This is not just how formal education might look, of course, but by bringing the elements together in working communities, it would make more sense, not only of job preparation, but of continuing professional development in any organisation. As things are, however, too many organisations are far too toxic to develop proper educational cultures at all.

“Indirectness” or “obliqueness” in education

Relinquishing teaching in conventional classrooms

At the end of the previous chapter I remarked on some of the differences between the “logic” of conventional schooling and teaching, and the practice. In particular, I wanted to point out that some teachers have educational insights and intuitions that are at odds with the logic, and they operate in ways that are subversive of it, insofar as they can. Some are more attuned to the actual experiences of learners, and they do engage in practices that allow learners to gain insight into their experiences, and manage them better.

It is important, too, to acknowledge far more extensively than we do, that there are alternative systems and approaches to schooling, such as the Sudbury Schools, Agile Learning Communities, democratic schools, and many of those initiatives represented in the Education Reimagined project, that do break with the conventional model of teaching, shifting very much to an appreciation of experience, and to an appreciation of the importance of learner agency.

It is equally important to acknowledge the longstanding achievements of unschoolers around the world, many of whom achieve a great deal in redressing the balance. All of these initiatives can no longer be thought of as mere “pilot” programmes struggling to find their feet, but have built up a considerable wealth of experience, insight and skill over a number of generations, and have records of achievement that are more than competitive in conventional terms.

I do not want to advocate any such projects as the “answers” however, but as highly suggestive projects that have so far proved their worth. The enduring existence and relative success of initiatives like these is now sufficient to negate claims that real change is impractical. From my own observation, most of the objections to their practicality result from a very cursory examination, and most have little merit.

The “alternatives” are tolerated, but conventional wisdom seems to be that there is little to learn from them. They are vulnerable, dependent upon the political benevolence (or indifference) of establishments that are committed to the conventional practice; they are dependent, too, on the fragile nature of that toleration of the marginalised and inconsequential “opposition” (or competition).

Though many of these developments can now tell us a good deal about what is possible, they do not represent signs of significant change. In social terms they are ineffective when set alongside the scale and ubiquity of universal, state, compulsory schooling in all countries. And in the spirit of religiosity that permeates these vast systems, such “alternatives” represent “educational” heresy, rather than experience from which we might learn. They are to be denied.

It also needs to be acknowledged that there are many other innovations that come into existence with great enthusiasm and demonstrate impressive results – at least for a time – while owing little or nothing to educational principle at all. This enables a constant enthusiasm for “improvement” within the system, and a belief in its progress while also ensuring that expectations and aspirations remain low. While these ineffectual cycles of excitement persist, they serve to sustain the illusions that there is little to learn from those “alternatives”. “Look what we are doing now!”

At the same time, it is important to acknowledge that the aspirations of all of the alternative programmes is lower than it should be. All of these alternatives have invariably developed in opposition to conventional schooling, and in their very opposition, they tend to reflect what they oppose. The conventional system continues to set a “standard”, and the aspiration of alternative approaches is at least to match the conventional system in terms of its benchmarks, while asserting other values that are exemplified within the alternative institutions, but remain isolated there.

They remain disconnected from the world at large, having no more impact on that than they do on conventional schools. In terms of the religiosity of conventional schools, and in terms of public perception, they are viewed not unlike religious cults. The conventional system is massively disconnected too, but it can at least give an account of connection through vocationalism – employers, industries, economists and politicians look to them. The alternatives do not have even this much connection to larger social systems. This is partly an inevitable result of marginalisation, and partly because the alternatives, just like their conventional counterparts, are under-theorised. “Education” is still reduced to the “alternative practice”, just as it is to schooling.

While our benchmark for improvement continues to be the conventional system, we need to recognise, on the one hand, how easy it is to do better, and to acknowledge the success of the alternatives in this. At the same time, it is important to appreciate how little anyone is likely to care. Our genuinely educational aspirations, however, should be very much higher than being better than conventional schooling, and there is every reason to believe that much higher aspirations are, indeed, quite realistic.

The problem of achieving a proper and effective institutionalisation of education is not a lack of knowledge and experience about how things might, quite practically, be done differently, or how we might organise that knowledge and experience under a coherent theory of educational purpose. Rather the problem is that of facing up to the seriousness of our existing educational failure, and being willing to do something about it.

Back in the conventional classroom, the teacher who does make an effort to understand the lives of learners, listen to them with respect, have a high level of appreciation of their capabilities, and who is sensitive to the educational costs of conventional schooling practice on learner experience, must practice their subversion with a careful eye to the expectations of their employers.

Whatever they do, they are likely to be aware that their continuing success in employment will depend upon meeting the “standards” of assessment that the formal system requires, and that they will have to continue to prove themselves under audit, or performance review, or inspection. The dilemma that they face is that, to move in an educational direction, they will almost inevitably have to relinquish much of the control and direction of learning that are central to the practice and expectations of the institutions within which they work. Relinquishing control can be scary and dangerous within institutions where high degrees of control are expected and sought, and there are firm templates for measuring “success” and “best practice”.

Their better educational intuitions and intentions for practice are also likely to run counter to the assumptions underpinning conventional assessment, and to be critical of the experiences these induce in students. “Teaching to the test”, or even to favour good grading on conventional assignments, are very likely to become problems for them.

Both of these factors mean that the classroom teacher who wants to move in an educational direction will put themselves at risk. It takes faith in one’s educational conviction to believe that, without any particular effort to meet the grading standards, the educational approaches they take will so lift learner functioning that they will meet the standards anyway. It takes courage and faith to relinquish leadership and cultivate responsibility in others – particularly when you, in turn, will be held accountable for various performances.

The inability and reluctance of leaders and managers generally, across all our institutions, to do such things should exemplify what any would-be-educator in the classroom must face. It is difficult to take a path of growth in the knowledge that there will be obstacles along the path, and failures to overcome, considerable risk and uncertainty while under the potential gaze of sceptical employers and doubtful colleagues.

It is important to recognise, too, that many of our classrooms are pretty grim places – not just unsafe for many pupils (as we know from the problems of bullying, not to say discrimination on a variety of grounds), but also for teachers. Teachers can be struggling for survival too – even under some physical threat – and there is no shortage of those who feel that students need to be “taught respect”, and whose major struggle every day is to maintain a semblance of order, against issues of widespread and disruptive “disengagement”.

Such teachers will often resort to tactics of mastery and control that go back centuries in order, simply, to cope.  Given the circumstances under which they are expected to work – their own struggle for survival – it would be insensitive to think of them as “bad teachers”. In their situation, the very idea of moving in an “educational direction” would seem laughable; something quite impractical, apart from requiring the character of a saint. These things are not often discussed in the same breath with schooling as it is romanticised, or treated as a sacred institution.

The key at the level of individual teachers, and even schools is, I believe, to move in modest steps, beginning with ones that have minimal risk.  The first and central task is to work towards achieving reasonable and disciplined discussion among students. Depending upon the difficulties of behaviour, this may mean very strict protocols of conduct in the initial discussions – which may be difficult to achieve in harsh circumstances, since the best ways of doing so might be to have small groups, each controlled by an adult, or even several adults, which would be impossible for a teacher to organise on their own. The objective, however, would simply be to engage reasonable discussion among learners for long enough for learners to appreciate the benefits of doing so, and want to continue doing so, because then they are likely to become self-regulating, and the external control can be eased.

Indeed, it might not be too bold to say that, Until we are able to bring students together, enabling them to talk reasonably and respectfully with each other, from their own free will and not through us, we cannot achieve anything of educational value at all.

Disciplined discussion: the education of experience

The power of group discussion is significantly underappreciated on our standard, schooling conception of “education” for a number of reasons. The first, of course, is that we over-appreciate the teacher-learning transaction. We do this because the standard belief about what matters in educational learning is that education involves a transmission of knowledge from teacher to learner, which of course goes back to the priority that we have given to the interests and agendas of people and groups other than the learner.

Even when the teacher “gets them to find out”, or to “look it up”, the arbiter of the value of what is done is the teacher. There must, after all, be standards. “Education” is something that we “do to” people, and many of the devices that we use to enrol them in activities that serve our purposes are simply the art of concealing our hand. At the end of the day, “what did I achieve” means “what did I teach?” Or at the very least – “what did they learn that I can approve of?”

Coupled with this is the over-estimation of the importance of training learners in agreement in judgment in the application of linguistic rules, as well as in agreement with the opinions of those who know better. Teaching is dominated by processes of transmission, instruction, and training because it is about rules, procedures and conventions rather than experience. These distortions in our educational perception – the idea of formal and official teaching, and the priority of training for agreement in judgment – make it very difficult for the teacher to let go of control, handing it over to learners, and taking much less responsibility for the learning that is to occur.

They are teachers. They are responsible for what is learned, and when this responsibility is combined with the requirements of curricula that are established externally, and the external demands of assessment and evaluation, there are strong incentives for them to feel that they must micromanage all learning; discussion included.

Equally importantly, the under-estimation of the importance of experience, and of learner agency in the management of experience, leads them to underestimate the processes that are most effective in its development and management. There are numerous ways in which discussion is much more important and potent in cultivating the minds of learners, but teachers find great difficulty in allowing it to happen in effective ways. They find it difficult to let go of the discussion, because of what they understand their role to be in the management of knowledge, since it is vital, on the conventional view, that they know better. When they stand back, they aren’t going to feel that they are doing their job.

In the devaluation of discussion, they are not sensitive to building the discipline of good discussion in ways that enable that discipline to be achieved by the group, which would, as it developed, put them out of their traditional role. They would feel that they were becoming bystanders, or observers. They ought to do something. Perhaps ask the profound or important, or leading questions.

Discussion is, of course, a widely used “tool” in the classroom, but too often it is a tool simply used to manipulate the outcome for which the teacher feels responsible. When the teacher does “let go” of this manipulation, the discussion degenerates into something more like an idle conversation that doesn’t appear to make much progress, and it is difficult, under the traditional model of schooling-and-teaching, to see if anyone is learning what they should. The fear that emerges here is of a discussion that “just goes in circles”. The teacher (very often along with the learners – if there are grades in the air) is likely to feel that an effective discussion is one that “gets somewhere” – perhaps reaches some agreement, or shared conclusion. Since having the right answers is so important in schooling, this is, perhaps an inevitable anxiety.

The reason that the real contribution of disciplined discussion is not well understood is a problem that comes back, once again, to the poverty of our own educational experience. Teachers, like everyone else, have no doubt participated in conversation throughout their lives, but have had little personal experience of knowledge-seeking, disciplined, peer conversation. Dinner table conversation is better than most things that happen in schools, but the rules of hospitality tend to curtail serious inquiry, or challenge. Dinner table conversation is, in the first instance, to be entertaining. Keep it light. No religion or politics.

My own experience of dinner table conversation as I grew up may have made all the difference to me. My parents were open to intellectually stimulating discussion, and religion and politics were often on the table, though all of our political imaginings were quite limited, and there were conventional moral taboos that restricted the likely range of exploration. My father rarely read, and my mother was no intellectual reader. Both of them barely brushed high school. But they submitted themselves to our reasons and did not exercise any particular control over the direction of the discussions. I didn’t ever experience an authority that I felt a need to rebel against. Family religious and political conventions were ultimately dismantled.

These dinner table conversations did not, however, have any significant intellectual discipline to them beyond the demands of casual conversation, and nor were they much better informed than might be enabled by the daily newspaper. Compared with not having them at all, they were invaluable. As inquiries, however, they were primitive. Teachers who encourage discussions just as some sort of good-in-themselves, without any appreciation of discipline in discussion, are squandering their time.

Only those relatively few students who have been lucky enough to experience “philosophy for children” conducted along the lines developed by Mathew Lipman and his “Communities of Inquiry” are likely to have known genuine discussion in conventional schools that had a chance of developing knowledge in its own right – knowledge that comes from a proper and free management of experience. But Philosophy for Children, though a significant movement worldwide, hardly counters the overwhelming practices of conventional schooling.

The other two possibilities are, on the one hand, those now probably atypical graduate school discussions where the teachers finally sense that their students are holding their own with them, or passing them in understanding and skill. The other possibility probably lies with the even more rare and ephemeral existence of philo cafes, or philo pubs, though they may well have attracted participants from that small segment of the population with a taste for philosophy already developed. Disciplined, epistemological conversations probably occur in some research workplaces, but even in these rarified contexts, equivalent discussions of the issues of everyday life are not likely to be common.

The sociology of the cultivation of mind

I recall a moment in a primary school classroom when I was perhaps ten or eleven years old. A boy, at his desk, was speaking to the class, explaining his thought. For a few brief moments, others responded with thoughts or considerations of their own. I don’t remember the teacher’s presence, but I do recall that the exchange was brief, so I presume that whoever the teacher was, they soon shut it down. What I vividly recall was the lift of excitement and attention within me, and I remember how short the exchange was, and how very, very rare.

All of my schooling contained discussion, of course, but with this difference, that it was always mediated through the teacher. Even at university, though there might have been comments back and forth among students for a while, the teacher or tutor was prominent, as judge and guide of the value and direction of thought. They sat at the centre of the intellectual solar system. It was only at graduate school that this began to change, and only at the more advanced levels, and with the faculty who I now understand to be the most relaxed and confident, prepared to listen and learn from their students.

As “discussion” became a more popular teaching technique, I have often suffered through those practices of “group discussion”, where the teacher divides up the class to discuss in separate small clusters, thereby losing contact altogether with all of them with the exception of the particular group they now favour with their attention. This technique is very popular on the workshop circuit. I have learned a lot about weekends and extracurricular activities, and the friends of friends in such groups before the ultimate test of initiative (and potential embarrassment) when one of our members is designated to report back on the “conclusions” that we hadn’t made any real effort to reach.

Something quite different is happening when peers, under circumstances of equality, discuss an issue they have developed for themselves and that really does matter to them, particularly when they do so in disciplined ways for which they all take responsibility. Sometimes, at advanced levels, the issues that matter to the participants can be a theory or point of view, or a text that is very much located in the public discourse, but this is not a counter example.

The theory or point of view is taken up by the participants, not because it is a part of some externally determined teaching process, but because the inquiry matters to the participants, and is taken over by them. Conventional schooling concedes its authority. At graduate school, some of my classes were like this. But then we, as students, would also occasionally coopt an empty room, and run much the same inquiries for ourselves.

The difference between discussions of these sorts, and the kinds of discussion that are usual in conventional schooling may seem subtle, but the sense of the subtlety can be explained in terms of the way in which the practice conflicts with our more ordinary “educational” expectations – particularly those teacher expectations concerning the things they are supposed to control and direct.

In addition, and equally importantly, the value of the process is not at all transparent, because what really matters is what is going on inside the participants, which no doubt differs from participant to participant. We can’t see into that, and so our gauging of what is going on, and its value, is likely to be indirect and oblique. Our sense of what is happening will be dynamic, and perceived in terms of tides and flows of ideas and feelings, sometimes in clusters, or across the whole group, sometimes highly individual; sometimes both, but in different ways. It is not that a good sense of what is happening in terms of educational success isn’t possible. It is that it will defy our conventional assumptions about measurability and assessment. For many, who can’t come to grips with that, it will never be “hard” enough (and education may never be possible).

The key here is that the real work is being done to participant experience itself, and by each of them. The importance of the process is not to be shown by a demonstration of conformity with some publicly agreed understanding; that a collectively agreed point of view has been grasped according to some public measure, or that a public procedure, or a language-game can now be performed or played to a certain external, agreed standard.

There is, indeed, an element of this in the intellectual discipline that is displayed in the group; that its members do perform certain intellectual moves, and acknowledge them, responding appropriately when others make their own moves. The discussions can, moreover shape up agreement in judgment within the group – their shared language becoming more effective as they get to know each other, and make adjustments. They may even perform their own conceptual analyses.

But the educational point of these public activities and performances is not the displaying of them, or the demonstrating of them, and their refined public agreements may not extend to any other communities outside. Neither does it have anything at all to do with the group “arriving at a conclusion”. The point is their effect on the inner experience of those who participate, and the internalisation of refined and disciplined processes that are modelled on the dialectic of the discussion itself.

What is the real work that is going on?

When people come together to discuss something that matters to them, with a view to understanding it better – not to master some external or public piece of knowledge or doctrine, but something that matters because it is personally serious, perplexing or important to them – they are bringing the complexity of their own minds and experience to the discussion. They want to test their understanding against the understanding and experience of others, learning for their own sake what others make of these shared personal issues, and why and how they make what they do. Our perplexity might resolve itself if we can see it in different ways, using tools that we all understand, but each with our unique impulses and initiatives in applying them, as richly different members of a team. Doing this with good will, humility, courage and respect is like participating in an enlarged mind.

In these groups of equals we may respect and even admire the abilities of some of our peers. We may ask them to explain things to us – consenting to some informal teaching. There is an important difference here that contrasts with what we do when we bring ourselves before authority, however. Among our equals we reserve the authority over what we take from the interaction. We are not there to please them with the appearance of our belief, or to show them an intellectual performance that they desire to see.

In the case of formal authority, there is always a degree of submission – a surrender of some of our own authority – and will – to another. Even when, among peers, we may temporarily confer an informal teaching authority on one of them, it is much more provisional. We “allow them” the authority of their experience or what they have made of it, because we respect their perception, and are willing to have ours challenged. They may be right, and we may be wrong, but it is we who are to decide that. The real testing is to be done by us, and not them. It is our testing of our experience that matters. We do not compromise our integrity, or divide it, as we may when the ambiguities of conventional schooling authority are involved; and our ambivalence towards it,.

“Indirectness” or “obliqueness”

I make a presentation to a class. The first purpose is to challenge them, so that, even though I may present some theoretical content, that content is secondary. The first purpose is to challenge, and the content is part of that purpose. We know, after all, that relatively little is retained from a lecture, but the content, as well as helping to give force to the challenge, may also make their own reading, study and discussion easier to do.

In the spirit of the challenge, I warn them of that spirit; that I am not responsible for the “truth” of what I offer. They are. I am not there to deceive them, but nor is my purpose to win them to my point of view, or my take on “the facts”, or what the facts suggest – though I often try to advocate for a view that will shake theirs, and it might, indeed, happen to be mine. That may help to give my challenge its force, but it is not the point. Authority for what they take away from all this is in their hands. I may change my mind in a year or so. The authority and responsibility for changing their minds is theirs.

Perhaps, as I finish, I open up a few preliminary questions arising from the challenging; perhaps encouraging them to submit theirs. Then as a discussion warms, I pull back, having  set, as the rule, that they do not talk through me, or look to me for approval for what they say. I do, at times, ask for reasons, explanations, justifications. I ask for examples, and counter-examples. I ask for the identification of assumptions, and the implications of them, just as I ask for potential consequences. I encourage the pursuit of disagreement, even the invention of plausible disagreement.

I do this only to the extent that these things are obviously lacking, and I limit myself. It is vital that the discussion be about their agendas, and not mine. In this way I do some coaching of group skill, but keep it limited. If I do praise, it is simply in acknowledgement of one of these moves of skill, or as an acknowledgement of their mutual support, regardless of the content.

Sometimes I have the sense of something very important that is being missed. It preys on my mind. How will they ever come to terms with this issue if they don’t notice this important point? As the discussion progresses, and this point is still being missed, I begin to feel a sense of responsibility for it. Surely, given my position as convener for this whole affair, I owe it to them, to my role as an educator, to the issue itself, to place it before them.

Foolishly I do so. If, on another occasion, I hold off and keep it to myself, the result is a revelation. Someone in the class eventually raises it, and the impact on the class is so obvious to me – if one of them says it to their peers, the effect is many times greater and more influential than if I offer it myself. The whole atmosphere changes when I intervene. The dynamics change, and have to be recovered. This difference – between their saying it and me saying it – is very visible to me, and I vow never to do that again.

If the point doesn’t come up, and it matters so much, it is better to schedule another session and see if it comes up this second time. It is better to do this than corrupt the point by introducing it myself. If it doesn’t come up at all, and it still matters, I may separate it out as a challenge, or part of a challenge, in a presentation at another time. To reschedule like this, though, there must be enough flexibility within the schedule – within the sequencing of classes – to enable such responsiveness.

The reason for this profound difference in effectiveness and power when a fellow learner makes a point, as compared with when I, as teacher, make it lies, I think, in the differences in the nature of the authority, and the distortions it can contain.

In the earlier stages of life, when the dependency of children is high,  the authority of parents is not chosen by children, but imposed. And that imposed authority is conflicted- or we may say, compromised – an authority divided, on the one hand, between being justified in the best interests of the child in terms of education and safety, but on the other as a protection of the rights of the parents. Boundaries are set, both for the sake of the best flourishing of the child, but also because of the other demands that are placed on parental lives – such as work and outside obligations, peace, mental health, their interests and pursuits and other aspects of their own flourishing; things that the child cannot be expected to fully understand or respect. The difference, however, isn’t always clear. The authority itself is contaminated by the ambiguity.

Children are aware in some way, and from very early on, that these mixed motives exist. They are frequently made aware. Indeed, the ambiguity permeates much that parents want children to believe and understand about their behaviour and their worth. Much of our first learning (and misunderstanding) of conditional self-esteem comes out of these interactions.

In very many instances, it is not to be supposed that it is “up to” the child, to make up their own mind about these things, and we must remember that how all this is understood is a matter of the interpretation and understanding of a very young child in the early stages of learning about power, authority, will and responsibility. Even when parents give reasons, there is often power and mixed agendas behind them, and the reasons can come to an end. “Just get in the car now!”

As the child grows, these relationships can evolve – and the parent-child relationships may become more like friendship and equality, but teaching in conventional schooling is not like this. It is like an early, paternalistic relationship, developmentally frozen. The teacher comes surrounded in a cloud of the agendas of others, and this compromised paternalism partially corrupts, in turn, the force and effectiveness of the reasons that teachers give. All of them have a context of compliance of one sort or another, and the degree to which that compliance is justified by the best interests of the learner is ambiguous at best.

In respectful discussions among peers, where all have begun to trust each other, as equals, and begun to appreciate the worth of their own minds through mutual appreciation within the group, it is therefore not surprising that the same contribution from one of them will have more power than if it is made by their teacher. They are in this together. They have begun to trust that, and themselves. The comments of their peers come to them more freely, and less encumbered. Less is at stake behind it. It is not surprising, either, that they can so often explain each other to each other better than we can.

What is my real role then, for I am not there to teach? “Facilitator” seems rather vague. “Leader” is inappropriate, for I am not there to lead, and neither are any of them. Their equality, and equal humility, their free initiative – to step up – and their responsibilities to each other to play their part are essential to the quality of the knowledge that they can create.

“Coach”? But my coaching is invariably of the whole group. It is kept minimal, and is never carried out in a “practice session” or a training or coaching session, except, perhaps, for a few preliminary remarks. “Coaching” might be an aspect of my one-on-one role, but not about behaviour in discussions, unless there is a major problem with someone undermining the whole process.

The conductor of an orchestra comes to mind – but conductors have far too large a hand in the performance, and I am certainly not at all the conductor of the discussion – more like its tuning fork. But there is an aspect of the conductor that does offer us something. The conductor is concerned with the experience of the whole, and of all – the musicians and the audience – and at a very refined level, while being unable to access the uniqueness of every experience.

We are looking to the sociology of the group to do its own training and cultivation here. Groups socialise their members; bring about conformity to group norms. We want to turn this basic characteristic of group behaviour to advantage, socialising the conditions of group inquiry and good reasoning.

My concern is with all of their experience – their experience of a process that is, above all, a collective, critical inquiry in which they are all engaged. I don’t need to worry about what they uniquely experience, as individuals. I want them to be internalising the key characteristics of a quality discussion that is exemplary in the pursuit of knowledge and understanding; a discussion that is about something that matters educationally. I want this quality process to be at work on the unique geography of their own experience, and what they are making of it, and I can be content that this will work in educational ways, because of the warrant I have for trusting the process.

If it is a good model, they will tune themselves to it automatically, just because of what it models, and because they engage in it with respect. What they internalise will enhance their powers of thought – each no doubt differently, and in terms of their own experience – which works upon it, and is in turn, worked upon. It will do this because the process itself is sound, worthy of trust, and we must let it do its work.

I listen. Perhaps I write a note on the board representing every point or shift that is made. But as I watch and listen, I am feeling for the whole group. The eyes that meet mine, and what they seem to express, or when they catch each other’s. The stiffening of attention, the breathing. The leaning forward, or the relaxing back in the chairs. The twisting to hear. The smile, the frown, the puzzlement. The patience. Who and what springs off who and what. The one who now speaks who rarely does. The one who puts themselves aside in support of others.

Was everyone engaged? That isn’t at all the same as “did everyone speak?” It is a poor session – poorly developed by them as much as by me – if any of them aren’t engaged, but their silence has little to tell us about their engagement or their activity. If any of them aren’t engaged, then we haven’t yet identified issues that matter to them all, or they aren’t yet a team.

We debrief at the end. This isn’t a “teaching appraisal”, it is a brief time when we step back and look at the whole course of the discussion, and their experiences of it and in it. We might wonder what we missed, what parallel topics might be worth considering, or the larger context, how we might have reframed our questions, what challenges we failed to make or that didn’t arise. Was there any empirical knowledge that might have helped? Where might we go next?

Personally, were there any discoveries, changes of mind, ways or occasions on which any of us were challenged? Anything surprising about our experiences – such as discoveries about what others had experienced, or that other people had had similar questions or doubts – or feelings? Any special moves that were appreciated, or worth acknowledging, such as different kinds of support when we had difficulty? Anything that we would have liked to spend more time on – and why?

Looking back, were there any shifts in our discussions that just weren’t blind wanderings? Were there blind alleys? Were there fruitful, expansive or illuminating shifts? How did they come about?

And when they get up to go, moving out of the room, down the corridor, out down the pathways . . . are they still talking about it?

Assessing the individual

An unschooler was asked how she could tell if her children were growing without measuring them. Her reply was that she could tell that they were growing in the same way that she could tell if a plant or tree was growing. At first glance this might appear to be just a loose kind of measurement. The tree looks taller. Might as well measure that. But there are so many dimensions, even to the growth of a tree. It might also have to do with width, density, limb weight. Well, measure them all, and see if a number of them are getting, well, bigger. But she is concerned with the whole, not just additively, while also being sensitive to the detail.

A human being is very different from a tree, of course. Given the priority of mind, we should be concerned to evaluate that largely opaque “inside”, and not merely what is displayed on the surface. The “inside” is not measurable in any very useful way, and we should be keenly aware of the dangers of judging the inside from the outside. This is not to dismiss a concern for the agreements learners have reached with public judgment, either, but what matters in the end, even here, is the role of these public judgments, rules, procedures and understandings in the management of the growth of experience; what is made of it, and with it, by the learner, on the inside.

We can draw some conclusions from what they do, apart from their talk, but probably the only way we can ever get close to the experience and understanding of another person, and what they make of their experience, is by talking with them and, above all, by listening to their reflections and attempts to express themselves, and watching their natural and spontaneous reactions – not in response to our “testing”, but in a trusting dialogue.

This is the only way we ever can get close to those we would be close to, or they to us. It is the only way in which we could get close to understanding and appreciating what they believe, think, feel, value or are committed to; or to their doubts and uncertainties. Some of our best opportunities, then, will be when we are sitting casually with them alone, and we reflect together on a recent group discussion, and our experiences in it.

It is hard to know what to say to someone who thinks that measuring dimensions, and then comparing these measurements to measurements taken from others, is any serious effort at educational evaluation at all. To give any significant weight to this is simply to fail in human understanding, and to display a lack of educational awareness. It is to miss everything that is important.

Educational practice requires good educational understanding and judgment. Measurement is never a substitute. To the extent that we feel obliged to convert educational evaluation based on the quality of discourse into various kinds of measurement, this should be a flag to us of our educational failure – probably of educational purpose. Where measurement comes to be seen as an acceptable form of evaluation, it is our purpose that we should look to again – because the idea that such means of appraisal or evaluation could be adequate to our purposes suggests a drift away from purposes that are educationally justified.

Schooling and art as experience

Just as the special kind of knowledge-seeking discussion that I have drawn attention to has traditionally occurred within a schooling context, though mostly only with very advanced learners at graduate level in universities, it is important to note another special relationship with experience that has a very long tradition in schooling, and this is in the teaching of literature. Novels, poetry, and drama are written to be experienced. Their purpose has to do with what we might undergo in the reading of them or their performance, and the undergoing is usually intended to be very comprehensive in experiential terms; engaging the whole of us, emotionally as well as intellectually, in the experience.

Good criticism, as the cultivation of disciplined reflection on the experience of literary art, drama and film, works to enrich and refine that experience, enabling greater depth and subtlety, as well as disciplining the reflection on experience. It is not, in the first instance, about reaching agreement in public linguistic judgment in the meanings of words though inevitably this may be an aspect of the refinement of experience, making possible a greater discrimination in judgment. Its work is, however, better understood as a deliberate intervention in the reflective continuity of experience, as Dewey has explained that to us.

Criticism might, for instance, dismantle the work in terms of its formal structure – of plot, character  and style, and it might explore the artistic construction and its moves that make it do a certain kind of emotional work – of its surprise, or challenge, its imagery or scene-setting, its reversals or juxtapositions.

At another level, and with some of these more structural features laid bare, the “moral” interest of a work may be explored – not “moralistic”, in the sense of teaching a moral lesson, but in what the work attempts to expose of the dimensions of human life; its paradoxes and conundrums, its interests and quests, its anxieties, fears and fortunes; its development. Good discussions and explorations of such things lay the groundwork for entirely new feelings and observations, quite new aspects of experience refined and appreciated, when next the work is encountered, and in a more discriminating fashion.

In this way, the teaching of art criticism is of quite a different sort from the teaching of almost all other “subject areas” in conventional schooling because of its complex relationship to the work of art as experienced, and the relationship between the art work and the rest of life.

The experience of the art work often stands as a kind of vicarious experience of life. There is, moreover, not only artifice to it, and the fact that it involves various kinds of representation, but always there is a question of the authenticity of what it represents. The vicarious experience can be distorted by the ignorance and prejudice of the artist just as easily as it can illuminate. That doesn’t mean that it lacks value, because understanding that ignorance and prejudice, which is all too human, has value too. But it does point to the role of good criticism in clarifying what we might tend to miss.

Because it is vicarious it can give us access to experience that is otherwise outside our reach, not only because it is outside our more natural circles of experience, but also because it can take us, more or less safely, into experiences that we do not want to undergo too literally. We should be reminded of Aristotle’s “pity and fear”. [13]

At the same time, of course, the fashionable corpus of literature that is treated seriously can be silent about some significant kinds of experience – with profound political and moral consequences. It can, for instance, be ethnically exclusive, or exclude social classes, or various marginalised groups that have little voice. But even to point out these things is to highlight the educational potential of that vicarious experience, and of the role that criticism can play.

I was “schooled” in literature all the way through high school, by numerous teachers in what counted as a “good” school, if a very traditional one. In terms of any emotional or intellectual residue of all that, any impact on my life or experience, or even of pleasure or satisfaction, it may as well not have happened. I persisted with it into my undergraduate study because, for some reason, I was “good” at it, and I think this was largely due to the fact that I read a lot of stuff outside school that interested me, and had done so from the time I could read.

The study of literature at university was a revelation. Good teachers unpacked the works for me, and showed me the life in them – showed me my life in them. That was what stunned me the most. As I learned to explore literature, it invaded my privacy. I was shocked to discover, time and again, that great writers were somehow privy to my innermost secrets. If they knew such things, then they knew very secret things about me – and no doubt this meant that other people could too. There were (and are) some mighty weird things in there, and it mattered to me that I wasn’t exposed, together with all of them, in public. There are some things that none of us want to talk about. Perhaps.

But I wasn’t exposed. Instead, the study of literature took me an enormous step forward in the growth of my humanity – my self-understanding, my understanding of others, and the workings of various social worlds. The educational contribution was incalculable.

The study of literature is as old as schools, going hand-in-hand with basic literacy itself. I have experienced the power that this can have, and I have experienced the pointlessness of it. We should also be aware that, though the point of criticism is the experience of the literature, this purpose is overridden, in schooling by the agendas of schooling; most obviously, that the purpose is to master the publicity of the criticism, because it is the mastery of the criticism that will be assessed. We can’t measure the experience, after all. The experience is “up to you”, and we are quite indifferent to those things that we leave “up to you”.

So we must ask; is the combination of schooling and literature the best that the study of literature can be?

We should, I think, always find ways to work around, or away from, the institutionalisation of education that creates the systematically anti-educational features that conventional schooling does, and this involves minimizing formal teaching – teachers hired by powers that are separate from learners and have agendas that spring from those powers. Understanding literature does require the extended unpacking of texts, and my lecturers certainly delivered this, often vividly and compellingly. But good video, or even audio presentations would probably have done just as well in a context in which the point of studying literature was clear to the learner, and encouraging.

What is needed, at base, is social support and good discussion. By “social support” I mean mutually supportive interaction with others who are equally keen on experiencing literature, and not just external encouragement to study it. We have already been introduced to that here, and will discuss its possibilities even further. There appears to be no good reason, however,  to assume that such discussion and support must be located principally within the conventional institutional framework of schooling. Indeed, this may limit its possibilities, and make it far too expensive.

With good social support it should not take long before learners are able, eagerly enough, to transition from lectures – video or audio – to critical text. Good critical text is not easy to find, however, to those who do not have access to university libraries, and it is expensive to build private collections.

Pick any novelist (or philosopher), and go find six works of criticism in your local bookshop, or municipal library (outside major world centres). Six works of criticism per writer is not many, if you hope to get close criticism of their specific texts, and they have anything of a corpus.

Having failed at your library or bookseller, price them on Amazon. Figure what it would involve to build a private library across any adequate range of writers or thinkers. Figure how you are going to store all that, and move it around when you have to shift.

Except for those few who are truly wealthy, hardly anyone could build such a library. Home libraries tend to belong to those who have made a very particular study an outstanding passion. Otherwise they are career libraries, for professional development.

There is a remarkable conclusion here. Once we leave university (should we have been lucky enough to go there, and engage in these studies), most of us have little more real access to critical text than would have been available to someone in the ancient world wanting to read hand-copied parchment or papyrus. The problem today isn’t technological, however. It is copyright and the business models.

That drives us back to all of the inadequacies of schools. Because of the cost and limited real availability of text, most of us who wanted to pursue the critical study of text would have to go back to school. Schools can fulfill that need in the age-old way;  by finding a teacher who has stuffed their head with the text that we can’t afford for ourselves, predigesting and judging it in their own way. Literary and philosophical criticism collapses into oral tradition, and our intellectual independence is compromised.

Plato and his educational theatre

Given our discussion of education so far, including the ambivalence we should feel about the role that schooling might have to play in it, many of us whose educational understanding was nourished on the conventional accounts of the origins of the concept might begin to wonder if there could be something wrong with that standard story. We are all taught to believe that the idea of education was invented in Classical Athens. This standard and conventional story always acknowledges that this invention of education is different from the invention of schooling, which in Western tradition at least, began thousands of years earlier.

The invention of education, we are told, involved the gradual resolution between two competing traditions at the time. On the one hand, there was the tradition of the sophists. These were teachers who plied their teaching for pay, and what they taught was the knowledge and skill needed for a political life – the rhetorical abilities for participation in the political life of the city. Athens was a participatory democracy, and oratory was considered the highest art required for the highest duty of a citizen. The sophists, in other words, offered learning that was of instrumental value. It was a form of vocational training, particularly for those young men who aspired to leadership.

The competing tradition began with Socrates, generally considered a sophist, though he did not teach for money, and what he taught, he viewed as a good in itself, and not as a means to an end. This didn’t prevent ambitious young men from seeking out his teaching, even if they did so for utilitarian reasons initially; the argumentation that he taught might be a politically useful tool nonetheless. Socrates and his philosophical heirs, however, were concerned with questions that went to the value and point of life itself; what was the Good Life, and what was the good society? Their first concerns were with ends, and not with the means to them.

The standard doctrine, then, is that the idea of education was born out of competition between these two traditions, the philosophical being represented initially by Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, and the sophistic tradition being represented by the greatest of the sophists, Isocrates. It is in the history of this competition that the birth and evolution of the concept of education supposedly lies, and over the course of time it is the sophistic tradition that has won. The philosophical tradition – the quest for good living – has come to play the minor part of what education is understood to be, and the history of education and its thought depends upon these assumptions.

My suggestion is that this is a massive and incongruous “reading back” of our later world-view into the circumstances of the idea of education – particularly our modern one, with our extraordinary and elaborate institutionalisation of schooling,  our reduction of the idea of education to that institution, and our confusion of education with vocational training.

The distortion here should be obvious. The competition between these two traditions is not over the concept of education at all. It is over which would come to dominate in the institutions of schooling. If that is what the competition was going to be about, there is no way that the philosophical tradition could hope to win, because there are just so many human utilities that schooling can serve. Schooling costs money, and money is always available when preparation for careers seems to require that something be taught.

Even more money will be available when the possibilities of using schools for social engineering are appreciated. The value of coming to understand the Good Life, or the good society are, on the other hand, in-valuable – perhaps beyond price. You can’t put a dollar on it. Such intrinsically worthwhile learnings, however, always fall down in the priorities of schooling, unless the possession of them becomes a mark of culture, civilisation and social status. Then, it might be thought worth buying them to impress other people.

That the competition wasn’t over the concept of education at all should be obvious just in the shared assumption that here was the occasion for the invention of the concept of education, because there is nothing about the sophistic tradition that could have contributed to that invention. The point of the sophistic tradition was the point that all schooling and teaching had always had, and still has – the provision of skills for high status positions (or middle positions for wealthy merchants and artisans). The origins of school, those thousands of years before, lay in the value of mathematics to astronomical observation. Priesthood, in Mesopotamia, required it, and this is where Western schooling was born. The sophistic tradition in Classical Greece is merely a variation on this theme – the knowledge and skills useful for politics instead of priesthood. There is no conceptual invention here at all.

With this in mind, it might be wise to look again at the beginnings of that philosophical tradition, with its invention of the idea of education, and to do so with new eyes. What we have here, and what is readily available for us to look and see, is the work of Plato – particularly, but not exclusively, in that first great work of educational invention, his Republic. Perhaps there is as much here about the invention of education as there is about the invention of social philosophy and the philosophical problem of good living. Perhaps we cannot even begin to understand these latter two, without renewing our appreciation of the former.

Plato wrote in a dialogue form – a dramatic form – and that has always been viewed as somewhat peculiar. Philosophers so often want to struggle their way around this difficulty – his great inconvenience for us – to get at “Plato’s view” – the philosophy that Plato believed, and no doubt intended to teach us. It is quite annoying that he should have presented these ideas within a fiction that we have to “deconstruct” in order to get at his real views.

The fiction all centres around the character of Socrates, an annoying fiction, too, because everyone has always known that it isn’t the “real” Socrates, even if we often give up and treat “Socrates” as Socrates. So does that mean that Socrates is merely Plato, and the character of Socrates is the mouthpiece of Plato? Or is it somehow important that Plato’s “Socrates” is not the real Socrates, while also not being Plato?

In the Republic, Socrates offers the well-known “Platonic” theory of forms, and this theory is used to attack art. All of the features of our world that we experience are “appearances” of the ideal “forms” that underlie them. They imperfectly represent the forms in various accidental ways. Art, which consists of the representation of the stuff and happenings of our perceptible world, is thus twice removed from reality. It is an appearance of an appearance. One art that he singles out for attack in this way for its divorce from reality is – drama.

We are told this in an art form – a dramatic dialogue from the mouth of a character who we know imperfectly represents the person it is supposed to represent. What a silly mistake – or set of mistakes – for Plato to make! Not nearly as smart as he thought he was.

And that seems right, if we are to measure Plato’s work against some sort of philosophical dissertation that presents and defends a thesis. We might, however, recall all that we have considered about experience; about its educational importance, and the inadequacies of our educational implementations to address it, about art and experience, and about obliqueness and indirectness in the cultivation of experience educationally.

What if Plato isn’t always telling the “truth”, as he understood that to be? What if, instead, his attitude is educational? “I am not here to tell you the truth. In a year’s time, I might have changed my mind anyway. It is you who are responsible for determining the truth, and you must learn to think and judge well for yourself in order to do so. My job is to challenge you to do that, not to supply you with ‘the answers’ at all”. What if his purpose is entirely different from a presentation to the American Philosophical Association, or the Philosophy of Education Society?

His Socrates, however, is in dialogue with ambitious, probably aristocratic young men who find his company – because of his conversation – addictive. He speaks their language, and does so about  issues out of their lives and experience.

He doesn’t set them reading, and they don’t ask what will be on the test. Indeed, though they came to learn things that might advance their careers, they keep coming back just because they find him interesting, stimulating. There is something  about the experience. The process awakens in them a new eros – not just desire for fame and power and reputation – but the eros or desire of the pursuit of “truth”.

The pursuit.

Well, it isn’t the best of discussions, as I have discussed these above, because Socrates seems to do most of the talking, and not much time listening. But this is art, and these are made-up characters. Plato isn’t reporting, and if it was just a reporting of extended conversations among the kids, and not tweaked up as it is by the character of Socrates, and led by him, we probably wouldn’t still be reading it.

While the conversation in the dialogues is stacked in favour of Socrates-the-character, we have no way of knowing that this is what daily discourse was like in Plato’s academy. It is, hypothetically, unlikely, since Plato seemed to have such a good sense, in writing his dialogues, of just what the young men might say and respond to. He may well have done a lot more listening than the dialogues suggest.

After all, in all the complexity of this artistic creation, “Socrates”, the character, isn’t just in dialogue with Athenian youth. He is in dialogue with us, and it is part of the experience of the art that we need to engage in that dialogue ourselves, in some way. It is art. But it is educational art. It is educational work with philosophy, and so there is a deliberate obliqueness, and indirectness in his engagement with us, because he isn’t attempting to “transmit”, or fill empty vessels. He is working in and on experience. We are, indeed, witness to the birth of the idea of education, and with a sophistication that so few, in our “educationally sophisticated” age, are yet able to grasp.

It may even be a mistake, in our time, to think of “the Socratic method” of teaching as a teaching technique at all, rather than as an artistic device. As a “teaching method”, we drift back to the idea of “teacher-as-authority”, and if we stand back and look at what Plato is most likely doing here, it is probable that he wouldn’t approve of that. If we use such a method, we are apt to forget that we are being paid, and the character, in the drama, was not.

When we use the “Socratic method of teaching”, the agendas, once again, are ours. But this shouldn’t be the effect of reading the dialogues, unless we are slavish. Socrates may appear to have agendas – leading us to “doctrines”. More likely, though – more consistent with the art, and more useful to our philosophical development – is not that we are “led” to agree with him, but that our understanding is challenged by him. He leads us into difficulty.

And so, when we read the Republic, we experience a work of art – a dramatic dialogue, containing figures who are experiencing this dialogue in artistic time. We have an experience of fictional people who are undergoing experiences, and creating external conditions of experience for each other. In addition, Socrates, in this work of art, tells stories and myths – works of art within works of art that are to be experienced by the characters – and by us. Where is “reality” in all this? How many layers are we removed now?

Hence the story that is the context of the whole dialogue – the dinner party. Then there is the story of the ring of Gyges, the story of a society that might satisfy pigs, the myth of the metals, the myth of the cave, the whole story of the Republic itself that is to be created to achieve justice, the story of its decline and fall. Finally, there is the myth that ends the Republic – the Myth of Er. At the beginning, he had been challenged to explain justice in the individual, and he had said he first needed to give an account of the just society. When he completes that task, he tells us how it won’t work. And then offers us the Myth of Er. About the individual. Perhaps the answer. Finally.  After all that.

But if this myth does anything, it doesn’t do that. What it does do is show us the difficulty of choosing, and what is at stake. It is, itself, a challenge. Your business is to mind your own business; the business of living your own life well. Doing yourself justice. Choosing how to do that is very, very hard, as is learning to do so. But learning to live well is the most important learning of our lives. So where is the recipe for that?

No recipe. Just the probing and the challenging, and putting up of examples and stories, and taking them down. Comparing practices and experiences, and proposals. Infuriating us. Getting under our skin. Making us itch. Showing how scratching will give us no real relief. Prodding us to examine our lives, until we go away from him, going over and over our own lives on our own, talking to ourselves about them. Arguing with his “Socrates”. Changing our minds.

Well over a thousand years later, the second great book of Western educational theory was written, clearly inspired by the Republic, and in response to it. Rousseau’s Emile.

It was a novel.

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References

1.  Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. 3rd edition. Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Pearson, 1973. p5

2.  Philosophical Investigations, p11

3.  Philosophical Investigations, p53

4.  Philosophical Investigations, p81

5.  Wittgenstein, Ludwig. On Certainty. Edited by G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright. Translated by Denis Paul. New York; London: Harper & Row, 1972. p62e

6.  Philosophical Investigations, p12

7.  Philosophical Investigations, p226

8.  Philosophical Investigations, p88

9.  On Certainty, p62e

10.  On Certainty, p73e

11.  Philosophical Investigations, p150

12.  Philosophical Investigations, p151

13.  Martha Nussbaum reflects on a possible re-reading of Katharsis, in Aristotle’s account of the value of tragedy, not in terms of the conventional “purgation” through pity and fear, but of “clarification” instead – that the experience of these feelings through tragedy helps us to clarify our own unreflective values and convictions. Nussbaum, Martha C. The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. p388ff

© R. Graham Oliver, 2019, 2020

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