Chapter 19: An educational constitution

Chapter 19:

An educational constitution

So . . . there is our “little soul”, the soul of a person-to-be, in the annex and able to make some principled decisions about the social arrangements that will surround it and be in play at the moment of its impending biological conception. It is preparing, so far as it can, to be conceived. When that actually happens, the unique social, political and cultural circumstances that provide the context of that germ of life from that moment on will begin to form the mind of the person it will come to be. It will be forming it in one way out of an infinite variety of others, a formation in which, from all those beginnings and influences will grow its ability to play its own part in its evolution through the choices that it comes to confront. It is poised before this mortal point, but capable and fully-equipped to make one crucial kind of decision.

It will decide criteria to which those arrangements will conform. This will include even some of  the qualities of its parents and the possibilities of its parents’ situation. It will not include all the features and characteristics and interests of its parents, or even the place in society that they inhabit, or the ideologies and beliefs that they live by. But the choices made by the little soul will constrain and facilitate within their scope, what these things can be. It will be the same with every institution and every practice that it encounters or participates in for the course of its life. There will probably be an indefinite variety of differently featured societies or cultures or worlds that will satisfy the chosen criteria, but they will be in a class of their own among all possible societies in sharing them.

We can think of how this would make a difference to the “life of a private man who minds his own business”, that Odysseus chose. Such a life already has a certain developmental track built within it, and some social conditions are implied, for how could a person come to such a life, unless the conditions of experience were already there in the world to help to awaken it?

At the same time, even though awakened, such a life could be one of enormous struggle to build much of a business – hemmed in, bound down, dumbed down, marginalized, blocked off from the necessary resources and opportunities. Or the society could facilitate it, grow and nurture it, watering and nourishing it at every turn. The little soul would, if it cared, have to know that its social choices would not only be vital to the possibility of being able to conceive of such a life, and to want it, but also to the possibility that such a life could truly flourish.

Apart from the amount of space available to the little soul on the virtual forms that it can fill out, there are, then, two rules that govern the decisions that have to be made; firstly, that the little soul is to decide a set of criteria by which the the social order into which it will be born is to be constrained. Secondly, it is to decide these criteria in order to achieve for itself the best chance of living a life that is meaningful, fulfilling and satisfying – a life that is good. It knows that it must do its best to respect itself in its decision-making.

Though it is on the cusp of conception, this is nevertheless a point where time has little meaning, and so it can explore an abundance of information about possible worlds – tyrannies, monarchies, oligarchies, democracies of various kinds, theocracies, societies with different levels of technology prioritized in various ways, or that organize power in various ways. Societies that prioritize wealth in various ways, or the control of fragility and disaster in various ways.

Societies with a diversity of good lives that can be chosen by people in various ways, while others involve prescriptions in terms of stations, genders, ages, genealogies and their duties. Societies that cultivate some wants at the expense of others, and give priorities of some virtues over others – honour, physical prowess, courage, truth-telling, generosity, social sensitivity, social imagination, social concern, power, status, competitiveness, wealth, intimacy, curiosity, certainty, doubt, and many, many more. Societies that distribute opportunities and mental powers in various ways. Societies that don’t believe in over-thinking it, or prioritise violence. Even Plato’s plan for his republic will be featured there, so that unrealized plans for societies are up for examination as well, to warn or challenge.

Some societies have pluralities of religions, too, all of which claim to be the one true faith. One of them may even be the true faith. But the soul can’t evaluate all their claims. And even if it could, it knows that it would start on the same footing with all of them after conception unless it is equipped by experience and skill to make the necessary interrogation. The only way it can be sure that it has this equipment and experience is with the criteria it specifies. Otherwise it is likely simply to be born into one or another of them, and its subsequent development will dispose its reason and sentiments towards it, whether it is the true faith or not.

There are so many possibilities for societies, but then the universe is vast, or so I am told. Almost anything is possible out there – anything, certainly that a graduate soul would be likely to take seriously. Having made its considered judgment, and drunk again from the River of Carelessness, it loses all memory, as we have said, and arcs out across the night sky, a shooting star seeking its proper home somewhere amid those vast possibilities that the universe contains.

And so the great game of life begins; and that night, it will begin in a twinkling.

When it has departed, and we pull up the virtual form that the little soul filled in, what do we find that it had chosen?

The General, Societal Criteria

1. It would choose a just society that sustains a strong sense of justice, and that maintains strong procedures of social criticism and active mechanisms to continue to develop and maintain just institutions.

The conception of justice here would be strongly and vividly based on the principle of equal respect for persons, articulated in some detail. I would suggest something neo-Rawslian for this. I Accept the Marxian criticism that Rawls’s focus on distributive justice is not sufficient; at least to the extent that, in focussing on the distribution of the goods we may tend to think (with our background) of the goods of consumption and overlook the goods of fulfilling work as being an aspect of wealth, or falling among opportunities, for he does not mention it. Justice must include issues of the exploitation of productive labour, which is one of the reasons slavery is an issue of justice.

It is too easy for distributive justice to focus on dealing out economic and material goods while ignoring what is done in the creation of wealth and goods and services. Rawls’s account of “goods” is broad enough to include such things as “opportunities”, but it does not go far enough to meet this objection. To distribute either wealth or fulfilling work is also to distribute minds – the things people can and do think about, the knowledge that is available to them, how they feel about themselves, their identities and what they consider themselves capable of. Justice is therefore a core educational dynamic. Rawls was, of course, at least partially aware of this when he included self-esteem as a good to be distributed.

2. It would choose a society in which educational understanding is built into the structure of all institutions and promoted through them.

We have already discussed this at some length.

3. It would choose a decent society,

. . . one in which people are generous in their willingness to facilitate each other’s lives above and beyond the requirements of obligation or duty. Warm goodwill and easy sociability will provide a background for conditions necessary for the ready mutual understanding of difference that is essential to properly challenge choice and the loop of indoctrination, and it will facilitate mutual educational support.

4. It would choose a society in which the conceptions of worthwhile living and flourishing are diverse, rich and pursued with creativity.

. . . as well as the opportunities available for earning a living sufficient to support a broad range of fulfilling activities. Evidence that these conceptions and activities count as potentially rich and fulfilling will be based on the diversity and extensiveness of the claims made for them, both directly and in literature and video by the many, and by those long counted among the wise.

5. It would choose a society which has a well-developed culture of widespread respectful, disciplined and critical discussion of good living and its requirements

. . . where such discussion is regarded as a pleasure, and where the sharing of experience in the cause of better understanding of life and its possibilities is rightly considered a safe and desirable thing to do.

6. It would choose a society that is politically stable and can offer safety and security for all of its members

. . . since these are necessary for life-plans to be developed and carried through with confidence. This condition has to be heavily qualified, however, since too much emphasis upon safety or stability can too severely close down possibilities of life itself. The excesses of military societies and police states are as incompatible with the proper demands of self-respect as are the limitations on the possibilities of life in a theocracy.

Personal moral self-determination carries with it an acceptance of considerable risk, and if self-respect matters, it is also worth being prepared to make sacrifices for a system that enables it. The idea that we should make our social circumstances so well-regulated that no individual’s life can ever be at risk, or that no-one can get harmed, needs to be balanced by the risks each of us should be prepared to take in order to sustain conditions under which people like us can live lives that are our own. The freedom we need to be ourselves comes with requirements of courage, including the ability to continue to make the best of things when misfortune strikes.

7. It would choose a society that is capable of generating and maintaining a degree of wealth sufficient to enable the other criteria.

This is also , a very problematic criterion of course, – a degree of wealth sufficient . . .  But proper attention to the other criteria, particularly justice, and also criteria 2 to 5 will provide very valuable clues. The pursuit of wealth by a society can get out of hand, as it clearly is today, where it overrides concerns of justice and corrupts both educational possibility and the richness and diversity of possible lives. A better, more just distribution of wealth is compatible with much lower national expectations of wealth in a world where ten percent – or less – of the population have captured sixty percent – or more – of the wealth.

Rawls, of course, did not limit his definition of wealth to financial matters, but included what might be called “public wealth” available to citizens in terms of public resources and facilities. This included, for example, swimming pools and libraries. It does not take much thought to realize that this would have to include most significant educational resources. The abilities even to use libraries or swimming pools necessitates that.

With our currently wide distortions of the distribution of wealth it is inevitable that a proper and ethical distribution of the educational resource will also be wildly distorted too, particularly where access to information is commercialized, even by the State. We face greater emerging difficulty in this area, not least over the direction in which intellectual property is tending. In capturing sixty percent  – or more – of the wealth, it is within the hands of ten percent – or less – to capture and manipulate the educational resource as well.

If we had asked the little soul to prioritize its requirements, I believe it would have done so in the following way: justice would be a priority first equal with educational understanding, since justice would protect the little soul wherever in the chosen society it happened to be born, and educational understanding would ensure appropriate insight into justice, and enable its defence – contributing to the “sense of justice” that Rawls considered so important. The distribution of educational goods must also be just, and it is certainly hard to see how any uneven distribution of educational understanding would be consistent with respect.

The other criteria are dependent upon the combination of justice and educational understanding. The value of decency, for instance would flow from educational understanding, since it improves educational possibilities, as does a culture of widespread critical discussion. Safety, security and wealth all have to be understood and evaluated in terms of the issues that educational understanding would reveal. Wealth, for instance, needs to be understood in terms of its contribution to good living, and we need to be very clear about what we are willing to sacrifice for it. It is not an unconditional good in itself, as our own political obsession with it might otherwise suggest.

The Developmental⁄Educational Criteria

The set of criteria listed above are the general criteria by which a society might be selected. The ones that follow are more specific criteria that would have to be satisfied in the developmental experience of the little soul in whichever society it discovers itself to be. The little soul would therefore need to look into these developmental conditions more closely, once the pool of societies has been narrowed by the preceding list.

Criteria Governing the Circumstances of Development

1. It would choose conditions that fostered a vivid imagination.

The emphasis here would be, firstly, on social imagination – an ability to enter imaginatively into the lives of others, particularly those who live and think differently. Secondly, it would involve an ability to imagine experiences of many kinds, particularly the satisfactions and dissatisfactions of undertaking or participating in various activities.

2. It would choose conditions that not merely tolerate, but positively foster sophisticated social, political and cultural criticism – particularly where power, authority and ideology are concerned.

Clearly this does, in part, repeat the requirement for criticism and maintenance mentioned in the general criteria above, where the justice of the society is concerned. But here we are also concerned with life-planning itself, and with the learner’s growing capacity to participate in the development and maintenance of the good society from their personal educational standpoint.

3. It would choose conditions that enable the ready awareness of the inner life and its development, particularly of self-deception and the partiality of experience, favouring courageous self-criticism, and a willingness to undertake the personal change that such criticism might reasonably suggest.
4. It would choose conditions that would enable it to be educationally aware, literate and sensitive, and to participate in its own educational decision-making  as early and as fully as possible.
5. It would choose conditions that enable it, with sophistication, to be alert to the wide possibilities of indoctrination, to protecting itself against it, and to removing it, where possible, from its environment, and from its heart and mind.
6. It would choose conditions in which all institutional sites that make up the potential learning environment – such as the family, the school, the workplace, sport and leisure, economic, commercial and public institutions, the media and the streets – are organized in ways consistent with educational principle.
7. It would choose conditions of learning that are social

. . . that involve extensive dialogue with like-minded peers, with more experienced learners, and with a wide range of people from the larger community with interests, experience and expertise that can inform and challenge their own emerging interests. This social richness will not be closed down by being restricted by sub-cultures or age-bands, but will involve people from a wide range of sub-communities and life-stages.

8. It will choose a society that encourages disciplined rational debate and dialogue, but also fun, light-heartedness and a sense of humour

. . . since the importance of reason throughout should not be at the cost of a dour society where people can only take themselves seriously.

All of the reflection and the conclusions bound up with the pre-conception of our advanced souls is, of course, lost in total amnesia in the process of leaving the annex and entering into their new life. But we, careful observers of this whole process that we are, and wishing to be parties to the sort of society that they have chosen, can see a further way that we can help them. We can discuss the myth of the little soul in age-appropriate ways, as they grow up, and we can speak of this myth as creating for us a virtual educational constitution which can be referred to for guidance, both by learners and educators throughout educational processes, and used to test our actual practice. Here is an outline of that educational constitution – that set of educational meta-rules.

The Virtual Educational Constitution

1. That the core educational motivation is to consist of the learners’ interest in and concern for their own lives, as these are conceived, understood and pursued by them. The actual interests, curiosities, enthusiasms and passions within those lives are to be the basis of educational development, which has the purpose of enriching, deepening, expanding and challenging those interests and enthusiasms in ways that the learners come to take responsibility for, and can be held responsible for, coming to be perceived, understood and appreciated, by the learners, as beneficial to themselves. See items 3 and 5.
2. That each learner must be the final arbiter of the “truth”; the ultimate decision-maker about what they will believe, based upon their own growing awareness and appreciation of the importance of discovering and using the best protocols and methodologies that they can find or develop for making their determinations, and through social exploration and challenge.

The design of the environment must not attempt or work to pre-empt these “truth” decisions, or involve an assumption of knowing better. Though the environment in which educational activity is to be undertaken must itself be constructed with a concern for the “truth”, it must do so by providing resources and abundant opportunities to explore critically a wide a range of sophisticated, competing alternatives, able to be explored in as much depth as possible, as well as an equally wide range of sophisticated tools for testing and challenging.

3. That a core and organizing developmental theme throughout the environment, continually facilitated and attended to, is the educational understanding of the learner, where the learner’s own learning is the centre of educational attention, and that this developing understanding comes to play the major part in practical educational decisions as soon as possible, and with the purpose of continuing throughout the learner’s life.
4. That insofar as educational processes are formalized or institutionalized, and  mentors, coaches,  facilitators and teachers are involved, and once total dependency has come to be qualified developmentally, the entire course of educational development is to be decided in partnership and collaboratively between learners on the one hand, and mentors or coaches, facilitators and teachers on the other, with the balance of final decision-making moving to the learner, becoming complete at the end of any compulsory educational requirement.
5. That the early years of dependency on caregivers and formal educational institutions be constrained in terms of the activities that can be undertaken and the associations that can be formed, but only in the interests of health and safety and respect for those around them, and an active engagement in educational activity all of which are to be justified by and exercised exclusively in terms of the goal of achieving independence ruled by the equal consideration of self-respect and respect for others.
6. That all formal provision of educational resources and facilities be life-long.
7. That the purpose of the collaboration, on the part of all parties, and of institutional design and conduct, is to equip learners to develop their own conceptions of their own good lives in the best ways and to enable them to make the best possible choices within them and about them, and to implement them as lives they choose to live. It is not a part of the purpose of any public institution to engage in negotiation between the educational agendas of learners and other external interests that may seek to develop agendas for their learning.

Everyone has moral obligations under these rules in two ways. Firstly, and most obviously, as the learner who is subject to the educational processes. As a matter of self-respect they have a duty to themselves to live good lives, and this has demanding educational implications, for they must take responsibility for developing such lives for themselves and in the best way. This means that they must acquire the relevant skills and disciplines of thinking, and they must seek out the appropriate knowledge and understanding, dispositions and character to undertake their duty. Indeed, we owe this to others as well as ourselves, since it is their duty to respect us as human beings, and because of this our self-respect is a matter of their respectful concern.

Here is a set of principles intended to structure social arrangements and organise goods so that these things can be accomplished. The evolution of their own thought and understanding about their duty may not coincide with these provisions in many ways, and on all sorts of occasions, but these are the best so far that their community has been able to devise in good faith, in acknowledgement of the paradoxes of their initial dependency, and out of fairness and good will to human possibility. Since the roots of their own reason lie in that community, they at least have an obligation to engage with these social arrangements and resources critically and with integrity, always seeking to find their own way.

Secondly, we all have educational obligations to others. We are to be educators of ourselves, but since the duty of others to themselves is that of human beings bound to respect themselves in just the same way, and we are required to acknowledge and respect the value of their humanity, we owe educational support to them just as we need educational support from them.

Because reason and knowledge have a social character, and because the activities and undertakings we may seek as the content of our own lives is invariably socially dependent, we are all bound together in need of common social conditions to accomplish each our own good. So we owe to others our educational skill, understanding and support across all activities and undertakings, just as we need theirs.

To the extent that we might look to others for teamwork, mentorship, coaching, facilitation, leadership and teaching, and to the extent that we would want that to be sympathetic, supportive, considerate, thoughtful and skilled, we should prepare ourselves and be equally ready to make these things available to others with the same integrity that we would expect of them.

We should expect these commitments to be life-long, and we should expect them to be maintained with an appreciation of their dependence on the integrity of the whole, ready to contribute our criticism, understanding, initiative and advice to the maintenance of the educational character of the society as a whole. Respect for all persons, equally, depends upon it. Our lives depend on it, individually and together.

But when I say that “everyone has moral obligations under these rules”, it has to be remembered that the important underlying condition is that they be bound by their own consent as early as possible, and that this consent must be given with the highest possible quality.

In the early stages, of course, it is not a matter of choice at all. The educator is bound by the educational constitution, and the idea of the compact is introduced in stages, challenged and explored as this is possible, but implemented by educational mentors (who will most likely include their caregivers) while the dependency continues.  Consent would be an evolving thing, revolving firstly around whatever animates them as their own interest in their own lives, before expanding, over time, to include other matters of educational principle.

Not much choice about participation in the constitution can be possible, for instance, until ECOI practices have been introduced, and participation has become effective. Then, the actual course of educational processes must be negotiated with learners, with their own perceived interests in their own lives having priority, the mentors being responsible for seeing that the decisions are compatible, as far as possible, with educational principle.

As development proceeds, even this responsibility moves to the learner, with the role of mentors becoming more advisory, and with the power of their advice standing or falling by their skill and experience, and the ability they have to demonstrate them; that is, by an educational authority that is genuine, and not merely official. This means, of course, that learners must acquire the right and the opportunity to choose their educational mentors, and learn how to do so with skill.

Still, the element of choice has to be real and effective too. For that we must consider what sense it might make for the learner to opt out of the contract, or some aspect of it. Clearly there is no chance of this initially, when the contract must still simply be “virtual”.

There is nothing to opt out of until genuine consent begins to move to the educational principles, particularly those that have to do with the true motivation and genuine interests of the learner. Genuine consent, however, will depend upon genuine and evolving challenge to the educational constitution as it gradually ceases to become virtual, and is considered to become actual in its own right.

This will include challenge to the principles concerned with the cultivation of personal interests; principles of growth and expansion, balance, and mental as well as physical discipline, the choice of activities and arrangements that may facilitate these developments, the nature of rational life-planning and the rationales behind all of these things.

Rightly, we must anticipate that each learner will become an interpreter of the constitution, and we would be seeking, through sustained and ongoing inquiry, that these interpretations be rich and sophisticated, and testable in skilled popular debate. The virtual educational constitution, while maintaining the restrictions of caregiving that dependency requires, offers so much freedom, together with well-resourced support, and is so closely tied to the real passions of the learner, that it isn’t easy to conceive why a learner would want to opt out of it – unless there is some way in which the application of the contract is distorted, or the process otherwise failing.

Issues with relationships may have emerged, for instance, or the genuine interests may not have been properly identified, or resources may be inadequate and the processes too onerous, or the educational principles themselves may not have been properly worked through, or perhaps there are inappropriate expectations or agendas that are intruding into the process and causing frustration.

In such cases the withdrawal of consent may have more to do with failure to apply the educational constitution properly, than with the constitution itself. It is not, then, consent with some aspect of the constitution that is being withdrawn, but consent over being treated in this unconstitutional way – “if this is what the rules mean, then I will have none of them”.  It is the responsibility of educators to handle the process to minimize such failures, or to deal with issues speedily in accord with educational principle.

At the same time, however, it is conceivable that some learners might, from time-to-time have had enough of the whole thing and want to break with it, at least for a while. This is particularly likely to occur while educational systems are in transition, even where our new approach is fully resourced, simply because learners will have been growing up under environmental conditions that are less than educational, and also because some learners will have experienced a mix of the systems.

Learners who we currently describe as “school failures”, for instance, may have to enter and exit the system a number of times before they can capitalise on the educational approach and appreciate its advantages and possibilities. There will be those, too, who, having lacked the stability of consistent rules, perhaps need a more highly regulated structure, at least for a while, in order to achieve even basic discipline.

Having to do this, though, will itself create difficulties of dependency that will need to be addressed more fully as the process continues. Others may seek more highly regulated structures simply because their history has already made them excessively dependent on guidance and external regulation. None of these reasons should be excuses for dragging our heels and not dismantling and replacing the systems that have been causing the problems.

Depending on the circumstances, one form of opting out might simply be time-out – a sort of occasional sabbatical. This should not be viewed as time wasted – as it would be under a conventional schooling system – but instead as a time to reflect and regroup, which is simply consistent with the sort of reflection that the educational approach is bent on cultivating, and some appropriate skills of reflection would already be present, insofar as the question of choice could even arise. “Wasting time in order to gain time”, as Rousseau would have put it. It is also not at all likely that time taken out would involve separation from people who had achieved some educational sensitivity.

But for those other cases, where dependency is a problem or the stability of close supervision is sought by the learner, the most obvious solution to this that springs to mind is something based on more conventional teaching, with some sort of curriculum established externally. Something like what we currently understand to be a school.

It would still have to put the learner first, and it would still have to sustain ECOIs, and it would have to be working towards intellectual and emotional independence within its limits, because it would have to keep open the possibility of returning to the contract, and hence it would still have to promote educational understanding. It could, however, relieve the learner of some of the educational decision-making for a while, though we might hope that it would not be for too long.

Such schools would have to be redesigned without all the larger institutional paraphernalia that turns the idea of a school into the schooling factories as they exist at present. They would not be in place to serve as social engineering sites for the State, but would revolve around groups of skilled teachers dedicated to educational principle, and hence working to be transcended. Preferably these sites would be small, and represent a diversity of educational approaches, catering for different “learning styles” if there are such things, and with different degrees of supervision, so that “opting out” would at least offer this much variety.

Detours into school-like institutions would be a standard part of any educational plan, broadly conceived, in any event, simply because the lower undertakings of the educational hierarchy would still have to be served at the best of times – where educational plans under quite normal conditions will require some intensive, well-supervised skill learning, such as in languages, or very specific tutoring in science or mathematics, or for such vocational preparation that truly cannot be undertaken in the workplace. The larger scheme would always allow for such excursions, and they may prove attractive through providing additional variety.

No matter how helpful they may prove to be from time-to-time, however, their value must ultimately be determined in the light of a much larger and more comprehensive educational scheme, which should dominate educational thought and practice, and with which these school-like sites should endeavour to be consistent. They should also be brief and the time spent in them carefully justified because of the potential for harm to educational and intellectual independence that they represent. They should have, as core to their purpose, the maximisation of effective participation in independent study and collaborative learning in settings remote from anything resembling the schooling-factory.

© R. Graham Oliver, 2018