Part 3:

The Practices of Education

Chapter 11:

The core domains of educational content

Superseding the reduction education to schooling means rethinking the content of education. We will need to attend much more to “education in everyday life” and to the quality of our mental lives if education is to be about good living, and properly respectful of the learner. This will mean that managers may become much more important as educators, and that better attention will need to be paid to positive psychology and “personal development”

If we are going to embrace respect as our educational purpose, placing a priority on the duty of each person to make their own life worthwhile, then we are going to have to radically revise our thinking about the nature of educational content and the domains in which it is to be found. We have already seen, for instance, that we must demote schooling from the primary focus of our educational interest. We must enable a Copernican revolution that will put the learner at the centre, instead of a single institution. Such a move will require an entirely new way of thinking about what is to be learned and the circumstances under which that learning is to be found.

Once we begin to acknowledge that the realms of learning and experience that must now matter will extend across the whole society in which the learner lives, and not just in the peculiarity of their school attendance, we will have to rethink educational content and process. Our recognition of our potential responsibility and control over the conditions of experience in these larger realms is what will draw all of these sites and circumstances within the new ambit of education.

Wherever our culture and its institutions could have been difference in any way, then the potential for educational judgment and decision opens up. As we created or continue to create the conditions for our practices, and the circumstances in which they are undertaken, we create external conditions for learning, and these conditions are now the responsibility of each and all of us, to the extent that we are parties to creating or maintaining them. This is the logical conclusion that we must draw from the widely acknowledged and respected principle that “we learn by doing”.

As our awareness of the importance of this new way of seeing grows, we must face up to the ways in which schooling, by its very nature, creates a partial mismatch between the kind of knowledge that it pursues, and the kinds of knowledge employed in that larger world. It erects an obstacle and potential hypocrisies to the proper application of its own knowledge out there. Schooling can only address behaviour; not just “good” and “bad” behaviour, as determined by external authorities, but all learning outcomes must be perceived and understood only in terms of certain restricted possibilities of behaviour that can be observed directly.

Learning outcomes in school can only be cultivated and assessed in terms of behaviour, as external displays; performances and demonstrations for the purposes of assessment. This did not matter when the school learner was to be a docile factory hand, and an extension of a machine. It does not matter politically, if the political agenda is compliance.

All that does and can matter is the external performance; what you show me that you can do. Give them what they want. This is remote from real conviction or true commitment. What learners really do with their minds is their own affair, so long as they perform and conform according to specification.

Fulfilling our personal duties to ourselves to devise worthwhile lives as a matter of self-respect forces an entirely different learning requirement, however. This is also true of any genuine understanding of responsibility (as opposed to accountability). It is true of self-determination as well, and intellectual independence. All of these things that make our lives our own business mean that it matters, right at the heart, what we actually do believe and feel, what we really are committed to, the real and personal grounds for our decisions and choices, how we personally decide questions of truth, justice and authority. It is in these inner conditions of our selves that our humanity lives, and not in the ambiguities of our external displays.

These two sets of considerations must utterly transform our thinking about educational content. We must now grasp that learning and life go on beyond school, and how bizarre it would be if we thought any different. We must also grasp that the central aspects of mind with which we should most be concerned are not mere external display but the internal features of mind – the thought, feeling and powers that really do characterise the person who is doing the living.

There are other domains of content that appear more conventional, and need to be included. The body is the one most obvious of these. The other quite obvious domain is disciplined and public knowledge gathered by our intellectual institutions – the more conventional arts and sciences. Even these most obvious, traditional candidates need to be reconsidered, however, since their inclusion is all too often automatic and unthinking, as if they have rights of their own. They need to be selected and adapted for the purposes of life-planning, of course, and their inclusion only justified by that, and this will make a considerable difference.

The purpose of this chapter is to make these implications of content more explicit, so that the difference between conventional thought on educational content, and the larger view that we must take if we are ever truly to grasp the educational problematic, can be held more firmly in mind. Without an explicit attempt to do so, it will be inevitable, because of the way that we have been brought up to think about education – the cramped quarters of the conventional educational mind – to succumb, again and again, to the temptation to reduce content back into the conventional categories of schooling. The curriculum; stuff to be taught.

Provisionally, then, we should think of five domains that will do the larger part of exhausting the possibilities of educational content. These are:

1.      The everyday external conditions of experience

2.      The internal conditions of experience

3.      Our bodies

4.      Established and disciplined intellectual communities of enquiry

5.      Educational awareness, sensitivity and judgement.

These five domains are far from discrete. No categorization of domains could be, without seriously compromising the wholeness of life, and all of these work on each other. Separating them out will be beneficial, however, because doing so in this way will help us to make the radical break that we need to make with content as we imagine it when we reduce education to schooling.

The scheme is provisional in two ways. Firstly, any scheme that we should come up with should be contestable, and this one is intended only as a most superficial beginning.

But more importantly, we are not attempting to set up a meta-curriculum here, or we will just tend to fall back upon the old ways of external authorities creating the agendas for learners, when what we want to do is to enable learners to take charge of the agendas for themselves, and what we don’t want to do is to begin imposing conceptions of good living. All of these domains need to be ruled, in the first place, by procedure. We want to equip learners to be deciding upon their own good lives in the best ways they can, and to be implementing them in their own best ways, according to their own, well-developed understanding and skill.

Any potential consideration of content then, needs to be understood, procedurally, according to their contribution to the powers and abilities of people to decide their lives for themselves, with the purposes unfolding in this ethical sequence: from the equal intrinsic worth of all human beings, to the principles of self-respect and respect for others, to the principles of growth for the sake of an enlarging and more adaptive growth, to the principles and processes of life-planning.

The everyday external conditions of experience

Internal and external conditions of experience

When Dewey discussed the continuum of experience, he noted not only that it continued through time; experiences growing out of past experience and into future experience, but also that they had internal and external aspects that interacted. Internal conditions of experience – that grow out of past experience – largely determine what is made of the external conditions. The experience that is then undergone, in turn has an influence on the external conditions of experience, modifying the conditions of future experience. Our reaction to what is happening in our world often changes that world – the possibilities of future experience. (E&E)

When we consider the whole world of our everyday lives, or the potential for experience that exists across and within all of our institutions, we are mostly talking about the external conditions of experience. How we set up our worlds, from the architecture and decor, to the missions and philosophies of our enterprises (real and fake), to the formal and informal rules that we create, to the explicit and hidden agendas; all of these create external conditions of experience for those who come in contact with them. They are often meant to create impressions, “send messages”, organise our activity, control and regulate our behaviour, and as they do so, they condition the experiences that we can have.

I have just described these external conditions as if they are intentional, but of course they may not be. They might just flow naturally and unwittingly through every corner of our institutions simply in response to the weight of tradition, to the agendas of those with power, or the power-plays they engage in with each other, or the contempt they have for employees, or their contempt for segments of the population, or even the population at large, or the dominant view of practical possibility.

Set up the rules and structures in various ways, even quite thoughtlessly, and we can create conditions of wariness and distrust, deceit, envy and jealousy, unhealthy competitiveness, back-biting and malicious gossip, tittle-tattling and spying, bullying and sexual abuse. That is, we can create organisations and institutions that encourage bad character, and undermine the good.

Or we can create conditions of trust, safety for vulnerability, enlarged capacities for initiative, honesty, openness, collaborative problem-solving and engagement with reasons, an acceptance of intellectual and moral challenge, a willingness to admit mistakes and take responsibility, a reluctance to assign blame. The cultural possibilities of quite different educational environments can occur, reflecting any of these or other conditions of learning, from the smallest collections of families or friends, or so-called friends, to entire civil service or government practices, or from the smallest of businesses or clubs to the largest of corporations.

And of course the background cultural expectations – of success, of the worth of contributions to the social whole, of the role of wealth-creation, of the availability and integrity of information, of political access and participation; indeed any of the things that go to make up a conception of the good society – or of the actual society insofar as it falls short of what we value – are the background educational conditions; the stage on which all the parts are played.

It does not follow, of course, that because an external environment is set up with the intention of providing for certain sorts of experiences, that these experiences will inevitably occur, simply because the external environment is only half of the experiential story. We can set up conditions in the hope that they will influence experience in certain directions, but we cannot determine or even predict the actual experiences that will unfold for any one person. Many of our notions of punishment and reward, for instance, depend upon general expectations of human nature, but even these could be inexact at the individual level. Even the gross ones. Hanging might come as a relief.

Similarly, an art curator displays a great work of art in a gallery, but that man sitting in front of it may get little from it, depending upon his sensitivity to art, his knowledge of, or interest in it. He may barely notice it. Just waiting for someone; using the art merely to identify a location.

Living large portions of our lives within an enduring set of external conditions of experience is likely to have more profound and sustained effects, however, and that is why families, schools and places of work are as influential as they are. So are forms of government and government agencies. Whatever the character we want to sustain, we often have to make our peace with the conditions under which we live. But this can also mean that they can wear us down.

This variability in experience has never got in the way of our willingness to attempt to influence experience through manipulating the environment, however – at least as far as we can see into recorded human history, and considerably beyond.

We can trace the way that power was to be understood, or the significance of religion and even of its beliefs, of the role of feudal power of princes and aristocrats, merchants, or traders, of capitalism and consumerism, simply through the architecture, monuments, decorations, the layout of towns and cities facilitating who should meet with whom, and discouraging those who should not. Schools and universities are as eager to do this today as banks or food halls. Supermarkets are designed as mazes, set up so that you have no alternative but to pass this product for sale, or that.

It is also true that when attempts are made to create influential environments, the effort can be quite crude, simply because a range of responses can satisfy the intended agenda.

In a tyranny, for example, displays of power from monuments to the military, to the presence of the police and the secret police, to propagandistic media and government posters may have little more in mind than compliance, submission, and a minimum of resistance. Why people comply, whether out of fear, prudence, cynicism or blind faith in the tyrant hardly matters. This simplifies things, and enables propaganda.

The same can be true in our so-called democracies, where voting may well be an empty ritual for many, bereft of any real sense of popular sovereignty, or it may be an ardently exercised right performed out of reverence for the battle required in achieving it, or it may be an occasion for the expression of fierce party loyalty. All that may matter is “that they vote”, simply legitimating the system while facilitating the mechanical working of the process, and the ease with which a political elite can govern. It may have almost nothing to do with real policy decisions at all.

The same is surely true of advertising and marketing. Why people buy may provide useful data for developing better marketing campaigns, but otherwise “why they buy” is much less interesting than “that they buy” at all. Good campaigns may speak to all sorts of quite different potential conditions, from efficiency, to status, to sex, to humour. Rarely may they be genuine appeals to, or encouragements to reason.

In all of these cases it hardly matters what those who experience the external conditions really think or feel. What matters is what they do. At this level of control and understanding of the conditions of our institutions, social structures, formal and informal rules and policies, all that is being sought is manipulation and coercion. The educational integrity of the control of the external conditions of experience is irrelevant.

We can consider these institutional arrangements from the educational point of view by converting them, intellectually, into virtual contracts and considering their implications as potential external conditions of experience from the standpoint of respect. We can do this from the larger features of our background cultural environment down to the organisation of formal and informal rules within our institutions and the attitudes expressed through our activities and practices. We already have enough awareness to see how this might be done, since we have been attentive to this in matters of discrimination for many decades where sexual and cultural discrimination are concerned. This has been a slow process, of course, but that is to be expected, to the extent that the effort is only loosely understood as educational, and that the educational does not have the reach or the status that it should have.

Thus women struggle on with glass ceilings; and sexual molestation, mostly of women, continue to be issues. They will continue to be difficult to address fully to the extent that they are confined in boxes, and remain in isolation as issues that are not connected up with a larger educational problematic that we should feel at least as passionate about as we do about economics.

Enterprises, sites and roles

The external conditions of experience are created across our entire societies, in all of their institutions and practices. It is impossible to go into any useful survey or extensive analysis here. At various times, I suggest incomplete lists, in addition to such background conditions, such as capitalism and the meritocracy. Lists can include things like urban design and zoning, housing, transport arrangements, streets and public spaces, architecture and interior design, all of which largely settle where and how people meet up and associate, and the conditions under which they will. They have much to do with the ways in which our beliefs about those “other people” can be reality-tested, and hence to the maintenance, or challenge, to prejudice.

Then there is the workplace, recreational facilities, sports, clubs and entertainments, the media, publishing, the availability of knowledge and information, and what counts as either. The intellectual professions. Medical facilities and industries. Law and justice. Policing. Religion. The military. The family or domestic unit, its housing and servicing. Retail and commerce, banking and finance. And schooling, high and low.

On occasion throughout this book I have delved into a number of areas, both for the sake of the whole story, but also to be suggestive for further thought. Schooling is obviously one. Religion will receive attention, as well as democracy. We will look at some of the issues of the institutionalisation of knowledge as well.

A further way of gathering together significant ways in which experience can be conceived relative to the issues of learning about our own good is in terms of the social roles we come to inhabit, or we come to interact with, and the social expectations that come to surround them. We also develop our own expectations of social roles, and make decisions about our own exercise of those that become a part of us. An initial list of these might include that of learner or student, manager, business person, administrator, leader, worker or employee, partner, parent, son or daughter, friend, stranger, journalist, teacher, medical professional, lawyer, politician, citizen, consumer.

These roles come to us pre-defined and surrounded by social expectations, and sometimes even involve considerable training. All of them, though, so far as they enter our lives and become a part of our identity, do so as problems or potential problems. What sort of friend, manager, partner, parent, journalist or consumer are we going to be? It should be clear, for instance, that if much of the argument of this book is to be accepted, we would need to re-think the sort of student, or parent, or friend, or teacher or journalist we might want to become, and our conclusions would set us a whole new raft of issues – of learning and practice, and our relationship to others and their expectations.

Clearly, too, after some time in any of these roles, played out in the world of social expectations around us, the conditions of employment and the circumstances of their application, we might want to ask ourselves what sort of manager or son, or stranger or politician or citizen we have become. Multiple interactions creating and recreating experience are possible here, with the past, with the external conditions, and in terms of the future. These interactions will have a great deal to do with the ongoing formation of our “outlook on life”, which will influence much else, and will go far beyond the simple idea of choosing between being an accountant, or having a military career, or taking over the farm.

We will look at just one area in a little more depth here, and this is management, and we will return to remark on it again in a number of places.

It may well be the the role of manager, considered at all levels, is the most important educational role of all, since it has so much to do with shaping the conditions of learning and experience wherever there is some organisation or enterprise to be managed, perhaps even underpinning the nature of the democracy we implement. Our formal institutions – indeed, most things on our lists beyond personal intimate relationships – need to be managed in some more or less formal way.

The nature of management has so much to do with what people learn and how they learn it, and this learning and experience that management regulates is not something incidental or external to the purpose of management; it has everything to do with the ways in which the practices of the organisation are undertaken and its purposes fulfilled. To the extent that schooling serves the purposes of the workplace, as well as our governability, then assumptions about good management drive the nature of schooling as well, right to the highest point at which schooling is regulated. This would mean – as a consequence of this alone – that those who are most captive of our contemporary educational misunderstandings have most likely been looking always in the wrong direction . . . once again.

Management

How managers manage, and what they set out to achieve through managing may be much more important, educationally, than how teachers or would-be “educators” do what they do, attempt to do, or set out to achieve. Universal, State compulsory schooling has always been managed. The prevailing models for that may have been part of its problem.

One of the central interests of that schooling has always been the preparation of pupils for work. The workplace is managed, and it lies in almost every pupil’s future. More than that, significant workplaces turn up in other ways as a part of the educational domain, not simply as parts of the commercial processes of conventional production and consumption, but as sporting organisations, as public administration, as government, as entertainment, as finance, as journalism, as retail. Religious institutions, too, are managed.

In our critiques of schooling, we will often want to say that they are preparing pupils to be managed, and that preparation does them great harm, making them intellectually dependent, dependent on extrinsic reward, pliant, fearful of uncertainty and seeking to be told what to do. It stifles their initiative, their imagination, their creativity, their proper ability to question. It channels them into a life, a conception of their good, which leads them to subordinate themselves to their work as others define it. It makes them, from the standpoint of employment, manageable. We have already seen that this process is hardly more than we would do for slaves.

But is this what good management would want of them? Is this, as a description of the virtues of manageability, the sort of thing that the contemporary and future workplace requires, if it is going to be effective and at its best? Is this what the good manager will want from the good employee?

There is a very considerable awareness among sophisticated, leading managers – management thought-leaders, both theoretical and practical – that this picture is an absolute disaster for management, and that conventional schooling is one of the most significant obstacles to getting management right, to enabling it to do what it now needs to do.

This is because conventional schooling is serving a model of work, and of management, that is no longer helpful to the level of intelligence and cooperative problem-solving that work is coming to require. It is ineffective. It is inflexible. It is just not smart enough. It might have been suitable to an older model of factory production, but it is neither adequate to the needs of modern factory production or to the very much larger world of contemporary work that is no longer driven by a factory model at all.

Work has changed. It is no longer dominated by repetitive, sweated craft labour, or by having humans as adjuncts to machines. So much more of it at all levels requires brain power, thoughtfulness. But much more than this, organisations themselves have to be smart. The environment in which they work is much more complex today than it used to be. A simple mistake by Apple, or Toyota, or Samsung, or Google can cost the corporation many millions if not billions of dollars to fix, and then to recover its position, because competition is global, laws in various markets more complex and exacting, consumers more demanding, and they communicate.

The circumstances of competition are continually shifting as well, not just because of geopolitical changes, but because of the speed of technological development and the speed of many social changes that go with it. The lifetimes of products are shorter. Even the pace of climate change creates new challenges. Markets are volatile. Organisations must constantly invent, innovate, attempt to read the future, second-guess the markets, fashion, their opponents. In just a few years, blogging can change the whole face of journalism. In just a few years, the technologies of self-publishing and the marketing of books online can change the whole publishing industry.

The traditional factory model of management was a command structure, resembling a military structure. Commands passed from the office of manager, to the foremen, to the workers on the floor. Down there, they didn’t even have to believe that it was a good idea. They knew what to do. This meant that the manager, the narrow little pin at the top of the pyramid, had to have all the knowledge that counted, and make all the decisions. Teacher knows best.

But in a fast moving volatile world in which knowledge, insight, creativity and imagination are the keys to success, that system places too much faith in just one head. It is a fragile, brittle system, because just one head, no matter how smart, can’t know enough, can’t imagine enough, can’t ask enough of the hard questions, is vulnerable to mistakes and outcomes it didn’t see coming. No matter how smart it is.

And we know this very well. Science isn’t smart because of one smart man or women. It is smart because it is organised as a smart community which, as a community, is creative and systematically critical. It is particularly smart because it shares the burden of being smart.

A central problem today is not how to make one person who rules it all – or even an elite cadre of management – into smarter, more knowledgeable, more creative, more insightful, prophetic or intuitive managers who are quicker to respond and more likely in the right direction. We have exhausted the possibilities of creating such individual brilliance.

In any case, it is grossly unresponsive to have decisions made this way, no matter how brilliant, and then to expect the whole organisation, otherwise outside the loop, to lumber around to implement such decisions. Inertia aside, such approaches are not only potentially fraught with misunderstanding, they are rarely well-motivated or properly engaged. We have passed the limitations of these approaches, and the many organisations that still persist in this way consistently reveal their inadequacy.

What we need to be able to do is to make whole organisations – the collective as a single body, the whole “team” – smarter, more knowledgeable, more insightful, prophetic or intuitive, quicker to respond and much more likely in the right direction. This is widely acknowledged in a range of terminologies: we need “learning organisations”, or “knowledge organisations”. Good managers are now ones who can cultivate this collective intelligence, and collective intelligence doesn’t respond well to command. Command collapses into deference and trying to please – even into fear and anxiety, various hypocrisies and lack of trust; frequently into trying to do what it suspects, or even knows, is wrong.

The collective intelligence that the old organisation failed to mobilize is, perhaps its greatest potential and untapped resource; perhaps its most expensive resource, simply going to waste, because it is already paid for. The payroll is frequently the largest item of expense, and each pay item represents a potential contribution to that intelligence. The task is to cultivate that resource into a problem-solving community bound together by a worthy common purpose.

Cultivating that resource as a collective intelligence does not merely mean to encourage people to propose good ideas, but to collaborate in teams that can create knowledge, teams and groups that can discuss together in ways that develop their skill to invent and make proposals, and then to test them rigorously, and refine and develop the good ones through continued invention and testing that is disciplined and pursued with respect. A very powerful way of doing this is explored in chapters thirteen to fifteen. Numerous benefits for doing so will be found there. But one is not considered, and that is the benefit to managers themselves.

This new management requires new forms of authority. Just as the creation of a genuinely problem-solving community requires that trust be cultivated among its members, and they must learn to participate in hard discussions with mutual respect, so managers must learn to trust their employees. They must be prepared to listen, often in quite a sustained way, and they must model that respect for the minds of others in their own behaviour, which must be appropriate to the collaborative, enquiry tasks.

They must acquire a certain intellectual humility and be willing to change their own minds in response to the better reasons or arguments that they come to hear, just as must all of the participants. Facilitating the sorts of discussions explored in those three chapters will give managers excellent opportunities to shut up and listen, as well as to acquire the habits of respect and trust, since if they practice as facilitators, they will be responsible for cultivating them in others.

But managers often find difficulty doing these things, sometimes because of ego and the privileges of power, sometimes out of fear that they will lose control – that they will lose authority and end up being held responsible for decision-making that they unwisely gave away. For this reason, they not only have to learn the virtues of good collaborative enquiry that all of the other staff must learn, including trust and proper respect, they must also get very, very clear about their actual responsibilities, drawing sharp and firm lines very close to the boundaries of those responsibilities.

Managers must be able to manage. But they must also ensure that the problem-solving processes that they open up are genuine collective inquiries that are disciplined, respectful, trusting and capable of honesty. In addition, this means opening it up across the entire organisation, and not just to a small management teams, or research and design teams. The area of input and discussion that is excluded, even at the lowest levels, is to exclude the most intimate knowledge of that area – the knowledge of those actually engaged – from inclusion and consideration in collective intelligence. Making sure that this knowledge is incorporated into the system is a part of what is involved in making the organisation a mindful whole.

A second area that is vital is in the formation of purpose and vision, since at the organisational level it is this that binds the community together in a common purpose. It is also this upon which the genuine enrollment of the energies and motivation of all staff will depend. To the extent that it is spin, or propaganda, or PR; to the extent that it is vague or hypocritical or, alternatively, unworthy of the lives of those who are to be engaged in it, then the community can never be expected to be of sound mind.

Management has, then, a twofold task. It has to cultivate in the organisation a culture and practices of very receptive forms of collective inquiry that create knowledge, and that facilitate good decision-making. The second task is to cultivate, in management, the proper skills and attitudes to enable it to create such a culture, and to develop the requisite skills within it. Both of these tasks, and not just the first, is made difficult by the model of management as usual, just as both are made difficult by the fact that all, and not just the employees, went to school. Managers can get very excited by the prospect of creating such organisations, but compromise and back away the closer they come to the tasks of actually creating them, because of their own reluctance to develop and change, and even the fears they have of doing so.

It is then that all sorts of disabling “laws of human nature” begin to be emerge – about the nature of employees (or “our” employees) – about their real motivations, about their unwillingness to change, about their dysfunctional abilities in relationships, even in the workplace, about their deviousness, about their lack of initiative. Even when it can be acknowledged that these things may not be “human nature” after all, but a combination of parental attitudes, schooling and management as usual, still their own inability to change becomes, in turn, a disabling prophecy. Managers are, themselves, often unwilling to face the task of change when they come right up to it.

Difficult though this may be, however, it is these intelligent organisations of the future that are likely to be the most successful, and the need for them will grow. What is interesting, and profoundly encouraging educationally, is how such a different approach to management, and the organisations such approaches seek to develop, are clearly converging with educational principle.

To open up the intelligence of members of organisations so that they are more and more involved with its purpose and critically engaged, together, in problem-solving, high and low, including how the organisation is positioned in the larger society, is necessarily to move in directions quite inappropriate for slaves, but very fitting indeed for free men and women. It has to be encouraging that the need to do so is arising in a field such as management, and not from the ethics of respect directly, but rather from necessities to adapt more effectively to the social world as it is unfolding.

THough it cannot be explored more fully here, there is much be more to be said about what is involved in engaging the whole person of the employee into these collaborative organisations, accommodating to their rightful commitment to the value of their lives, and respecting that. We need to give more thought to the importance of their willingness to engage the whole of themselves in our enterprises, and to do so freely, which means that managers, too, must concern themselves with the worth of the lives of their employees, and their duty of self-respect.

We need to be clearer about what we can offer their lives, that our purposes are worthy of their passionate engagement. It should matter to us that their life-plans be well-considered and well-developed, that their own personal purposes clear, and that they are able to see and to seek in employment a diversity of significant advantages that go beyond the shallow and distracting extrinsic rewards of income and status that have so dominated our minds, distorting human motivation as much as they have.

Organisations will have to become open to quite different and more humane kinds of discourse than most have been used to in the past.

The internal conditions of experience

Our second domain of content is the other half of experience; its internal conditions. This is a domain that schooling can hardly afford to approach closely. On the one hand, it is structurally almost indifferent to it, since assessment must be limited to performance and demonstration. Indeed, because of the authority-structure of schooling, and because its agendas are designed and regulated by the State, any attempts on the part of the school to deal too closely with the inner life of personal belief, value and emotion would immediately raise questions of indoctrination and social control, even among people who currently are otherwise quite insensitive to these dangers. Schooling dare not probe too deeply, and its behavioural control must limit itself to externals.

Paradoxically, almost all teaching agendas imply the attempt to influence those inner lives in some ways. Even those “bucket” and “vessel” metaphors imply some sort of pouring in to somewhere, and “learning how to learn” and “love of learning” suggest fiddling with the insides. So does the schooling fantasy of critical thinking. Nevertheless schooling really does not consider the inner life as a world in which it can realistically expect to enter very far. It (rightly) recognises that attempting to do so would violate respect.

But we have to be able to get there somehow. We have already acknowledged the importance of the “outlook on life” that each of us creates, and that plays such a large part in our thought and decision-making about good living. We have considered our wants and desires; how they may be examined and developed and the role that they play in decision-making. We have raised (and will come to examine further) the particular kinds of critical enquiry that might be involved in working out for ourselves our own good lives in the best ways. And we have acknowledged the uniqueness of our personal reasoning, and how that is crucial to understanding how we reach different conclusions about good living.

We can attempt to construct external environments that will facilitate good developments of these things, and even good teachers can contribute to their development by the sorts of questions they ask and the challenges to life and to thinking that they are capable of making. But they must largely do this “on the outside”, and largely in general ways that might be applied to groups of people. This is what makes it possible for us to manipulate the external conditions of experience across all of our institutions. Though we may tailor our responses to clients and participants where we can, when we know enough about them and have their permission to do so, most of our manipulation of the external conditions of experience is based on expectations of how groups of people, by-and-large, will undergo them.

The actual conditions of experience for each of us are crucial to our duty of self-respect, however, and though there are severe limits to how far any State official or stranger may dare to meddle in them, and though this is a serious limitation on the possibilities of “education-as-usual”, this limitation does not apply to education as we are considering it here. Thus half of the educational equation – we might say almost half of the content of education and the larger part of what is missing at present – can now be addressed to the extent that learners become their own educators; that they be equipped to make their own educational judgments and to take charge of their own educational experience. Our manipulation of external conditions does not have to assume the task of deciding what people should believe or value. Instead it can provide the stimulation, challenge and support, and lay out the tools so that we can decide for ourselves.

This is what becomes possible when we undertake that Copernican revolution; when we really do remove the school (and its official teacher) from the centre of the educational universe, and put the learner at the centre instead.

Reason and unreason

In Chapter 4, where we considered the practices of self-respect, we already saw that in order to understand the differences that are likely to exist between us over our conceptions of the good, we need to appreciate how these will result from differences in our own reasoning about ourselves and our lives. We saw, too, that our self esteem is crucial, and that one of the most significant things that can affect the decision-making about ourselves is the conditional self-esteem that we evolve, dependent as that is upon the judgments other people make of us and our characteristics. What we each come to make of the external conditions of experience is therefore going to be crucial for education.

This inner life, its world, is the house of our reason, and its unreason. It is the location of the history of our experience and our skill in dealing with experience, or making something of it. It is the home of our processes of life-planning; what they have been, are or will be, and hence of our possibilities of taking charge of our flourishing; of the worth and meaning of our lives. Our decisions here will issue in the world, making some of the potentials of that life real. It is here that we can imagine it, conceive it, and keep it in touch with some sort of reality . . . or not. It may not amount to much in our schooling, and just be intellectualised when it is, but it is at the core of our real educational interest.

Our collective understanding of reason is parcelled out poorly. Philosophy is the discipline responsible for its norms and standards, for what it should be when it is done well, for its epistemic qualities, explaining how it can achieve knowledge and understanding.

But philosophy, typically, isn’t much interested in the forces and frailties that distort reason, corrupt it, or lead it astray, sometimes wildly. It has little to say about what to do if it goes wrong, or doesn’t develop very well. All of these things are buried deeply within empirical fields of the facts of human being and its pathologies. We tend to leave these things to cognitive science, to psychology and to therapy, to those disciplines that use empirical theories to identify the phenomena, to guide the gathering of data, and to describe and interpret the findings.

This is not a good thing, because the experience and practice of reason isn’t parcelled out in this way in the practices of the living organism, or in experience. It leads to serious mistakes on all sides. Philosophy should have learned the lesson that its justifications – the standards it would set for deciding good reasons – need to stand in some good alignment with what people can or could do. It needs to keep close to the best of the empirical. It should have learned that from its experience in the philosophy of science.

Logical empiricism, a philosophical conception of the best practice of science that is still captive of many professional minds and much of the popular imagination, allowed itself to be seduced by the project of producing an ideal conception of science; a purity of perception and description that broke itself time and again against human possibility. Time and again, historical research showed that what we count to be the best of science never did, and never could satisfy the conditions of inquiry that logical empiricism proposed; that whatever it could mean to produce an ideal account, it would be irrelevant to human beings, because human beings just aren’t the sorts of creatures that could ever operate in such pure and ideal ways. Perhaps there are gods that could, but not creatures of this earth.

This means that the normative tasks of philosophy – the setting of the standards of good reason, the explaining of what and how reasoning achieves knowledge, and what that knowledge can be – must remain rooted in human experience. These things must be achieved with a due regard to what we know from cognitive science, from psychology and human development, and from the distortions and denials and repressions struggled with in therapy. Philosophy must show us the possibilities of the norms of reason without itself being in denial about reason’s inevitable limitations and blemishes.

The empirical fields so often suffer from a reverse problem, however. Too often they appear to operate with an idea of reason that, if it existed, would be perfectly impartial, dispassionate, neutral, conscious and completely transparent in consciousness, which may not be true to the best of philosophy either. Then, in their empirical studies, they discover that such a thing doesn’t exist.

This comes out periodically in popular press reports of the latest work. Studies show . . . that we aren’t rational after all. The decision, for instance, is already made before we are conscious of it, and that is taken to mean that it can’t be the result of reasoning. But all that these celebrations of irrationality really show is the impoverished conception of reason with which the scientists are working. It is the fall from grace of the assumptions about reason made by the scientists themselves, and of a poor and popularized conception of reason. A conception of reason capable of explaining our reasonable achievements hasn’t been the object of study in the first place.

The conceptions of reason that have framed up the studies have to be impoverished, or the findings would turn out to invalidate – not only the overwhelming experience of the achievements of the species that will now be in need of explanation – they will also invalidate the research itself, the very studies that propose such conclusions; studies that are supposed to be reasonable. The problems lie, not in the mind or in reason, but in the demarcation lines drawn up between disciplines, the boundary wars of specialisation between them, and the ignorance that they have of each other; ignorance that led the scientists to do bad philosophy, and philosophers to neglect the relevance of empirical work.

These problems go to the heart of the educational project that we all must set for ourselves. Our abilities to work out for ourselves the best life that we can depends upon the quality of our reason, as does our ability to manage our own experience educationally. Both of these require continuing and evolving powers of critical and disciplined self-examination. This is, however, frequently and seriously thwarted by powerful psychological tendencies we all have to distort experience through commonplace cognitive biases, and to avoid facing up to much of the potential bad stuff in experience through denial, repression or the construction of self-serving narratives.

These mechanisms of denial and repression aren’t necessarily naughty mechanisms. They can be seen to have functional benefits. They serve to help to keep our self-esteem intact, to enable us to go on, to continue to function. They are, however, very primitive in their operations and the benefits they have to offer us. They may help us to keep fighting for a while, or to moderate our ambitions and fit in with what is available to us, including slavery, if our lives have been overpowered.

On their own, however, and unchecked by other more rational processes, they will stand in the way of our proper flourishing, depriving our lives of fulfillment and real meaning. They might work to save us, but when they do, they usually work to limit us as well, and often to crippling effect, not only narrowing down the future possibilities of our lives, but even undermining our health. They can also make us very hard to deal with.

A major part of our power and effectiveness as human beings depends upon the extent to which we learn to manage these features of our inner lives. Indeed, this is where our lives are lived, our experiences undergone, and our decisions made. The larger part of the learning that is involved here is a matter of the cultivation of habit, and the best resource that we can probably possess is other people who are wise, who care about us, and with whom we can communicate. Scholarly study can help, though the classroom has very limited value, having almost no control over the way in which knowledge is applied. The real educators, in the end, can only be ourselves, aided by cultural expectations that we all engage in such learning, by critical study, and with the support of those who love us, if we are lucky.

Awareness

“Know thyself” is, of course, the advice of the ancient oracle. It isn’t so easy. There is much that we need to learn to do; difficult habits to form, and much that goes against the grain.

We have likely been told about our strengths and weaknesses for most of our lives. Despite that, a good deal can be missed, and when the occasion arises, or others remark upon it, it can come as a surprise. We didn’t know we had it in us, or that we would give way so easily; to bad impulses, to unwise suggestion. We find a new old fear.

Self-observation can be difficult, and it is even difficult to know that we don’t do it very well. So much of our mental activity can run wild, and we can be so absorbed in it that we don’t even notice it. Noticing it, however, is an important thing to learn to do, because it is full of clues as to our strengths and weakness, our inability to solve and handle problems, and the learned obstructions that stand in the way of taking action, confronting problems and solving them, or seeking out useful knowledge. In order to take responsibility for our own education we need to be aware of such things in ourselves.

Meditators speak of “awareness”, the ability to detach a part of the mind and just watch the flow of thoughts and feelings, the mind-chatter, the monkey mind. This ability to detach and watch the thoughts, rather than to “lose oneself” and get caught up in them, is difficult, but holds enormous possibilities for self-knowledge. It can be a sobering discovery to become aware of how much rubbish, including an enormous amount that is patently untrue and unworthy commonly does just flow through our minds. Aware of most of it, we wouldn’t want to listen to its advice, let alone surf with it as we so often do. It is too easy, almost the default condition, to lose ourselves in it and think it is “us”.

Awareness also gives us many clues about when emotions are out of control, persistent, obsessive, and it can be vital to get some insight into this. Here, very often, are the emotions and feelings we aren’t dealing with, embedded in our worrying, angry, frustrated, irritable thoughts. They are not only clues to emotions that we may not be dealing with very well now, stirred up by trivial incidents that we should quickly have put behind us, they may also be symptoms of accumulated past grudges, or wounds, irritations, humiliations or traumas that have quite ancient roots in our histories, that we never did deal with properly, and that have been having an accumulative effect, to our detriment.

Not only do such current and old feelings distract us from things that might otherwise be much more important, they sap energy. Accumulating; their residual effect is a continual energy drain. Learning how to get rid of these persistent things is worthwhile, partly because of the energy that is restored, partly because these things stand in the way of our being positive, happy and thereby effective, and partly they get in the way of the creative possibilities of our mind. Getting rid of such garbage frees up our mental life for more important things. More useful stuff can be allowed to arise. Indeed, we can recover our unconditional self-love, which our experience of life has often been eating away.

Typically we think that the task of getting rid of the garbage is difficult or time-consuming, but there are suitable tools. The bigger problem is to want to do it, and that is why becoming aware is so important. It helps to give us reason to want to clean ourselves up, though we will likely have excuses to deal with as well.

An equal, indeed perhaps even more important role of awareness is, however, when we are in the midst of experience that is likely to give rise to powerful emotions. This may be the time when awareness is most difficult, because the circumstances so strongly engage and focus our attention. We are doing some sort of battle, perhaps, or perceive ourselves to be in some sort of danger, or are carried away with some sort of enthusiasm. Fight or flight may kick in, or we may be drawn to disaster.

If we aren’t aware, though, pretty well all that we are likely to do is ride our emotions and the urges and responses to which they give rise. We may be oblivious to the triggers. This can be dangerous. If we can’t detach to some degree, and observe, then we can’t be looking ahead to where this might be going, we can’t be looking around to see what the alternative possibilities might be, and we can’t be watching what is happening within to be sure that these flooding emotions aren’t about to catapult us into something catastrophic or traumatic.

This shouldn’t be interpreted as an advocacy of suppressing emotion in favour of cold hard reason. It is just a matter of keeping our heads – giving thoughtfulness and wisdom a chance. There are countless people who are, from time-to-time simply unaware that they have lost themselves to emotion; simply slaves to their passions, as philosophers from Plato to Rousseau have warned us against. Their feelings exercise a tyranny over them.

People who can’t handle their anger simply “lose it” when anger is aroused. Often they are quite incapable even of hearing what others are saying. Everything is distorted into the theme and narrative of their anger, a fictional inner drama recreated in an outer drama. Two people, doing this to each other can cause each other irreparable damage. If our angers have triggers, then we won’t find them without awareness. If we can’t find the triggers, usually arising out of poorly resolved past experience, then we can’t release them.

Those mechanisms of ours of denial and repression – Freud put them under the general heading of “defence mechanisms” – require much more deliberate and self-conscious acts of awareness. Whenever we have been through something that didn’t turn out too well, and we come out of it suffering in some way, there very likely will be all sorts of chatter about it, reliving it, going over what we would have liked to have said and done, the search for the last word or the comeback that makes for a good ending to a scene in a movie, but rarely works in real life. There is the inevitable tendency to search for a self-justifying, self-defending narrative.

It is hard, in these circumstances, to ask the questions that might go against ourselves; to face up to possibilities that put our own behaviour in a poor light. This is where the real moral courage comes in. Defending ourselves is a natural part of self-preservation, and going against it is hard, and seems counter-intuitive, since it makes us feel weak when we are already weakened. Self-doubt is a difficult virtue here, and its exercise contains its own dangers. It probably requires a lot of painful and thoughtful experience – at least some of it unpleasant – to learn to strike the right balance.

Proper pride and dignity are important as well. Self-respect involves taking responsibility, but it mustn’t end in a loss of integrity to the point that we doubt ourselves so much that we are always surely in the wrong. The person who constantly takes the blame isn’t always being helpful. Low self-esteem could lead us in this direction, or could be led there, just as readily as it could lead us to other forms of denial. That would be equally dangerous.

Indeed, we could doubt ourselves so much that others come to depend on it, or exploit it. We need to achieve enough distance to enable a proper self-doubt, but then to explore our doubts about ourselves among the other doubts and possibilities we can find in the whole situation, finally approaching conclusions that, if they justify us, do so with a due caution about their problematic origins. There is also more to this than can be subsumed under “defence mechanisms”. We need to be alert to the whole world of “cognitive bias”.

These abilities to doubt, to entertain uncertainties, should be continuous with our skill in enquiry in general. Though an awareness of the scholarship opens up the field of possibilities, the intermediate key towards our own self-knowledge, as with all other enquiry, lies in quality opportunities to talk things through with people who are at least equally skillful, and who are also trying to do better themselves. Sensitive people with humility, who may already have been there, or somewhere similar, and who have acquired real skill in cleaning up emotional damage. We need such people around us in our daily lives, and not just in clinics. Beyond these things we also have to take action. To practice. The encouragement of other people helps here as well.

Denying that we have these problems of denial and self-deception is, perhaps, the ultimate self-deceptive denial. It cripples our ability to learn vital things we need to learn, inhibits our intelligent adaptability, stunts our sociability, and leads us again and again into disaster.

We also narrow our own responsibility by acts of self-definition, sometimes accepting the definitions of others, sometimes drawing our own conclusions from the way we come to think things tend to turn out with us. We are just this or that sort of person. This is who we are. Take it or leave it, this is is our identity. We have learned to accept these things about ourselves as given, and you must learn to accept them too, if you love us. These can be the problems of conditional self-esteem.

We are, then, as if determined by our genes, quick to anger, and irrational when we are, highly emotional, too trusting, too mistrustful, wary, impulsive, too spontaneous, we don’t think before we speak. We don’t listen, we daydream, we don’t apply ourselves. We are practical people, not abstract thinkers. We think too much. We are perfectionistic. We put ourselves down – or other people. We aren’t good enough. We are unattractive, unwanted. We always say the wrong thing. Nobody takes us seriously. We never listen. We are just hopeless at this or that – or maybe even just hopeless. We don’t have a head for business. We aren’t creative, have no taste. We are always uncomfortable in this sort of situation or that. We are afraid of flying.

We could never do a thing like that, though we know it is easy for you. We are just not that kind of person. It would be bound to go wrong for us. We are good at our work, but lousy at relationships. We are bad with money. Things never get any better. We know we eat poorly and don’t look after ourselves. We just can’t help it. We have tried to change, but we can’t.

Most of these things are learned, but insofar as we just accept them as part of our identities – this is who we are – we drive them out of learning potential, and come to see and think of them as parts of our “nature”. Even if we do acknowledge that they may have been learned in some way, we have, by definition, come to see them as immune to learning, at least for us. They fall outside our capacity to change them. They fall outside our personal educational domain of potential decision and action.

If we truly catalogued as many of these things as we could, tagging them where possible to qualities of people in our pasts who we loved and admired, or to remembered experiences that “proved” it to us, or to the first time we had experience of it, or were told about it, most of us should be able to come up with a very large list, with some sense of how these convictions might have been acquired. Just by mapping the limitations of belief in this way, we map the limited potential of our lives.

The map becomes richer, and full of more interesting possibilities if we also make a catalogue of the sorts of reasons why it wouldn’t be a good idea for us to change these things, because odd as it may sound, there are remarkably common reasons people have for wanting to stay limited in so many ways such as these. Thus women who have been sexually abused sometimes carry extra body weight in order to be seen as unattractive; in order to be safe. They do, and don’t, want to lose weight.

Beliefs such as these need to be found – or even hypothesised – and addressed first. Doubly disabled in ways such as these, we take our issues out on each other rather than addressing them. If we can see them at all, that is. We are only likely to know that they exist to the extent that we are aware of the contents of our inner monologues and dialogue, or with the help of sensitive others to whom we are receptive.

Insofar as we have such beliefs about ourselves, we also tend to have a body of negative beliefs that look outward. These too, are created both out of the “wisdom” of others, particularly from our context of origin, and from unsound generalisations from selective experience.

Thus we may expect little of other people, particularly of the wisdom or good sense of an abstract “them”, not merely of their realized abilities, but more importantly of their potential. We are likely to be sceptical of their abilities, particularly to think, or do the right thing, and we are particularly sceptical of the likelihood that they would change, even under the most favourable conditions. In this regard it is often striking how we fail to see the similarity between our view of them and our own lack of self-awareness, being likely to rate our own reason much higher than we do theirs, including our willingness to confront ourselves and to change .

The role of relationships

The conditions internal to us are profoundly shaped by the language and conditions of our cultures and sub-cultures, but these have the reality that they do in us, and take the forms that they do as a result of our encounters with the real people we have lived out our histories with so far. We do not build our language and concepts out of some generalized culture, but out of its representatives in our own lives, each living their lives in their own way.

Thus, although we often think of the social in terms of conformity – in language, in habits, in expectations – it is also true that our relationships and social memberships also highlight our difference and even our uniqueness. To begin with, of course, the others in our worlds are all different, the more so to the extent that our society tolerates, or even celebrates difference. In addition, moreover, the difference they facilitate in us is not their inherent difference, but the difference we experience in the light of our transactions with them. The voices, the reactions, the actions of others, interpreted and giving shape to our concepts and values, our beliefs and inclinations, and made into something by us, go everywhere in our future interactions with the external conditions of other experience, even when we are alone.

So much in the quality of the internal conditions will therefore depend upon the quality of our past experiences of social relationships. If the possibilities of communication have been poor or superficial, if the relationships have been unpredictable and untrustworthy, if other people have been quarrelsome, and language has been another form of combat, if awareness has been low and the proportion of self-serving narratives have been high, then the inner conditions of experience will have been built just as effectively as for anyone else, and indeed there will continue to be growth.

But they won’t be very good conditions. The opportunities for further growth – for enlarging growth – will have been corrupted at every turn, and all kinds of narrowing and learned incapacity are likely to result. The qualities of our social world are directly connected to the possibilities of our inner powers.

Trust in at least some relationships is crucial. A willingness, within these relationships, to withhold judgement is also crucial, since it is hard to be intimate with others about our real uncertainties, doubts and fragilities while they may judge. Withholding judgment just as a matter of principle can, however, be cold and stand in the way of much needed understanding, and therefore of problem-solving. Better if it is based on a humble recognition and sensitivity to all our weaknesses, the potential we all have for misreading situations, for lacking awareness; our potential for self-deception, the distortions of judgment by misplaced loyalties or clouded judgment.

Both trust and the withholding of judgment provide necessary conditions for honesty, without which problems remain hidden, and the best resolutions evaded; the best opportunities for proper growth lost. Honesty, supported by courage and respect on both side, enables the exploration and critical examination of alternative explanations and proposals, and two can do this better than one.

With this mutuality, and the power of difference, people can teach and mentor each other naturally, establishing a genuine authority to do so by granting it to each other and submitting freely to the authority they have granted, trading it back and forth as the need arises. The more that we can do this, then the more we are able to explore the possibilities of life through each other’s experience, and through getting closer to an understanding of what other people can find interesting, or want to do, or find satisfaction in and why.

We can also, through such discussion, plumb many of our fears, inner obstructions and disabling beliefs, at least partially dissolving them in the light of exposure to the eyes and ears of others whom we trust. Such discussion opens up the possibilities of life, both of further growth, and also of life-plan decisions. We can explore greater possibilities with greater safety when we do it together, with people who have experience different from our own, and have done things we have never thought to do, or had a chance to do.

The possibilities of education are massively increased by time spent with other educated people; people who are on a well-considered educational pathway. The more such people there are for us to meet and spend time with, the better off we are likely to be. We should favour the conditions that create them, including the application of the “love” model.

If we attend to our inner dialogue, seeking out and shaking off negative beliefs about our possibility, and the world’s, and as we avail ourselves of opportunities to discuss with educationally sensitive people who have explored life in their own ways, we will greatly enhance our rightful trust in our world. We will enhance our sensible and calculated risk-taking, renewing our curiosity and exploration of the possibilities of life. We will enable the practices of growth for the sake of further growth, and we will likely enhance our ability to take decisions about life, to make good plans for it, and to find and pursue activities and projects that we become better able to judge to be worthwhile.

Bodies

This section is mostly included for completeness, rather than to draw attention to something that we do, or might overlook in educational content, or need to re-conceive entirely. That isn’t to say that we have our educational interest in our bodies right, but merely to point out that, since the beginnings of educational thought there has always been a strong awareness of the importance of a balance between attention to the body and the mind, and physical education has always been perceived as a genuine part of the educational.

Even in our own time, in schooling, which falls so far short of the educational, considerable amounts of money are spent on gymnasia, swimming pools and sporting fields and facilities. These provisions for the body are mirrored in the larger community in ways hardly matched by provision for the mind.

There are, of course, agendas here that depart considerably from the educational. Health is a cost to governments, who often describe the damage done by poor life-style in terms of the economic rather than the human cost. Physical exercise is seen as an aid to the projects of conventional schooling as well, burning off surplus energy in the young. Military interests have long been present; earlier forms of conventional schooling speaking rather of physical training, and even of drill. This fitted well with workplace interests too. We want fit hands, and fewer sick days

In our time, of course, sport is a major part of the entertainment industry. This creates new possibilities for vocational preparation, and sport-as-entertainment has long been an aid in the construction of nationalism and patriotism, bringing disparate groups in the community together in support of a shared local team, or behind the national team in international competition. This is used by schools as well – rallying behind the school team is a way of encouraging school “community”, and “spirit”.

Yet throughout all this there is still the ancient thread; a healthy mind in a healthy body, that to live a full life that is whole, we must attend to our bodies as well as our minds.

If anything, though, we seem to be much more concerned with our bodies than with our minds, both in terms of how our bodies appear, and with how genuinely healthy and fit they might be. We seem fond of saying that we should look to the inner beauty in each other, rather than the outward appearances of beauty, or the lack of it, but we surely don’t really mean that either, given the extent to which we are preoccupied with outward appearance, and how little attention we give to cultivating that which is inner. Inner beauty is something that we had all just better have, as a natural endowment, and more or less equally. Surely you can see it? Try harder. This is one of the last ditch things we can appeal to for the sake of our self-esteem.

If we were sincere, we would not have lost the concept of character in favour of personality, and we would be doing at least as much about our own character development as we spend time at the gym, or worrying about our diet. Our real priorities can be seen in our behaviour.

Health goes far beyond fitness, of course, and there is our whole relationship to the healing professions, the health industries, and our uneven political approaches to health-provision. The critiques of the ideologies that prevail here, and the possibilities of indoctrination are vast and readily explored.

Established and disciplined collective intellectual enterprises

Knowledge created by academic research and scholarship is our fourth domain. Many of those who will be pleased that I have placed so much emphasis on education arising from the circumstances of everyday experience will be appalled at this apparent turn towards the intellectual, from which they may have been so eager to escape.

But it is impossible to evade the importance of our collective attempts to create knowledge that is publicly assessable as knowledge; knowledge that is based on carefully agreed methods that satisfy serious and disciplined attempts to explain why they justify the knowledge-claims that depend on them.

Our personal knowledge (and the personal knowledge of others) may sometimes be more important. It may even be more insightful.

It is, however, severely handicapped when it comes to its testability and proving its warrant, and it is prone to distortion, corruption and error in ways that public knowledge can work to correct with relative success, and which thereby provides us with a cautionary standard. While knowledge gained through collective disciplined inquiry has its own severe limitations, it can also provide an extraordinary confidence and authority across our personal lives that could not be possible in any other way. It provides an abundance of tested experience that there is no other way to accumulate.

The purposes of public knowledge

Where the collective intellectual enterprises (traditionally known as “academic disciplines”) have been applied to the content of schooling, it has been in the form of some application of the idea of a liberal education. (1 Toulmin) The content here was largely made up from a collection of attempts to devise schooling content as a preparation for participation in each of the approved disciplines of the day, supplemented by artistic studies and physical education. That is, the purpose of each study was the discipline itself, and the purpose of the discipline usually fell under some vague version of the “disinterested pursuit of truth” according to the aspect of the universe that the discipline purported to study. By studying a diversity of these disciplines, the learner was supposed to become “well-rounded”.

This vagueness of purpose enabled, on the one hand, the defence of a general kind of freedom of academic enquiry which allowed important virtues of criticism, and kept political interference somewhat at bay, while also concealing the degree to which the disciplines have tended to become bent to the agendas of the culture of their day. Much that has been pursued and developed in the academic disciplines has been very far removed from the sorts of knowledge that we would, upon reflection, very likely prioritize in the search for a larger growth in the life of an individual, to illuminate themselves to themselves, or to facilitate life-planning.

However urgent and meaningful they may be to various human projects, a good deal of the knowledge in academic disciplines is relatively esoteric from the personal point of view. It serves purposes such as warfare, engineering, transport, macro economics, technological development, or the prediction of earthquakes. Most of us might be likely to depend upon a coach, or a bus, or an airplane, but not to design one.

Other agendas may even be quite dubious. We live in a great age of the technologies of indoctrination and propaganda because so much wealth and intellectual energy in a variety of disciplines has been put into the purposes of manipulating other human beings for quite gross, even enslaving ends. Industrial psychology may be similar. Many studies also, while being of great value for those that have chosen various contents of life-plans, and pursued particular interests to advanced levels, would be pointless and irrelevant diversions in the development of further growth in general for the rest of us, or to facilitate life-planning itself.

Hence, if we were going to approach the academic disciplines with anything in the way of a sophisticated principles of education, we would not just try to break them down wholesale into subjects of study, as has been the universal practice. We would be very selective, applying quite rigorous criteria according to our educational need, and even revising and retesting much of what we might find in terms of its suitability.

How this might happen should become vivid enough if we think of a learner with an existing passion, and consider the value of some enquiry relative to that passion as it might lead towards an academic discipline. Consider, for instance, our young man who wanted to go hunting and fishing with his uncle. Academic disciplines have an enormous amount to offer here. All the same, we would not be launching into the study of a discipline “for its own sake”. The discipline would have to prove itself to us, and it would do so by coming to us in a highly selected form much modified by our own interest. Which is just as well, really, because otherwise we would be overwhelmed.

Discipline and critical engagement

They are called disciplines, of course, because they are highly disciplined. The enterprises that are conventionally called the academic disciplines, however, are only a subset of those of the disciplined, collective intellectual enterprises. They are, instead commonly viewed as a somewhat privileged subset. They are frequently seen as representing the major divisions of knowledge; the major and distinct ways in which the universe, or “the world” can be analysed and understood.

Sometimes, the ways in which the primary set of disciplines have been distinguished has been seen as some sort of logical distinctions among kinds of subject matter, from which differences in method have followed. Philosophy, for instance, is not empirical, or not concerned directly with the making of actual descriptions of how things are, except at the level of concepts. The empirical is the domain of science. Science, in turn, divides itself between explaining the physical or natural world, and the social; social science, and different methodologies follow from the differences in subject matter.

None of these apparently logical distinctions hold up very well under close examination, and perennial errors show up time and again because of the crudity of the distinctions, and the things we come to assume at the borderlines. The division between the physical and the mental often founders on the distinction between natural and social science, as it also does on the understanding of the mental between sociology and psychology within social science. Both fall into confusions from time-to-time on the distinction between science and philosophy. These distinctions that appear to be made on the basis of logic often owe much more to convention and intellectual history.

What we study is very much shaped by our human interests and preoccupations, and not just by an abstract analysis of the content of the universe, as if this can be studied in some sort of detached way, entirely independent of what we are as human beings. As a consequence, numerous areas of study or studies have blossomed, particularly in the last fifty years, because they matter to us, and because, not only do they not fit well into any single traditional discipline, they fall across a range of disciplines. To the extent that they are addressed separately from within a number of them, that understanding, in each case, tends to significant distortion, partiality and omission. Integrating them into a “study” gives a greater possibility of an inner dialectic, and allows some distortions to be addressed.

Studies of these kinds – women’s studies, cultural studies, environmental studies and many others, tend, at least initially, to be thought of as inter-disciplinary, or multi-disciplinary; enquiries in which people with a range of disciplinary backgrounds and skills come together in mutual dialectic or dialogue, gradually building something new and often influencing the so-called “parent” disciplines from which they sprang. Concepts, principles and explanatory tools unique to the new field, or at least somewhat modified to suit it, gradually tend to emerge. Though the process of generating areas of study may have accelerated in recent times, the process itself is not new. Geography, geology and meteorology, for instance, were always studies with strong multidisciplinary blends.

The differences between these two kinds of collective enquiry have significant implications for education. It is likely, for instance, that most formal study that our personal interests lead us to will be in areas of these “fields of study” rather than primary disciplines, simply because these are already transparently created out of articulate human enterprises and interests that are ready-made, as opposed to abstract and apparently impartial divisions in the nature of the universe.

Thus our boy who wants to hunt and fish with his uncle is more likely to be awakened to ecology, climatology, geography, geology, ballistics and environmental studies, than to see the immediate relevance of chemistry. When chemistry does arise, it will emerge from within one of these others. This does not mean that we might not, at some stage, want to sample across the disciplines for other educational reasons, but this is less likely to happen simply as a result of expanding on existing interests.

We are not in control of our own knowledge, however, to the extent that we just learn off the findings of any fields or disciplines. We are sacrificing our intellectual independence to the blanket authority of these fields, and open to assuming that anything they say about their subject matter is right. This may make little apparent difference to the recreational hunter who studies ballistics, but it can cause problems in almost any area, and it does so unpredictably. It is, moreover, also problematic for our larger interest in growth.

What is needed here, as an adjunct to whatever studies are pursued, is some sort of exploration of the epistemology of disciplines as these might arise in the course of studying any of the “fields of study”. In order to know what we are getting when we acquaint ourselves with the “findings” in any field – what “studies show” – we need to have some familiarity with the sorts of research methods that are considered legitimate in generating those findings. We need to be familiar with the kinds of arguments that are generally accepted for justifying such methods, and the deeper issues and limitations of both the methods and their justification.

We need to know something of these things, not only as the intellectual background of research – such as the principles and procedures, the standards and assumptions – but also as they are to be found in the practices of researchers. And this must be the actual practices, and not just the idealized practice, which means that we must have some insight into the critical history and sociologies of a range of kinds of research. In order to appreciate the value of the findings we so often hear of, and so readily take on board, we need to understand how badly it is so often done, and how readily we absorb misunderstanding and error based on an idealised or inappropriate sense of authority.

At the consumption end of “findings” of research, we often see the practice of essay or report writing as it seems prevalent in high schools, and flows through into undergraduate classes at university. A topic is set, and the student is expected to “research it” in the library, and then write up what they find. Judgment as to the worth of what they find is largely limited to whether it can count as a “reliable source”, which rules out newspapers, indiscriminate internet sites, and popular authors. Anything without at least one of a bibliography, an index, or notes and references probably doesn’t count, unless it is very old. Anything from a university press or a university site (.ac or .edu) probably does. Nobody would expect an undergraduate to find, let alone read a serious academic journal.

The ability to assess the quality of the ideas or conclusions found is virtually non-existent. Almost no effort at all goes in to determining if what the source says is right. All that remains is to string the sources (the remarks made in print) into a more-or-less coherent essay, ensuring that every claim of any kind in the essay that might be considered a potential fact or opinion is connected to something that has ever been published, and that this is meticulously referenced in the proper form.

Schools and universities are obsessed with this, not because of any integrity about the research, but because assessment is corrupted to the extent that work can be plagiarised. For assessment to work in the schooling-factory, the work must be your own. But since you have no authority, and therefore are barred from giving your own opinion, the only way that both demands can be met is to build the assignment out of what other people “with authority” have already said, and then reference it all meticulously. You find other people who have said in print what is convenient for your essay. It hardly matters (may not matter at all) if what they say is true, or even well-thought out.

Since their teachers have usually been at pains to convey that this is exactly what they expect, it sets the general standard of what counts as critical thinking. Students might be asked to give reasons, but the only safe reason has a reference.

This approach to “acquiring knowledge” misses entirely that this “public knowledge” that we are supposed to be exploring only counts as knowledge to the extent that it survives disciplined public debate in the intellectual communities concerned, a debate with which the students rarely, if ever, make any real contact. Reading through a real debate is very unusual, since it invariably takes place in journals or at conferences. Books of readings don’t tend to pick up close debates; at best they sample different “views” or aspects of a topic.

A good deal of the content potentially available for debate finds its way into print under the auspices of “reputable authorities”, but only some of that content ever arouses enough interest to issue in a real debate, and only a relatively small proportion of that which is debated, is debated extensively or well. The debate, even when it is good, may be inconclusive.

Debate, itself, can be a mixed signal. Instead of it being an indication that an idea is deeply flawed, it can be a sign that an idea is becoming particularly influential. Outsiders can be misled into thinking that debate means that “the scientists disagree”, and hold off on essential policy-making because of that perception. Climate change is an example. As consensus over some things emerged, the debate moved on to newer, more technical aspects of climate change, while fringe debaters persisted, for ideological and political reasons, over issues that were largely dead to the cutting-edge of the science. This can be very confusing for those who just want to learn off the findings – and it has been a confusion upon which a good deal of political inaction has been justified.

Scientific studies are supposed to be replicated; the possibility of their replication is a standard. But very little is replicated. Nobody would bother to replicate a piece of work that is badly done, and badly done research is more common than the good stuff. Nobody is going to replicate a piece of work that doesn’t have the potential to advance the field, or turn it over. It wouldn’t be a good career move unless attempting to replicate it, one way or the other, would attract attention. Otherwise, replication is a particularly unoriginal thing to do.

Poorly done research, and unreplicated research is published by reputable sources all the time, giving their communities a chance to assess it. Such-and-such a researcher found, in her research. . . Did anyone replicate it? The really, really bad stuff is supposed to be filtered out by peer review, a system that has its dubious side, because some very good stuff is filtered out too, being unfashionable, or even just conflicting with the reviewers’ views of what matters. Some bad stuff also gets published because although it is patently flawed, there is something there that is thought to merit more attention.

It is also commonplace that poorly done research, and unreplicated research is pushed to the popular press, because there can be all kinds of professional benefits from all kinds of attention.

These bad practices are all imitated down the intellectual food chain into less disciplined fields that would like to offer a pretence of intellectual authority, such as the pseudo-academia that surrounds many vocations, particularly the more they turn from on-the-job training to the classroom. Now we can ape the authority of academia, with its essays, assignments and reports, and with the authority of its meticulous referencing. Here we can freely cite all sorts of opinion, even in the absence of studies with findings so long as it is the opinion of someone who gets published in a trade journal.

Since the only real point to studying the knowledge that is created by academic disciplines and disciplined fields of study is to learn from the knowledge itself, it is vital that learners have an understanding of how that knowledge-creation works, so that they can approach it with a proper caution and with some idea of what would be required to check the legitimacy of the claims being made for it.

On the one hand, they need a very good understanding of disciplined community debate and testing, and on the other, they need a cool-headed idea of the ways in which these communities can let down their own ideals, and produce corrupted products. The social-critical ideas that they use elsewhere, including indoctrination, need to be understood and applied to academic communities as well.

Acquiring this knowledge of the epistemologies of collective intellectual enterprises is better done in the context of the traditional academic disciplines than in the complex matrices of the more specifically content or issues-oriented “disciplined fields of study”. The reasons for this are partly for the sake of simplicity, and partly for the larger body of relevant resources that are available for each case.

By looking closely at the nature of enquiry in a mature discipline, there is some chance of engaging in critical history. Mature disciplines have long histories and tend to have undergone significant theoretical, or “paradigm” shifts, and the chances are that there might even be some historical study and potential debate over the rationality of such shifts. This is important, because crucial to our reason is an understanding of the best choice of theories or points of view for particularly purposes. Poorly understood, we just pick between them on the basis of taste, falling into a kind of relativism that abrogates our responsibility for the authority that knowledge requires.

A second reason for looking at the mature disciplines is that our understanding of the social practices is likely to be better – more work is likely to have been done, and the fund is likely to be richer, particularly in terms of what can go wrong in the social practice – how individuals and groups can be led astray.

The final reason lies in the understanding of method. Since the general student is not going to become a specialist, and thereby immerse themselves in the diversity and complexity of the adaptations of method being made, it is better to examine a few classic methods closely. These are more likely to be isolated in the mature discipline. They need to be examined in sufficient depth for students to begin to understand why those studies that they hear about so often stand a very high chance of being badly flawed, and also to get a sense of why disciplinary disagreements go in the ways that they do.

The transformation of disciplinary knowledge into educational content

The knowledge that is generated by the collective intellectual professions depends upon disciplined debate; proposal and criticism in carefully managed professional fora according to techniques, standards and protocols that are accepted by the community and achieved in training. Conventional schooling is not at all like this, the knowledge generated by these professions being passed down to the learner as the accomplishments of the professions, coming to the learner with the authority of the institution, the curriculum and the teacher.

As such it arrives at the learner with a greater authority than it has in the profession, where it can, in principle, always be questioned, and where there are often attempts to do so. Finding a way to challenge something that is widely accepted can be a career-building move. As knowledge, then, it is of quite a different order, having lost its real warrant by the time it reaches the learner, and having achieved a different and second-hand one in the face of which the learner is passive, dependent, and will be assessed.

There are, however, intimate connections between the two sides of the fence that perpetuate this in problematic ways, even conceptually. Researchers can be buried in the laboratories of great corporations, but the word “scholar” is inevitably connected to the word “school”. Researchers in their labs are not always thought of as scholars, since the latter seems to convey a special interest in text. Those who deal with text, then – historians, philosophers, linguists and literary people – find it harder to detach themselves from the schooling traditions.

The intellectual professions as a whole, though, tend to be classed as “academia”, even for those who are in those corporate labs. Academies are some kind of school, and the connection goes all the way back to Plato’s Academy.

Though there are many whose heart is in research, and who find teaching a burden, research-and-teaching are typically thought of as going together. That is, even many of the people who create the knowledge are equally responsible for transforming that knowledge into something “teachable”.

It is so often the case that it is only in graduate classes that students might find themselves joining with their teachers in knowledge-creation as they begin to pass through the doors into the intellectual profession itself. Not always, though. In large graduate classes, and particularly in trade schools, the possibilities of appropriate interaction are frequently diminished, and they can be little more than the continuation of an undergraduate class at a higher level, still just receiving the finished products of the disciplined intellectual communities. The initiation of the scientist, however, tends to be through the laboratory.

All of this is to suggest that, to get a greater grasp on the nature of the knowledge that most of us think we possess, we need to approach it with a far greater humility than our popular perceptions of the intellectual disciplines, and of the content of our schooling, so often leads us to assume. This can, I think, be well-illustrated by some remarks made by Norman Hampson, as he considered the transition between traditional authority and the authority of reason as this was occurring in the sixteenth century.

. . . it was impossible for anyone to distinguish between science and superstition, except perhaps in his own specialist field of study. This is, of course, partially true of all ages. The present writer, who would be hard put to prove the heliocentric theory, confesses that in many parts of this book he has relied on information which he lacked either the time or the knowledge to verify for himself. He assumed the accuracy of what was reported as true by men who enjoyed the respect of colleagues in a position to challenge them – which is more or less what scholars have always done. (TE p32)

This is why we need a fairly acute sense of just how reliable are the conditions under which such proper challenge is liable to occur, for we will fall into error ourselves when it should do, but doesn’t. We need to know the basis of our trust, and to know that it is not simply blind, as schooling so often encourages it to be.

The proper conclusion, I think, is that while we should be curious, exploratory and diligent in our search for knowledge relevant to the possibilities of our larger growth, we should wear the cloak of our knowledge lightly.

Here, we need to acknowledge two things. Firstly, that the vast proportion of the knowledge that we acquire from others is second-hand, that its authority is not only derivative, but has been reconfigured a number of times, each with its own problems of reliability and corruption, probably compounding.

The second thing that we should acknowledge, however, is that our task in life is to negotiate these lives in the best way on the basis of our own best judgment. It is not to create a dependency on external authority, nor somehow to assemble in ourselves a mirrored collection of the experience of those specialised, front-line moments in which public knowledge is constructed, and from which we are inevitably so distanced.

We should put our emphasis, instead, not on the confidence of our convictions, acquired second-hand as so many of them are, but on the processes by which we seek them out, embrace them, and willingly revise them. We should place emphasis on our continuing curiosity and exploration, our willingness to question and entertain doubt, and to welcome and traverse the inevitable confusion that is a sign of potential growth. We should seek and demand justification, looking for better reasons, more comprehensive explanations, more refined understanding.

We do this, not by struggling with ourselves over which external authority we should become slavish to, but by developing in ourselves the personal versions of the intellectual discipline that has been constructed in those intellectual communities, bringing our own intellectual discipline to those encounters we have with second-hand public knowledge.

We must confer our own authority, and we must do so by developing good ways of exploring, questioning, doubting, testing and reconstructing our own judgments from the materials available to our experience, including the materials of public knowledge. We should develop good, personal epistemological processes, recognising that knowledge, for the sake of our personal lives, is a different sort of thing from the knowledge that an intellectual community can create, and not just because one is social, and the other personal.

This is, in a sense, just to continue, in disciplined ways, a favourable development that natively began to be expressed from the moment of our birth; but encouraged – our curiosity and exploration guided by benevolent social conditions, and by the Aristotelian principle, and by ourselves as self-educators, into growth for the sake of larger growth.

Educational awareness, sensitivity and judgement

It will be recalled that these domains of content that we have been considering are not discrete. Insofar as learners engage with the work of collective disciplined enquiry, the external circumstances of that engagement will be within their living experience, as also will be what they bring to that experience from the history of their inner lives. We have seen how that interaction between the external and internal conditions can be destructive of life, as well as being full of great possibility for living life well.

Clearly the way that we, and and other learners understand all of these engagements educationally, is definitive of our entire interest here. Education itself is, of course, the ruling domain of the concern we have had with educational content throughout this chapter. What learners can make of their experience, educationally, depends upon the awareness, sensitivity, skill and judgment that have been developed in their inner lives.

Their ability to do this will depend, not just on whatever contact they have made with collective disciplined professional communities that specialise in talking about those lives, but on how well educational understanding is developed and expressed throughout all of the world that they experience; in all of their social engagement and the socially constructed environments everywhere in everyday life.

As with any area of understanding, educational judgment is not just a matter of learning off what some people appear to believe. It is something that we must enquire into for ourselves, and it matters so much to our self-respect that it is worth developing well, and becoming skillful at it. We need to possess a thoughtful control over the judgements we learn to make about our world and ourselves for the sake of our own lives, that we live them well.

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Dewey, John. Experience and Education. New York: Collier Books, 1963. p33ff

“Collective intellectual enterprises” is often a more helpful expression than “academic” disciplines” – and more inclusive. I follow Toulmin, Stephen. Human Understanding: The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1972.

Hampson, Norman. The Enlightenment. Vol. 4. The Pelican History of European Thought. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1968.

© R. Graham Oliver, 2018