This piece is posted separately in the “articles” section of this blog, but it will eventually be incorporated as the first chapter of Part 3 of “Education as if our lives depended on it. It will be posted there along with two other chapters in preparation, and when some re-ordering has been completed. I do apologise for any inconvenience, but am working in this way in order to make as much information available as possible.
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The “logic” of conventional schooling is completely at odds with the requirements of education, and fundamentally unethical. School is about agendas others have for learners – not for their own sake. Not only does this mean that the purpose of schooling is incompatible with education, it is ethically untenable. It is a systematic form of indoctrination
“Educational” systems at odds with the educational:
the incompatibility of purpose
I began by identifying the purpose of education with respect, and spent three chapters explaining the anatomy and workings of respect as the core and overriding solution to the problem of value in the educational problematic. It is the first and final priority, to which all other value interests must submit if the intrinsic worth of human beings is not to be compromised – as it so easily can be if we mishandle their learning. Respect involves duties; to each other and to ourselves, and they are first duties, simply because we owe them to the humanity we share. We owe it to ourselves to seek out worthwhile lives for ourselves, because of our value. No one else can do this for us, though we can and should, as a matter of mutual respect, assist each other, and support mutual conditions for enabling each other to perform our personal duty. We must take pains not to thwart these possibilities for each other, or unreasonably deny to each other the conditions that our minds require to fulfil our duties. Our understanding of the difficulties others face in their pursuit of their self-respect will come as we learn to wrestle with our own, and the more that we come to appreciate the roles we can play in facilitating each other in the pursuit of our highly personal first duties, the more we will come to understand how much we have to offer each other – how essentially human, and how socially human, the Good Life, as an undertaking, really is. We discover that we are in this together; that most of what we can achieve for ourselves is dependent upon what we can accomplish through our knowledge of each other, and through discussing the issues of life in effective ways. These duties demand a very great deal of our mental development – in terms of our skill with the tools of thought, in terms of our understanding of ourselves and the circumstances of our world, and in terms of the construction of our beliefs and values, attitudes and commitments, tastes and feelings, and the possibilities and limitations of any efforts that we might make to control and manage these things. Whatever is possible for us to make worthwhile lives for ourselves, it is a mental undertaking that must be carved out through our human capacities for learning and experience, and the quality of our social interactions.
The models of mind “built in” to schooling-and-teaching
Because we must realize the best lives for ourselves, and it must be up to us, the proper educational transaction must be with the beliefs, values, knowledge, understanding and points of view that we actually do possess and could posses as the unique individuals that each of us are. The proper transaction is not with what we may display to others, or what can, or might, be perceptible to them. It is not with what we can learn to display for their judgment and approval. At the educational heart of it all is what we are to make of our own minds and lives, and this comes down to what we make of and from and through our own experience. Teaching, instructing and “lessons” can only touch the surface of this, and though most of our experience of others is opaque and our understanding of it from the outside is superficial, teaching, instructing and lessons can only attend to the outside, and only be assessed from the outside. The ultimate educator is he or she who truly can have charge of the inside, to the extent that such management is possible at all. Education, in the end, is an inside job. It is, of course, misleading to talk of an “outlook” on life, just as it is to speak of there being “lenses” through which we view the world. The disadvantage of such ways of speaking is that they convey a kind of passivity, as if the learner is like a video camera; a CCTV passively recording an “outside” world. In this sense, these metaphors give free play to all of those misleading mental theories of associationism, sense-data, and passive models of perception. And from the standpoint of teaching these metaphors and theories are false too. We do not “create” experiences for others, organising “stimuli” for them as if they are passively waiting to receive our projections, constructions and communications, and as if we could really know, with any confidence, what it is that they will “take” from our attempts to stimulate them. These ways of conceiving our mental life are pervasive, however, and they undergird conventional conceptions of teaching that distort what teaching can do in profound ways that conceal real disconnections between the process of teaching and the minds that are supposed to be taught. Even more seriously, they encourage such a false view of how minds operate, and how they develop, so that we come to think that teaching, and things like teaching, are the most appropriate ways in which education can take place – that they represent the ideal of educational intervention. This is so serious that it gets in the way of our ability to grasp the educational at all. We still think of institutionalised teaching and learning on two false models: a false model of communication, and a false model of “shaping”. Teachers, on the one hand, are like radio transmitters transmitting code. On the other, they are like potters, moulding clay. These models are ancient, and are both easily enough discredited on any serious understanding of the mind, or of human development, but they are not merely persistent fallacies. They are models that are embedded in the organising principles of the entire institutionalisation of schooling and teaching, and they continue to control decisions and actions simply because they are essential to the purposes that schooling and teaching were created to serve and continue to express. That they violate human nature, and we should very well know this, is masked through our cultivated blindness to the crude and unethical character of these purposes, which violate human value and dignity. We are willing to accept the inevitably high degrees of the ineffectiveness of these practices – even in terms of the clear purposes of schooling – rather than to face up to the unreasonableness (and irresponsibility) of our commitments that lie behind them. The transmission model, and the moulding model both flow from the fundamental distortion of human interest that underlies schooling-and-teaching. All of the agendas of content and process lie behind the teaching. They flow toward the teacher, not from the learners with whom they are directly engaged, but back up through the institutional structure via curriculum design and institutional quality control, to policy-makers and external stakeholders. All of this “educational purpose” flows from the outside, and downward into the teacher, who is a sort of “knowledge dump”. It is the job of the teacher to “get this across” to the learner, or to “shape” them according to these external plans. The learner has no part or real say in any of this, because they “don’t know any better”. If they did, they wouldn’t be the students. If they knew enough to make any of these decisions, “education” would be unnecessary – or so it is assumed. Everyone – including all teachers – presumably agree that the “bucket theory” of mind is false; that pupils are not buckets or pitchers, somehow to be filled. But the entire teaching transaction, and almost all educational research (and hence “evidence-based”, and “best practice”) is predicated on the idea, not that it is false, but that it is flawed or incomplete. However people might want to deny the bucket theory, its authority is evident upon observing the nature of practice; in teaching, in the design of content and process, and in research. The problem is that, as the teacher “streams” desirable content to the learner, the damn stuff just won’t go in properly. The bucket has some sort of cover over it, or the mouth of the pitcher is somehow blocked, or partially so, so that what we try to stream into it splashes off all over the place, with only some if it going in. In the worst cases, hardly any of it goes in at all. Not only that, but the pitcher or the bucket seems to have a hole in it, so that as we put more in, the stuff we have already put in keeps leaking out at the bottom. So-called “educational” research is largely about trying to find ways of plugging the holes in the bucket, and finding ingenious ways to circumvent the barriers and obstructions at the top of the bucket, or the mouth of the pitcher. We try all kinds of techniques to get past the obstructions at the mouth of the bucket⁄pitcher, depending upon our guess as to what the nature of the obstructions are. We try to “motivate them”. We try cajoling. We try rewarding with prizes. We try coercing them. We try compelling them. We try fear. We try giving them teachers of their own gender, or racial group. We guess that all this might be solved by smaller classes, so that they could pay closer attention to us, and we to them. We try to “personalise our instruction”, we try listening to them. We try to entertain them. We try to encourage them and tell them they are worthwhile, praising them for every success (success in doing what we want, or what pleases us). Perhaps “their problem” – their problem in absorbing what we want them to absorb – is low self-esteem, or lack of confidence. Perhaps passivity is the problem – that they aren’t just passive recorders of their outside world. But our thought here is not about the deeper error of the idea of the passive recipient at all, but just the idea that the windows or ear holes of the mind are more closed when the body is restrained or inactive – and that what we need to do is loosen things up a bit, and the transmission we seek will be resumed, by-passing the filters. So perhaps if we get them to move, or paint and draw, or do craft; if we allow them to stand up, or rearrange the desks, or do something outside. Sort of like banging the bucket (in the past, we tried that a lot too). We also try to deceive them into thinking they are getting the knowledge for themselves – carefully controlling the stream, while concealing that we are doing so. We know that people don’t like being talked at all the time, that they remember only a small percentage of what they are told, that they switch off, become bored, and day-dream, or start passing notes to each other, or fiddling with their phones. Perhaps there is this unpalatability layer at their surface that is preventing our streaming from getting in. Instead of trying to hose it into them, perhaps we can get them to drink at our well. So what we try to do is conceal the streaming, or disguise it, or sugar-coat it. We are scientists, of course, and so we are not just making all this up. We test for the success of what we do. We produce endless studies that “show”. We stream the stuff at them, and then we get them to show us whether or not they have got it. If they don’t give us what we want, then we know we have a problem. Some of us even believe that if it can’t be measured then it didn’t happen, so we shouldn’t attempt to stream some things at all, and will leave them off our educational agendas altogether. But we are still just trying to fill buckets, or pitchers, and if we dare to look at the agendas we have for their learning – whose agendas they are, where they issue from, how their success is to be assessed, and not just at the classroom level, or even the school level – it is impossible to deny the ubiquity of the pitcher theory of mind. The pottery theory of mind works in precisely the same way. Traditionally, the learner comes to education as raw clay, the clay that the teacher will form into something worthwhile. The teacher is the artist, and the learner is to be formed to their vision. To the extent that artists are hired hacks, of course, what they owe to their employers will dictate the extent to which the artistic vision is not really theirs, but the vision of those who pay the bills. Many an artist has sold their soul to patrons with poor taste. The pottery model is, in some ways, more compelling as a description of the corruption of education than the bucket theory. The reason is that the pottery theory has more to suggest to us about whether we are accomplishing anything, and how we might tell whether we are. Institutionalised schooling-and-teaching is obsessed with measurement and assessment, and evaluation of a certain kind, and it does so pretty much as the potter does – by giving most attention to what is discernable on the outside. In this respect, the pitcher, or bucket theory is limited in its description. We try to pour or hose into the bucket or pitcher, but we don’t really know what there is on the inside, or what happens on the inside when we do this, or what becomes of what we hose in. We can’t measure what is on the inside. When those experts say that if it can’t be measured, it didn’t happen, this means, of course, that the very idea that there is anything inside at all is to be discounted altogether. Perhaps the best way of bringing the two models closer together would be a transparent bucket. We would measure what is on the inside by measuring it on the outside. But the vital mischief in education is that, not only is the bucket not transparent, but we have only the scantiest of clues as to the relation between what has happened on the inside and what is going on outside. Indeed, in an important sense, the relationship is unknowable – or it is only knowable to the extent that anecdotes and stories are suggestive of knowledge, and if we do allow that such knowledge is suggestive, we must also acknowledge that it is always radically incomplete. If the bucket truly was transparent, we would likely come away even more confused than we are now. But this is not what schooling people mean when they talk of measurement, or assessment. They assume a reasonably direct correlation between the inside and what is available to perception on the outside. This is where the pottery model comes into its own. We are mostly concerned with how things appear on the outside, regardless of the inside. There are all kinds of ingenious ways we can measure or evaluate that. This should be disconcerting for education – grounds enough for abandoning either model – because where education is properly conceived, it is on the inside that the purpose of education must rest. For schooling-and-teaching, however, the outside is always good enough. It isn’t concerned with what the learner really believes, or thinks or feels, or is committed to at all, and almost never takes the time even to ask. It is concerned that the learner come to conform to its external agendas – conform, as a matter of mere behaviour. Outside conformity to these expectations is quite good enough. Indeed, for most of us throughout the schooling process, there have always been very good reasons – such as safety or shame – for learners not wanting their insides to be particularly perceptible to others at all. Huge problems of privacy and the violation of dignity and personal integrity would arise if they were.
The problem of “other minds” in schooling-and-teaching
In order to seek out processes that are properly educational, and to understand both how limited the role of teaching would be in an educational scheme, and how its institutionalisation in conventional schooling undermines educational possibility, we need to be clear about two related sets of ideas, and, with some clarity, engage them together. The first is to grasp the limitations of our access to each other’s minds, and how far conventional schooling sets the boundaries of its own interests well within those limits, in relative disregard of experience.The second is the importance of the idea of experience, and its role in agency; in the acquisition, by learners, of knowledge that is their own, and its importance to the ability of learners to make good educational judgments for themselves. Minds are not things that exist within bodily containers. The mind is embodied, and the fact that some of this is perceptible to others on the “surface” of our bodies may appear to us, from the outside, to divide the mind between the surface of a container, and what is inside the container. This is a false distinction about the mind itself that arises as we attempt to perceive the minds of others, but can only do so within the limits set by the perceptions that are available to us – from the outside. Our minds are not so divided between an inside and an outside: the inside and outside are whole in a single body. That sense of a division – of an incompleteness because only the outside can be perceived by others, is a limitation of our social relation, not a condition of our personhood. Our speech is a bodily activity. Our speech, however, is very often our thought, and not merely an expression of a thought that occurred on the inside. Indeed anything we do intentionally or purposively is mental activity, even if, at the same time it is so obviously physical, because intention is a mental activity, and we act with intention, and not merely because we have one. Thus when we walk, or hit a ball, we are performing a mental act, to the extent that it is intentional. We are not just somehow executing an internal intention, and nor are we just behaving – moving our bodies without purpose or intention. The intentionality is what makes the action mental, and distinguishes it from mere movement or “behaviour”. This is why robots built to resemble animals or humans get spooky when they seem to “do things”, mimicking what we do, but without meeting any conditions that resemble intentionality. The difference between a robot and an intentional, purposive human being is that the human being is actually walking – an intentional and purposive undertaking – and the robot isn’t; spooky though the resemblance might be. Indeed, the more closely the robot mimics walking, the spookier it gets. This is why talking, shaking hands, pointing directions, saluting flags are mental acts just as equally as they are physical performances. When animals do it (such as fetch) we see their minds. When we interact with each other – communicating, or even in a teaching and learning relationship, we do so as interacting bodies. In ourselves we are united in our minds in the sense that the internal aspects of mind are unified in our bodies. Some of our mind – that which bodies forth – is available to others through the perceptions each of us have learned to make of other people. Neither of us has access to the inner workings of the other, and to this degree we do not have access to each other’s experience. This is how the problem of “other minds” arose in philosophy. You are walking, or shaking my hand. How do I know that you are not just a robot? How do we know that a dog is intending when a robotic dog is not? It is tempting to suppose that we will get the answer by disassembling you. The outside looks the same either way, so the answer to intention must reside on the “inside”. So I will look for your real intention by cutting open your head. This is not how we learned about purposive behaviour, however, or about being a human being who recognises other human beings. They are “one of us; akin to me”, and learning this at all – at the very beginning – involved recognising their intention, at the same time as I became aware of my own. In the earliest of my days, I was distinguishing a wilful world from a world of natural causes – and realising, in the process, that my judgments of intention were sometimes mistaken. These are things that I learned from birth as I came to understand about myself as a human being, different from other animals, and from inanimate objects. My identity clarified out of this, and was bound up with forming relationships with others – very basic relationships at first – as I began to discriminate at all, developing a species identity appreciated between bodies, as well as within my own. This is how we are not buckets or pots. The external is not “evidence” of the internal, as if that signals, in some intelligible way, what is going on inside. When we play a game with others, or dance with them, we are not theorizing or hypothesizing or speculating or testing – unless “our mind is elsewhere”. Most of the time, we are hardly “thinking” in any conscious way – apart from just the playing or the dancing – at all. We are judging together, according to rules that we share that are themselves built on judgements we share – developing them in ourselves as they developed between us. In this way our minds are operating together in quite an external way. And we can even change these rules together, renegotiate them. There are no buckets. We should know better than that from the relationships that we know best. In a sense, we are in their bucket with them, except that we have access to only a small bit of their bucket – which we must content ourselves with; just as they are in our bucket as well, and they must be content with the little they have of that. “Testing” what we do have access to tells us remarkably little about the rest of the bucket, and in our genuine relationships, we know better than to expect too much; cherishing the small discoveries that can come to us for the precious insights that they are. When we communicate with each other, we are in each other’s experience, and interacting with the help of a system of judgment that we share. At its best, we are growing together, each in our own unique way.
The denial of experience
An everyday clue, available to anyone, of the priority of the bucket theory and the pottery model in schooling-and-teaching, is the overwhelming preference and use of the idea of learning over the idea of experience. The idea of learning has a bad history – at least all the way back to John Locke, who thought of the mind as a blank slate. Here, any idea of experience is reduced to the writing of sense data on a slate, and from here we might see something that would encourage a bucket theory. All we need to do is control the writing on the slate. The teacher, by controlling the sensory inputs, can do the writing. Hardly anyone is likely to believe in blank slates any more. But when we express this disbelief, we are usually supposing instead that the slates come into existence with some sort of preliminary writing already on them. Genetically, the slate is disposed to some things, inclined to others, apt to shape perception in this way of that from the start. This still isn’t a theory of experience, and it only slightly modifies the bucket or pottery theories. So the clay has some lumps in it. It is textured. At the other end of the history of learning, the stark divorce between learning and experience is represented by behaviourism – popularly understood through the work of B.F. Skinner. Behaviourism, in that perennial attempt of psychology to emulate the “hard sciences”, rejects the idea that there is even a mind at all. There is a black box, into which we cannot see (a pitcher or a bucket, really). All that we can know or understand is on the outside. On the outside are things we can influence and measure. Where we can’t pour into it, we will mould it or shape it. When finally we are satisfied, it is the outside that we will be satisfied with. Behaviourism and John Locke hardly exhaust learning theory, but these key exemplars are very suggestive of the impoverished and constrained understanding of human development and human “being” that we will have when we limit ourselves to the idea of “learning”. And we do. Educators are talking about learning all the time, though almost always in a very vague way. Hardly ever do they talk of experience, and when they do, the idea has little power. The more I have listened to teachers talking of learning, the more stunned I have become by the gulf between this ubiquitous learning-talk, and John Dewey’s talk of “experience”. John Dewey – he was by far the greatest educational theorist in recent centuries. People dutifully read bits of him. But they don’t “get it”. Dewey does use the word “learning”, but the concept that matters, again and again, is “experience”. Of course learning occurs in and through experience. We learn by experience, just as we learn by doing. But it is the experience that finally makes sense of it all, and makes the learning what it is. We can tell the difference by considering the way in which we suppose that learning can be undone; we can unlearn things – replacing one habit with another. The behaviourists believed that learning could be “extinguished. But we cannot “un-experience” things. They remain a part of our experiential history – continuing to exist in the evolutionary stream. Experience is the core. It is the educational bedrock. Dewey was right. He explained it again and again, in many useful ways. To listen to “educators”, you wouldn’t know this. He may as well not have bothered. Learning dominates schooling thought because we believe that we can specify it. We intend that they learn this or that. We can design our curriculum to do it. We can create our lesson plans explaining what they will learn, and what we will do to achieve that, and we can set up our materials and interactions to “bring it about”. Finally, of course, we can tell whether they have learned what we want by testing them. That is, we know what we have in mind when it comes to those buckets, or that clay. The idea of “experience” however, brings all of these cards to the ground, and it is why we are so often frustrated. We can’t create conditions that will bring about specific experiences for others. We can’t do this, because, in the first instance, the internal conditions of experience that will contribute at least half of what the experience will be inconveniently reside in the pre-existing internal history of past experience that the learner brings to the situation. Worse than this, the “external conditions” can’t be defined externally either. They are not some set of neutral and objective conditions lying outside the learner. The external conditions arrive at the learner pre-conceived – by the learner. The external has to be conceived of by the internal. What the external conditions are is what the learner, and not the teacher, perceives them to be – which is why we can be terrified by things we don’t understand. Experience has an object, a focus, an interest; there is something that comes into awareness, or is pushed into it; into our consciousness. It is something that we are about to undergo as we come into relation with it, or bring ourselves to it, and we will undergo it with some sort of passivity – it will happen to us – even if we sought it out. It is a “thing” or an event, or an occasion, or an emergent circumstance in our lives. But whatever it happens to be is not limited to the physically external; such as slipping on the ice, or how we experience the encouragement of the maths teacher. We also experience headaches, memories, nightmares, fantasies and fears about what might happen next. We experience the products and processes of our own thinking and feeling – things that are, in that moment, the external dimension of experience, but are internal to our bodies and minds. The external dimension of our experience is constructed in our perception, and these conditions of experience will differ from person to person according to their history of experience (and not just the DNA of their slate). This applies, of course, to reflection itself. So when Dewey emphasises the importance of reflection on experience – reflective experience – this too is experience that we construct for ourselves. We look at what we have already undergone, or experienced, and we act upon it (with thought), undergoing the consequences of these mental actions too. Unfortunately for schooling and teaching, this is not something that is bound by the geography of the site, or its timetables, but finds its place in the total processes of living. It can happen on the way home, or in the course of a conversation over the dinner table, or with a parent at bed-time. It can even happen twenty years later. Thus, the “external conditions” of experience that we, as teachers, so painstakingly attempt to set up are not at all neutral or “objective” conditions, and we have little control at all over how they are properly made into external conditions, despite appearances. Nor are they whatever we want to think they are when we are doing all that specifying, planning and intending. Unfortunately for us, and our planned bucket-hosing, the actual external conditions that exist are those that the learners perceive and appreciate in the light of their pre-existing internal conditions. The external conditions are those that they perceive. And it is in this dynamic, or dialectic, that the learner undergoes the experience. It is not a dialectic between what we think we set up, and their insides. As they undergo the experience, they will no doubt learn. But what they actually learn will be made within the experience itself, and in terms of the ways in which they “process” that experience – which again they will do in the light of their past experience and what they have already done with that. If we really do care about what students feel, believe, or become committed to – or actually learn – this throws all of our specifications out of the window, as well as what we usually make of those measurements. Instead of being on the highly technical, carefully planned, specified and finely measured side of a learning equation, it is we who are on the crude side of this, indulging in mythologies of human nature and its manipulation. It is also why the final educational decisions are always made by the learner, and never by us. We do manipulate all right. Something happens, because we can measure some of the changes on the outside where part of their mental life is active, or can be activated – or at least some aspects of changes that they allow us to see. In terms of equipping them to join in activities with us should they want to do so, or to manipulate them, it is often good enough. But we are disengaged here from the humanity of the learner, if that is what we presume to develop. If we want to develop that humanity – as we should if we want to educate – then we will need to look to other ways to do it. The mind is active in its own construction; making itself, making what it can of the world, as we go about making our relationship to and in the world. The mind is a “doing” thing, and its doing is a seamless combination of “inner” and “outward” activity in the world. The mind is not just a matter of internal processes of thought or feeling, and nor is it merely the recipient of external sensory input, through such activities as hearing, seeing and touching. It is very important that we get a solid grasp of this, and we see its real educational implications. If we do not understand this properly, we will be arrested constantly in a world in which the best of our notions of “education” will continue to collapse back into engineering human beings regardless of their own agency. We will continue to misunderstand teaching, and the educational role that it may have to play. We never will understand the nature and educational role of experience within it. We will continue to fail to treat the minds of other human beings seriously. The moral price of such continuing failure should give us pause.
Why experience matters
The locus of our interest and attention where self-respect is concerned – where achieving a worthwhile life, or a life of meaning and purpose is our interest – is with the unity between inner and outer mental activity in our own single experiencing mind – the whole embodied person that we are, who acts and engages in the physical environment with self-awareness and reflective consciousness. It is the same for our respect for each other. Our ethical concerns with each other are with the unity of mental life in experiencing minds that are whole – whole embodied people. Our ethical situation with each other has this crucial difference, however: we each have access only to the outer of the mind of the other. Nevertheless in both cases it is vital that the centre of educational interest and attention lies with numerous processes and activities that we can only perceive in very limited ways – with the undergoing of experience, and the management of it by whole organisms. It is with life as it can only be lived by each human individual. Whatever good educational design and practice might be, it would firstly have to come to terms properly with the inevitable limitations of social relationships – of the incompleteness and necessarily indirect access that we have to each other’s minds. Within the reasonable bounds of possibility, then, when we speak of the intrinsic worth of the person, we are acknowledging, in a radical way, that it is the totality of their experience that matters, and that the inner aspects of their experience and what they make of that experience, are decisive. We speak of the importance, to the value of their life, that the life have worth to them, that it have meaning and purpose that is theirs to discover, to posses, to experience and to be responsible for. We speak of it being “their own life”, and that their choices and decisions are, in the end, theirs to make, because this is where the intrinsic value of the person must rest. We see much of this in what they “do”, but what appears on the outside is by no means the all of what they do. Whatever we can accomplish through the interpersonal transactions that are embodied between us on the far side of both of our barriers between the inner and outward of the mind, on the one hand, and the internal and external of experience on the other, the final resting place of educational interest lies in the undergoing of the experience by the learner, and what they make of it internally where their embodied mind is united, and where the human life that we value must be lived. Education is not about what we believe the learner’s experience to be. It is not about what we believe they value, or conceive, or are convinced of, or understand. It is not about what we believe they feel, or believe they “have made” of their experience. It is not about what we believe they have learned, or failed to learn. It is not about what we believe about these things before we undertake an “educational intervention”, and it is not about what we believe after we have completed the intervention, and tested for its affects. It is about what they actually experience, believe, value and learn. It is about the actual management, by them, of their own experience. This is why it is of central importance that the learners must always be moving in the direction of taking charge of educational judgment for themselves, because they are the only ones who can (and do) build their own minds; the minds that are to determine their own good. This does not mean that they “know their own minds” better than anyone else can, because that would suggest that there is one kind of knowledge possible on the inside that is in some way equivalent to the kind of knowledge enabled on the outside. Worse, of course, it also assumes that, even if they were the same, the self-knowledge would somehow be superior. Self-knowledge and agency are highly problematic, of course, to the point that, poorly developed, the results for our own humanity, as well as the humanity of others, can be disastrous. But in attempting to come to address what is at stake here educationally – which is the only way in which they can be addressed – we have to start with an appreciation of the ways in which any educational interventions will always be undertaken under conditions of a very significant opacity of the actual learning and experience of others – just to the same degree as our own conditions of experience always are largely opaque to them.
Learning-and-teaching
Schooling-and-teaching-as-usual involves a formal system in which immature learners are obliged to participate. The authority to teach is formal, and conferred by employment. The content of what is taught is decided within the institutional structure; what is worth knowing is not something arrived at by mutual agreement between official teachers and the taught, but is a kind of “settled” and “authoritative” knowledge, skill and disposition that is to be “transmitted”, and that is decided at various institutional levels. Tailoring the transmission of this “worthwhile knowledge” to the learner is based entirely on the outer – on what learners body forth, as does any assessment, or grading of the success of the learning. Given the circumstances of schooling – not just the general compulsion to be “in a system”, but specifically to be here, and to submit to these specific agendas under all kinds of imposed discipline, the potential for ambiguities between what is presented in the public space between teacher and learner, and what is going on in the inner – the experience itself – is simply huge. Often enough, of course, there is little ambiguity. There is low motivation, disengagement, and day-dreaming, covert resistance, even rebellion, though teachers rarely have the time to explore this very far, or do much about it if they could. Because these challenge classroom management and teaching agendas, they tend to attract the most attention. But there is a large range of compliant behaviour that should be equally troubling – where there is a surrender of will as the only alternative to various kinds of resistance. I will give up my agendas in favour of theirs because the price I will pay for trying to sustain mine will be too high anyway, and my agendas will inevitably fail. For some, this reconciliation may well have begun some time before the experience of schooling itself, through their immersion in a context in which there is no doubt about the inevitability of the schooling that lies in the future of their childhood. To confuse these multiple surrenderings under the conditions of compulsory, factory schooling with an abstract argument about the necessity to socialise the wilfulness of child nature into community, is simply to allow an abstract principle to be exploited without discrimination. Used in such a way, the necessity of socialisation could be allowed to surrender the child entirely to the will of the group (or those with power), and annihilate agency. In the context of schooling, this will likely follow as much from the difficulties of classroom and school management as from any genuine learning agendas. So for many, it may be better just to go along. And if I choose to surrender, I can seek some compensation by picking up on the rewards or bribes they offer me for doing so, just as I may avoid the punishments (the explicit ones, or the vague, and perhaps more threatening ones that might follow from “poor performance”). Even better, of course if I approach my surrender by finding what pleasure or enjoyment I can; making the best of it. They even teach us the science of this. Compliance becomes acceptance, and we all need to learn to accept the things we cannot change. If we fake enthusiasm for long enough, it may even become a “real” (if watery) enthusiasm. Or within all this mess we might be lucky, and find something to be genuinely enthusiastic about. Either way the time, which has to be spent anyway, may pass far more pleasantly if we give up our agendas for theirs. We are going to have fifteen or more years of this. Perhaps a lifetime. We may as well fake enthusiasm. Putting on an act actually does make life easier. (This was one of the “lessons” that John Taylor Gatto claimed that he taught [1]) The success of the teaching falls against the barrier between the inner and outer of the learner, and all that there is for teaching to assess is student “performance”. If their external displays satisfy criteria that exist on the outside, then the learning is a success, regardless of what it means in the experience of the learner, of whether it has any value there, of whether it is retained, whether it is, or is not, integrated into the tools and perceptions which they use to guide their lives, or whether they will ever use it again. Or even, what “it” is.
“Education systems” at odds with the educational
Two basic features of the institutionalisation of conventional schooling-and-teaching are very much at odds with what education requires. The first of these is that the teaching-learning transaction is poorly suited because of the numerous structural ways in which it attempts to ignore and override experience and its proper educational management. It has to operate as if the “inner” of the learner does not exist, or is a nuisance, or is simply to be exploited in the service of the purposes of the teacher (on the basis of hypotheses about that experience). Ideally the inner should just be a bucket or pitcher, and the problem of mind is simply the ways in which it is less than an ideal bucket or pitcher – there are obstructions and perversities that teachers have to overcome in their attempts to get the stuff in. The second is that the entire institutional architecture within which the teaching and learning transactions are to take place is devised to promote learning agendas that do not flow from the interest that learners have in living their own lives with meaning and purpose – as is necessary if their first responsibility is to learn to take charge of their lives and minds. That is, the institutional purposes are not directly concerned with learner experience at all. Even to the extent that accurate conjectures are made about that experience, it is selective in terms of its own purposes – some aspects of experience being desirable and others undesirable in terms that are extrinsic to the learner. As we have institutionalised learning and teaching, this is not congruent with the ethics of education. An interest in experience only arises, here, to the extent that it is seen to have an influence on purposes that stop at the “outside”. The fact that learners construct their own minds through the management of their own experience is incompatible with a mission that involves moulding learners to fit the ideas of those in authority who “know better”. Teaching, as a bundle of activities, techniques and technologies to “bring about learning”, is simply the transaction of choice for a vast institutional structure intended to fulfill purposes that ignore or attempt to override the full mind of the learner and the learner’s construction of experience. The learners who, from the educational point of view, should be receiving guidance towards taking charge of their own minds and lives for themselves, are instead simply processed according to the designs others have for them. Where some of these agendas are concerned, it would (and does) hardly matter what students learn, so long as the appropriate “hoops” are in place, and learners oblige by jumping through them. Because this is not respectful of the intrinsic value of learners, but prioritises the schemes of others; the architecture of this system is fundamentally unethical, at its core. The model provided so far of a “learning-and-teaching ” transaction is entirely suited to this overwhelming design, and is not merely a “bad idea”. What is implemented in the teacher-learner relationship is the understanding that “learning” is a teacher intention that the learner must somehow “satisfy” – on the outside. The learning-and-teaching is heavily constructed to bring about “learning-to-specification”, as those specifications are made and measured or assessed from the outside. It is learning that official teaching practitioners are appointed to induce in learners, with relatively little regard for the nature of learner experience at all. Meeting that “specification” or expectation is what “achievement” is. In part this comes from the attempt to bring about such a learning-to-specification on a mass scale, and is entirely consistent with using a factory structure to do it. The “outer” can be standardised, as befits a factory, but the inner cannot. The structure of such schooling is at odds with the possibility of tailoring content to the uniqueness of student experience. Whenever it is suggested that this factory structure is educationally inappropriate, a conventional reply assumes that the only solution would be to improve the ratio of teachers to learners. This must, of course, be set against the very point of the school-as-factory, which was to make the process feasible in dealing with people in the mass. Defenders of the factory system are likely to agree that the ideal arrangement would be one-on-one. Only in that way, it seems, could we tailor the teaching to the unique differences of each learner. We would do this by adjusting our method to their difference until we could best achieve our purposes for them. This would be impractical, however, because we have to be realistic about the scale of our undertaking. It would be outrageously expensive, and unacceptably demanding on the adult population – not all of whom want to be teachers. In the interests of more effective teaching, however, teachers do persist in lobbying – against this reality – for smaller class sizes. Apart from the ways in which large class sizes multiply many tasks, teachers are quite aware of the difficulties of treating their students as the unique individuals that they are. Taking even a class of thirty, and a five-hour teaching day, teachers could only devote about 12 minutes per child if they spent the whole day one-on-one. Take out the time that is spent on teaching or managing the whole class, and very few minutes are left for individual attention. That is why a factory approach predicated on teaching requires conceiving of learners as buckets, and why all buckets need to be treated much the same. The idea of improving teaching by improving the ratio in the direction of one-on-one is simply to extend the assumption underlying the larger system itself. Even if one-on-one teaching could be achieved, it would do nothing to enable education to transcend that barrier between inner and outer that teachers stand outside. The “inner” of learner experience would still only be relevant to the extent that we could manipulate it better to serve our ends of getting the stuff into them and having them demonstrate what we want them to show us anyway. The inner would, of course, still be as opaque to us as it always is on any other one-on-one relationship, but our guesses about it might be better, and this might help us to achieve with learners the outer displays that we seek. This is because the assumptions of learning-and-teaching would remain unchanged. It would still simply continue to be an attempt to “do” the learning of our choice to the learner, though more efficiently. We would be able to observe the outer effects of our interventions more closely, with more refined insight, and this close attention might indeed help us to do better with our conventional aims than we can expect to achieve with learners in the larger mass. Hence, the purpose would still not be to bring about growth on the learner’s own terms, but to achieve the “learning outcomes” that the teacher is seeking, and that the teacher’s employers require. This is revealed in the assumption that one-on-one teaching would be the ideal, but an ideal that we have to reject because it is simply impractical. In contrast, there is no reason to suppose that the best ways of cultivating learner experience and agency – the inner and outer combined – is through one-on-one teaching relationships at all. Indeed, I will be arguing at length in subsequent chapters that we will do much better in groups, with learners learning from each other, and with limited formal teaching. The assumption that one-on-one would be the ideal educational arrangement arises because it rests on the belief that underpins the whole enterprise of “schooling-as-usual” that “we” know better, and that the scale and scope of our knowledge, and our possession of the authority for it, means that learners can acquire very little without being taught by us. It appears that, for a very long course of their development – as indicated by the span of schooling systems and the time that must be spent in them, learners need “knowledge” that can only be “passed on” to them by those who already have it and can vouch for it. This suggests a very significant and enduring incapacity on their part, not only to seek knowledge for themselves, but to take charge of its necessary authority – such that it could ever deserve to be called “their” knowledge at all. This, In turn, must raise questions of how they should cope when they leave these schooling-and-teaching relationships – when they no longer have teachers to stand for the authority of knowledge. As we continue to extend schooling for more and more years, and with further and further schooling-and-teaching expected throughout the life-span, we can only wonder at the likelihood of an increasing dependency, and more limited agency. How will they cope when they no longer have teachers to manage their learning, and as their dependency on teachers is made greater and greater by longer and longer periods of schooling? It also raises a troubling question about the authority of teacher knowledge; that for most teachers, it was not knowledge that they acquired through participation in intellectual communities of inquiry among intellectually disciplined peers. Most of them got it in just the same way as their own students get it, except that the classrooms they got it in – built on exactly the same model of “intellectual authority” – were at higher levels. It appears, then, that it is our business to do things to learners in their own interests. It is not just that we might be justified in doing this some of the time, and strictly limited, and with complex variations even then. It is the assumption that this is what education must be like most of the time, such that the whole structure of our “educational” institutions must be engineered to accomplish this one task above all others, using the “learning-and-teaching” model. Even when efforts are made to mitigate this factory processing in ways that take account of “learner difference”, perhaps through the complex adjustments that electronic means – or “tech” – can now make possible, the adjustments that are seen to be necessary are adjustments to apparent differences in such things as “ability”, or “learning difficulties” or the vagaries of “previous experience” (which turn out to be “gaps in what they were taught”, or things they have forgotten). That is, they are not adjustments to learner experience, understood as the complex differences among the actual values and beliefs, interests and agendas of learners at all. Instead, tech opens up all sorts of possibilities for extra tutoring – for identifying errors and gaps in their performances, and looping more slowly and in more detail at those points where learners find themselves in difficulty when attempting to satisfy the intentions of the learning tasks that have been set for them. Sometimes, too, the difficulties of the teaching process are put down to problems of “motivation”, or “engagement”. But then the only ways in which these difficulties can be approached while leaving the external learning agendas intact is by finding ways to “motivate” learners, or “engage them”, or “get them to own” the knowledge or the process. That is, the “fix” is to do something to learners to bring about the required motivation, or engagement, or ownership. At first sight, these can come across as quite enlightened strategies, because they can suggest attending more closely to the learner. We must listen to learners more. We must cultivate their interests. We must introduce positive psychology to help them get rid of their “negativity”, and encourage them to “aspire”, to set goals, and learn how to learn, or to reduce disabling stress. But what they should aspire to, the goals that they should set, and the learning that they should achieve are the kinds of things that we, with our more advanced knowledge, consider to be good for them. If their experience is tapped into at all, it is mined, in the only way that is available to us second-hand, and from the outside, in order to get the learning performance that the schooling-and-teaching system already intends for them anyway. They may well be motivated already, of course – but to do the “wrong” or inconvenient sorts of things. It is our job to erase undesirable motivation and cultivate the right kinds of purpose – to do what we desire that they do. This is a hypocritical intrusion that appears to be for their own sake and well-being, when its real purpose is to get them to do what we want. It is, of course, ironically consistent that this approach is also the default position in management and “leadership” out in the workplace – which equally suffers from expensive problems of motivation and engagement. Leaders and managers must “inspire” others according to the “vision” they have for them. Thus this teaching-and-learning model at the heart of the schooling transaction is not simply a model that has been poorly chosen. It is exactly fit for purpose; for the purposes that the institutionalisation of schooling-as-usual is designed to serve. Our entire idea of an “education system” is that of a system constructed not for the purposes that learners might develop for their own lives – their lives that really should be respected – but rather to fulfill various kinds of political, economic and administrative agendas that stand as ends to which learners are to be moulded, en masse, as means rather than as ends in themselves. In among these purposes and among the many things that are often discussed, there are likely to be numerous, purposes that have worthy potential, and would need to be considered in any genuinely worthwhile educational scheme. It is almost inevitable, however, that when these purposes are contained within a larger framework and architecture of considerations and practices that assumes learners as means to ends – one that decides what is to “be made of them”, subordinating their own minds to the intentions that decision-makers have for them – it is inevitable that what otherwise might have been worthy becomes corrupted, becoming incorporated within a larger, inhumane and deeply disrespectful enterprise. Where those purposes do have ethically worthy potential, however, and we attempt to incorporate them into a genuinely educational undertaking, they are likely to align quite readily, and to benefit considerably in effectiveness, because they will be remade in ways that enable them to be congruent with the kinds of purposes that learners will likely have arrived at for themselves for their own good reasons. Achieving a livelihood is, perhaps, the most obvious example here.
Legitimate and illegitimate “deciding for others”
In our conventional approaches – through conventional schooling-and-teaching – our inclination to subordinate the interests of learners to the interests that various elders have in them – as means to their ends – is perpetuated because of the distortions in our thinking about when and how it might be appropriate to decide for people who are in various stages of dependency. The very elementary implications of development – that young, vulnerable and naive learners need to have competent care-givers making many decisions for them, and guiding their development – is, of course, true. The danger is that – like the idea that every child needs to be socialised – these general truths can be used to justify all kinds of practices that are highly problematic. “Socialisation” does not justify the particular socialisation that goes with conventional, compulsory, factory-schooling and the management of learning and teaching within it, unless that socialisation is justified in their interests as equally valuable human beings. “Socialisation” does not automatically justify any agenda we would have for them, no matter how conventional it may be. It would not justify producing offspring and tying them too us so strongly and dependently that they will serve our needs through into our old age, any more than it would justify producing children as a cheap labour force, binding them to our farm in order to make it more profitable for ourselves. These could be forms of socialisation, but they are not to be justified simply because “children must be socialised”. The deciding for others that goes with the general vulnerability and naivety of the young does not justify making decisions for them in ways that will limit their ultimate intellectual (and moral) independence and agency. All cases of socialisation require thoughtful discrimination, and the ethical stakes are high. General truths such as “children need to be socialised”, or that we must “transmit the culture to the young”, or even “pass on our knowledge” come with the danger that we will let our guard down over “deciding for others”. There are numerous temptations to lead us to cross all kinds of very significant ethical lines, and we do so to a disturbing degree; most obviously when our cultural circumstances are taken-for-granted, and unthinking. The legitimate exercise of care must not tumble over into an illegitimate paternalism – our propensity to be paternalistic; no matter how noble our intentions. When we supersede the decision-making of the young – to keep them safe, and because of their naivety about life and the world – we may only do so within the limits of a strict regard for the rights of the adult they may yet become; an adult who is our moral equal, who can meet our gaze at eye level, as free in their moral agency as we should hope to be in ours. We never were free to fiddle with their development so that, when our gaze meets theirs, we are meeting a gaze that is partly what we chose to make of them, according to our own beliefs and commitments and conclusions about life. Surely we would have wished for ourselves that we, in being brought to our adulthood, had been guided and encouraged into our own responsibility, to become free and authoritative in who and what we choose to be. We owe them no less when they are in our charge, and have no business pre-empting that freedom. It is, however, remarkably tempting to think that we would like to meet, eye-to-eye, with others who agree with us, supporting our own beliefs, values and commitments, and even deferring to us. Some of us may find it more gratifying still if they would thank us for setting them on the “right” path. This is a profound ethical issue, deeply disrespectful, and subtle in our susceptibility to it. It is a tempting inclination, even for those who are kind, noble, and sensitive to issues of respect. There are good reasons for each of us to be favouring our own views. We have to live with confidence with our own decisions about what to believe, and do, and feel, and give authority to, and we are everywhere sceptical of the conclusions that others draw. This is not necessarily a weakness, it is a requirement of integrity. But it often leads us to believe that we know better than our adult moral equals, and often enough too; we are quite sure of it. Our respect for those whom we recognise as equals can, however, serve to restrain us when we are bound to acknowledge it, eye-to-eye. As caregivers for the young, however, we have already relaxed those restraints in order to guide, keep safe, and to care in legitimate ways. We have authority over them, a certain permission to know better, and that relaxation that we have allowed opens us up to temptation. The thought of these people as adults equal to ourselves is abstract and difficult to imagine. There is no real danger that we will confront them, eye-to-eye, in any way that is vivid, while we are deep in our present relationship with them, and the eventual adult moral equality is also difficult to conceive. It is probably hard to imagine ourselves in fifteen or twenty years time, and much more difficult to imagine them. And so, hardly aware of it, we overstep the mark, and would be shocked that such an over-stepping could even be suggested. When we listen widely to adults in their discussions of what must be done to the young, we are likely to find many of them feeling free with such excessive paternalism all the time, once we have an ear for it. We are likely to become more aware of adults wishing to live out their own convictions about life through the next generation, as if unaware of what they are saying. Instead of fostering the agency of those whose agency is still immature, we are remarkably eager to promote our own insights and “wisdom” about how life should be lived, based as that is on the conventions we have come to take for granted, and our own narrow, and peculiar histories. Indeed it is not uncommon to hear new parents or prospective parents remarking on this opportunity to share their accumulated wisdom as one of the delights of parenthood. It even seems, sometimes, as a reaching for a kind of immortality, or a legacy they wish to “leave behind”. For some there is the sense that it may be their only legacy, and to be treasured the more for that. Even worse, if we have chafed under the thumbs of adults for so many years, eager for the day when we are older, come into out power, and are able to be “free”, are we really to be asked to give up some of that power that adulthood apparently allows? “She is only sixteen! Why should we listen to her!” As the good, the kind, the noble and the loving give in to this too easily, this ethical slipperiness grants a permission to others less sensitive to respect – particularly to those who possess economic and political power and whose activity keeps them at some distance from the issues of care-giving, beyond their own parenting. If we find difficulty in imagining our own children or charges in twenty years’ time, these more remote policy-makers and advocates have more difficulty imagining both the children and the adults they are never likely to meet. From this standpoint of greater abstraction they perhaps feel even more free to expand on the sense of permission, becoming social engineers, encouraged to promote the sorts of agendas for learning that conventional systems of schooling can freely, if illegitimately, impose on the young and the vulnerable quite routinely. Politicians, policy-makers, social scientists and powerful commercial influencers are likely to feel that their very access to the levers of public decision-making is a warrant for their greater freedom. Under a meritocracy, they are clearly the meritorious ones – they wouldn’t have access to these levers, unless they were trusted to use them wisely – through being voted in, or hired, or achieving academic or commercial success. They are the very successes of this very same system, a system insensitive to the ethical issues of paternalism. When they are confronted with social issues, the abstraction and impersonality of their situation – as well as their own “educational” experience – leaves them unsophisticated educationally, and susceptible to the numerous other facile explanations and solutions that are available. Nothing in their experience or their circles is likely to arise to challenge the conceptual crudity of their appreciation of the educational problematic. How is this ethical error manifest in our practice? Is it a small fault that we must watch for lest we stray occasionally? Conventional, compulsory schooling is about what “we” are going to do to the young, and this can be seen in the decisions that are implemented at every level. Above the teacher, reaching right up to the legislature, are institutions that predetermine the content – and largely the process – which will be framed by the schooling institutions, and directed by the teacher. This is not just through curriculum design, or through the overwhelming role of certification, but in every aspect that includes formal authority; the administration, management of classrooms and other spaces, and the delivery of resources. It is liberally expressed throughout the language and concepts through which we try to explain what we are doing, and improve upon it. From the teacher on up, there is a whole architecture that decides what knowledge is to be of most worth, the range of it to be covered, when and at what pace and with whom – and very largely where and with what resources. It doesn’t really matter, in these systems, that learners, for the whole of the rest of their lives, will be responsible for their own beliefs and knowledge; their own values and actions, not just in some abstract way, but in their effort to make every decision; to be in possession of their own minds and thought. From the standpoint of conventional schooling there is a presumption that there is certified and authoritative knowledge, and that if it is true that learners “construct” their own knowledge, it is nevertheless their job to construct it in such a fashion that it aligns with the knowledge of their betters.
Quality control
This process and content is accompanied by systems of quality control; assessments and grading that must, above all, be intelligible and useful upwards in the systems of the management of learning. These systems of assessment are much less relevant for diagnostic purposes of individual learning, and where something diagnostic is made of them, that does not mean that the “diagnosis” will even be conveyed to the individual student. Assessment and grading are more to ensure that, overall, the performances of groups are satisfactory, and worth the money, or whether some professional development or new innovation is indicated, or some old practice reintroduced in the cycle of fashion to which schooling is so prone. These agendas have little or nothing to do with what the learner actually thinks about, or cares about, and they and their parents have to rest content with a generalised anxiety about what is involved in making a “success” of their lives, which appears to be dependent upon participation in the process. The details are not up to either of them. By the time the student reaches university, they have learned, along with everything else, that the stakes are high, that the rewards that matter are external to themselves; that they are abstract, extrinsic and considerably delayed, and that all of this is dependent upon “giving them what they want”. Teachers have often been very explicit about this – “this is what I am looking for”, this is what I want you to do”, “this is what I expect of you”, “show me that you can . . .”, “this is how I want to see it set out”, “this is how I want it referenced”. If the assessment is external, these are modified to be “this is what they are looking for”. Because assessments come at particular times, or have due dates, uncertainty and confusion are things to fear – particularly if they arise close to the deadline. This is one reason why the last-minute essay can turn into disaster. Not a good time for what initially seemed like a good idea to unravel in the execution, regardless of whether this might be a good sign of growth. It is not just that the general institutional processes appear to have been purpose-designed to develop intellectual dependency, and dependency on institutional authority. These would work well enough on their own to create conformity and dependency, one would think. But the task of “figuring out what they want” emerges with greater and great urgency as the process proceeds, simply because that mysterious success-in-life appears to depend so much on grading and assessment. This is, perhaps the one piece of “educational control” that the learner comes to see (and is taught to see) as available to them – even if, from any properly educational point of view, it has nothing to do with education at all. It is a mark of educational insight to recognise in the process just how educationally irrelevant, marvelously contrived and full of mystery it really is. Much of these processes are surrounded by a quite arcane mix of myth and illusion. Grading is transfigured into the mathematical and statistical, which, of course, makes grading into a hard sort of science or technology. In many settings, grades emerge at the outcome of the process as percentages. That is, the student’s effort is “graded” on a scale from one to a hundred, and faculty are often confident in debating over a few percentage points. This student’s performance is worth a sixty eight. No, they are worth seventy. This mystique of precision comes to matter when there is a “pass⁄fail” point, or an admissions requirement. This is mythical and mysterious, because the original assignment of the grade is always dependent on judgment, and the numbers we end up with are no stronger than the judgments made initially, which were rarely fine and precise. This may be less obvious in technical subjects that appear to be dependent on getting some calculation right. But even here, judgments had to be made about the level of difficulty. “Hey, Mom, I got 100% on my test today!” Oh, well, the test (or the course) must have been too easy. But the thing that really matters; the teacher was satisfied. When judgment of difficulty is combined with judgment of quality, the numbers become even more problematic. I look at this paper I am about to mark. Crudely, I can see it is some sort of snapshot of a performance at the moment that she or he clicked the printer icon. Three days earlier, or three days later, and it might have been a different document. “Crudely” because it represents a “performance” several steps removed. I don’t see the performance itself, and I certainly have no idea at all about what went into creating it. I can speculate, of course, but the hard science of grading isn’t about such speculation, and even if I wrestled with something genuinely educational, and speculated, and then applied my speculation to my grading, I would very likely be wildly inaccurate, and therefore unjust in other ways. So what I grade is this strange piece of paper, not even a quality of a person’s outer mind that can be perceptible through their body. A piece of paper that materialised in this form at a particular instant in time, and is far removed from the complex active being who is the student living and experiencing through time. So I grade the piece of paper, not the person’s learning, experience, or achievement at all. And in that grading of the whole “class”, it is perfectly feasible, and acceptable, that one person who has done very little work, and grown very little, will get an A, while another person who has worked very hard, and undergone very considerable growth, driving themselves forward against the panic of confusion and reasonable doubt, will get a C. None of this matters, of course, because these peculiarities are only peculiarities or distortions of human experience in the light of a certain purpose – a human and educational one. But that is not what we are about. We are supplying markets here. We are grading fruit. Some are to be wrapped in tissue and sent to the good markets, because they possess the required virtues. Some are blemished, and will be juiced, and some are plain rotten. It is a pity we must discard so many. Because the stakes are so high – such as getting into the “right” college in order to compete for the “best” jobs, students inevitably learn some very inappropriate lessons. Some learn that they are “A” students, and others learn that they are “C” students. It is part of their identity, like race, or gender. The letters are as if branded on their foreheads, so that “C” students don’t really believe that they can do any better anyway. “A” students know that they are “A” students (though there is a class who realise that they are “imposters”). One of the truly awful things here is that both believe that it is some indication of how smart they are. “C” students, pretty sure that they aren’t so smart, cluster together for safety. “A” students can afford to be confident. They are the smart ones, obviously, and this is their sort of place. Just watch how some of them perform when they enter on a kind of study that is unfamiliar to them, and they don’t get their “A” straight away. Something is wrong, and they just know it can’t be them! Differences in subject matter, and method and purpose dissolve into questions of justice. The concept of “intelligence” that we have done so much to render bankrupt, lurks in the background. After all, the whole purpose of IQ tests was to predict success in schooling. This is what intelligence meant for the testers. In the first instance they wanted to draft out those at the bottom, before their presence caused too much trouble. But these differences in school performance are likely very poor indicators of differences in intelligence. Simple things like the differences in reasons for study, different understandings of the nature of the game and how it works and, more importantly, different understandings of how to work the system make all the difference, as does the relative confidence that flows from relative success. Few of these things have much to do with how inherently smart you are. It is probably the case that there are numerous strategies that are effective for getting good grades, but that vary in the other purposes they serve. Some students are more adept at figuring out what the teacher wants than others, and with some finesse at writing and assembling answers, they can routinely get “A”s. I have had “A” students who, when set a task that required them to reason for themselves, found they couldn’t do it. They acknowledged (with some chagrin) that they couldn’t do it, and changed their whole approach. Not all of them of course. These were the ones who were more flexible and adaptable, but also (notice) concerned to give the teacher what he wants. And because “A”s were matters of course for them, their extra confidence made it easier for them to believe that they could adapt. It is possible, for instance, to have a real mastery of the routines advocated in all those study manuals and guides, and with hard work, to get “A”s in a predictable fashion. But those study guides are about the clerical work of study, and about what the teachers (think they) want. They are poor guides to academic scholarship – or to educational growth – and they won’t turn you from a clerk into a scholar or a serious researcher.
“Giving them what they want”
The teacher sets a topic for an assignment – a topic that lends itself to some reading in the library (sometimes called “research”). The teacher explains what they want to see demonstrated or shown in the essay, and they admonish the student to “give reasons”. It is clear, however, that their personal, naked reasons probably won’t stand on their own, and so they must find references for their reasons, or someone else’s reason where they don’t have any that they can “back up”. Someone else must have said something useful in a book that has the appearance of being “scholarly”; a “reliable” source. They are to give their reasons, but not on their own authority. They must find stuff to “support” them, and these must be cited, in the teacher’s preferred format, in a bibliography or list of references. This both shows their deference to the authority of someone else who knows better, and is a protection against the sin of plagiarism. It shouldn’t be too difficult. Someone, somewhere has almost certainly said something like it in the past. We just need to find them and cite them, and then, since they are “authorities”, the blame can go to them if the idea turns out to be bad. None of this “referencing” bares much relationship to the reasons good scholars offer references in their work, or the ways in which good scholars use them where they do exist. The schooling-and-teaching reasons for using references are quite different from their effective use in research, but few students every learn the difference. What is missing in all this is the value of the knowledge itself, as well as how genuine knowledge might be created, and rendered authoritative. The odds are that the teacher doesn’t know any of this either, since they became teachers in just the same way. Like many professors, they weren’t immersed in the epistemology of their own fields, and their understanding of the “pursuit of truth” advanced little beyond what was expected in class. The simplest test is to ask them why it matters to study any of this – the most undesirable of questions; usually given the most cursory and unconvincing of answers. Unconvincing because the teacher doesn’t have time for anything convincing, but also because teachers rarely spent time reflecting on it to good effect themselves. Our (encouraged) aim has been to write for the teacher, the giver-of-grades. Our “research” isn’t real research; it is looking things up. We have little understanding at all of the processes involved in creating the claims that get put into books, or why some claims, or books, really do have more authority than others. The book, or source, or text stands like a wall between the student and the community of inquiry on the other side that creates the “knowledge” and gives it provisional sanction. The student on one side of the wall stands in doubt and confusion against a wall of solidity, confidence and apparent conviction – without any sense of the doubt, confusion, disagreement, challenge and debate that lies on the other side – in the relevant intellectual community. In such a fashion, students do not acquire knowledge, let alone create it. They are dependent upon an arcane authority that will only disclose the basis of that authority at advanced graduate levels; if then. There are plenty of professors who think that their job is to “back up their views”, rather than seek to have them challenged. I heard a story that goes to the heart of the political divisions in America, but is more informative, perhaps, of our educational misunderstandings, and our inability to create educational relationships anywhere. A right wing student finds himself in a university class with a “liberal” or “left wing” teacher, and surrounded by “liberal” or “left wing” students, all of whom feel free to share their political views, and who would no doubt turn on him if he tried to air his own. He feels angry. This is unfair. Universities are full of these people, and surely he is entitled to be taught by someone who shares his politics, so that he isn’t marginalised and estranged; so that he doesn’t feel he must “keep his head down”. Politics, on this prevalent model, isn’t a matter of enquiry; it is a matter of identity. The first thing that we should notice about this situation is that, at least as far as the description goes, none of the participants are involved in a properly educational process. The right wing student wants a right wing professor, which is to say, that he wants his own views confirmed. He is there to get “better reasons” for the views he already holds, not to have them challenged. But this is also true of his “liberal” or “left wing” peers. If he is right, they will turn on him, not to embrace the only opportunity to develop some challenge to their own views, but probably with scorn – at least that is what he fears – and the behaviour of his professor tends to confirm this. And if he is right, then there will be no proper engagement with challenge on either side. He may be able to use what he hears to challenge his own understandings and beliefs, but since he dare not question, he will have no chance to refine his questions, and no help at all in doing so. Any challenge he attempts to engage with the issues in his own silence will probably have limited value, partly because the other students and the professor are under little pressure to make their own views more sophisticated. They won’t be a real challenge to him. He has probably heard it all before. And the behaviour of the professor provides grounds for the student to believe in this impasse. Even though the professor is also “liberal⁄left wing” he or she doesn’t appear to be interested in challenging the views of the “liberal⁄left wing” students, but of confirming them. A teacher who was an educator – even on quite a conventional understanding – would be offering their students contrasting, challenging positions, intelligently put together, and would be expecting the students to take them seriously and respond to them thoughtfully. They would be probing for weaknesses and facile assumptions behind all positions, regardless of their preferences. And if they couldn’t think of good objections themselves, they would be encouraging their class to come up with them. They would be fostering a respectful enquiry, in terms of which all might develop knowledge. Instead, the professor is modelling that very limited thing – the transmission of what he or she believes to be true. Such professors are, of course, much easier to “read” – much more amenable to the student tactic of figuring out what the teacher believes, and therefore, what they want. All of the students stand to exit the process still dependent – at best – upon that formally contrived authority, with little accomplished to enable them to be any more responsible for their beliefs in two, five, or ten years’ time. It is not just the “right wing” student who is being let down here. Everyone is let down; even the professor, who would also stand to learn from a proper and rigorous inquiry – particularly if all the students had experience of a long history of such inquiries – as they should. It may be important to note that we need not assume that a scenario like this is likely to be confined to courses of political studies. It may well be much worse elsewhere; arising in other subjects; even in vocational ones that have become open to political discussion, such as discussions of power, justice, race, gender or class. Professors and students feel no compunction about taking a political position, particularly if it has come to seem one that is sanctioned and commonly expressed in the intellectual community. The problem is that, because they aren’t in political studies, they don’t feel under any pressure – ethically or socially – to challenge the political assumptions that are surfacing. Challenge can be neglected if for no other reason than to do so would take time away from the official subject matter. I write, though, in a time of deep political division and hostility where it can be perilous to become isolated in a politicised community. Across the divide, politics is not a matter of discussion, it is a matter of combat. This can mean that, where colleges have lost their way, it can be dangerous for professors to offer challenges to the doctrines that are the standard around them. It might be their educational responsibility to do so, even when they share those views, because challenging established positions is a condition of educational growth. Doing so in such circumstances, however, can create serious issues for personal peace and even for personal safety. Exercising educational judgment can be an unfortunate career move, compromising the possibility of making any further educational contribution in the future.
Bodies of knowledge
These illustrations of practice, and the endless variations upon them, go back to the systematic features of the physical and social institutionalisation of schooling, and the architecture of ideas and purposes that they are understood to serve. There is the first, general assumption that there are “established bodies of authoritative knowledge” to be “passed on” by those with some sort of official power to insist upon it. They can insist upon it here in regard to those who are immature and captive within a system of compulsory schooling where they cannot insist upon it with those adults who actually construct this knowledge, because those adults exist in intellectual communities that are supposed to encourage doubt and disagreement. These “bodies of knowledge” present themselves to us as if they are bodies of logically ordered and finished “information”, albeit information that sometimes requires some complex understanding. The discrepancy here is with the way in which this knowledge is created, and the nature of its stability. In its creation, it is better understood in the activities of real, professional intellectual communities, and the activities consist in various kinds of scholarship and experimentation that find their place within or without complex debates. Elements of these debates become settled for a time, depending upon the field. Some elements may be considered more or less settled like this over a number of generations, but these are relatively rare across the whole world of these professional intellectual communities. Other elements that appear settled from time-to-time may change many times over a professional lifetime. In many fields, too, where these “debates” show the coalescence of interest in the intellectual community, they are surrounded by a host of “studies” and inquiries that attract little or no attention in the community at all. They twinkle briefly in their solitude. They are not debated, they are not examined closely for their methodological adequacy, nor are they replicated, even if they “get published”. To the outsider, though, they are still part of that “body of knowledge”; yet another brick in its accumulation. They are of a piece with any other stuff that you might find when you go to the library to look for “authorities” to cite in your essay. These studies are sometimes combined into clusters when they seem to be a part of a particular trend. “Studies show”. This can, of course, just be a proliferation of error, which gets turned over in ten years’ time, to the very great benefit of some emerging academic careers. This is particularly true of the social sciences and their applied versions that have to do with “practical affairs”, of which education is just one. Social work, nursing, management and leadership are others. A key element in the development of these debates is intellectual purpose. In some fields or disciplines, such as some of the natural sciences, the purposes are relatively stable. There is an agreed problematic that is used partly to define the discipline for a time, and in rare cases this may last for many decades or even centuries, and the debates along the lines of these purposes can result in some questions appearing settled. But even in the most impressive of these sciences, because they are aimed at a common curiosity – a humanly perceived problematic – and because the understanding of a common purpose can only be human, they are not unaffected by the many ways in which their problematic manifests itself in the cultures of their day. The path that might be taken in a world dominated by a religious sensitivity and its questions will shift in a culture dominated by industry, technology, war or trade. Even though most of us will experience considerable shifts in what is found to be scientifically “true” in our own life-times – including from relatively “hard” sciences, and quite dramatically in fields such as medicine, or history, or psychology – we persist in thinking of education as a process of passing on those “bodies of knowledge”, in the spirit of “cultural transmission”, that was discussed in Chapter 2. We do so through a structure of “educational” authority that has a confidence in itself far out of joint with the doubt and uncertainty that exists – and should exist – in the intellectual communities that work well in the creation of knowledge, a confidence that is quite incompatible with the duty of challenge upon which good intellectual communities are based. Throughout a period of, say, fifteen years of schooling, many of those apparent “bodies” will have been going through processes of breaking down and remaking themselves, and will continue to do so. The idea of the “body of knowledge” upon which a curriculum may be based, is a fictional construction, a rock-pile lying somewhere between the intellectual communities and the schools. A construction in which the activities of living, breathing communities are abstracted and fixed, reified; and with an authority breathed into them that they may never have had in their communities of origin. But since learners aren’t inducted into these epistemological problems, a veil is drawn over all of these issues of authority. There is even a fantasy about “progress” in all this, which privileges “the latest” knowledge in ways that are quite absurd. Knowledge doesn’t just “accumulate”; worthy projects constantly fall out of fashion, and their materials and media become less and less available. Because of this, it is not at all easy always to be clear when and how it has “advanced” at all. A small glimpse of this can be discovered with a little appreciation of the brief life of books in print, and the rapidly diminishing life of old books toward the expiration of copyright and beyond – and also how limited is the carrying capacity of even quite good libraries. Another useful test is how far young scholars are expected to go back in their literature reviews (to the extent, of course, that they take any real account of the old literature at all). There is little way of telling whether new work is really a poor excursion into an area well-studied in the past, except to draw on the memories of old scholars, who are apt to die. All of this assumes, of course, the relative clarity of professional, intellectual communities of inquiry that appear to be seeking the “truth”, in some sort of detached way, about human nature, and the natural world in which we live. It assumes these communities offer their knowledge to us in a kind of pure and impartial way; sometimes distinguished from “practical” and “applied” fields as being “theoretical”. In this abstraction, they have often been justified very directly as educational content – even in the service of working out good lives because they are about “the way the world is”, or about the “way human beings are”. After all, if it is our concern that learners come to make good decisions for themselves about their lives, it is surely desirable that they be acquainted with the best of our knowledge about human nature, and the best of our knowledge of the world and its universe within which that human nature must exist. Often, this is grossly reduced to the mere presentation of “facts”. The problem of the “objectivity” of these facts often only becomes apparent when we explore the intellectual histories of these studies in critical detail, and as cultural artifacts. Though quite frequently this general assumption about the purity of non-applied studies is passed off in a very abstract way as sufficient justification for much educational content – the answer to the question “what knowledge is of most worth” – it is as problematic as any other vague generalisation when it comes to justifying what we might do. It is equally problematic as the idea that we all “must be socialised” – which seems to permit indiscriminate socialisation in anything those who can influence the young happen to prefer – including hardening us against suffering, or boredom, or cultivating contempt. Or as problematic as the acknowledgment that caregivers must guide and teach the naive and vulnerable young is then used to justify inflicting our own preferences, or perceived “wisdoms” gained from our own “experience of life” on to them, to save them having to go through what we went through. The difference is that it gets to parade under a banner of “greater objectivity”. All of these vague assumptions about knowledge and its ready conversion into educational content remain problematic, and are in constant danger of blundering into the unethical, because the basic ethic of education – which should do so much to define and guide this process – is never spelled out in sufficient detail to enable us to ask, with any clarity, “what does this have to do with an individual person’s power to make something of their own lives and experiences?” Because we don’t have any clarity over the task that this question implies, we settle for vague answers to these questions of content as well. There is no real attempt to interpret this vagueness in the circumstances of real life, and no real pressure to come up with alternative possibilities that might have a greater claim. Certainly there is no real attempt to make sense of it to learners, in their own lives; so that we can get a better sense of where or how it might fit into their experience, or their interests or intentions for themselves. They are just fobbed off with our “adult wisdom”. It is only when we step beyond the vagueness of “good living”, and move to explain and describe the educational requirements of respect as it must play out in real life, that we are able to build tools adequate to the tasks of making such decisions well; of setting higher standards for the decisions. But when “practical people” depend on these generalities – in the absence of a well-articulated ethic – “knowledge” and its “authority” can be seen to play an almost magical role in decision-making. If the spell of “knowledge” is vague enough, it can turn all sorts of things into educational content without the need for much examination at all. Our intellectual laziness about the transformation of inquiry into knowledge leads simply to the unthinkingly perpetuation of unexamined tradition; a tradition that might be good enough for a gross and exploitative social engineering, but not nearly good enough for education.
Vocationalism
Almost everyone that makes up that mass of the population need to earn a livelihood – of course! And so, without opening that up as a problem within the context of living well as a matter of self-respect, we leap straight to practice. And here – without sufficient ethical or educational guidance – we convert education into job preparation. How we might earn a livelihood is an issue that lies down-stream of the larger and controlling issue of how we might live a worthwhile life – worthwhile to ourselves. On the one hand there are questions of whether fulfilling work is an essential part of living a worthwhile life – that satisfying labour may be an essential condition of such a life, in balance with play and “re”-creation. Freud, for instance prioritised work as well as love. To the extent that work has this kind of humane importance, it might be essential regardless of the income that it might generate – we might still seek fulfilling work even where we had a surplus of financial riches. On the other hand, there is the “livelihood thing”, that work is necessary to generate sufficient income for the basic means to life – or for sufficient income to live an abundant life apart from the work. Where our concern is with a whole population, we must be concerned for both of these possibilities, because the proportion of the population that has independent means, and need only consider the first, is likely to be small. For most, if fulfilling work is to be a possibility at all, it must be found within conditions of employment, and this throws up numerous paradoxes and dilemmas for our lives. The question of fulfilling labour cannot, for instance, be understood merely in terms of the purposes of the labour – of beautician, mechanic, computer technician, sales representative, lawyer or journalist – but also in the terms under which we are likely to be engaged in any of these capacities. The activity, in the abstract, or under congenial conditions, might be understood to be intrinsically fulfilling. The conditions under which it might have to be undertaken, on the other hand – as determined by those who hire and manage us – might make a living hell out of any of them, and does of many. This, in brief, is the reason why vocational preparation cannot be at the centre of anything that we should consider calling “educational”. If education must firstly be justified by respect for persons, and this comes down to respect for the learner, then consideration of living a worthwhile life must come first, since this will not only be the framework that should guide learners in understanding the place of worthwhile work in their lives, it should also enable them to discover and negotiate the problems of putting themselves up for hire, and the problems that can be consequent on being hired. It should help them to decide what they will stand for. To have some control over the value of their own lives, they would need to pursue, for their own sake, a critical understanding of work in their world – critical, in the interests of their own self-respect. It should be clear enough that schooling, as we know it, defines its purposes downstream and without regard to the basic priority of respect; starting at vocationalism as if there are no such ethical priorities. Vocationalism is at the centre, surrounded by a cloud of social agendas held for learners by those with the power to push them, and that emphasise social conformity and compliance. For this sort of social engineering, conventional schooling, with the externality of the teaching process, its indifference to the inner lives of learners, and its intrinsic bias in favour of conformity and dependency, is perfectly in tune. The emphasis is on “fitting in”. If it wasn’t, then it would be uncomfortably clear to many that schools were not “preparing learners for the world of work” as that currently exists. We should have no difficulty in recognising, in the conventional conditions of schooling, just how coherent with schooling for slavery this system is. The kinds of conditions that would have to be in place – the critical history and sociology of work, the nature of properly humane management, the philosophical discussions both of work satisfaction, and of working under conditions that corrupt such satisfaction, the educational judgment and awareness of indoctrination, and an appreciation of the practical approaches for addressing these problems – would all have to be present if the bar of the slavery test was to be crossed. In the context of such understandings, there would then be a decision-problem for each of us. How should we go about negotiating all this in our lives? The silence in these areas is very loud, and silence, of course, is itself a mechanism of indoctrination.
Meritocracy
The final purpose of the overarching “system” of schooling that is fundamentally at odds with any ethically justifiable idea of education at all is the role that it is supposed to play in the distribution of societal goods and rewards – of creating inequalities that matter. Historically, status and wealth were determined by birth and patronage, but as trade and industry became more important than the basic divisions of those who fight, those who pray, and those who work, new forms of distribution of social goods became bound up with the possibility and desirability of mobility itself. In a capitalist system dependent on the mutuality of production and consumption, one of the primary rewards is clearly financial wealth – the power to consume the goods that the system produces. The other key reward is the status that goes with the value of one’s perceived contribution to production and its maintenance. Having a hand in it, by at least being employed, is to have some minimal merit, but the more one controls it, earns from it, or sustains it in terms of legal, political or administrative service, or facilitates its technologies and infrastructures, the more one is likely to receive back in status, as well as financial wealth.The connection between this social process and the discussions of the problem of conditional self-esteem in Chapters 3 and 4 should be obvious. This is the “meritocracy”, in which we are to receive rewards of income and status in terms of our “merit” – a notion far different from “merit” as that might be understood in Buddhism, for example, or even “faith and works”, but not too remote from Calvinist Christianity. Reward goes to hard work (of the right kind) and to talent. One should notice, too, that the meritocracy defines “success”, which is understood in capitalist societies in terms of the standard rewards of financial wealth and social status. Though many people repeatedly challenge this notion of “success”, the challenges lie outside the prevailing system – and are not at all new. They persist, but remain anomalous, and to some extent do little more than reassure us of our open-mindedness, and the “alternatives” that are “open to us”. They have to be set against the power and ubiquity of schooling, and the work of all those educators who struggle so hard to help learners “succeed” – as well as the constancy of the media, and the visibility of those who are to be admired. The role of schooling, where its meritocratic purpose is concerned, is to provide a partial system of selection and sorting according to merit, and to give this an appearance of fairness. It is partial, of course, because success in schooling is no guarantee of success out there afterwards. It provides certificates that, hypothetically at least, can be cashed in for various opportunities to compete for various positions. Not having the right certificate can rule us out, but the certificate is no assurance of “success”, either. The problems of fairness are well-known. A fair race is always impossible, because educational and indoctrinational experience are much larger than schooling. People start the race and continue in it with all kinds of advantages and handicaps because of this, and schooling does as much to exaggerate them as it does to equalise them. Very many well-meaning teachers want everyone to succeed, but if this really was to happen, the system would fall, and a semblance of meritocratic fairness would have to be achieved in some other way. Indeed the very idea that we could lift everyone up is absurd, if we wanted to preserve meritocracy. In order to work at all, a considerable number must fail to “succeed”, and enough must do this to sustain the legitimacy of the system itself. In this sense, the noble aspiration of so many teachers to help all of their students to achieve success requires that they blind themselves to the nature of the system of which they are a part, and what, precisely the part is that they are obliged to play. Notice, too, that in order to work, it doesn’t much matter what students learn in this system. Where the vocational purpose of schooling is concerned, and we present our certificates at those job interviews, we probably discover that the grades we worked so hard for hardly matter, and certainly no one is likely even to explore what any of those courses actually covered. What might matter is the name of the diploma or degree (in the hope that it might, in some way, speak to the position we are applying for) and the prestige of the institution that gave the diploma. What might also matter is how old the degree is, because “old” means “out of date”. Your degree is losing currency from the day that you graduate. All that work for the good grade may simply have been to get in to the next “right” school. It matters little what we actually did there, so long as we came out with a vaguely relevant certificate. But where meritocracy is concerned, the content of what is learned is (if anything is) even less relevant, as is the quality of the teaching, or the credibility of the grades. Getting sorted is all that matters. From the standpoint of hard work and talent, the only thing that would be wrong with twelve years of sorting out students by having them engage in competitive poker playing would be that it would expose the game for what it really is. Being in school, and learning something does have to have some appearance of relevance, however vague. The general idea of its legitimacy is held together by the sense that the system applies “standards”, and by its appearance of “objectivity”. But the vagueness is obvious when we consider the fashions in school reform, which could emphasise the intrinsic worth of the arts in one decade, STEM in another, fiercely specific vocationalism in another, or the “basics” in yet another. None of these swings or sways raise any question about the fulfillment of the meritocratic purpose at all. All of this, too, is perfectly compatible with the external character of teaching – with its preoccupation with publicly measurable performances, its indifference to what is really going on in the minds of learners. What they are really experiencing, what they believe, feel, or value lies somewhere between being irrelevant and an inconvenient nuisance.
The “logic” of the system
My account of the nature of schooling and teaching here, and in the next chapter, is offered as an account of the internal logic of our so-called “education systems”. These systems have social engineering as their purpose, and this purpose is interpreted in terms of the agendas of various stake-holders external to the learner, but vested in the teacher who is hired to implement those agendas that become policy. Nothing about this institutional structure has anything to do with education at all. In terms of this purpose, and its agendas, teachers are hired to “do” teaching to learners according to these agendas; and in terms of the logic of these relationships, and their authority, the “bucket”, or “pitcher” or “pottery” theories of mind are perfectly appropriate. The fiction of “pouring stuff in” to the learner, or “moulding” them are perfectly compatible with the idea that learning is something that must be done “to” learners, without any real regard to what is in the bucket, or what it is really filling up with, as this might be appreciated from the inside. The process is quite external, and this is also to be seen in the process of grading and assessment, which is equally external. Desirable external behaviour, defined by the external agendas, can be described, and the actual external behaviour can then be measured against these external standards, which, in lying outside the learner, but in the public world of the stake-holders, are thus announced to be “objective”. Indeed, the ultimate “objectivity” in this hierarchy of assessment doesn’t even stop at the level of national politics, but is decided internationally, and not by educators at all, but by economists in the OECD and the World Bank. Where do we rank in reading performance? Where do we rank in science and maths? Where we rank can have repercussions back down through our “system”. This is an account of the logic of the system. It is not an account of the actual convictions or intentions of the people in the system. In this system, and quite at odds with the logic of the system, some pupils do, rather remarkably, have educational experiences and learn things of educational value from time-to-time. This is not counter-evidence. It simply means that the system is a human one; not perfect in its own terms. Indeed, we could account for this by pointing to the limited ability of schooling to address the whole mind. Despite the purposes of the system, it is still possible for some people to become critical, independent and creative thinkers to some degree. We should not be reassured by this, however, because it is equally clear that the system does work – that although it purports to provide the tools of thought, it does so in ways that undercut their effective use by the manner in which their acquisition is experienced, cultivating that dependency, compliancy and powerlessness in citizens and workers that administrators and managers also appear to seek. All those years spent under those conditions takes its toll even of the best, and, since schooling does provide such a huge foundation for the self in our modern societies, its effects can be seen in all of our social problems, dis-eases, tragedies and political wranglings that are our collective, everyday aches and pains. Nor is it the case that all teachers blindly follow the logic of the system. The classroom is, remarkably often, a centre of resistance to the logic of the system on the part of many troubled and hard-working teachers who try to make something humane out of the conditions under which they work. Many teachers, sensing what might be happening with their learners in ways that the “logic” would deny them, and with a more appropriate appreciation of caring and respect, run risks with understanding of their teaching duties, and attempt to work against the “logic”. Indeed, a good deal of talk and advocacy occurs at the level of the actual teaching that appears to run counter to the logic. There is much talk of “challenging assumptions” and “critical thinking” and putting the learner first. But on any close examination, it is clear that these practices and advocacies occur within very closely circumscribed limits. They very much favour “fitting in”, and have very much more to do with reconciling our lives to the “way things are” and to resolving potential conflicts than they have to do with building deep personal strength, confidence or independence. Within these limits, the humane talk merely puts a benign and benevolent face on agendas that exist to render learners serviceable and manageable. The easy test of this lies in the limitations of learner participation in the setting of learning agendas, and of the development and administration of the rules under which they must live – the rules legitimated by state compulsion. The final tests lie, of course, in the silence over critical thinking about the whole system itself, its authority, and the development of educational judgment. It is the social agendas, as determined by official authority, and under political, rather than educational determination, that finally dominate. This too is understandable. There is a fundamental contradiction between the purposes that modern, universal compulsory state schooling were set up to serve, and the core ethic of respect for humanity that has been evolving in recent centuries; the ethic of respect that provides the foundation for our current, commonly-held sense of justice and human rights. Teachers represent the point at which those external agendas of conventional schooling come face-to-face with real learners, and it is in their own real experience that the contradiction between their own humanity and the real purpose of schooling is liable to be most keenly felt. Though their good hearts struggle against the “logic”, the latter is larger, and will always outlast them. There will, moreover, always be other teachers. We need to understand how ineffectual this resistance is, on any larger view, even though there may be many local miracles that give temporary personal satisfaction. Very few learners, across all those years of schooling, will have more than one of two teachers like this. The logic of schooling is much larger than the effect of these isolated events. Most learners will not even have these experiences at all. The system and its purpose is vastly greater than our efforts, and those glimmers of light that we see, that we think presage some sort of educational progress, merely twinkle and disappear, as they have done so now for well over a century, in the endless parade of “educational” fashion and exciting “educational” innovation. Even in these days of “austerities” enduring cuts in the UK and the US, with cries about the underfunding and children who are hungry and cold, and teachers who are often working at multiple jobs, it seems hard for those involved to acknowledge that schooling now may be worse than it has been in the past. The factory grinds on, oblivious; so vast that it can permit those temporary innovations; so vast that it always returns to its inevitable logic.
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The “logic” of conventional schooling is completely at odds with the requirements of education, and fundamentally unethical. School is about agendas others have for learners – not for their own sake. Not only does this mean that the purpose of schooling is incompatible with education, it is ethically untenable. It is a systematic form of indoctrination 
