The vacuum at the centre of our “educational” thinking

The vacuum at the centre

of our “educational” thinking

I have repeatedly claimed that education, properly conceived, should be about equipping learners to devise and realise worthwhile lives for themselves. The core value in education, I have said, should be the intrinsic value of the person we would educate – equal to the value of every other person – and that this value is prior to serving our own ends, or any other agenda that we or others might have for learners. I find it hard to conceive that there could be a more fundamental purpose that could justify overriding this one, and I suspect that support for the idea is about as widespread as any agreement we could hope to achieve. Education should simply be a matter of respect for the life of the learner, and where that is not the first and ruling priority we should be against such proposals or undertakings offered in education’s name.

My perception is, however, that while this purpose easily rallies consent, it is simply like so many high-minded platitudes or commonplaces that remain mere abstractions. People assent to it readily enough. They feel it coheres with their core values – and it probably does. But because it remains an abstraction, it is powerless to affect much that we do.

As it stands – just barely stated – it offers no clear principles for action or conduct in education at all. It offers no benchmark against which our practices or decisions can be held to see if they measure up. Between its abstraction and our practice are a million specific conditions and qualifications that jostle for attention, so that by the time we engage with the “reality” of our institutions and practices, its value has disappeared almost entirely.

As a consequence, as “educators”, we end up swimming in a sea of coercion and manipulation of the minds of learners according to the agendas that we and others have for them; agendas that are remote from the core value of their own lives. With the purpose so compromised, we leave them, through into adulthood, relatively powerless to manage the growth of their own minds, with little sense of what is involved or at stake in making a worthwhile life that is truly theirs.

We leave them prey to fashion, convention, the judgments and self-interest of others, advertising, “nudging” and the political propaganda in which all of our social worlds are drenched – indoctrination that is often “evidence-based”, and insidiously injected into our lives with sophisticated technology. The extent to which we fail to equip learners to be in charge of their own lives and minds – and able to take responsibility for them – is the extent to which we facilitate the power of these forces.

To grasp what is missing, it is helpful to recall some aspects of the circumstances under which our present, popular conception of  “education” arose. Universal, compulsory state schooling emerged from a world in which living the worthwhile life had largely been settled by birth – by the social and cultural context of one’s family of origin. Not only were the expectations of worthwhile living settled by fine gradations of social hierarchy that were reflected in the nature of worthwhile work, of recreation and entertainment, of detailed etiquette and civility, of protocols and authority in marriage and family. The ethical dilemmas and perplexities of life not covered in these ways were also largely settled for us as well – by religious authority – and where such concerns were complex or contradictory, they were deferred to the pastoral care of the prevailing religious professionals or “elders”. This is not to say that these things weren’t challenged, or that finding one’s way was always simple and unquestioning.

The difference, however, between that kind of world and the independence and responsibility that most of us take for granted today makes it hard for us to conceive of living such lives without enormous frustration. And yet if we were to break down that whole framework of institutions and conventions that did so much to settle “good living”, and replace it with the expectations of self-determination that we live with today, the transformation would have to be accompanied by a radical difference in education. Where it was enough simply to be “brought up to it”, the revolution in responsibility would have required an equal revolution in education – an education that would equip each of us to exercise our self-determination personally, and as freely and fully as all that social architecture and authority had once settled most things for us so easily and so well.

For all of us now – as it wasn’t for those in the past – there are two fundamental questions that are problematic at the core of each of our lives. What shall I do with my life? And – what sort of person shall I become? “What shall I make of my life?”, while being a perennial question, fell, for most, within a much narrower sphere than it does now. No longer can we rest back on stable and predetermined recipes and roles within an elaborate structure of rank and authority.

Now, “what am I to make of my life?” is the central question for anyone who would claim moral independence and self-determination, and for anyone who lives within a world dominated by such expectations. Whether or not we ask such questions vigorously, or well (whether or not our education equips us to do so), such questions follow as central to the lives we live, simply from our contemporary moral situation.

Universal, compulsory, state schooling was never intended to close this gap, and has never attempted to do so since. Enlightenment thinkers, who initiated the interest in human agency and responsibility that underpin the commitments to human rights and democracy that we take for granted today, were almost universally opposed to the idea that the populace as a whole could, let alone should, be educated to assume such self-determination. Universal schooling had more to do with creating a workforce with its domestic support system, on the one hand, and building common national cultures with shared, popular understandings, information, stories, and aspirations, on the other. 

Schooling was, as it is today, simply a matter of managing and domesticating populations. It was social engineering. The engineers themselves were still expected to be that small class of people who would be the heirs of the Enlightenment thinkers, and their different education was expected to consist in a combination of advanced professional training and the ancient and evolving tradition of a liberal education.

Though the idea of national systems of schooling was developed initially with little expectation (or desire) that they play a role in social mobility, changes in power structures that were consequent on the industrial revolution were already fracturing the strict lines of social class based on birth.  In its place came a more fluid hierarchy of “socio-economic status”, supposedly based on merit; a combination of “intelligence” and diligence. In this transformation, the development of universal, compulsory, state schooling systems came to have a central gate-keeping role, sifting, sorting and grading according to these capacities. Civil service examinations, and university entrance examinations or tests were devised to select for “ability”. They were intended to replace traditional practices of assigning positions on the basis of nepotism, or “who you know”.

None of this, of course, had anything to do with equipping people for intellectual or moral self-determination. Conforming to social expectations was taken for granted in the beginning, and was continuous into modern population-management and its social engineering. Even a liberal education, with a heritage several thousands of years old, turns out to be a poor, vague thing when ripped out of its class context.

Liberal-education-as-elite-schooling was effective as a subordinate educational mechanism for a social class that valued and patronised the arts and sciences and was capable of distinguishing itself as Enlightened. Its inadequacies are quickly revealed when the values of that class collapsed, and a liberal education is left trying to survive and influence an anti-intellectual culture-at-large that has been dedicated to wealth creation.

We have, then, a deep cultural dilemma. On the one hand, through some long and often painful centuries of struggle, we have come to embrace human rights which have, at bottom, an absolute and unconditional appreciation of the intrinsic worth of each human being, where that value is to be expressed in terms of our self-determination. We dare not decide for others what they should do or believe, or make of themselves, and they can halt us, with a word, should we presume to do so. Those cases where we do override such self-determination are the occasion of much thought, debate and complex legal judgment.

At the same time, we do almost nothing to prepare people, through education, to assume the enormous and complex responsibilities that self-determination entails, acting as if most of these matters are readily resolved simply by accidental experience. Since we do nothing to equip growing people to learn or think or decide about what they are to make of their lives, and since the complex superstructure of rank and rules and authorities and social expectations that severely restricted the need for self-determination has collapsed, we now bring people up with a significant void in them where the things most important to their humanity are supposed to be. In the past they would have spoken of this void as a “soullessness”. But today, “mindless”, or “heartless” or just plain “emptiness” will serve equally well.

This is no small or simple omission. It is not something that can be repaired with needlepoint (or powerpoint) mottos, or mindfulness. All cultures give evidence of complex trajectories in the quest for solutions to good living and the good society, and even when these things have been settled into rules and conventions and traditions of authority and power, we also have traditions of independent thought about these matters that span thousands of years and which show that questions of how best to live are some of the most perplexing and complex of questions; and unavoidable. These traditions, however, are scholarly. They do not penetrate very far at all into the larger culture.

But we now have to decide these complex questions for ourselves. We have no choice about that. We can only do it well or badly. Since the Enlightenment, in our age of self-determination, the task falls to each of us. Our “philosophy of life” matters, but it must be each our own. Where education is concerned, however, we are simply left to it. We may become lawyers, or engineers, or policy-makers, or scientists, but in regard to living well, or creating lives of meaning, we are abandoned in our infancy.

There are initiatives in contemporary education that are compatible with the pursuit of this area of content.  Indeed any initiative that empowers the actual interests and curiosities of learners, listens to them, encouraging them to set their own learning tasks, and to engage in individual and collaborative learner inquiry, at the expense of the teacher-driven and teacher-centred, is a step in the right direction. These are in the right direction, because they attend so much more closely to the integrity of the learner, and respect for them, and because our central problem will always be the tendency for educators to favour their own agendas for learners, particularly in regard to what it is to live well, or gain meaning from life.

But the problem of depending entirely on learner interest, curiosity and inquiry as the sole principle of educational judgment, rather than employing the guidance of considered educational principle to cultivate that interest and curiosity, is that these things immediately spring forth in learners in the shapes of the culture in which they find themselves, right from their beginnings. What there is to be curious about, and have an interest in are invariably the products and arrangements of the culture around them. They will reach for plastic mugs. They will grasp at pre-made toys. They will learn a specific language or languages, and not pick them at random, or “out of curiosity”, and these will quickly define what they perceive.  They are loaded with cultural value.

Even “nature” is not neutral. No  engagement with insects, for instance, will take children very far outside our cultural efforts to control or protect such animals. Children will be dependent upon the resources available to them, and these will consist, for the most part, in how insects are perceived by our sciences, our arts and our enterprises; how they are perceived in everyday life and conceived in our languages. Children will find, inquire into, and explore what is there is be found, and they will prioritize those questions that the culture acknowledges. And even the most libertarian educator, who trusts the wisdom of the choices children make about what to learn, will have done a great deal to preselect the environment in which the exploration will take place. They will have chosen “safe” ones – both physically and emotionally, and they will have chosen ones they consider rich in possibility.

Worse than this, perhaps, is to overlook how much culture has already been involved in the earlier activities of care-givers, prior to, and as, language and the possibilities of questioning and doubting begin to emerge. The roots of learner-inquiry lie in the interests and activities of play. But these are going on before reason in a time when a great deal of fundamental socialisation has already been happening.

Anyone who would cultivate learner-inquiry with learners who have grown up in unpredictable environments will know that some order must be achieved before much coherent inquiry would ever be possible. Stability of rules and routines is essential in all this, but of course all the rules and routines are cultural. Aristotle wisely pointed out that we become just by doing just acts; by which he meant that becoming moral involves children learning to follow the moral rules, as these are understood by adults, before they can understand them as moral themselves, let alone follow them for their own sake. But what rules and routines? What stabilities and predictabilities? These are educational decisions for the care-giver, embedded in a culture.

Even questioning and doubting – crucial accomplishments for both reason and inquiry – have such interesting beginnings. Not only are these dependent upon the ways in which languages is used in specific environments. More than this, in order to be acquired, there are so many delicious ambiguities to be navigated once a child discovers their power, and begins to use questions everywhere. Effective questions depends upon existing knowledge and judgment, and it is important to distinguish between the form of a question – which can be idle and empty – and a question that has something to engage in experience, and for which there is – at least in principle – the possibility of an intelligible answer.

In the period in which questioning is a new and exciting discovery for the child (along with the power that goes with asking them) questions tend to flow in an endless stream which caregivers must navigate. In doing so, Caregivers negotiate this stream by performing a kind of educational triage. 

There are questions that can be answered, though some will be inconvenient. There are “questions” that have the form of questions, but that get no grip on anything for which there could be an intelligible enquiry – genuinely “idle” questions that are not really effective questions at all. And there are questions that stump the care-giver – questions to which the care-giver is likely to say (silently) “good question! There should be an answer to that! I have no idea what the answer might be, but I wonder myself what would happen if I had the time to pursue it!”

In this triage, often performed in the heat of many other things that just have to be done, the child learns much about what appropriate questions are. Not all questions are given the attention that even good care-givers feel that they deserve. Not all judgments that the caregivers make about questions that are “not real questions” are likely to be well-judged, either. Some may even be questions that “shouldn’t be asked”; impolite or improper – or potentially dangerous. In the process, and guided by the triage, children learn what “questions” to suppress.

This is the educational background to the educational possibilities of learner inquiry, and knowledge of such things is essential to the construction of future educational environments and challenges. It is of little use to say that we can just trust the native wisdom of learners to make sound educational judgments for themselves, and unaided. The construction of the world is a construction of a local cultural environment mediated by the decisions and actions of  caregivers,  and this is “nature”. It is the natural condition of human development that creates the educational problematic.

Learner-centred educators will therefore already have made some predetermining educational choices, and this is how it should be, so long as they understand that they have, indeed, applied some educational predetermination. The mistake would be to believe that they hadn’t; that the decisions of learners were somehow educationally “pure”; untouched by adult caregiving. But the fact of this educational decision-making does raise the question of the fullness and adequacy of that predetermination; whether it is educationally complete, and full, or in various ways harmful or impoverished.

What there is out there for insects, plastic cups, the use of technology or even understanding the weather does not exist with equal cultural seriousness in our contemporary world when it comes to the issues involved in achieving a worthwhile life. What does exist is the trivialisation of these humanly central issues; their reduction to the lowest common denominators of marketing, along with all that social engineering about jobs and responsible eating. Beyond “learning how to behave”, the quest for a fulfilling life is just another consumer item. The search for meaning in life has been reduced to a joke about philosophy.

A serious learner-centred educator might, therefore, even eliminate much of the cultural content that is actually there, being rightly conscious of the indoctrination and propaganda that it contains. But in our present cultural circumstances, while this might be appropriate, the effect would also be to reduce the content that speaks to, or conceptualises good living at all, almost to nothing, because of the cultural and conceptual impoverishment of the issues of good living in modern life. In making these decisions without making them transparent, and without opening up the problems and decisions of good living upon which they depend, such educators are prioritising their own conclusions about these matters as a part of the educational content, and perhaps doing so unaware. Silence and concealment are mechanisms of indoctrination.

There is, unfortunately, very little of significance in our cultures that speaks to the interests that any child or young person might have in the good of their own lives, such that they could engage in genuine inquiry into them out of perplexities that arise in the course of their everyday experience.(1) This is firstly because our own expectations of relevant, disciplined discourse about it are already so limited through the neglect in our own education, and also because we see the issues of living well largely as matters of accidental experience gained in the course of “growing up”. Regardless of a predisposition to doubt their capacity to discuss it in useful ways, we can hardly imagine what an “age-appropriate” inquiry might be when we have so little experience of it ourselves, being able to offer so little light, even to each other. There are few expectations that there is anything to know.

There is no academic discipline called “living well” – as there are for insects, or the weather. There are no attempts to conceptualise it, or structure it intellectually – for educational, or other personal or social purposes. It is not a “content area” in schooling, so it can’t be very important. There is no public or popular practice of exploring the issues of living well in disciplined ways. Google searches are likely to yield depressing results.

Here, of course, the vacuum within the culture becomes a vacuum within the learner, because there is nothing (that is not trivial or cliched) that learners might build upon out of any interest in their own well-being. Where there is a vacuum of this kind, it will, of course, be filled. The educational vacuum becomes filled by every other agenda for the manipulation of the lives and consciousness of young people.

When our own agendas seem noble to us, we have so few qualms about this. We want them to stand for world peace, sustainability, to save the seas, the whales, the rhino and the atmosphere, to establish gender and racial equality, and to create a loving society. We want them to be innovative and aspirational. It seems churlish to suggest that there is any harm in such agendas – even shocking to suggest that it might be wrong for us to have them.

But what we are doing when we do this is exploiting that vacuum – counting on the probability that our noble purposes for the lives of others will simply flood in and fill it. We want that to happen. We want to market our ideas – even through schools, and we value the fact that the minds of learners have been rendered so receptive to our own enthusiasm.

But if we accept this situation, and exploit it on grounds of our own nobility, we must also accept that the vacuum can just as readily be filled by those agendas that we are against, and we should at least be sobered by the power and technological know-how available to all those others, too. All that advertising, promotion, commercialism and shallow fashion, that gender discrimination and racism, all that political and economic power; that exploited patriotism, that social engineering and people-management and fake-news, that corruption that is modelled daily in corporate and public life. We might purify our “formal” or contrived educational settings of these things, but not from learners’ lives indefinitely. The thing about vacuums is that they don’t discriminate, and learning intellectual discrimination is not merely the only ethical defence, it is the only practical one.

What we should be doing, of course, is holding well back with all such agendas. What we should be doing is developing strong people whose strength lies in minds that are their own, and that they have made their own; people who have canvassed the possibilities of life, given consideration to it, and are passionate about what they are making of theirs. People who are curious about the issues, paradoxes and dilemmas of living, and actively seek to clarify them. People who have learned to build their own lives out of a powerful and knowledgeable concern for their own good living, and from a rich and reflective treasury of personal and vicarious experience of living.

We should be developing people who know what they are doing and why they are doing it – for their own sake, and no one else’s – and who have taken charge of their experience and commitments through self-consciously mastering the authority of their own educational development. We should be developing people who do these things, and seek to do them, in sound ways, interrogating the nature of knowledge and its authority in the process; including educational authority. Including our own.

We should only be submitting our agendas to these people in a context of such development, and not to a vacuum. And when we do so, we should be able to feel confident in encouraging them to test the agendas we propose for them against other agendas. If we do not have such confidence, then either we have failed them, educationally, or our agendas are not as worthy as we would like to suppose them to be.

(1) A partial exception to this is Philosophy for Children (P4C) which is as close to a model of a genuinely educational process as we are likely to find.  It is completely open to the issues of good living, and can be engaged with children at least as young as six-years-old. Significant as it is as a movement, it is, as yet, too far outside the mainstream of educational awareness to make the difference that it needs to be able to make.

The only hesitation that I have with P4C is that, in terms of what it has to offer to education in the larger sense, and not simply as an introduction to the discipline of philosophy, then an indiscriminate interest in “philosophical questions” of almost any kind, or even the philosophical questions of interest to academic philosophers, would not be adequate. This approach would have to give explicit priority to questions of good living, and questions of educational principle and judgment, as these can arise out of the interests and curiosities of learners and their lives. Questions of epistemological and educational authority should, for instance be routine and continuous with the actual learning and enquiry that students undertake.

Additional material is available on my website: www.whatiseducationhq.com

Key chapters of my book Education as if our lives depended on it are:

The anatomy of respect

The practice of self-respect

and

The “Love” Model