Chapter 12:

A hierarchy of formal educational activities

Some educational activities are more important than others – if, that is, learners genuinely are to be put first; to become a self-determining, responsible human beings in charge of their own lives. There is a hierarchy of educational processes, and conventional classroom teaching figures pretty low in the order

If we do, indeed, perform the necessary Copernican revolution in our educational thinking by displacing schooling from the centre of the educational universe, putting the learner there instead, the largest difficulty that we will face will be to keep schooling in its place among the circling satellites. All of our intellectual habits and inclinations will tend to draw it back, looming over the centre and putting all those other satellites so far into the pale that we will hardly see them with the naked eye; more or less as we only incidentally see them now.

We will have to make an enormous effort, and give the problem continual attention, or they will just remain there, invisible or barely visible but predominantly powerful in the educational sphere. They will exert their indoctrinatory influence over the larger part of our lives, and their educational potential will remain untouched. We will perpetuate one of our greatest educational mistakes.

Even if we completely reconfigure all that is in the space that schooling now occupies as we should do – the space we might think of as “formal education” – it will almost be inevitable that this new and reconstructed matrix of institutions will come to overwhelm what should, at the very least, be the equal focus of our attention; the larger world of experience in which we all live and from which we die.

Indeed, to the extent that our participation in the formal educational world is the lesser part of our lives, as it surely should be for most of us, then we need to be alert to our own very real educational responsibilities in that larger part where we mostly live. Principally, no doubt, where we work, but also where we participate in the public world, spend our recreational time and have our domestic lives. We will need to speak up for our personal educational responsibilities in all of those other spheres.

Still, there is much that we must deliberately do to contrive resources and facilities for self-conscious learning, and on a very large scale. I think this is obvious. Since “formal education” is almost synonymous with conventional schooling, moreover, it is, I think, necessary to pull together some principles or priorities that help us to see how and why our obsession with schooling must be broken down, even within the framework of formal education. This may not tell us directly what to do, but it should serve to help us to see when we are making progress, and when we have achieved very little. It will also turn out to be very instructive for the educational development of many of those sites that fall outside the formal sphere.

I am not going to talk here about the many potential sites that we might construct for formal educational activity, however, or of the relationships that might exist among them, though I may engage in a little speculation in a later chapter. Indeed, it is very important not to place too much emphasis, at this stage, on how to get there. There will be a product of a collective evolutionary development, and not of any plan that I might propose here.

What is vital at this stage is to get as clear as we can about where we should be trying to get. The more unclear we are about our purposes the more difficult it will be to develop effective proposals and plans and to work progressively through the inevitable iterations of failure and success.

Instead, I am going to discuss the priorities of activities that are necessary in order for a formal educational undertaking to have some chance of being properly educational. Such priorities will, of course do much to set requirements for the sites. My plan is to present these priorities in a hierarchy. Those processes and practices that most fully exemplify educational respect will be at the top of the hierarchy.

These will be activities that most fully foster and call upon practices of self-respect and respect for others, create the best conditions for authority that a free human being can achieve, and that do the most to ensure that the knowledge acquired is personal, and not just a display to meet someone else’s expectations. These procedures and activities will set conditions that activities lower down the hierarchy must ultimately serve, that they must facilitate, and not hinder or thwart. Lower processes must endeavour to align themselves to the spirit and purpose of those higher up. Whatever else their purposes may be, these must not be at the expense of the higher activities.

Informal, semi-formal and formal education

In order to tease out this hierarchy, however, it will be necessary to look a little more closely at what “formal education” might have to mean, since at present it is almost entirely identified with conventional schooling, and conventional schooling is a large part of our problem.

Informal education

I am proposing, as informal education, those experiences in which the learning is not the purpose of the activity and not in the focus of attention; what we often speak of as “incidental learning”.

That does not mean that the learning is not in the realm of contrivance. We have already seen how the external conditions are often managed in the interests of facilitating certain kinds of learning, but in terms of the internal conditions, no self-conscious collaboration in the learning is sought, and indeed under many current conditions under which incidental learning is currently sought, self-consciousness or awareness may be undesirable to those who are attempting to manipulate the external conditions.

Sometimes, of course, people seek to learn from experience in a general, but in a rather incidental sort of way. They bungee jump, or visit Paris for the experience and the memory, and they come away, perhaps, with indelible impressions. They might seek these things out for the “experience”, but the prime quality they are looking for in the experience is to have a damn good time. How well the experience is informed might be rather haphazard. All of these fall far short of the contractual relationships and the expectations involved in building formal educational institutions.

The larger part of our experience is probably of informal education, and it is likely the most significant part. These are the conditions under which we acquire our deepest cultural understandings and assumptions without much control on our part, and often their role in reinforcing, or even undermining formal or semi-formal educational experiences is decisive.

Informal education is that experience that is not deliberately sought for the educative quality of the experience. Where institutions are concerned, educative experience is not their first purpose, though to the extent that it is a serious consideration in the design of facilities, activities and processes we will do much to determine the quality of our educational world. The educative value, for good or ill, is incidental to some other purpose or motive, and it may not even be perceived.

This does not mean that, as learners, educational awareness need be entirely absent. Its presence is most likely to be after the fact, when we ponder on what we have just been through with an eye to what we might make of it. In this way we can have some measure of control even over our incidental learning, depending upon our level of educational sophistication. This is surely true of that emotional “baggage” that we all come to possess. Turning our attention to it may have decisive educational consequences.

We might discover, through our experience, and perhaps without much reflection initially, that our institutions or relationships do not really work the way that we have been taught that they do.  As we revise our judgment the adequacy of our new conclusions will depend upon our educational habits; of self-awareness, for example, or the caution that we should have about generalising from our limited experience, or of adopting popular cynicism uncritically, or about the choice between a debilitating cynicism and expecting or demanding more in the way of standards.

It is hard to animate such reflections, though, when the external environment is largely habitual. Reducing things to habit, including being selective in our awareness, is necessary to our ability to handle aspects of life that do demand our attention. It is because this level of experience can be so important to what we make of life, and that it is so easy to miss what we are learning incidentally, that the proper management of the external conditions of experience, where they can be managed, matters so much. This is an area where indoctrination can otherwise range freely. As a consequence it justifies a very large amount of our collective educational attention.

Semi-formal education

Semi-formal education is a twilight zone between the informal and the formal. Here we might set out to have an educational experience or construct the conditions for one, but not under the auspices of an institution deliberately set up with educational experience as its first purpose. All institutions should satisfy educational criteria, but it is the first purpose only of formal educational institutions to do so.

Thus we might pick a coffee bar because we seek to have a conversation of educational value. Coffee bars should enable such things, but not require them. Other people might equally seek them out for flirtation, or to take the weight off their feet. A coffee bar, should, in the first instance, be a coffee bar, and only informally an institution that satisfied educational criteria and has  educational potential.

There is a twilight zone here between the informal and the semi-formal to the extent that experiences are sought out for educational reasons. We may bungee jump for the sake of the experience, or we may do so because our friends are doing it, and we want to be a part of them and not look foolish. Paris might be about friends and fun, though experience might be anticipated in quite a vague way. In either case, the educational consequences may be much larger than any educational intention.

Teaching and mentoring plays an ambiguous role in this semi-formal domain. Here, teaching can be sought out, asked for and freely chosen, and this significantly changes what teaching can be from that which exists in the formal system, where teaching authority is conferred by the institution and assigned, often under conditions of compulsory attendance. This does not necessarily create, in the teacher-learner relationship, a genuine authority to teach. Students can withdraw, but only to seek another school, set up under much the same rules. Beyond a serious personality clash or outright teacher incompetence, there is usually little point in doing so. Pupils can, of course, resist full cooperation in numerous ways.

Teaching can be semi-formal rather than entirely informal because of the consciousness with which it is entered into on the part of both parties. “Will you show me how to do that?” “Will you explain to me how that works?” or “What should I do here?” Agreement to show or explain seals the relationship. These relationships can be very casual and brief, with roles swapping back and forth with little difficulty as the knowledge of the one is acknowledged by the other. We might not even be particularly aware that we are doing it. Trust usually precedes the teaching-learning relationship, is extended over more of the relationship than is required for the teaching and learning, and the shifting contracts depend upon it.

On the one hand, these relationships are deeply cultural, and existed extensively before formal educational institutions were ever contemplated, or teaching was ever professionalised. They were a part and parcel of the processes of enculturation itself, and spread throughout all forms of labour and domestic life. They are natural social processes, and it is a pity when those who engage in them do so with a measure of insecurity now, because they are not “trained teachers”.

There can be a very wide spectrum of educational adequacy here, depending on the adequacy of the educational judgment and skill of the parties involved. We can confer educational authority unwisely; our trust can be misplaced and learners can acquire unsafe or at least ineffective practices, learn prejudices or shut down their own growth by taking notice of just the wrong people.

Choices well-made, however, can be just the ones we need in order to be challenged properly, and to open up entirely new and more powerful perspectives, significantly increasing our freedom. At the higher levels of our existing formal system, skilled students go to considerable lengths to seek out the best teachers, not being impressed simply by official appointment or popularity, but learning from the respect that their prospective teachers attract in their fields of study, and gathering intelligence on their approaches to teaching and to students.

Relationships among graduate students and staff outside class can be every bit as important as what goes on within them. Colleagues and peers who share a common interest are often constantly teaching each other without the slightest threat to their freedom and intellectual independence, frequently reinforcing them both.

From the educational point of view the best of these teacher-learner relationships are ones that do most to leave learner independence intact, or even facilitate intellectual independence, and this is least likely within relationships that are already unequal for other reasons, or where compulsion is involved, or where there are external agendas to which the learner is not party. Under conventional management such contexts are almost inevitable in the workplace as well, where the learner is induced to sacrifice their intellectual independence or to perform various practices regardless of their own better judgment. It can also be problematic in families, where pre-existing parental authority and ties of affection may not always be congruent with the best in educational judgment.

Informal teaching and mentoring can, then, cross the entire spectrum between slavery and freedom. In a society that was well-ordered, educationally, we should hope to see a significant increase in the practice and the respect for informal teaching and mentoring, both being protected in their educational quality by a greater sophistication in educational judgment on the part of all parties, and by an increase in the congenial contexts in which such teaching could occur. Informal teaching and mentoring would flow naturally between formal and informal settings without any other obvious difference than the setting itself.

Formal education

Formal education will consist of all of those institutions or those facilities within institution  that have, as their first purpose the educational development of the learners who use them. That is, they are physical or on-line sites or services purpose-designed so that people can deliberately pursue their own educational growth through studying to gain knowledge and understanding, or to seek coaching to acquire various kinds of skill, or for practice. Schools would be included in this mix of institutions, but I do not anticipate that they would dominate. Indeed, I suspect that in the ideal mix they would be small, relatively few in number, and highly specialized to perform very specific tasks.

Some of these sites may involve various shifts in purpose throughout the day, not always expressing that first purpose, and perhaps not always in the same way. Large swimming pools, for instance, may run classes, and coaching sessions, enable laps for training and exercise, and have areas for play. Like such conventional municipal pools, they would be available for use, and widely used by many people for a variety of needs across a long day, and not unpopulated for long periods or closed for long vacations.

In our day, also, we would expect a good deal of the institutionalisation of formal education to be on-line, in terms of resource facilities and for many kinds of collaborative activity.

These facilities and services would, no doubt, be bound together into a system or systems of formal education, and it would no doubt involve a variety of educational professionals, though because schools would play a much smaller part in the mix, we would not expect that larger part who were directly involved with learners to be teachers.

A hierarchy of educational activities

Conventional institutionalised teaching

At the bottom of this hierarchy will be activities that resemble the standard processes of teaching and learning that we are most familiar with in schooling, but which can also occur in the home and the work-place, in religious institutions and in a variety of recreational settings, depending upon the structure of authority and how the learning decisions are made. These are at the bottom, because they could be used just as readily to harm learners as to benefit them, and without proper and principled oversight they are harmful.

They are perfectly compatible with expectations that the learner be exploited, used to serve the interests of others, or kept under some form of control by higher powers. The test is whether we would use these same activities with slaves, a test that was explored more fully in the earlier chapter on slavery and education.

To the degree that the answer to the test is “yes”, when the test is applied to any particular activity or proposal to induce learning, or when we cannot dismiss the possibility without considerable reservation, then the activity remains low on the hierarchy. What would make a difference in the case of formal teaching are circumstances in which learners can choose from among an effective range of alternative teachers, one to whom they are willing to grant authority on the basis of trust, including trusting that the teacher is able to teach them something that they are willing to learn. This is not, however, how conventional institutionalised teaching is arranged, and it depends upon learners already having acquired considerable educational insight and the personal motivation that would lead them to seek out a teacher at all.

In the absence of these conditions, and as they almost universally exist in conventional schooling, learners are educationally vulnerable. Conventional teaching and classroom processes almost  always fail the slavery test on three counts that always exist, any one of which should be sufficient to fail the test.

Firstly, the circumstances of compulsion create conditions of acceptance and compliance. The students have to be there, and there is no real choice but to pick from the cafeteria with which they are supplied – if there is any choice at all.

Secondly, there is an absence of any serious educational involvement of learners in the choice and development of the content that is taught as well as the assessment of the value of the learning to learners themselves. That is, the agendas are set by other people, and not by the learners. Both of these speak to the dependency and submission that the institution requires; the subordination of the learner’s own interests.

This is vivid in the content as well, to which we can readily enough apply the test of whether or not we would teach it to slaves. Even if some aspect of content happened to touch a general area that we would not normally think to teach to slaves, the weight of the practices of schooling and teaching prevent them from being treated as we would want for free people. The glaring omission of a critical examination of the practices of schooling themselves from any educational point of view should be enough in itself to expose the conditions of slavery.

Teaching is an art or cluster of techniques, and it is ethically neutral, which means that it can be used in ethically promiscuous ways. Medicine also is an art, and the accomplished practitioner is well versed also in the ways in which the body can be harmed or killed. Authority relations between teacher and learner, as between medical practitioner and client creates a considerable vulnerability for the learner, just as it does for the medical client. The teacher can indoctrinate, and without the knowledge to know any better, the learner can be powerless even to realise it is happening, let alone to stop her. Similarly the client of the medical practitioner has to invest a good deal of trust in the practitioner’s understanding and commitment to preserving the health of the body.

This is even more complex ethically in the case of education, since the medical practitioner is not trying to turn the client into a doctor. Educationally speaking, the teacher should be in the role of working to enable the full exercise of moral – and educational – equality.

Because the learner’s independent powers of mind are at stake, and because the relation between teacher and learner is unequal, creating an intellectual dependency, it is crucial that other processes stand above the relationship of teacher and learner; processes that can call it into question and enable the authority-relation to be kept clearly in view – and honest.

In addition, those higher processes provide the ethical framework within which the teaching relationship can occur with ethical legitimacy, so long as those higher processes are indeed kept higher and supervisory; so long as they set ethical conditions that constrain teaching, settling what purposes and processes are ethically legitimate and what are not. To the extent that teaching works to undermine those processes, then teaching is ethically in trouble.

Conventional vocational preparation – which has been coming more and more to dominate schooling systems – is almost always going to be outstanding in the failure of educational possibility, since the required performances and the standards of performances will be set to the specifications of employers, and not employees. Vocational preparation has the potential of being even further corrupted, educationally, by practices that are subject to audit demands, where what becomes of primary concern in carrying out the activity is that such things as workplace health and safety requirements are met by some sort of class attendance, and the appropriate industry boxes are ticked regardless of the quality or relevance of the content.

In these practices, the integrity of what is learned tends to fall outside educational purposes altogether. This is because there are so many incentives, in vocational teaching, for concerns and purposes that not only neglect respect for the learner, but are at odds with it.  There needs to be very strict monitoring and close educational management and supervision of vocational preparation programmes if there is to be any pretence at all of sanctioning vocational training as a part of an educational enterprise.

In the absence of this, we ought to view these activities with considerable ethical suspicion. Some hope lies, however, in the possibilities of the newer ideas of management for intelligent organisations, since their practitioners should hardly be satisfied with vocational-education-as-usual.

Mere codes of professional ethics are not enough either. They are always superficial rules requiring little sophisticated understanding or judgment. The professional ethics rules for teachers clearly do nothing to require them to stand up for education itself, for instance. As learners develop in their educational sophistication, they will likely play a part in a proper setting of standards. We should hope that they will demand them.

These ethical problems are made so much worse for teachers in conventional practice since they are trained as technicians who will be servants of the conventional system. That preparation, as technicians, involves almost no contact with educational understanding at all. This absence of educational awareness extends across the our entire schooling systems, and not just in explicitly vocational programmes.

In the United States, to the extent that educational awareness exists in teacher education programmes, it is buried somewhere in the lonely “educational foundations” course – though how much attention is paid to the concept of education or the problems of educational justification is moot. In the United Kingdom, as in New Zealand, educational understanding has been officially driven out of teacher education altogether, though a little may exist subversively.

“Adult education”, may be even worse, since, it does not require the extended preparation of conventional school teaching, and all too often is simply a window for industry workers to jump out of their conventional industry practice which has lost its charm, trading it in for the workplace workshop circuit, which they find far more congenial. Having a bright smile, reading off PowerPoint slides or policy documents and asking leading questions may be harnessed to tasks in which educational awareness is completely absent.

This is not at all to say that conventional teaching, and even classes, have no place in a proper educational programme. While they should not replace learning that can be done in more educational ways, there are many points at which they can provide helpful efficiencies, particularly where there are difficult technical problems to be overcome. Careful instruction and closely mentored performance can speed the acquisition of a technical skill and understanding when independent study truly does falter.

But these are only educational if they are ruled by properly educational principles, and by the needs of higher educational activities that must genuinely exist and take precedence. The subordination must be real.  The lower level teacher-and-learning activities must, for instance, be heading somewhere for the real sake of enlarging growth and intellectual independence, and if they satisfy some larger intrinsic motivation. To avoid the window-dressing that is commonplace, such criteria must be demonstrable.

Nevertheless teaching and teacher-directed activities have grown way out of proportion. We radically over-teach in official and institutional ways, and we do so too much in the wrong places. We move forms of teaching and learning into conventional schools and classrooms when they would be much more effective elsewhere, and undertaken in ways that do not encourage dependency through the process. By limiting the role of teaching to those occasions where it really would offer real efficiencies we could significantly reduce the number of teachers down to those who truly are highly skilled and talented.

I have already mentioned that much of vocational training would be better done by improving the old ways – where learning was done on the job under the supervision of more skilled practitioners. Performing the real tasks under the supervision of a skilled and sensitive mentor who makes an effort to learn respect and who can be trusted with one’s doubts, uncertainties and perceived problems – trusted to talk them through and who finds it harder to evade workplace realities, rather than simply to enunciate what is taken to be standard practice, or to regurgitate policy – is infinitely to be preferred in the development of intelligent workplace practices. Such mentors should have little interest in dependency, and be keen to see their budding colleagues standing on their own feet and at their side. Such mentors are also more likely to play an effective role in an intelligent workplace, being more likely to step up. Teachers rarely accompany their pupils to see such points of arrival.

Skilled coaching in sport is often a better model than the classroom, where students are rightly reluctant to expose their doubts and weaknesses in front of a group and its teacher, knowing how readily their requests can be dismissed. Mentoring, rather than teaching, when properly conceived, is also much more capable of participating in the educational awareness of the higher levels of the hierarchy, and maintaining and expressing the values within it. People who are full-blown independent participants in a field in their own right still acknowledge mentors.

If the initial impulse is to reject the idea of hands-on mentoring because the available practitioners in the workplace don’t necessarily have much mentoring skill, then we simply need to consider again my remarks on the development of mentoring and facilitation by learners themselves as a valuable part of all of our own educational growth. I have already suggested that it is an important feature of the whole educational process, throughout its length. Participation as a mentor enhances our own grasp and appreciation of our field. As soon as children are capable of taking some care for those who are younger than themselves, their role as mentors should begin, and be cultivated. Everyone’s skill at this would be a vast improvement on the current process of trying to turn good practitioners in the field into classroom teachers.

Independent study

Many, many of the things that we currently teach could, of course, be acquired more effectively by a student studying independently, and with much greater cost effectiveness, if learners were skilled, disposed to do so and properly resourced. Almost all enterprises will be more effective if workers within them are continually keen to seek out better knowledge and skill for themselves.

We have already seen the suggestion, even if anecdotal, that this is a skill and disposition that our current practice kills off in many doctors, and that should suggest an even higher price that we might be paying for our obsession with teaching and our neglect of independent study. There is an irony, too that teachers rarely seem to go to school eager to further their own education, as well as to teach. Schools are not commonly alive with the ferment of the intellectual pursuits of the teachers. True collaborative educational activity for their own sakes is a rarity, and schools show little sign of the resources that would indicate such an expectation. In this sense they don’t model education at all.

Independent study, then, represents a kind of activity and process that can rise above conventional teaching and classroom practice. I say that it “can” rise above it, because its greater educational possibility depends on its purpose and conduct. At the lowest level of independent study, where it is no better than conventional schooling and teaching, is “homework”, and much of the private study done by undergraduates. More recently, though for somewhat limited educational ambitions, the great hope here appears to lie in computerization.

Mostly all of this is just an extension of the sort of intellectually and motivationally dependent activity that we get in conventional schooling. Learners do it with the shadow of their conventional teacher at their back, often mediated by some form of assessment. It is a mastery practice, limited to what can be achieved without an immediate overseer – when the necessary direction has already been given. Little or no independence of thought is required or expected, and the agenda itself is not set by the learners, but dictated externally through the curriculum requirements.

It has always mystified me that homework is supposedly set to encourage students to work independently, as they will have to do when they reach university. If it was an important process – and an advanced one, why is it left over until after school hours? If it is important, why isn’t it cultivated in school time? Is it because the time of the teacher in the classroom is too precious to waste by having students study on their own? Or is it because our expectations of what a student can achieve on their own is so low, and they can only be expected to perform relatively mechanical tasks, being so dependent on the teacher when it comes to anything else? If homework really was designed largely to put the teacher out of a job, why not do it at school, and get on with saving the money?

The actual time that a classroom teacher has to spend with each pupil, individually, comes down to mere minutes each day, so the importance of the teacher presence makes little sense. What homework is really doing is domesticating learners to the schooling process – getting them to study when the eagle-eye of the teacher exists only in the imagination – as a matter of will-power for the promise of external, and often remote reward. It is about cementing the authority and reach of schooling, and the dependency on it into the minds of learners. It is about getting them used to persisting at boring tasks even when there is no one to oversee them, and when they would rather be doing something else.

At the properly educational end of the spectrum is independent study that learners engage in because of their core motivation, which usually means study that they have had a hand in designing out of the interests and curiosities of their own lives and that is disciplined by their personal desires to know.

This is the sort of independent study that we see in the best of home schooling, or in the occasional graduate student who has no difficulty at all in finding a thesis topic that will engross them without fakery. That such high level independence is possible, at least through the high school level, and probably earlier, was finally brought home to me through Grace Llewellyn’s book, The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education. (1TLH) John Holt was right. It certainly can be done.

When I talked to an undergraduate who had been home-schooled, he agreed that it could be done, but cautioned that it was an awful lot of work. I am sure that it is. But with all of our educational efforts and supporting institutions and resources focussed on schooling, we should hardly expect otherwise.  It isn’t as if there is seamless support across the spectrum from conventional schooling to independent learning. Under our current thinking, we should expect it to be hard. That doesn’t mean that it has to be this way. Indeed, it opens up a whole world of possibility.

This is part of the reason that I don’t place independent study at the top of the hierarchy. We don’t live in a properly educational culture which is intellectually challenging and where good reasoning is widely modelled. And in our world as it is, to move from conventional schooling towards independent study is to move from a complex social world to a world of isolation. It isn’t to move from the social world of the marshalled factory to an alternative social world where independent learners are meeting, discussing, challenging and supporting each other. Independent study is equated with isolated study. It is lonely. It is hard.

This means that it is vulnerable to misdirection, distortion and manipulation. The skilled mentors available are too few or non-existent and their backgrounds and understanding of education too limited. Learners lack easy contact with widely-read peers, or peers whose enquiries have led them down different paths.

It is difficult to encounter intellectually penetrating conflict or debate – particularly that which exists within or about advanced intellectual fields. It is sophisticated debate, challenge, disagreement that is the protection against distortion, manipulation and indoctrination. It is questioning – but particularly the quality of the questioning – that counts.

Questioning is not just a skill independent of the available knowledge. Asking good questions depends upon points of view – standpoints from which they can be asked, and it depends upon the sophistication of those standpoints, and the skill in moving among them. Solitary questioning is impoverished questioning, compared to living in and among questioning groups and communities.

There is a world of difference between encouraging the learner to ask questions because you should “ask questions whenever you don’t understand something”, and questioning whether what you are hearing might be poorly conceived, in conflict with other known things, or assuming something problematic, or might be empirically questionable, or limited in its point of view.

The former spirals back into dependency; “I need to understand what it is that I am supposed to know, the material I am being given here, and am supposed to master.” It is a variant of “give me the answers”. Somebody else’s answers. Those other sorts of questions – the ones that we aren’t in the habit of asking and aren’t encouraged to learn to ask at school – are the sorts of questions we might ask if we want to decide for ourselves whether something is true.

Someone (much younger than me) told me recently of her great hope, educationally, for young people of today because “they know how to search”. I did not find this reassuring. At best, the searching of the Web, like searching anything else, depends on one’s ability to ask truly good questions, and we don’t learn that by searching. We learn it largely through our grasp of subject matter, and the challenges to which that grasp has been exposed.

In order to search well, we need to be well educated, and particularly to have knowledge structured in ways that give it form and power, and which enable it to reach far into subject matter at many points. Because no single structure will do this completely, we need experience with more than one structure. And to avoid the complacencies of the present, we need some knowledge of the histories of structures.

The Web is not built for readers. It is a common complaint that, in many respects, the Web is replacing serious reading. That is why the content we are likely to find there is so brief. Being short, it is almost always introductory. By the time it has sketched where it is coming from, it is finished. That is also why it is quite apt to equate knowledge on the Web with fast food. I use the fast food Web a lot – but not to draw conclusions about things that really matter.

Introductions are always pretty much the same. If they weren’t then they would have to explain themselves at too much length. By the time they have covered “the basics”, there is no room left. But we won’t get a mind-changing, or a life-changing experience from the basics. Potted versions of great thinkers won’t change our lives. It is when we get into the details and the more advanced debates, and the intricate intellectual history that things get interesting.

When I challenged students with the problem of the meaning of “education”, for instance, they used to ask me why we didn’t just look it up in the dictionary. Try it.  You will find that it is defined by a number of other words. Now look up those words. Get it? Try the same thing with the word “indoctrination”.

The qualities of good questioning and challenge are the qualities that we would find in independent study, if it was going well, but the purpose of independent study means that it is difficult to build these qualities in that context when they are not yet present in other ways. The reason for this is that independent study is likely to be for the purpose of exploring, and to some extent mastering some aspect of pre-existing knowledge – usually from one of the traditional academic disciplines or a professional, disciplined field of inquiry.

In the previous chapter we have already seen how problematic this knowledge can be; indeed, how our “learning off” the products of such disciplines is not only slavish and prone to all kinds of ignorance, error and misplaced authority, it is a different sort of knowledge altogether than that achieved by the debate and testing in the disciplines, if indeed it deserves to be called
‘knowledge” at all. It is immediately to surrender to dependency, and gives over authority to an abstract and remote priesthood that may not even wish to be given that role. The problem even begins at that very nexus of research and teaching.

The researcher, sitting reading in her study, and the student, reading the same book at a table in the library may be engaging in entirely different processes of inquiry. The researcher may be puzzling over how certain conclusions came to be reached, why the concepts work in the way that they do, and if they are consistent, what sorts of evidence or arguments may have been inaccessible, or overlooked, and what would happen if the question was approached from a different point of view. She may be debating or conversing with it. The student may just be trying to get a sort of snapshot of it; any sort of memorable sense of the whole. That is all she knows to do.

Independent study can be worthy of standing higher in the hierarchy of educational processes than conventional teaching insofar as they are motivated by genuine learner interests that arise out of their own lives and developed accordingly, to the degree that they reflect free choices of the learner, and to the extent that these learner points of view are at the centre of assessments of the success and value of the learning. They are limited, however, to the extent that they involve little more than simply learn off the things that other people have said are true.

This is a limitation on the extent to which what is learned can count as knowledge from the learner’s point of view. The limitation arises from their relative inability to confer authority on these things in anything other than the most rudimentary of ways. This problem becomes the more acute for us the more we understand that the extent to which sources that receive so much trust are prone to error, partiality and the dysfunctional features of their social organisation.

To truly find its place as a higher level in the hierarchy, then, independent inquiry must begin to reflect processes that move in the direction of establishing that content as knowledge in the learner. There must be an evolution of internal debate in the direction of a great epistemological sophistication. Learner’s must be learning to debate their way towards the protocols of the relevant disciplined intellectual communities.

It is very, very hard to achieve this, simply by working on one’s own; and on one’s own, it is likely to be a slow process. There are great thinkers who appear to have achieved remarkable things through solitary work and very little social support. It is not, however, to be recommended.

If independent study is to be educational, it needs a collaborative element.  It needs access to people –  more than one – at least some of whom are themselves more advanced and advancing in their own understanding of the field, perhaps in different ways. More than one, because any one of them may have missed just the path we need to explore, the questions we need to learn to ask and pursue.

We also need access to people who are coming at the same or similar questions from different disciplines or sophisticated points of view. Interdisciplinary scorn is a major, major cause of vital things being missed, and it is infectious, it is catching. The infection is made worse the more that people allow themselves to become specialized. Because of the specialization and lack of educational breadth that is now commonplace, interdisciplinary scorn is far, far too prevalent.

Inquiring groups

Many problems of isolated independent inquiry can be overcome by participating in group inquiry set up under similar conditions of independence. That is, groups of learners coming together freely to share the task of enquiry in pursuit of a common intellectual interest. Group learning and collaboration do occur in conventional schooling, but still within a framework dictated by external agendas and under a teaching authority that owes its allegiance elsewhere.

It is, perhaps, more helpful to envisage groups coming together out of home-schooling settings where learners have been expanding their own educational programmes on the basis of personal interest. The difficulties we have in doing this are, I think, simply logistical; a consequence of all of our attention and the vast bulk of our resources going to support the institution of schooling. I am not, of course, setting up home-schooling as a model, here, either. We should look to transcend the limitations of both approaches, and in the direction of educational principle.

Preferably, learners would seek out such groups for the efficiencies that they would provide in accelerating progress towards their personal knowledge goals, but also for the ways in which they can open up their appreciation, and often their grasp, of new powers and skills as well as informing their own educational planning in important ways.

Inevitably, for instance, some tasks in the inquiry will gravitate to those who are already skilled, but this will, in turn, highlight our own lack of skill. To the extent that we are truly capable of the necessary educational self-examination and decision that is the core thread running through the entire educational development, this may lead us to pair ourselves in a mentoring, semi-formal teaching relationship with someone who has the skill we lack, or it will suggest to us some gap that we should seek to fill by working in a group dedicated to that skill, or through individual study, or by seeking help elsewhere. Good educational mentoring will facilitate this.

There are various protocols available for the organisation and administration of such groups; assigning leadership, distributing tasks, debriefing and reassigning regularly, and so on. However this is done, it must be consistent with the protocols of mutual respect that will be considered across the next three chapters, and for our individual quests to give knowledge its proper authority.

Some of these approaches have been developed in various industries and are thought to be applicable to schools. One of these, called SCRUM, which has some promising features, nevertheless proposes that the “knowledge” that results should be the property of the teacher. While this does appear to be quite consistent with the nature of conventional schooling, it is, of course utterly inappropriate from an educational point of view.

It would also be a bad idea to adopt a mechanism that involved little more in the way of meetings than basic administration and reporting. The quality of discussions, not merely about the subject matter, but also about the nature of the inquiry itself, and of the disciplines that contribute to it are of first importance to their educational power.

A better model might come from Ann Brown and her work on Fostering Communities of Learners. Though (inevitably) this approach was developed in schools, the connection is only contingent, as is the role of a “teacher”, and it appears that it could be developed in a variety of settings. (2TKI)

As with any other kind of collaborative process, all learners need to be skilled in initiating them and leading them, just as they need to develop their own skill at informal mentoring and teaching. Developing such skill will, of course, begin with official mentors, and will continue within the groups themselves, where the more experienced will have a role in mentoring the inexperienced into leadership.

Significant practices within such leadership will be the tracking of group progress, debriefing groups and facilitating them in the use of debriefing for further planning. Learning to track and debrief will, themselves, go back into the earliest relationships with caregiver/mentors, and will involve the careful cultivation of awareness of the internal and external conditions of experience and of the application of educational judgement. We might expect that the greater discipline in these skills will occur in collaborative groups that form around studies that are widely applicable, rather than groups following more highly specialised interests, since the former groups are likely to be more common, and to contain within them greater numbers of learners with experience.

Educational awareness, understanding and judgment is the core field of content that is essential to the entire view of education that I have been offering through this book. It is, I believe, essential that a pursuit of that understanding should be continuous throughout our lives to enable us to maintain our ability to continue to perform our duties of self-respect.

It seems to me that this would be facilitated greatly to the extent that, from time-to-time we met with others similarly motivated to share our educational plans, the reasoning behind them, and to exchange criticism, advice and suggestions – like the mastermind groups that are sometimes advocated for entrepreneurs. This could only have any prospect of real success to the extent that we can form groups within which we can trust ourselves, in which criticism and advice can given with sensitivity and be gladly received. Everything turns on our ability to create such groups.

Philosophical/educational communities of inquiry

The final and highest level in the hierarchy of educational activities is vital to keeping the lower levels educationally honest, and this involves philosophical communities of inquiry – self-disciplined discussion groups that attempt to advance knowledge through respectful, mutually supportive but critical and disciplined dialogue and debate. The best of high level university graduate seminars can be like this, though my experience is that very few students, even at the graduate level, ever truly encounter them.

Equally rarely – across the whole academic world – is the situation in which groups of scholars form to pursue a particular line of inquiry together across the table in a sustained way. We often hear about such teams, but given the scale of the academic world at large they are, I think, relatively rare, and frequently have very limited lives. More typically the life of an academic is a very lonely and isolated one. The very poor surrogate for this sort of community collaboration – the best that the intellectual professions are typically capable of – is dialogue through journals and in the brief discussions at conferences. These are, unfortunately, all too often fraught with careerism, territorial wars and all kinds of gate-keeping.

My own experience as a student in a large graduate school was that a graduate class could be very much like one of these high grade communities of inquiry, though by no means all professors knew how to enable them. Sometimes other faulty, even from other departments, sought out those good ones and participated in them. It may well be that for those professors capable of attracting and sustaining such groups, these were prime moments of academic community.

It seems to me, too, that alongside these classes the quality of relationships among students, and their willingness to engage together in academic discussions outside class brought value to the whole process equal to the value of the classes themselves. My experience since then has led me to conclude, however, that even though such interactions are highly romanticized, and many students go to university expecting them to be a normal part of the university experience, they are, unfortunately, relatively rare, and university management does far too little to cultivate their possibility.

Although this activity sounds at first like something that can only be undertaken in the shiny towers of academia and only by the highly trained intellectual elite, this is not the case. The Philosophy-for-Children movement has shown that the activity works well with children as young as six, and pretty well regardless of ability or background. It is also clear from their experience that motivation, learning and behaviour improve in other subjects and contexts beyond the discussion sessions, which is not surprising, since the process really does engage the mental lives of the learners and they begin to discover that they can trust their own minds, and each other.

Behavioural improvements come about as a result of the ethic of respect upon which the discussions are based, and this ethic becomes personalised as participants come to value what the discussions can achieve for them. For many students who have formerly been classed as failures, and have learned to agree that they are too dumb to do well, the process can have dramatic  positive effects on their self-esteem and their educational effectiveness.

These special discussions engage the stream of the learner’s own convictions, doubts, uncertainties and conclusions. Adult facilitators who might set up and guide these discussion have very little say in the content once the initial stimulus is left behind. In the discussion themselves, which are now largely in the hands of the participants, the job of criticising ideas has equal play with the task of constructing them, and the facilitator’s role now reduces primarily to commenting and guiding on skill alone, rather than the content of those ideas or criticisms.

Participants come together as peers. Contributions to the discussions have to be backed by reasons; no contribution has any extra force simply because of who makes it. For these reasons, intellectual dependency is abandoned, along with peer pressure and the need to please adults or authority figures, and the facilitator cultivates these expectations until they become the group culture that is self-enforcing. These practices minimize the dangers of indoctrination, the more so to the extent that the discussions are sustained, regular and the fields and topics explored are wide-ranging. They are ideal accompaniments to good independent and group study, providing intellectual discipline, critical skill and enlarging the social resources of activities.

I will have more to say about these special “communities of inquiry” in coming chapters. Suffice it to say here that they should be at the core, and routine in any programme that purports to be educational, rather than – where they exist at all – being the occasional add-on that they are today, given only grudging space because of the time that they take away from the conventional curriculum. This idea needs to be reversed, and the privileged status of the conventional curriculum brought down and subordinated to these discussions. The power and value of all educational content should come to be seen to depend on what can be achieved here.

Whatever else we might wish to do in the name of education, its legitimacy should firstly stand or fall by the seriousness with which we set out to position these discussions at the absolute centre of educational activity and interest, and give them priority over all other activities. They are precisely the sort of activity, and pursue exactly the content that we would not make available to slaves.

Such discussions represent the content and process, and generate the right sorts of independent study that is the significant difference between the indoctrination of slaves, and an education that properly respects the intrinsic moral worth of learners. If conventional teaching cannot be freely validated here, it should not be undertaken, except at the very beginning when this sort of inquiry is not possible or very limited for developmental reasons. Even then, the purpose of teaching should have this evolution in mind, and that purpose should be demonstrable in practice.

This process – pioneered in Philosophy for Children and related to good academic seminars,  even if rare in conventional practice, nevertheless still sounds at first pre-eminently like a schooling process, and something to be under the control of a conventional teacher. Not at all. Parallel efforts have already been attempted with adults in the practice of philo-cafes in France and philo pubs in the UK. I understand that a Canadian enthusiast even set up a philosophical discussion group on a beach in British Columbia on summer evenings.

Such undertakings have been isolated and fleeting, but there is no reason to suppose that this marginality is anything other than what we should expect of an anti-intellectual culture lacking in educational awareness and dominated by conventional schooling. Just as independent study through home-schooling is hard, because it lacks serious institutional support, and there are no social expectations of such support, so we cannot expect much that is transformative to come from these isolated and transient groups under our current, conventional conditions. But these conditions are simply conditional upon what we choose to do. Any education system worthy of the term “education” might be expected to have a mentor whose job it was to help interested citizens set up such discussion groups within a region as others exhausted their natural life.

Though we tend to equate philosophical discussion with high-level abstraction, that hardly defines it. More useful, perhaps, is that it seeks knowledge in the pursuit of questions that are open-ended, or require judgement, which explains why it is the primary form of effective discussion about value issues. In practice there is an abundance of contexts in which such discussions have a place – from parliaments to the media, to the community hall, to the clubhouse, to the boardroom to the workplace, to the bedroom to the dinner table.

We should indeed, be seeking the proliferation of discussions that are ruled by these disciplines of inquiry throughout the larger world of everyday experience in a wide variety of contexts. Our ability to create a truly educational society will depend, not simply upon the priority that we give to these sorts of discussions in formal education, but to the extent to which they are reflected in everyday life, as popular and even spontaneous initiatives to create semi-formal education wherever suitable occasions present themselves. We need to make better use of those coffee bars, pubs and restaurants, and those beaches, barbecues and dinner tables. They would be invaluable in the workplace.

It is practice in these sorts of discussions that can provide the proper basis for relationships in other forms of group inquiry, and can open up the sorts of questions, proposals and points of view that can transform group inquiries from mere “learning off” into genuine and critical inquiries that can make real progress with knowledge.

Most of the examples that I give of discussion topics for these groups are ethical; they have to do with issues of respect and life-planning, as befits our larger educational task. But philosophy is equally concerned with the nature of knowledge, and all enquiries have philosophical issues that underpin them.

It is in this way that skill and experience from this highest form of inquiry can be transported into group and individual inquiries, giving them a critical edge and enabling them to ask those vital questions of the authority and the nature of the knowledge that we need to ask if our knowledge is ever to be our own.  Inquiry groups that bring themselves together for such discussions, and then reform themselves into new discussions as the inquiry progresses can, of course be instrumental in re-setting the direction and tasks of further group inquiry.

The ubiquitous desire to win an argument, rather than to collaborate in finding the best solution for all tends to hold sway wherever the nature of such discussion and its proper protocols are not alive in the minds of the participants. When we cannot hold each other to account for our self-disciplined participation, we surrender the promise of fair and honest discussion to manipulation and power. Competitiveness, ambition, advantage, political power and private profit are all too often allowed to dominate simply because the form of debate is not demanded of participants who stray. The proper protocols of discussion need to be socially expected and enforced.

It may be that good discussion and disciplined argument are often going to be defeated by the grubbier sides of human nature. But it is hard for people to do any better when they don’t know any better – when they simply lack the appropriate and well-developed experience and the strength of intellectual and moral habit; when they don’t understand that they can attain knowledge and solve problems well through the right sorts of discussion, when they don’t appreciate the consequences of doing it badly, and when they have a poor sense of what is at stake. They will be defeated simply by a lack of awareness of how discussion should be undertaken, and the price that all pay by not doing so; by the inability to call out inappropriate agendas in the interests of restoring the proper rules of the game.

If we want people to be skilled at achieving the best answers together, and expecting each other to show that skill, then the skills themselves, and the expectations of such skill need to be practiced in a sustained way, and across a broad spectrum of questions, problems and explorations until they become engrained in them – second-nature to them. They must practice, being equal participants, participating under their own free consent and equally responsible that the discussion itself is conducted in an orderly and disciplined manner under respectful protocols.

Only when such practices are so thoroughly familiar that we are immediately and acutely aware of the loss of possibility when anyone departs from them in collaborative, problem-solving situations, and when a quick and sensitive remark is enough to draw everyone’s attention back to respectful dialogue, are we likely to have a practical sense of what human beings really can achieve.

In the meantime, we should not allow our expectations to be too high; expectations of personal knowledge, and of commitment, of personal responsibility, and of solutions and better answers. We should not ask much of better behaviour and better relationships; of becoming more reasonable and of achieving plain old-fashioned respect. We should not expect too much of management. Or of social policy. Or business and commerce. Or international affairs. Indeed we should never expect to live in a democracy worthy of the name.

And if these reasons aren’t good enough, how about the fact that these sorts of discussions are extremely pleasurable, animating and stimulating; as they always have been. In them, as we discuss the issues and problems of living well – issues that are ours, and that lie at the heart of our self-respect – we come more alive because we genuinely take our lives into them, and usually come out with more life than we had before.

This form of discussion is the only practice that, if followed correctly, widely applied, and sustained, is almost intrinsically immune to indoctrination and manipulation, and hence it is at the top of the educational hierarchy. Do not confuse this with conventional classroom discussion – even at the university level.

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Llewellyn, Grace. The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education. Eugene, Or.: Lowry House, 1998.

Sloman, Steven, and Fernbach, Philip. The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone. London: Macmillan, 2017. pp 228-231