Chapter 16: Integrating the practices

Chapter 16:

Integrating the practices

The educational requirements of our duties of respect for ourselves and each other have highlighted the need for a Copernican revolution in our educational thinking, in which the conventional school is displaced from the centre and replaced with the learner, considered in terms of their intrinsic worth as human beings and the respect that this deserves. As a result of a consideration of what that respect requires, it is clear that it is not enough simply to displace conventional schooling from the centre, it is important to diminish our sense of the size of the educational contribution of conventional formal schooling to the educational mix, bringing forward into the educational ecology the many other sites in which we live, as well as the ways in which so many other institutions influence the educational content of those sites.

As we have undertaken that exploration, it has also become clear that conventional schooling will not do as a proper implementation of formal education in any case. Indeed, universal, compulsory State education does more educational harm than it does good.

We have performed a brief overview of the now much enlarged domain of educational content. We have developed a rough hierarchy of educational processes. We have explored in a little more detail the features of activities at the top of the hierarchy. All of these surveys and explorations have enabled us to bring into the light, and to integrate, core educational principles that should follow from our consideration of respect.

But what about more detailed implementation? How should all this look, more systematically, in practice? These will, I think, be the urgent questions in the minds of many. Behind those urgent questions will be a flood of potential considerations to test the practicality of any suggestions.

Some of those tests will no doubt be decisive. Many of them will, however, spring from the natural inertia of the human mind and its training; a reluctance to change because change is uncomfortable, because our experience is that change so often seems to create more problems than it resolves, because effective change often requires hard work and persistence over extended periods of time before real successes begins to outweigh the failures.

Quite naturally we will be inclined to filter out demanding proposals before they get us into real trouble; wasted resources, energy and time. Commitment to real change frequently requires a very strong commitment to the urgency and the significance of the need to change, and neither of these are likely to be achieved, simply by reading so far.

My plan in this chapter is, then, largely to point out some potential starting points for discussion, and to raise existing practices that may be suggestive. It is a chapter embarked upon with ambivalence. I don’t believe that any real progress can be made in this way. What is required are teams made up of people who are skilled in the relevant disciplines and practical fields.  They must be people who are prepared to come together with their knowledge and a genuine and very strong commitment to reconstruct the relevant institutions and practices in line with educational principle. Since the whole of our society is now to be considered educationally, there should be teams looking in every direction. Because education is ecological, modifying just one area is not likely to achieve very much; it will just be bent back into shape – as schooling always is.

At the same time, we often have difficulty engaging our imagination when all that we have before us is bare principle. This chapter is offered, then, as a stimulus to the imagination. I do not think that anything in the conceptualization of education, its justification, or the principles that follow from them, will stand or fall by these suggestions and speculations.

Compulsion

We need to begin with some clarification of the issue of compulsion. The compulsion of State compulsory schooling is highly problematic, simply because of what that compulsion requires; submission to the agendas of others, particularly of the State and of employers at the expense of respect for the learner. It consigns them to a general intellectual dependency, and reduces their concern for their own good to the service of the interests of others. It deprives them of power over their own minds, and compromises their authority over their own knowledge. We see time and again, as a result of a simple test, that compulsion forces them into a learning environment fit only for slaves.

Very little thought is required, however, to recognise that educational development dedicated to equipping a person to carry out their duty to themselves to create their own good must start with some sort of compulsion. Almost everything that counts as responsible care on the part of a parent demonstrates this. Children are not born capable of reason or good judgement, or even with language, and this means that they are born into dependency through which they must be nurtured into independence.

Parents must set rules and boundaries, which, to be effective, must be applied with consistency. They must limit the behaviour of their children in the interests of safety, because of potential consequences that the children cannot foresee or understand. They must require that their children learn certain things, simply in order to be able to live among others with some sort of compatibility and decency. They must facilitate the beginnings in young children of the considered exchange of reasons.

The larger skills and understanding required for working out a worthwhile life are complex, sophisticated, and would always take some time to develop under the most favourable of conditions. The management of dependency under conditions of respect is, generally, to cultivate intelligent independence and to hand over decision-making as the capacities to exercise that independence are achieved.

This is, of course, much more complex than it sounds, because learning that intelligent independence presupposes a certain freedom to make mistakes as a precondition of learning to foresee and judge consequences, and to exercise the difficult freedoms of personal choice. We have to avoid “over-protection” and allow the young to learn to judge their own risks. At the same time, there are rough age conditions that we all acknowledge. As certain age ranges approach we are required, more and more, to treat the young more fully as independent adults, regardless of their actual abilities to exercise that independence.

Our scheme of education requires that learners come to take charge of their own education and the educational decisions made within their lives as soon as they reasonably can. This means that we will be exercising judgment on their behalf, but decreasingly, over a considerable period of their early development; our decision-making transforming more towards genuine mentoring.

At the same time there will continue to be restrictions on their activity in the community and constraints on the use of their time simply to ensure the educational development that will enable their larger freedom and their independence, even as they come to make educational judgments for themselves. Without such constraints they will be vulnerable to having their crucial developmental time absorbed in employment, or seduced into the pursuit of trivial or even immature desires that will stunt their opportunities for further educational growth.

These compulsions and constraints are quite different from those required by conventional schooling, since they should be designed to enable a large diversity of ways and directions of pursuing educational development based on the motivation that learners already possess. We might put it like this:

1. For X hours per day, over X days per year, and X years, learners must follow an educational plan, considerably and increasingly of their own devising relative to their skill, but in collaboration with an educational mentor to satisfy the requirements of educational principle.
2. The first principle of this plan must be that it evolve out of the learner’s own actual interests as understood by them, prioritizing their curiosity and natural desires to explore, and challenging, building, expanding and enlarging on these interests as they develop. These processes of exploration and enlargement of skill and understanding must maintain the integrity of their interests and prospective interests as ends in themselves rather than as means to learning agendas externally contrived. This process of developing on interests and enlarging them is to be understood in terms of the learner’s own desire to live well, and planned and undertaken collaboratively with their caregivers.
3. The authority in the devising of this plan is to increase in favour of the learner as the learner becomes able to apply educational principle through to X age. If the process has been properly learner-centred, and if educational awareness has proceeded satisfactorily, we should expect learners to continue to want to pursue their own educational plans throughout their lives, and facilities and resources should continue seamlessly to support this expectation.
4. This plan is to be executed using recognised educational resources and facilities, and must come to include a specified percentage of collaborative work in inquiry teams, independent study and with formal or semi-formal coaches, tutors or teachers. A good balance should be maintained between these three modes of learning, with a flagging for attention if the third is seen to exceed a certain proportion. This balance should favour independent, individual and team inquiry and semi-formal processes as development progresses.
5. These constraints are to be justified by respect, and testable against its principles. An “educational constitution” such as the one discussed in Part 4 of this book, might serve to regulate these requirements and ensure that the agendas remain those of respect for the learner.

Educators – formal and informal

With the emphasis being on independent and independent-collaborative study the principal formal or professional role working directly with learners would be that of a mentor, responsible primarily for the development of educational understanding and skill, and for guiding learners in educational decision-making in the course of helping with the development of educational plans. They would track development and play an initial role in opening up the field of resources, with more deeply skilled resource consultants, akin to librarians, perhaps, being the second point of call. Such first-call mentors might also work to bring together collaborative teams of learners.

Perhaps these official mentorships would not always be paid positions, but might include parents who would want to consider it an extension of their parental role, engaging in supervision much as good home-schooling parents undertake now. They would have to be educationally sophisticated, but since many parents, particularly home-schooling parents, might find it highly desirable to have this educational knowledge and be early adopters, the means to develop their skill and understanding could be made readily available to them from the beginnings of parenthood.

The process would have to be very supportive of them, hooking them easily into the resource bases and consultants, and with a minimum of administration. The more that parents could be enabled in this role the quicker such systems could be developed, and the more effectively educational judgment could come to be embedded in the community at large. We could easily imagine a system of mentors for such mentors.

The more common form of mentoring throughout the process would be informal, in the sense that it would be a matter of learners being properly prepared, partly with the help of official mentors, to support others less experienced. This would, of course, go hand-in-hand with informal coaching, tutoring and teaching, and since these roles have an important part to play in the educational activities of all learners, they would also be subject to the oversight of official mentors.

It is likely, too, that some of these relationships would cross institutional lines, blurring the separation between formal education and the larger world of everyday experience. People who had grown up through these processes would seek out teachers, tutors and coaches for very short-term learning tasks, and would make themselves available in the same way, just as matters of decency and reciprocity, and within well-established expectations that they had come to accept and confirm to as they grew up.

Thus our dad might automatically think of cousin Fred to spend a few minutes showing us this, or the neighbour to explain that to us, or the bloke at work to help us see the way through this issue. Our boy, the behavioural problem, wanted to spend time hunting and fishing with his uncle. Any good shop assistant might spend a bit of time showing us how to do something, on a slow day. Why shouldn’t we think that way with mathematics, if educational activity was viewed more often as a basic matter of reciprocity? We should look to see educational possibility expanding its own word-of-mouth, and how we might encourage that.

Similarly, as adults, or near adults, proficient in ECOIs, and having learned to facilitate them in the course of our growing up, and having enjoyed and benefited from their power, we might set them up on the fly anywhere, giving their establishment more thought if we want them to persist for a while. Yachties might put together a group to study the design of sails, business people might more readily set up mastermind groups.

With the growth of such inclinations and expectations we would need an equal growth in the design of our environments to facilitate these meetings, and this would more likely happen to the extent that we can come to appreciate that larger world as potentially educational. As has already been suggested, district councils might have small teams helping with their establishment and even some initial training, assisting with new ones as existing inquiries came to the end of their natural life. All kinds of clubs, and hospitality facilities could benefit from these social activities.

The coffee shop, the sports club, the workplace, wanting this activity to flourish, or at least respecting it, may learn how to encourage us. We may seek a tutor outside of our participation in the formal system, outside our educational plans and in our own time. But we might just as equally do this by finding a volunteer tutor through a reputable online source that is endorsed by the formal system. The more that this line between the formal and the informal is crossed, either way, the more chance that the community at large has of becoming educational effective and aware, with a significant boost in turn, to the effectiveness and appreciation of the formal system itself, and quite in contrast to the haste with which, at present, we leave things of school behind.

Sites

Schools

School facilities, just on the face of it, commonly display a variety of peculiarities. I will raise some of these as they apply locally, in my New Zealand setting, which means that some of the peculiarities will not translate everywhere, though I think they probably speak to the sorts of thinking that apply more generally, and for that reason may still assist in identifying other peculiarities in other localities.

Schools in inner cities tend to be old schools. More commonly, schools are sprinkled at a distance from each other through expanding suburbs.

Suburban development, after World War II, involved a number of assumptions. The first was a division of labour in households where the woman, almost always the wife, stayed home and managed the house while the male went to work as the sole bread-winner. The mobility of the population was also much less than it is today, and this resulted in a greater stability in neighbourhoods and a greater familiarity among neighbours.

Those schools, sprinkled throughout the suburbs, were genuinely local. Children could walk or bike to school, with a high expectation that doing so was safe. Mothers saw them off, and welcomed them home after school. If you lived close enough, as I did, you could even go home to lunch.

By the nineteen sixties and seventies, clear problems were beginning to emerge. Those women living at home became increasingly isolated as mobility increased, and neighbourliness decayed. The value of their domestic work was in decline as more of it could be automated, and manufacturing clothing became less of a necessity and more of a hobby. The liberating conditions of a war economy, in which many women had found more meaningful work, heightened the contrast. A condition called “suburban neurosis” developed, and the unequal value of work between gender roles heightened patriarchy and was one among a number of spurs to the woman’s movement in the nineteen sixties. Increasingly, women wanted to do more with their minds, have a richer social life, and sought these through a career.

Capitalism responded to this demand by progressively accepting women into the workforce, and as it did so, it rendered the idea of a single bread-winner redundant. There was no longer the need to pay men in the expectation that they might have a whole family to support, and this has meant that, for most families, two incomes are essential.

This has transformed suburbs into dormitories. During the day they may contain a sprinkling of the retired elderly, the unemployed, those few who can arrange to work from home, and those who are sick. Otherwise they are waiting for their people to come home from work.The time after school involves all kinds of juggling around work to ensure that children are occupied safely until a genuine domestic family life can begin again.

This is compounded in New Zealand by the way in which so many parents have come to deliver and pick up their children from school in their cars, a cultural change that occurred over a number of killings or disappearances of children on the way to school seared themselves into the imagination of parents nation-wide. As a consequence, there are traffic peaks around the times that school days start and end, which has transformed the significance of the idea of the “local” school.

Where there were reasons for placing schools in the midst of suburbs, these have become at least questionable, if not entirely obsolete, and it draws attention to the now more obvious fact that these schools always were located in areas otherwise bereft of any other educational interest. Even industrial locations might offer more for the stimulation of the imagination than the endless repetition of houses sparsely populated by strangers. Of necessity, such schools become even more inward-looking. Perhaps the only real justification for their location lies in the original value of the land on which they are built.

It might be thought that high schools would be a little different, because older children are better able to look after themselves on the way to and from school, and there is no doubt some truth to this. But halfway through high school, many pupils seems to acquire driving licences, as we can see from any view of the parking problems that the schools have to handle, with scooters, motor bikes and cars owned by pupils. High schools always were fewer, and pupils always have travelled greater distances to them.

All of this has to raise the question as to why schools aren’t clustered together with all kinds of other educationally relevant and significant sites, and their activities integrated with them. I know of one that, for historical reasons, is located in the town centre. On one boundary, facing the main street, is the local museum. Across a road which is another boundary is the public library, and almost across the road is a large area of sporting fields. From all that I have been able to see, there is little, if any educational significance to these proximities, which speaks again to the inward-looking nature of the school, and the absence of any coherent communal educational sensitivity.

Economies of scale

Schools, and through them the learners, suffer from the institutionalising affects of bureaucracy, with too many agendas set remotely. These negative educational consequences are magnified by scaling up, but this doesn’t matter if those effects are intended. Factories scale, but families don’t, and the better educational environments will, I think, be ones that more resemble better families.

The more we seek to develop educational environments, the more emphasis we need to place on relationships, and this is the difference that we should look to in creating the environments in which learners are to do their real thinking, challenging and enquiring, particularly insofar as this involves exposing aspects of the inner life; to seeking out and coping courageously and effectively with doubt, uncertainty and confusions, and personal sense of inadequacy, dependent as this can be on trust, sensitivity and good will.

Some resources and facilities for some educational activities do scale well, however. Good databases, for example, being rich and big, are more likely to throw up something we can use.

It has long been important, in New Zealand schooling, that pupils have a good chance of learning to swim. We are all close to marine environments that can be attractive, and we have long had an abundance of attractive rivers. Drowning is big in the history of New Zealand mortality.

New Zealand schools have swimming pools. That makes five in my modest nearby town, each unheated, so that they are only usable for half of the year. The initial investment is expensive, and the teaching is limited to the skill of the classroom teacher. In the meantime there is a perpetual lobby to build a heated and enclosed municipal pool so that those who are not at school could also have a satisfactory swimming venue. Each year lobbyists try to raise a little more money. With such a venue, all sorts of other water-sports could be made available to the whole community, coaching could be professional, and swimming classes for schools could be rostered year-round, as could an alternative and popular form of exercise for the general public.

Each school also has its own library. That means, at least in the case of the four primary schools, that all of them no doubt have to duplicate their holdings in order to reach a satisfactory and expected minimum before purchasing can become truly discretionary, and each of the more discretionary holdings is limited by the size of the individual school budget.

We should also expect there to be an overlap between a good primary school library and a good one in a secondary school. We do, of course, squander even the possibilities that we have. Just as those swimming pools and playing fields in the public schools represent a loss to the public resource, so do their  libraries. It is almost as if these limitations are planned.

It might be objected that there would be a considerable loss to the extent that we could not just walk over to the library, and would have to travel to a consolidated one. This would be a considerable inconvenience while we still struggle with conventional schooling institutions, because that is a partial function of the rather strange dispersal of schools at a distance from other communal educational facilities and each other. In any event, libraries can easily expand on small educational meeting rooms and personal study facilities.

It need not arise at all, however, if large public educational facilities were clustered in precincts, and the small working spaces of the compulsory formal system were embedded throughout them, along with coffee bars, restaurants, performing arts facilities, small and large, and public meeting and gathering spaces. Everything could be in walking distance. Chapter 4 would suggest the value of residential facilities for the elderly being distributed here too.

New Zealand primary schools no doubt take up more land than those in many other countries. The buildings tend to single-story, and there are usually playing fields sufficient for a full rugby field, and very likely a soccer or field hockey pitch as well. In summer, and some of the winter when it is not too wet, they can be used during recess and lunch; which are, indeed, their major uses. Out of school hours, they are, like all other school facilities, largely empty. Again, there is significant redundancy here too.

The scaling of gymnasiums, the consolidation of sports fields, all shared with clubs, and with the much more advanced coaching that such facilities could provide all suggest economic good sense. In addition, however, they offer both the greater possibilities of educational integration with the interests of sporting and recreational clubs together with regional and national sporting organisations, as well as more sophisticated levels of coaching, with more collaborative, less institutionalising bureaucracies.

The integration wouldn’t be automatic, of course. It would have to be worked at; developed.

Often in the afternoon, when I drive past the yacht club in Nelson, there are high school students racing and training in their fleet of locally sponsored one-design dinghies, under the supervision of a coach. The students have to travel several kilometres to get there, but they certainly seem keen. I am sure that the national yachting association is very happy about such activity.

It could be done.

The workplace

As workplaces pay more attention, not just to work-life balance, but to their workers as whole people, it seems that they reach out for ways in which they can help, and this makes perfect sense in terms of the growing need to achieve an alignment of personal and collective passion and intelligence. Some workplaces have set up creches in acknowledgement of those difficulties of modern family life.

Why stop there?

I have already pointed out the educational anomaly that it appears that teachers don’t go to their schools with the additional agenda, beside their teaching, of furthering their own educational growth. The schools clearly don’t expect that of them either, since there rarely appear to be any provisions, let alone encouragement, for doing so.

But if all workplaces have a stake in the proper educational growth of their staff, why shouldn’t the workplace make some effort in that direction too? How would it be to meet up with like-minded work-mates for an educational discussion or enquiry before or after work, or over lunch? Mightn’t that be more convenient than seeking out some other venue? To create an intelligent organisation, or a “learning” organisation, it would just seem obvious to set up all sorts of conditions and encouragement for freely available inquiry. There would almost inevitably be significant cross-over between personal inquiry and inquiry that supported the organisational mission, supposing that to be worthy.

At the same time, if a workplace can develop a creche, why might it not develop some support for a would-be home-schooler who just can’t spend the time at home? Couldn’t the workplace provide a partial bridge between the resources available to conventional schooling and the support for the parent who wants to create educational independence?

SOLE (“Self organised learning environments”)

Sugata Mitra, in a “must see” TED talk, describes his remarkable experiments that involved embedding computers into street walls in slums in India, with various contents just in English, and internet access. He then left them for the slum children to make of them what they would. Remarkably, and unaided, children taught themselves the English that the computing required, and made impressive progress with the educational subject matter. This included, in one study, a 30% improvement (from a pre-test of zero knowledge) for twelve-year-old Tamil speakers exploring the biotechnology of DNA replication from such a street site in a village in South India. Given Skype access to retired “grandmothers” – unpaid tutors with internet access in the UK – they mastered content that matched their age peers in schools. The role of the tutor, he suggests, is not to teach, but simply to raise the question, and then get out of the way, with the rest of their effort being given to simple encouragement and admiration.

Resources

Sugata Mitra’s experience suggests, not only that a very great deal of the educational work that we now do can be undertaken by groups of learners with an internet connection and a remote facilitator who has little special skill. It might also suggest that our own expectations of the skill of the adults who need to be directly involved is itself a limitation on the intellectual independence of learners. Perhaps we might already have learned this lesson if we had paid more attention to the successes of home-schoolers, where the level of parental knowledge appears to make little difference.

Where effective collaborative learning takes place, professional or formal supervision may not even be necessary, and often when it is, it might be of the most rudimentary kind, and even engaged from the other side of the planet. Enormous savings in costs should be possible, allowing the transfer of funds to those areas that do need development. These might be such things as appropriate transport and safety, the creation of better, consolidated educational facilities available to everyone, and to the build-up of proper on-line resources of a free and international nature that will overcome the current impoverishment of educational resources that are available to all.

We tend to be so enamoured of the resources that are available to us now, particularly through the internet, that we do not face up to how seriously inadequate they really are, and because we are so complacent about the knowledge that appears to have become available recently, we cannot muster serious interest in addressing the scale of the problem that should lie before us.

The difficulty of reading

Despite the joy with which so many have entertained the idea that a variety of media spawned by “information” technology will replace the need to read, it is impossible to advance very far in the  complex world of public knowledge without access to a very large range of sophisticated text. It is equally impossible to examine complex ideas closely except to the degree that their expression is frozen in time and space as only text allows.

This is not to be closed to the unimaginable possibilities of future technology; it is just to say that technology has so far achieved nothing that can even remotely be imagined to replace the current possibilities for knowing that are currently inherent in text. Without extended and carefully crafted text we are limited to the superficial, and we are dependent, unable to develop our own epistemological authority at all fully .

It may seem that my emphasis on discussion in face-to-face groups through ECOIs contradicts this. Here we depend upon the oral and visual, and the language flows in and out of experience in time. But the first power and point of this is the effect that the process has on the practices of our own reason. We get better at weighing reasons, at making intellectual decisions, at questioning, doubting, creating challenge and responding to challenge within the flow of our own experience. We build a proper confidence in our own minds.

Ultimately, though, these discussions will hit a limit, except to the degree that they are supported, on the outside, by painstaking consideration of complex texts. What can be achieved in ECOIs as discussions deepen will typically come to depend upon a shared familiarity with complex ideas that can only be built up through reading, and the discussion of what is read. The only alternative will be that ECOIs turn into something else, like extended expositions.

This does not mean that there may not be an enormous amount that can be done in ECOIs without much reading. Of course there can! The realm of valuable issues, cases and examples will still be, for practical purposes, unlimited, and the challenges we will receive from each other will almost always be beneficial in breaking down shallow conventional assumptions, and pushing our growth. But engaging with the detail of the great conversations that have been recorded over thousands of years, and with the debates of the best of our contemporaries who have devoted their lives to these questions, will push the power of ECOIs to a whole new level. The Aristotelian principle alone should be enough to suggest why this might be highly motivating, but so much more gets generated when the issues and ideas really do matter in our lives.

Reading can be difficult, of course, and texts hard, particularly because difficult thought is often hard to express in any medium. In and through our world of schooling, many learners give up as quickly as they can, and did so even before social media existed to seduce them away. But we cannot reach conclusions about the inevitability of this until we have removed several obvious obstructions that simply should not be in play.

The first is motivational. Of course learners will not persist through difficult reading until it becomes easy whilst the intrinsic benefits are obscure. Most of those who are struggling with that difficult reading aren’t doing so because they are seeking to master something that is intrinsically valuable to them. They are doing it to get the grade in order to get the certificate in order to get the job in order to get the money and the status that the job will supply. These are not good reasons for reading difficult stuff.

The second reason is that difficult reading is made unnecessarily difficult. We are expected to apply ourselves to it in private, and as our eyes glaze over, or we fall asleep over it, and as we go out among our peers, and listen to the few of them who can talk with confidence about the text, the processes of conditional self-esteem kick in. We do the social judgments for ourselves. It is so hard for us; so boring and uninteresting, and we get so very little out of it.

There, over there, are the bright ones, animated about it all, seeing in it things that we don’t notice. We can’t even maintain the main thread. We define ourselves in anti-intellectual terms. This is not for us, because it is not what we are like. Being here is to be in danger of being crushed, of being made to look stupid. What if the teaching assistant asks me about the reading? The teaching staff, who set the reading, know that most don’t read it. Their disappointment in us, their tacit condemnation of students like us, is palpable and habitual. We have learned to expect it of them.

It was only as I got to know good graduate students better that I realized that, despite appearances, they hadn’t read everything either. I even knew one who was great at discussing books in class that he had never read at all. He was good, though, at picking up the line of argument from the discussion, and confident enough to go with it. The key, however, is not to read everything, let alone think that you should. Nobody can read everything. We need to be selective, anyway. The key is to be around people who discuss what they have read, and with others who have “heard about that” – and to be confident, curious and unashamed of our ignorance.

Students go through their schooling like schools of fish. In the larger schools of fish, people don’t talk about the reading, or mix with others who do. They secretly believe that they are the dumb ones, and steer away from discussions that will reveal their stupidity to others – which is why they cling to their own school of fish, because they make it safe for each other, and they seek approval and self-esteem in other ways. They close down their own options.

Those other little schools of fish that appear like smart fish aren’t any smarter; they are just more confident, perhaps coming from worlds in which people talked more about books, including difficult books, traded their information about them, and didn’t confuse not knowing or understanding something with being dumb. In your timid group of fish, you don’t know when they don’t know what they are talking about because you “can’t (or haven’t) read the book”. These fears and anxieties create some of our social distinctions between being dumb and being smart.

What we need, of course, is a) a good reason to do the hard reading; b) the confidence to ask others to explain the reading; and c) lots of talk, in our groups about the reading (which means moving in groups that share our interests with us). We can then power this up with close reading groups, or slow reading groups in which we are comfortable exposing our ignorance. We could break from these into ECOIs when some really interesting issue arises among us. Conventional schooling, right through to the graduate level, just isn’t like this.

Lest anyone think that I am describing this out of inexperience, I went through my entire undergraduate degree as an impostor struggling desperately with the reading. I often feel asleep over it, or had to start that page again and again because I had gathered almost nothing. Often, I didn’t get the reading done at all. I did keep passing, though, and each time that I did, I couldn’t figure out why they hadn’t seen through me. That I was still getting away with it encouraged me to keep going back. It was only at the graduate level that I learned – from my peers, not my teachers – how I should have been approaching study all along, and what my attitude should have been. Part way through the second or third semester of my doctorate, I noticed as I read just how much I was enjoying this stuff. I wouldn’t have thought it was possible.

The available text

If we took education seriously, instead of indulging ourselves in the anti-intellectualism manufactured by our schooling system, we would surely have to confront the impoverished access of most of us to the world of knowledge available in text.

I have already remarked on the limitations of the internet, that what is freely available there is largely introductory. Advanced material is sparse, and where it is available, it costs. This throws us back on what is available through traditional publication, and this is costly to the point that it is fair to say that, in our conventional Western democracies, knowledge is yet another privilege of the rich, should they choose to have it. It would take a great wealth to maintain an up-to-date and well-rounded library that covered many of the intellectual disciplines. But there are public libraries, aren’t there?

With the advent of print, the development of the free, public lending library represented a remarkable way of making an unprecedented amount of knowledge widely available to people of very limited means, and there was no other conceivable alternative. But since such libraries were tied to a fixed location, there had to be so many of them in order for them to be accessible to populations spread over any sort of geographical area.

This means that they are necessarily small, and that they replicate much the same basic holdings. As a result they are virtually useless for any continuing study in any area of disciplinary knowledge. The sheer limitations of their carrying capacity often means that shredding yesterday’s books is a major activity. Of course, there is interloan – but at a considerable cost.

Anyone with a university degree who wants to continue study in their field, or who would want to advance another academic discipline, will quickly exhaust the holdings of a municipal library after just a few books, not even sufficient to gain a sense of what is current in most fields. Such study would call for the equivalent of a university library, but no municipality, only perhaps national libraries in major world capitals, and with large endowments, could expect to fund their equivalents, let alone replicate them so that they were in reasonable reach of everyone. What might have been a wonderful innovation in making knowledge available in the nineteenth, or early twentieth centuries is no longer adequate to the putative democracies of the West that came into being almost as such libraries reached their limits and were beginning to fail the needs of democracy.

Our political indifference to this poverty of real text, the real knowledge that a genuine self-education should have available, need not distract us from the issues here. Nor is it appropriate to counter that libraries are not well-enough used to justify anything better. Both of these responses come back (as so many do) to our educational failure in other respects.

The development of free public lending libraries occurred together with the expansion of the franchise, and the introduction of universal, compulsory State schooling. The effect of the latter was, of course, to create intellectual dependency and anti-intellectualism, as well as to diminish our sensitivity to the requirements of democracy itself – as we will explore at greater length in my book in preparation; The Fear of Education.

In that context, the public library truly did open up knowledge as far as that was practical, with physical libraries and print. Schooling, by cultivating anti-intellectualism and intellectual dependency, restricted the demands that we put on them so that the limitations of bricks -and-mortar and paper hardly seem to matter, just as it limited the kind of democracy we aspire to.  We just don’t notice that, with our digital advances, we should now have transcended the limitations of the possibilities of traditional libraries, and that we should now be able to meet the knowledge requirements that a true democracy would have to have available. Indeed, we should be able to do it with international cooperation, and on a global scale.

But we don’t even notice that we have a problem. We still just think about these things as we might have done in the nineteenth century, when printing on paper with ink was the medium of communication, and bricks and mortar libraries were the best that could be done to store textual knowledge and make it available. It might even be supposed that dependency on print and physical libraries set some sort of limit to the possibilities of democracy.

In addition to bricks and mortar facilities, however, what we each could have access to now is  an on-line library that extends from rich junior and intermediate level libraries to include the equivalent of a very extensive and competently stocked university library – or better – with the materials freely available. There are no technical obstacles to doing this, as existed with print and with paper. The obstacles are of our own making, and of our will.

We all need ready access to a library that not only contains an abundance of important primary texts across many fields, but also an abundance of commentaries on those texts through to the most advanced levels. It should not be assumed, as it is at present, that the users of those texts should be restricted to the people who have access inside the large, existing academic institutions, or public and private corporations, or those individuals with substantial wealth. These limitations on access create privilege, and do much to perpetuate illusions that there is a better class of smarter people, rendering the rest of us dependent. These artificial fabrications of difference violate respect and thwart the possibility of democracy.

For many of us, even a good bricks-and-mortar municipal library is too far away for effective educational access, and university libraries are far too far away, with access to their resources too limited and controlled, even if we get there.

In my case, I have the choice between a twenty minute flight across the straits dividing New Zealand’s two main islands, after driving an hour to the airport, or a road trip that is the better part of a days’ journey that involves a crossing that might close in winter of an alpine range . This is in a small Western country; and with such limited access, proper educational provision, and genuine educational opportunity simply do not exist.

Then consider the situation outside Western countries, and on a global scale – in the Pacific Islands, for instance, or Africa, or Latin America and much of Asia. The distances and difficulties become so much greater, and the costs unimaginable in most economies. Trying to remedy this with bricks and mortar libraries would multiply the problem that we saw in miniature in the dispersal of libraries in schools. The scale, now, is wholly impractical.

The construction of such an on-line resource ought to be easy, and it seems quite remarkable that we can’t do it. Oddly enough, the obstacles to doing so aren’t technological. Nothing very exciting in the way of new hardware is likely to be required. Nor are the software requirements; an adequate repository that can store large amounts of text in a format that is congenial for scholarship, and a search engine that is user-friendly and that will easily retrieve abstracts and reviews as well as titles and texts, without being distorted or polluted by advertisements.

The biggest problems, I think, are three-fold. They spring from the way in which copyright has developed for digital resources, the commercial charges attached to gaining access to knowledge, and the time and effort it would take to assemble a genuinely useful collection. To the extent that knowledge has to be paid for, even paper repositories often struggle to maintain collections. Only wealthy individuals can afford to maintain extensive personal paper libraries, the bulk of the population being limited to small collections for very specialised interests. At the lower end of the socio-economic ladder, spending on knowledge is barely an option, if at all. Here we are speaking only of the purchase of books. Very few people in the West can afford to buy and house books as a proper self-education would require. A broad collection of academic journals is inconceivable.

Existing on-line access is similar. Most intellectual material that is readily available is limited to the popularized outcomes of other people’s inquiries, with access to sophisticated material or genuine intellectual debate requiring subscriptions which only large institutions, the wealthy or those with a particular professional interests can afford. We accept what we can gain access to as amazing, when we compare that with what we had available prior to the internet. But it is truly very poor compared with the knowledge resource that actually exists, and with what would be required for us to have resources adequate to our educational efforts if we were self-motivated self-educators working with like-minded peers.

Then, as now, the expectations that we have of our own knowledge and its quality are those conditioned by around a hundred and fifty years of experience of universal compulsory schooling, with its assumptions of how knowledge should be viewed by the vast majority of learners, by its transformation of the results of inquiry to make it teachable, and by the humble dependency with which we approach it. There might be an awful lot of stuff about now, but the true authority of what is there is masked from us, and we still approach it cap in hand, with little qualitative difference from our older, more primitive use of encyclopedias and almanacs. 

Most of us, are deprived of knowledge in ways that are in conflict with our assumptions of ourselves as free people. But that doesn’t seem to matter because we know it would make little difference to our lives if we did have access. We wouldn’t be bothered to seek it out if we could.

With an anti-intellectualism and aversion to study created by our schooling, and with our curiosity stunted to the level of what we can quickly find with Google on our phones, we simply do not care. These are not attitudes that we would be likely to have if we had grown up with educational processes that genuinely sprang form our own lives and interests.

Copyright serves the purpose of making plagiarism illegal and socially unacceptable, though that doesn’t really stand in the way of conventional practices of scholarship and study. It doesn’t prevent us from taking notes or even copying out sections of raw text and filing them, annotated, on index cards, so long as we limit the quotations and provide proper references when using quotations or extensive precis in print (or in our schooling assessments). Almost any text on how to study advises us to do this. The second purpose of copyright is to ensure that the author or artist receives proper compensation for their work, and it is here that it turns out to be clumsy and stifling.

Prior to electronic developments, paper libraries could stretch to the limit of print technology. We could borrow the book, take it home and copy out the bits that we needed to work up our research. Libraries were indeed as limited as I have said, but that reflected the limits imposed by the technology, since books were physical things.

Now that we have electronic books, and they could be stored on-line, there is no adequate model for an on-line free lending library, because borrowing almost any electronic book in print would currently attract a charge – cheaper than buying paper books perhaps, but still per-book and by no means as cheap as a traditional library subscription, putting it out of the reach of large numbers of the population, and even the planet. An on-line library of the kind I have suggested, but with current charges intact, would simply be too expensive for most learners to use in order to do the reading that a serious education would require. The fact that they had to pay per book would limit their reading appetite, even if they were sufficiently affluent to consider such cost as a budget item.

In addition to that, though good technology is available, the most common forms of on-line publication do not allow study to keep pace with the technology we have available. Any sensible use of that technology would allow us to cut-and-paste relevant items into an electronic card file and annotate them as we read, collecting a small personal database for each research project, and organizing and accessing them in many ways, including through our own search tools. This would do no more to violate copyright than the traditional ways of handling text in study, which differ only in their awkwardness.

The commonly available texts do not allow this, however. Acrobat files (pdf) are frequently locked against copying, and are a form of image in any event, from which cut-and-pasting is frequently difficult, if not impossible. It is also awful for textual study, since the fonts are fixed and lines will not word-wrap, making them difficult to read, especially on small devices.

Google set out to scan the books in numerous libraries around the world and built a significant repository called “Google books”. The consumer is able to glimpse into the books, but to read them they must purchase . . . the pdf documents they have created. These are unfriendly to scholarship and difficult for the reader, made worse by the poor image quality extracted from older texts.

The other popular alternative, Kindle, is security-locked to prevent copying. We can highlight material, we can annotate it, but we cannot export any of that or copy out of it unless we transcribe it manually. Kindle books can be “borrowed”, for a fee. This holds the possibilities of study back behind the technology; back into the study technologies of the Twentieth Century.

The problem is ownership and copyright, not the technology. Kindle, for instance, is an encrypted version of a format called epub. Epub is simply a bunch of web pages (html) and even graphics stored inside a zip file. Just change the epub extension to zip and it can be opened with any archive manager.

Good free software exists to handle these files; Calibre to convert other formats into them, Sigil to edit them, Docfetcher to search the text inside them, and a number of good readers for devices, including some that allow cut-and-paste. Extensions for some web browsers readily convert web pages into epub files. This format is simple, and would greatly facilitate all kinds of textual study.

Our internet library could readily store the better part of its holdings in a simple format such as this. Now. Project Guttenberg has a large number of its texts available in epub format. It is not the library that we need, however, since it is limited to materials that are out of copyright. It does show us what could be done nevertheless, and that the limitations are not technological.

The way that electronic copyright has developed means that any free on-line library could not offer any work currently held under commercial copyright. The material most commonly thought to be valuable, in other words; the work most widely discussed and debated, and most of the production of research and scholarship, which includes all of the debates themselves.

All of these obstacles appear to be justified to enable the artist or author to receive fair compensation for their work, and for publishers to receive fair compensation for production, distribution and related services. In the case of electronic books, there is time involved in creating the digital files, and converting them, and there are service charges in hosting them. Most of the production work is now done by the authors themselves, however, and the over-all costs, beyond editorial help and cover graphics, are minimal compared with hard copies. If digital copies are secondary to the production of hard copies, most of the expensive work has already been done.

There may be an irony here that goes something like this. Many authors attempt to transform their own knowledge into books because they believe that they have something of value to say or make public, and this value lies in what their knowledge has to offer other people educationally. They also, quite rightly, want fair compensation for their efforts.

In order to get that fair compensation, however, they have to restrict the distribution of their work to those who can pay, which, globally, is probably only a tiny fraction of those to whom it would be of potential value, particularly as environments and practices of self-study became more common. If the artist could somehow receive the equivalent of the “fair” compensation from those who are able to pay at present, or in some other way, then liberating the work to the rest of the world would make no difference to what they received. As a digital item in a free on-line library, there would not even be any cost at the production end.

It can hardly be a desirable state of affairs, to authors and artists, that the conditions for the knowledge-building experiences that they create through their works are so restricted by these institutional practicalities to the few who will pay, simply in order to receive fair compensation. If it is true, as I am sure that most of them hope it is, that the work they produce could well be of value to people in the developing world, who may well number in the billions, then it has to be disappointing that its influence will be restricted to so very few. It hardly seems the right criterion for judging the value of their work to humanity.

Academics may say that they are only writing for a small, specialized audience, but even today that audience is restricted to those who have access to a library that can afford a subscription to the relevant journal. Even so, in a properly ordered educational scheme, we should not want to underestimate who might be the potential audience of almost any worthwhile work, particularly as an educated audience becomes both more sophisticated, and more attuned to the skills and importance of intellectual debate.

The social costs of these restrictions should also bemuse academics, because they receive no compensation at all for their journal articles, and little for their books. Indeed, for most of the content of university libraries, very little of the cost of the books go to the authors themselves. Perhaps, in terms of copyright, a distinction could be made in terms of “knowledge”, “art” or “entertainment”, with different controls for creating compensation, and the author or artist could choose.

There has to be a better way of meeting the costs of digital materials; better ways of compensating authors and artists, and liberating the enormous stores of educationally valuable textual and other material that is currently available, constantly being produced and so unevenly distributed.

It should finally be noticed that the on-line library that I am proposing would be accessible  internationally, just as so many other resources for education could cross national boundaries among democracies, sharing the effort and the cost. Not only would this be desirable in terms of respect, enabling the same high quality resources among nations regardless of their size and wealth, it could also mean that some part of the solution to compensation may lie in the international cost-sharing that could result.

Learner-produced resources

A second kind of resource that would not be compromised in this way would be one that enabled learners themselves to contribute to repositories on-line, and even come to participate in their management. Groups that had conducted ECOIs, or pursued collaborative inquiries could decide to submit their pathways, the primary questions they pursued, accounts of the views canvassed, their tricky points, and the stimuli that they had used or developed.

After enquiries had run their course, groups might refine all this and submit it to editorial groups, also organised by learners, so that comprehensive resources could be developed, catalogued and cross-referenced, enabling other groups that might form subsequently to gather together a good starting point and assemble some of the challenges they might want to explore for themselves.

We can afford to be ambitious in our consideration of possibility here, for several reasons. Firstly, the resource could also be international, which would give it considerable possibilities of scale, and greater potential for sharing the necessary funding. Secondly, since the educational processes are life-long, interest-based and open to all, we can expect that many people may wish to contribute as they grow through the process, participating at various points and in various ways as they continue through their adult lives.

As users, they will have had plenty of opportunity to appreciate what is of value; perhaps even contributing the material they would have wished to have found themselves. This could mean that large numbers of people with high levels of skill may be willing, indeed eager, to contribute voluntarily in a variety of ways.

Pending the development of our on-line library, the system itself, with professional support and multinational funding, could create its own, learner-managed, on-line publishing system, consisting of articles in debate as well as extended explanations and discussions of materials not so far freely available to all, by giving extended summaries and discussions of them, submitted by those who do have access to materials not available to others.

Debates stored in text could be picked up and re-engaged in ECOIs, reviews could be counter-reviewed. As material evolved, tools could develop to improve discrimination in access to it, through literature reviews. Indeed, groups might form simply to develop such material, to create collections, to fill important gaps, to raise questions about the directions taken in publication, both inside the system and without. They could filter, and  establish standards. Some knowledge communities here might even rival conventional knowledge communities.

Since we would want these materials to grow into a substantial body according to level of difficulty, learners could write for different levels.

But why would they want to? Indeed, we seem to know that learners are reluctant to read. Sugata Mitra suggests that they can’t see the point in reading when they have text-to-speech, and can’t see the point to maths when they have calculators on their phones. In one of his “self-organised-learning-environments”, however, he has his conventional internet-connected computer systems, and an X-Box, and learners are free to make use of either.

It seems that his learners abandon the latter in favour of their group studies when presented with a question that they find interesting, and can take personally. Some questions, and the process of some inquiries, are just more important to learners than X-Box. Many of his video clips show learners not only reading, but writing up their own reports and making presentations.

Once again, this is the key throughout. Education is slow, hard and even off-putting when it is done to satisfy the agendas of others. When I get outta here, I am never going to do this again!  And they don’t. But when an undertaking really does appeal to us, out of the stuff of our lives, and with our curiosity intact, we will prioritize it in proportion to its appeal.

Throughout schooling, and even into university, we write for the teacher, and almost always because it is the teacher’s expectation that we do so. We might present to the class, more because the teacher has set the activity up that way than because the class is eager to hear from us in order to learn something that they want to learn, and because we want to reciprocate, having  learned valuable things from them as well. The lack of a clear purpose arising from the learners’ own felt needs is the larger explanation of why these presentations are often so dreary, and of such low intellectual quality. 

This is the key reason why all this pesudo-activity with its pseudo-enthusiasm is so bad. The writing has no real use. More and more the writing is to satisfy the teacher’s pedagogical expectations. We sometimes write because we want to satisfy the teacher, and sometimes because we have to. But the writing rarely has a real communicative purpose of its own that springs from within us, and that we want to convey to someone else with a need to know.

Nor does our writing have that quality of self-discovery; that what we thought we understood evaporates when we try to explain it on paper, and requires us to step up to make it clear. This is the same discovery that we often make when we try to explain to a friend, or a group. It is also why having the opportunity to mentor, or to teach has such educational value.

But we are likely to miss all this when we labour over our enforced writing in school. The teacher is going to sit down at night and grade all those papers, and you need to know what she expects to find. She is not doing that because she is excited to receive communication from you. The writing isn’t real.

My own university writing was completely transformed when, at graduate level, a fellow student pointed out that I shouldn’t be writing for the teacher at all. I should be apprenticing myself for the academic community that the course represented. I should be writing as if I was attempting to publish in the journals and enter the debates. He reframed my writing, teaching me to look at how journal articles were written, and studying the publication requirements.

We might remember, then, that in our scheme we are pursuing studies that spring from our own life interests, and that in doing so we are seeking out others who share our interests; who will talk to us about that, perhaps teach us something in line with that. We should write, just as we should present, for the sake of those mutual interests, for the sake of our own understanding and to reach out to our colleagues and friends. It is in this, and together with like-minded learners with varying degrees of skill, that we might engage with these resource projects, learning from them, but then, perhaps, contributing to them ourselves.

The need for face-to-face relationships

When we wax enthusiastic about the role of “information” technology in education, and give consideration to examples, we need to be very clear, once again, about the meaning and purpose of education, and the level in the hierarchy of processes that is occupying the most of our time. What is most likely, of course, is that software and resources designed for “education” will be designed to support or improve upon what schools do, and as a result will be driven by little in the way of a coherent theory of education at all, beyond trying to make schooling and its current agendas more effective at what they really do than they already are.

This means that it is likely to be targeted below the line of slavery. That is, the technologies and resources may have little to offer the educational principles that we would not comfortably apply to slaves, albeit high tech ones. This does not mean that it must be intrinsically harmful, but all efforts that remain on this side of the line certainly run that risk, and have to be questionable because of it.

Nor does it mean that free people might not want to invest a great deal of time, energy and commitment into mastering understandings, skills and techniques that we could just as readily parcel out to slaves. We do not want slaves, and this will often mean that free people will be engaged in these activities. Nor need we identify all such activities as slavish. We all have to engage in many of them, and some may be highly pleasurable in themselves. The problem that does arise is when these sorts of educational activities loom too large in the educational field, and the genuinely educational activities that develop the person become secondary to them rather than being primary. Activities that fall below the bar must be answerable to activities that rise above it.

An example of these issues emerged in a PBS news report. A leading  American university was offering highly successful and very inexpensive IT degrees; inexpensive because they could be undertaken on-line. What the university had achieved was the development of algorithms that checked the requests for support submitted by students. The algorithm enabled a very high percentage of these questions to be answered automatically by the computer itself, which meant that the number of human tutors needed to answer the remainder was very small, at a very considerable cost-saving. It seems clear enough that, for this to be possible, the kinds of questions that are mostly to be expected are for clarification; simply about the mastery of pre-determined material.

Again, this is not undesirable in itself. It could be that the students, throughout their life so far, had encountered such mastery learning only when it was absolutely necessary, and when this happened, perhaps it was to be preferred that the answers be mechanical, and not invested with the additional authority of an adult teacher upon whom one was dependent in other ways. The learner is still dependent, but their dependency might be more like their dependency on the apps on their phone, and with a similar appreciation of their limitations. They may also be very well aware of this dependency, being familiar with its dangers, and with the importance of their larger independence.

It could be, too, that the bulk of their learning through their lives so far had been genuinely critical, and undertaken in structures where there was great learner independence. It could be that this university context was only one lesser aspect of their university study, being balanced by the highly independent, genuinely critical and properly motivated education between their youth and adulthood, centring on the issues of their lives, and constituting the major part. All of this is, however, extremely unlikely. It is much more likely that all of it, including this university degree itself, falls below the bar. Indeed, for some students interviewed, it was the only way that they could afford any sort of degree at all.

It was troubling to hear the academic who explained this system attempting to answer the interviewer who wanted to know whether such approaches, perhaps, made universities redundant. Clearly the academic didn’t want to foretell the end of conventional universities, but he struggled, and said that students often went to them to meet people. This could have been a window onto other, even more important educational possibilities; to the importance, to knowledge, of the social relationships that lie behind it, and of the many kinds of study to which they are more important than they appear to be in the mastery of IT. But he didn’t elaborate, which left it open that he may have meant that students go to university to meet people who will be useful in their future careers, or who will be the fathers (or mothers) of their children.

There is, I think, a divide here that opens up between, on the one hand, many protagonists for digital technology, who sometimes appear to look forward to a day when human relationships can be replaced as far as possible, or when human interactions are heavily mediated by digital technology. On the other are those who hold that there are critical relationships and transactions between human beings that must be undertaken face-to-face, and that it will be a disaster if we lose these, or attempt to introduce some digital medium between them.

There are such human interactions, and their importance becomes more obvious in the enterprises that we are engaged in above the slavery line. Given that conventional schooling remains below the line, and given that educational technology is obsessed with schooling in just the same way as the reduction of education to schooling is near universal, then perhaps this mistake is understandable.

There is a third “given” that might be considered here. Given that whole degrees can be taken in IT, there may be little chance that this understanding will be challenged by experience, but will be passed on from IT generation to IT generation as a part of the damage done by specialization that I have warned against on a number of occasions.

It is important, though, to go beyond just advancing the importance of face-to-face relationships, and offer at least some brief explanation of why it is so important. If we do not do this, the difference in views may simply appear to be ideological.

We have already considered, at some length how the acquisition of moral behaviour, and of reason itself, depend upon interacting with the people close to us in our context of origin, and also of how our abilities to reason well depend heavily on those we associate with.

It is true, of course, that numerous people, having made a good start, continue to make progress through reading widely and effectively; an old-fashioned form of technological mediation. But this depends upon the quality of the other relationships already experienced, on how far one managed to get with one’s critical powers before being able to take them further with such means.

It is always the hard way, however, never optimal, and it may well be that it is much harder for some forms of reasoning than it is for others. In some of the areas that do involve our judgments of situations and people, this course of learning can be of limited value. It is of no value at all, for instance, if it turns out to be valuable to have someone else who can reality-check our perceptions or interpretations of what is happening around us.

We need to recall the kinds of reasoning that are located at the heart of our educational interest. They are concerned with those studies and inquiries that inform and develop our self-respect. They have to do with our ability to make our own choices about how to live well. They are fundamentally ethical, and they go to our inner lives, to effective ways of interpreting the world with this moral end in view, to our proper self-esteem, to our self-deception and the distortions of our reason, to our abilities not only to doubt, and challenge, but to handle them effectively and productively, to our understanding of our educational histories and their social contexts, to our own authority and responsibility and what we owe to others, to our abilities to make choices and commitments, to handle what life throws at us.

These things will involve us in decisions that are deeply personal. Exploring them and understanding them; understanding ourselves, is deeply social. And it is strewn with issues of intimacy and trust. This is not the world of mastering IT systems.

Set out like this, the areas that we have to work on sound like ones that we would never want to open up in an educational situation, conventionally understood. They are far too personal and intimate. And stated in this way, they certainly are. But that is partly why and how the ECOIs have the power and effectiveness that they do. We can set up, define and explore the issues philosophically without the need to expose ourselves, put our vulnerabilities, our personal fears and anxieties on the table. We can engage in related inquiries, the exploration of what is known about these issues, the discussion of cases, the exploration of the ways in which literature has re-enacted them.

Nevertheless we still have to doubt, to challenge and to question, and we need to volunteer suggestions that might help to take the group to the heart of the matter, and this calls for a trusting group with a sound ethic, and sympathetic understanding. We need to be able to meet each other’s eyes, and achieve a significant kind of honesty.

It is likely, to, that as we become more experienced, we will exchange something a bit more personal as two of us, having built some trust, walk together down the corridor after a session, or across the square, or over coffee. We might muse over how the discussion that we have had connects to us, as we need to do to integrate the knowledge that we are gaining into our personal lives and judgements, but here with the special help of someone like-minded with whom we have developed a more personal trust, and who is doing the same thing.

This is not obligatory, but it happens often enough, and since some of the better understandings and greatest growth can emerge in these moments, we do not want to discount them or or discourage or disallow them. They become more possible to the extent that we can develop the right sorts of friendships, face-to-face. We need to encourage their possibility, and make them safe.

We can be more aware of these complexities of trust, and the importance of these incidental moments, as we break away from the tyranny of education-as-schooling. If schooling, in its formality and bureaucracy, were to ask these intimacies of us, most of us would grow wary. School has no business in our inner lives; just with our displays and performances for official reasons. We do develop friendships and intimacies in the free spaces we find within them, however. A proper system, though, would protect our intimacy and  vulnerability while enabling us to engage them safely, more readily and on our own terms.

Then we might begin to notice that the importance of face-to-face relationships isn’t just something we want to cultivate inside formal education. We want it to flow out into the larger environment, and with it our knowledge of how to reinforce cultures that keep us safe. Indeed, we want it to be growing out there independently of the formal system anyway.

The kinds of trust that we seek not only in personal intimate relationships, or in conversation around the barbeque, but also in all kinds of organisations, are often of a sort best undertaken face-to-face. We should want the employee to be able to look us in the eye without any personal threat or challenge, and tell us why they think there might be a better way. The awareness involved is often subtle, subconscious, and is only grotesquely reduced to “body-language”, or “tone of voice” or “facial cues”. We need an unconscious sense of them. Trust can have depth.

There are reports of families who address issues that they have with each other through texting; because they find it too uncomfortable to deal with problems face-to-face. Is this the direction that good management should go, or good politics, or friendship – or just the reverse?

Much of what we have discussed requires that we allow ourselves to be vulnerable, and although it is true that the online world has provided opportunities for people to expose and display themselves in all kinds of ways, its ability to protect the vulnerable or supply even basic privacy, let alone safety had been shown to be very poor. Algorithms are processing everything we say. There is no substitute for developing real trust with real people, and for doing so out of carefully considered experience. If we reach the day that IT tells us we can dispense with face-to-face interaction, we should fear one of the greatest mistakes we have ever made; a deep abandonment of humanity.

This should lead us to consider a mix of possibilities in educational practice, and maintain a balance in favour of face-to-face interaction. Tutors can be Skyped in from the other side of the world. So (in principle) could facilitators of some ECOIs. Inquiry groups could even be formed and carried on with Skype meetings, and this may prove the only way in which some collective inquiries can be pursued, since inquiries arising from personal interests should often be expected to become highly specialised. ECOIs, however, are more directly dependent on trust and even the privacy of the session, and for these reasons I doubt that many should be formed this way, except under unique circumstances, perhaps only at a very advanced level and for highly specialised kinds of inquiry where the few who could participate are too widely dispersed, and are well aware of the limitations of discussion. Perhaps priority should always be given to the local. Can this be done locally?

In any event, ECOIs need to be developed initially and for some considerable time only with skilled face-to-face facilitators, and the largest bulk of them continued that way, though maybe with more being facilitated by experienced team members or semi-formal mentors as time goes by. Mentors of both kinds need to maintain a strong local presence, because of the levels of trust that could be called for at any time.

The limitations of educational technology

It seems probable that if we were going to prioritize the sorts of developments with IT that genuine educational development would need, the focus would have to shift dramatically, since current efforts are likely to centre primarily on the purposes of conventional classrooms and conventional schools. It is true, of course, that much work “below the bar” will still be needed, and it is important, also if considerable savings can be made here, as in the case of our IT degree above, not with a view to lowering educational costs generally, but to transferring funds to educational facilities, tools and resources where development is more urgently needed.

There is clearly a huge amount of work to be done in creating online resources such as libraries and learner repositories of high quality. It will probably be very easy to develop very poor ones; ones that are overburdened with trivial content, hard to navigate and prone to being coopted by people with manipulative and even unsavoury agendas.

Developing good tools and resources online is likely to be very difficult. Success in achieving high standards in these areas has been dismal, as have the efforts to develop appropriate commercial models. Though social media has wrought many wonders, it has been fraught with issues – even derelictions – that mean that the existing forms are quite unsuitable from the educational point of view. Social media, as we would need it to find each other, and talk and decide together, is still in its educational infancy, and IT, as it presents itself at the moment, doesn’t look as if it knows how to do any better.

Finally, there is even a need for better study tools; for tools that are freely available, and that will enable students to collect, organise, annotate, recover and share their own notes and resources. While the role of commercialisation has to have an important part to play, it is destructive to the respect upon which education must be built if it continually works to exclude millions of users because of the cost.

Subscriptions are insidious here. While each one may not seem to amount to much, as the popularity of the  business model multiplies them, they become less and less tenable for individual users, because the more of them we have to sustain, the less useful they become to all but the  affluent, in much the same way as having to pay for each item worth reading.  They are also distressingly unstable, prone to disappearing or modifying their terms of service in ways that render whole data collections ineffective.

Even the poorest should have ready access to good, free, reliable tools, just as they should have access to the kinds of texts that their study really requires. At the moment, most of educational possibility in the area of technology falls on open-source communities and volunteers. Perhaps private funding needs to play a much bigger part in leading these developments to make a genuine education available to all – across the planet.

© R. Graham Oliver, 2018