Education, in our practice, is so poorly justified that we literally don’t grasp what we are doing – or what is at stake. Even a modest attempt at a sound justification reveals a deep moral bankruptcy to our practice; a ready contentment to exploit learners in the service of others. Nothing is more hollow than the idea that we are “putting the learner first”.
Why justify education?
It is interesting, and sobering, that we set such a low bar for educational justification. “People need education so that they can earn a livelihood.” and that seems to be enough to justify all sorts of things, many of which are downright harmful to people. “Education should be about life”, or “education should be about living well”, and these just appear to be self-explanatory. “Life” is unexplained, and neither is the relative ethical importance with which such a claim should be treated.
What would be an example of such an education? Is vocational training really the same thing? If it isn’t, then what is it about human living that gives it its special value, and what would life be like when most of that value is taken away? Oh, it is so complicated, and would take too long to talk about. We will just avow the platitude as the purpose, and then run away from it, doing almost anything in its name, because we have chosen to settle for the vagueness.
When we avoid these issues, we literally don’t know what we are doing. We choose not to know what we are doing, and this is without even confronting those difficult kinds of justification of educational authority itself, in which some people are to decide for others how they will think and feel, and be equipped through learning. That is an issue that goes to the core of our relationships with each other. In education, we often do have to decide for others, but the most important principle with which we must deal is respect for their right to self-determination.
The paradox of this hurts our heads, and perhaps the answers would make our lives too difficult, and so we turn back simply to convention and tradition, with all their paternalism, patronage and potential for arresting the next generation in a kind of infancy. We pay more attention to concocting excuses that we are doing no harm than we do to educational justification itself.
Vocational “education” is now clearly one of our worst areas, owing so little to the idea of education at all, and having virtually taken over the perceived educational space. There is no real educational principle or standard to which it can be held to account. What appears to be “educational” is simply the “best practice” of current effectiveness in vocational preparation.
Vocational “education” is about “how to do the job”, as that is wanted by employers and managers with little or no consideration to the conditions under which the job is to be done – the authority in those conditions, the terms of respect among the people involved, and the integrity with which they are permitted to undertake their work. The picture is kept small – to the role in production for which the learner is to be prepared. Insofar as larger issues are raised, they are carefully handled to be “imponderables”, or social issues of too much complexity or intransigence to be dealt with seriously. There are things about which we must not speak. We learn that they are not to be raised. We learn this with as much certainty as we learn anything in the programmes themselves.
People often enter the elder care industry, for instance, with strong motives of compassion and a desire to respect, support and assist the frail elderly. The opportunity to give back to the community, and particularly to these vulnerable people who must live such curtailed lives, is often a considerable part of their reward for doing so. Prior to, and in the course of their work they are usually required to achieve various vocational certificates and diplomas.
The bulk of residential elder care, at least in New Zealand, is undertaken by large corporations that receive government funding, but have as their first priority the achievement of profit for their remote shareholders, often off-shore. Organisational structure, management authority and policy are initiated, developed and maintained from the management suites of these corporations, operating in physically distant locations from most of the facilities. Policy is developed firstly to satisfy their commercial and legal requirements; that is, the requirements of government. What these regulations have to do is enable businesses to achieve sufficient profitability to want to continue in the industry, and avoid the legal entanglements and publicity if anything goes wrong. The funding for this comes mostly from the government; from the taxpayer.
Given the skeletal staffing arrangements, and the fact that staff must undertake their duties at a high pace – as the factory nature of the processing requires – it is impossible for all policies to be carried out as routinely as they should. Work must be completed by the end of the shift, otherwise it is passed on to the next shift, which faces the same problem. Staff are therefore forced to “cut corners”, not because they are lazy, or there is something perverse in their human nature, but simply out of necessity; to maintain the continuity of the factory process. They have no choice. But the policies protect management in the event of bad publicity. Someone at the weakest point in the hierarchy can always be found to have “done something wrong”.
The hierarchy is therefore structured so that the blame goes down, and the information that travels up is always filtered and formal, limiting the possibility of unwanted criticism, and ensuring that much unpalatable information about any but the most basic physical needs of residents is kept invisible, in order that the more costly needs – such as the mental and social – do not intrude on the core business and its profitabilty. It is the adequate meeting of physical needs of residents that are likely to attract the most family and public attention, and the interests of profitability mean that anything else is strictly limited.
The bulk of the staff – the ones directly dealing with residents, are therefore always unsafe, and forced strictly to limit the care and attention that they would want to give residents, often having to act in ways that go against the very compassionate motives that partially led them into the industry. Their ability to respect residents properly is often compromised, but equally importantly, they are forced routinely to compromise their own self respect. It should not be surprising that these institutions tend to foster cultures that treat staff like naughty children, are disrespectful, and frequently enable bullying.
None of this, of course, is a part of the so-called vocational “education”. No attention is given to critical thinking generally, because the whole purpose is to instill current “best practice” – research-based or not. The bigger picture that would at least alert intending workers to what they might be in for is not at all something that management would want explored, let alone critically, since it could not help but bring the organisational structure, its hierarchies of authority and, indeed, its very purpose into question. Insofar as vocational preparation is pretty much the only “education” that exists, learners are unlikely to engage the critical sociology of work, or a critical analyses of the humanity of management practices in any other “educational” setting, either.
A similar story could be told about teacher preparation, of course. Teacher “education” students have little exposure to any genuine concept of education, or to the theories that might be said to contain such justifications of education that exist, and when they do so they are usually presentations of the “views” of theorists or philosophers, largely adrift from the issues of how to survive in the classrooms that will be in the future of the student – except at the expense of the “theories”.
There is almost no attempt (if at all) to develop in potential teachers the skills to do their own questioning and theorizing, though it is a common practice to expect them, at some stage, to write “my philosophy of education”. Unskilled as they are, and without the expectation that anything that they say will have to be tested out in the conditions of their impending practice, they are forced into concocting an assemblage of idealistic and fine-sounded platitudes that are, perhaps at most, tests of how far they are willing to express a commitment to schooling and its contexts of practice.
There is plenty to choose from here with which we are all likely to agree, including “putting the learner first”, to “learning how to learn”, to “treating each learner as a unique individual”, to “developing their confidence, creativity and critical abilities”, to “encouraging a love of learning”, to “fostering a commitment to excellence”, to “growth” and “bringing out their true potential”.
In the course of collecting up such a conventional bag of things, they learn the vital difference between the veil of romantic ideology and idealistic fantasy that surrounds schooling and teaching while also learning that, because of their vagueness, there is no way of telling whether these things are being done or not, since there is never any expectation that any of these things should be explained at length in critical and disciplined ways. At this level of vagueness, we all agree with them, and boundless things could be interpreted as examples of doing them.
Which means that they are largely useless and set no standard at all. To be of any practical value, any one of them would have to be capable of being brought into a real classroom context and used as a criterion for evaluation. This could be in the form of a checklist; but more often it would have to be capable of being the occasion for an extended, disciplined discussion in which we could constructively explore what is involved in doing that thing, and ending up much clearer about it.
But what is important is what the student learns indirectly from all this; that as they come to struggle in their classrooms under the requirements that are set for them, there is no big picture, apart from platitudes and cliches. For these they are to swear enthusiasm and dedication, and take satisfaction from every bit of learning that meets the official criteria, regardless of its ultimate value. This is a recipe for institutions and practices that are riddled with hypocrisy and indoctrination.
Why isn’t education studied in school? Why, in all the years each of us spend in the classroom, isn’t education critically studied, so that students themselves can come to their own educational judgments in skilled ways? Why aren’t schools, the very places in which they are being schooled, studied in terms of what has been said and thought about them, their purposes and potential purposes, their histories and their problems? Yet somehow, despite our silence on these things, we help the students to learn how to learn? How is that possible? The problem of course is that if we did study education and schooling in school, it would be a hypocritical joke, or it would threaten its practice. But school is silent on school. Education doesn’t bare thinking about.
A colleague of mine once described what he saw in his Management School. In the first year, when those general survey courses are given, all sorts of noble management theories were offered up as criticisms of the way things are. Commercial organisations could recognise multiple stake-holders. They could pursue “triple-bottom-lines”, of profit, sustainability and justice, instead of the destructive, single-minded pursuit of profit for investors. They could create respectful, collaborative communities in which trustworthy managers blended into the teams with a shared vision, soliciting initiative and willingly entertaining criticism.
As the degree advanced, however, the content got more specific, and into the real stuff, and these more ethical and humane practices, commercially viable though they may be, fell into the background, and traditional expectations replaced them. The message is that some things are to be taken seriously, and others aren’t. After all, graduates must go into the real world of existing organisations, and it would be negligent to leave them unprepared for the world in which they must live and work. They may even end up in the large corporates that run elder care facilities. If they don’t fit in, they will fail.
This “fitting in” is what was characteristic of the previous two examples as well. Indeed, it is characteristic from industry to industry – all of those things about which we dare not speak openly, but must mutter into our beer among intimate friends. We learn, just from a few remark, and from what is so glaringly omitted from our training, the disrespect that will frame our lives. The point of the invisibility, and of what is to not be spoken of, is that it can’t be changed. And silence, the contrived silence, can be taken for consent. We learn to be silent. And this is part of what ensures that it can’t be changed
This is why vocational preparation, as it stands, can’t be educational, because it subordinates the learner to the powers of the workplace, powers that do not want to be challenged in the ways that education requires. Vocational education cannot put the learner first, because there are higher powers that insist on coming first, and to moulding the learner to their diminishing expectations – expectations that must diminish the learner in terms of their own authority, the value of their own minds, their self-respect, and their understanding of their own interests. They are not to be encouraged to see the bigger pictures, or to engage with them critically, or they will (it is assumed) be set up to create unwanted conflict.
Whenever a would-be educational structure finds itself trapped between the dilemma of “fitting learners into society” or “preparing learners to change society” (through engaging critically with the institutions and practices that exist, with a view to improving them when thoughtful analysis shows them to be wrong) then that structure has not yet found its educational feet. This is the circumstance of almost all conventional schooling, because it is a subordinate educational structure; subordinate to the institutions it serves, rather than to the best interests of the students it moulds. Vocational education rarely faces even this dilemma, because it is so clearly about learning to “fit in”, and for that reason its educational status is hardly debatable – it is compromised into indoctrination in the heart of its practice.
Small wonder that so much of the workforce is disengaged; many radically disengaged. It is not just about respecting workers, either, though that should be enough. This disengagement comes at a great financial, as well as a human cost. It is a huge inefficiency of labour, and hugely expensive. In condoning it and being silent about it we support gross ineffectiveness, wastage of energy and talent, the infantilisation of our people, the loss of democratic intelligence and the abuse of cooperation. This is the soil in which bullying, sexual predation and racism can, and do, grow and flourish as byproducts of a larger legitimation of disrespect.
The only way in which vocational preparation can become ethical would be for the workplace itself to clean up its act – to become a place in which workers can flourish as human beings, in which there is a vision worthy of animating them without fakery, and in which workers can freely invest their passion, not only because the vision is worthy, but also because it is reliably maintained – because it is true. This would mean that an educational justification would have to be one that could be applied to the workplace as well. Only then could vocational preparation evolve into a genuine education, fostering critical thinking, engaging in the critical sociology of work, enabling the bigger pictures in terms of which it is currently in denial.
There is a history to this, of course, that is reciprocated in the political establishment and that explains why, even when our mass schooling systems have not been so narrowly and specifically resolved into vocationalism, there has been no enthusiasm for the teaching of critical thinking, or social criticism, in any case. A deep suspicion of the mass of the population accompanied the slow evolution of our contemporary democracies – and, with the help of schooling, it persists. It is the persistent conviction that, if encouraged to think, those masses would rise in opposition to established authority, or at least disrupt it (it wouldn’t be good for business).
A century ago, the best employment for this mass of the population was thought to be with their hands. In our post-industrial age, where so much of that mass now work at intellectually complex tasks apparently requiring decades more schooling, much of it compulsory, the assumption that mass stupidity is a characteristic of human nature is revealed as absurd, and out of date. Our willingness to accept so little in the name of education, and our failure to bend our efforts to develop a conception of education worthy of such people is revealed as something more sinister.
We have these problems, and the idea of education is reduced to a mere “feel good” word that can be put to work in support of any dubious agenda, because there is no widely shared and finely developed set of principles that vividly show what we may or may not do in its name; what we are obliged to provide, and what we dare not omit lest we violate a serious human right. And because no educational ideal stands vividly before us – we might be prepared to die for democracy or freedom but not for education – it is clear that we do not even care. For too many of us, education is just another utility, like sanitation, water reticulation, electricity or paved roads.
Putting their lives in their own hands
As things stand, educators accept the authority that is conferred on them in the community, with only a vague awareness of the moral implications of what they are free to do. This happens, because the authority is a received, historical set of practices, largely taken for granted. Since education is so deeply important to what we may be as human beings, giving shape to our nature, and establishing conditions for our worthwhile living – indeed, establishing the possibilities in us of morality itself – we would be wise to adopt the rule that Noam Chomsky reiterates again and again.
If we are to adopt authority over other people (in this case, over what they will learn, and how) we must justify that authority and its exercise in such a way as to satisfy informed and disciplined criticism representing the interests of those over whom the power is to be exercised. He rightly stresses that the onus for justifying it should fall upon those who would exercise it. If it cannot be justified, then it should not be taken up.
All too often the justification of educational authority stops at the idea that “we” know better than they do, because we have lived longer, studied more, learned (perhaps painfully) from our experience. We want to protect them from their immaturity. Like so many of our justifications, this one stops complacently just when it needs to be treated as a claim to be explored, criticised, tested against critical cases and developed, so that its limitations are exposed, and so that its limited power to justify can be delineated carefully. It needs to be reconciled properly with the serious ethical issues that immediately should challenge it, because it is full of dangers. As it is, when it is pushed, it collapses like ash. Try to use this justification – that you know better – when you confront your neighbours. All that it can serve, at this primitive level where we are considering the vulnerable young, is as an excuse.
Imposing whole-scale, predetermined conceptions of good living on learners has become educationally untenable in our time. We can no longer justify an authority to do such a thing. As adults we expect a right to have our own decisions about living well respected by others, and though we may sometimes seek the advice of others, this does not entitle them to tell us how to live, or what to make of our experience. Neither does it entitle anyone to take advantage of our immaturity to shape us according to their beliefs and convictions.
Our sensitivity to our adult rights of personal independence must inform us about the exercise of educational authority over anyone else – particularly the young. We can hardly demand respect for our own self-determination, as adults, while failing to bring up the young to exercise this right for themselves with the freedom that we expect for ourselves, a right that they should possess and come to exercise equally, just as human beings
It would be impossible, of course, to bring people up in such a way that our educational decisions did not bend the twig of development in favour of some life schemes at the expense of others. No one can avoid growing up in some context. But such influences that are in our control should not have a role as principles of public educational decision-making, or in educational justification. The overriding purpose must be to hand over life to the learner; not to predetermine it.
To some people, this priority is so obvious that justifying it may seem unnecessary. But it is violated in practice in so many ways, and these violations appear so invisible to so many, that its implications cannot be assumed. The devil is in the details. The failure is so ubiquitous that it constantly highlights the importance of Chomsky’s point. Even such an “obvious” purpose as this must never be taken for granted.
Respect for persons
The justification of education and its authority should rest on a principle that is well recognised in Western ethics and echoed across many cultures and traditions. All persons should be treated with equal respect. The value of the person is the moral bedrock. Persons are of value in themselves, which overrides any value that they may have as means to ends other than themselves. and this intrinsic value of the person is the final moral appeal that we can make to each other, and which we should honour for ourselves. When such an appeal is unavailable, conflict is very close at hand, because others will likely feel free to impose their wills on us, and we may be forced to defend our lives.
This does not mean, of course, that people may not seek moral authority beyond or “higher” than the value of the person. Many people do. Nor is it to deny that some such higher values may even be “better”, in some sense. The problem is, however, that far too many of the people with whom we must reach agreement about the organisation of our collective lives will not be able to agree with us, or with each other, about what such a higher value would be. In the Twenty-first Century few people can continue to expect to live in homogeneous communities apart from others who differ from them on such values. We share facilities, utilities, and much public space. And in the Twenty-first Century, much of the world is at war again, over religion.
Even though some larger value may guide our own lives, we cannot count upon that value being binding upon others, or upon their willing acceptance of its application to them. At the same time, acknowledgment of the right to be treated with respect is widespread, and it continues to increase as groups diversify, or as diverse groups come into greater proximity.
It is, perhaps, the only moral appeal that the weak can expect to make against the strong, and insist upon with some hope of being heard, even if such acknowledgment is often only grudging given. Almost invariably, even those who are otherwise most critical, or even scornful, of “liberal” values, nevertheless cling tightly to their own desires for self-determination, and demand that others continue to respect them.
The ethic of “respect for persons” arose through conditions that are distinctive, but not unique. Prior to the European Reformation, a single conception of good living dominated in the West, expressed in Christian terms. This had involved a complex partnership between the institutions of Roman Catholicism and the secular state. Political authority was divinely sanctioned, in the form of monarchy.
The Reformation destroyed this possibility of legitimating political authority, wherever religious conflict emerged. Given the militarism of Western Europe, a well-developed interest in commerce and trade, and the balance of powers that meant that neither side was ever likely to prevail, an awareness that a new way of justifying political authority without recourse to the sanction of God began to evolve.
This took the form of a willingness to “live and let live”; to accept that whatever we might think of as the “right” view of Christianity, it was never likely to prevail, even through force, and to ask, simply, to be free to pursue one’s own religion in one’s own way. This placed respect for all at the top of the justification of public institutions, rather than God. By the Twenty-first Century, religion has become just one of a considerable number of differences that call for a final appeal of this kind. Culture, divergences over gender, disability, and a whole slew of differences over aspirations and life-commitments have all demanded respect as their due.
The pressure for such a solution is not unique to these Western circumstances, however. Any social group that has found itself in a position where its chances of supremacy are improbable, or fragile, but where it must reconcile itself to living among many others, is likely to stumble on a similar idea eventually as its fortunes vary, and this can be seen in the prevalence of recognisable versions of the “Golden Rule” around the globe.
“Do not do unto others as you would not have them do unto you” is the more common version, but it is more restrictive and defensive. The positive version – “Do unto others . . . ” is more proactive, more social, involves a greater reaching out, which is more useful in a world where we would want to be able to cooperate in many ways. Our difference should not, perhaps, be seen as a bad things, as an impediment between us. It can be a great source of our wealth.
In Western Europe, where these conditions became truly apocalyptic, it is understandable that this moral solution was articulated in various ways. Beyond Europe, the Golden Rule may not always have been articulated as fully, and cultural isolation has sometimes offered its own stability. But global conditions now push the priority of respect into the centre of the moral stage. Everywhere, something like the Golden Rule has had a sufficient presence to make the claims of respect for persons readily intelligible.
Respect for persons, but without self-respect
The overarching moral principle that All persons should be treated with equal respect can be broken down into two components: respect for each other as persons and respect for ourselves as persons. It is important to distinguish these two, because theoretical attention has mostly been reserved for the former, to the neglect of the latter. Indeed, respect for ourselves as persons has not often been articulated as a moral requirement, though without it, the moral theory would have a disturbing asymmetry. In popular expression, however, the symmetry is quite evident:
You owe it to them.
You owe it to yourself.
You are not doing them justice.
You are not doing yourself justice.
They deserve better than that.
You deserve better than that.
While the neglect of the duty of self-respect persists, it is possible for the morality of respect for persons to collapse, in practice, into a form of social control. This is because a crucial reason for adopting a “respect for persons” morality is that there can otherwise be irreconcilable conflicts between people when their conceptions of worthwhile living differ, and their interests appear to compete. This will most likely become a serious matter if individuals develop robust, personal and self-determined conceptions of worthwhile living that are genuinely their own. Mutual respect enables fair reconciliations.
If, however, awareness of the possibilities of worthwhile living is weak, people will tend to “fall in” with the conceptions that appear around them. And in the absence of a duty of self-respect and a lively ability to realise it, these available conceptions will tend to follow the prevailing lines of power, serving the interests of those who hold it. Respect for other persons will seem to be facilitated to the extent that people are channelled into mutually congenial and reciprocal roles, regardless of the extent of considered choice that is involved.
Supporting the indoctrination of other people into various ways of living, so that their ability to have chosen them is only a superficial appearance, might make for a superficial peace and order, but would be unacceptable under respect for persons, because of its violation of self-determination. The issues are likely to be missed if our own understanding of the freedom of the choice and development of our own lives are impoverished.
Social peace would be easily achieved, in these circumstances, if the surrounding institutions signaled moral virtues (of respect for others) on every hand. But its ethical integrity would be compromised because, in the absence of an awareness of the possibilities of life, the institutions are more likely to promote the interests of those with power, respect being corrupted at the core. Such structures can readily be illustrated from the practice in contemporary Western societies. The lines of power are structured by capitalism. Too often, respect is more a superficial appearance, because choice is compromised by a lack of education about the issues and possibilities of life, and replaced by desires cultivated through the economy in the interests of maintaining the system of production, consumption and wealth-creation, and prioritising “no disturbance to business-as-usual”.
In this case, the structure of conceptions of worthwhile living is, for the most part, dictated by priorities of of capitalism at the expense of human rights, which emphasise the importance of self-determination. The priorities of capitalism tend to promote desires to possess the material goods that are most effectively produced and marketed, with the means for attaining them being through competition within the existing and visible forms of production. Additional goods, in terms of social status and its esteem, go to the “winners” in the economic “game”.
The virtues of respect for others signaled by the surrounding institutions are thus muted in favour of the virtues of competition and “legitimate” work: achievement, excellence, success (as defined under capitalism), greed and personal possession. These bases of competition and the restrictions on the possibilities of success for all create conflicts with mutual respect, but the effects are minimized to the extent that people fall in line with the hollowed out recipes for “good living”, in the absence of a rich appreciation of life’s possibilities.
The overarching conception of good living – to realise the desire to possess, through competition, the goods produced and marketed, and the power and status that are in attendance – sets up respect for other persons as a constraint on the possibilities of good living; an obstacle to it, rather than a condition of its free realisation. Morality is externalised, and becomes a “problem” to be managed, or circumvented. Small wonder that hypocrisy, fraud, deception and self-deception, opportunism, manipulation and corrupted social relationships are characteristic of such systems.
It is important to recall that a weakened awareness of the possibilities of good living that flowed from the disorder of the Reformation has evolved into the the superficial conception of good living being defined in terms of capitalist production and consumption, and that this serves capitalist structures, realised in the interests and activities in the lives of people with power. In their interests, these failures of integrity are tolerable, because they do not diminish that power – indeed, they legitimate it, and they facilitate the creation of the sorts of wealth that those who garner power desire for themselves, and that power enables.
The wealthy have the material means to protect themselves (and to some extent each other) against the more blatant disatisfactions and dis-eases on the part of citizens – that might “disrupt the economy”, and the legal means to control those of their own number when they let each other down through embezzlement or other inconvenient behaviour. The control that is exercised need not be through force – such as policing and penal systems, but through the more velvet hands of ideology and the massive social engineering that universal, compulsory State schooling can provide.
Meanwhile, the development of legal and judicial systems loosely mimic the virtues of mutual respect, and this morality becomes a tool (beyond its legal expression) with which to chastise and whip those who weaken, and lends legitimacy to the structure as a whole. It has this power partly because the morality is out of balance, emphasizing mutual respect at the expense of self-respect. That the whole is very effective in its social control is evidenced by the readiness with which those impoverished and disempowered within this system accept it, and even endorse it.
No doubt there is a very great deal that would need to be achieved in order for this system to be significantly reformed. But we can be certain that significant progress will be impossible while we continue with “educational” processes that hinder an intelligent understanding of the possibility and the duty of self-respect, while leaving the field to ideologies of capitalist production, consumption and its reproduction.
A short history of the oversight in Western thought
Why has the duty to respect ourselves by endeavouring to live well been neglected in Western thought? There are a number of elements to an explanation of this.
One perennial background condition has been the conception of “good reasoning” which has prevailed during the Modern period. The emergence of the “respect for persons” morality coincided with the emergence of Modern scientific thought, with a corresponding awe of the power of scientific reasoning. This awe was expressed in faulty and unhistorical accounts of the nature of the nature of science itself, usually identified as “logical positivism” or “logical empiricism”.
The flaws in this understanding have been widely discussed. They are well documented, and will not be canvassed here. Under this perception inspired by an awe of science, it was thought that scientific reasoning enabled an accurate and direct “reading off” of the nature of reality, and that the way in which this was being done should stand as a model of good reasoning, which we could use to test the adequacy of other attempts to reason. Unfortunately, science can only describe and explain. It deals with “facts”, and the way things are, but it cannot justify values, or tell us what we ought to do, or desire.
Fields like ethics, or aesthetics, or spirituality came off poorly in the comparison. Science might help us to identify what we do, in fact desire, but it is unable to tell us why we should desire it, or whether (and why) it might be a desire we should not surrender to. The entire domain of understanding how we might best live has largely remained an intellectual backwater in Modern thought.
Where thought has been given in the West to the issues of living a fulfilling life, it has invariably been assumed that religion is the domain with the most that can be said on the matter. This has cohered well with the view of reasoning that has just been discussed, since religion is often set up as dependent upon faith, in contrast to reason. It thus relies upon something inexplicable which just has to be experienced, rather than planned for. It might be possible to be taught all sorts of things about religions, and their doctrines, but our faith is “up to” ourselves.
Educationally, the right to impose a conception of good living withered back into the private sphere, where the right to self-determination became vested. Along with the right to settle upon their own conception of good living, adults retained the right to determine the religion (and politics) of their children, a right not unreasonable in view of the long history of the educational authority vested in families (though educationally inconsistent with independence).
With the decline of institutional religion, and of religious family commitments, a vacuum has come to emerge in the space traditionally occupied by religion. It is a space that has been kept open by the intellectual fear of offending some segment of the population or other by proposing anything that might be perceived as a public conception of good living, and by the presupposition that there is little that can be said intelligently about it in any case. Into this vacuum, by default, has moved the ethic of consumer capitalism.
The process here can easily be seen in the fate that has befallen the idea of a “liberal education”. By the Nineteenth Century, the idea of an “educated person”, had taken the form of someone well versed across the range of “pure” as opposed to “applied” Western academic disciplines, including a range of Western arts, as these might be objects of academic attention. Sometimes this has been thought to aid good living, by providing insight into life, enriching its possibilities through exploring the nature of the universe, the human condition, political theory, and developing taste.
It had won acceptance on the basis of the conception of reason that had come to dominate in the West. Though scholars might differ in being Catholics, or Lutherans, or atheists, they all studied the same physics. Good reason in such areas gave value-neutral access to the “truth”, independently of religion. Other areas, such as the study of literature, were acceptable, so long as sophisticated and respected scholars gave them serious attention, though they were weak both because their “truth” appeared murky, and because religion could be seen to play a role in the work of particular scholars from time-to-time.
The closer scholarship came to issues of good living, the more intellectually weak the inquiry appeared to become. Forays into issues of good living were tolerated, academically, in their intellectual inadequacy. In our contemporary world, it is psychology, with its therapies and its counsellings, that have come to have most say on how to live. This can be sustained, so long as it manages to give the appearance of science and medicine, and so long as it steers clear of the actual substantive content of where and how we are to make up our lives.
A consensus on these things held together into the Twentieth Century, until it began to fall apart visibly in the 1960s. Once differences of culture began to involve serious claims to mutual respect, and once differences of gender commitment and disability became visible, the consensus behind the idea of a “liberal education” began to collapse. Instead of the perception that the Western arts and sciences were simply the application of a culturally and gender-neutral conception of reason, their embeddedness in European culture became obvious, as did their hegemony. Feminism drew attention to the patriarchal elements of these traditions – their preoccupation with dead, white, European males – and the culture wars began.
This hit the arts more severely than it hit Western science, though it is also important to notice the growing scepticism that replaced the unqualified respect that science had enjoyed in the public mind. This has become most clear with regard to medicine, where questioning the profession and its technologies has become a commonplace. It is also apparent, however, in a wariness of the use of science in political argument. Though the “genuine” results of science are usually accepted, it has become the norm to ask “who funded the study?” and to note the frequency with which “a lack of scientific proof” is used to stall change. Scepticism has increased, and not without reason.
The arts, however, have come to bare an additional burden. When the bias in favour of European culture became more apparent, awareness of a bias even more narrow than that began to emerge. The arts were not just the arts of Europeans, they were the arts of privileged Europeans; of the European ruling class. They were the arts of elitism, and this connection with a “liberal education” is a thread that extends continuously to the Ancient world. Indeed the word “liberal”, in liberal education does not refer to an education that will increase the learner’s freedom (let alone to modern political “liberalism”). It refers to an education for people who were already free – the rich and powerful who had sufficient leisure to pursue it for its own sake. (The question of what an education for freedom would have to look like if it wasn’t a “liberal education” has, of course, never been seriously addressed).
As inherited privilege has come to seem less and less worthy of respect (in contrast to wealth and status accrued from recently hard-won capital), so too the traditional liberal education has lost its credibility. What remains as educational ideals are little more than gaining the means to economic security and discretionary wealth, and pursuing activities that revolve around heavy material consumption (“foodism”, extreme sport, global tourism, “lifestyle” homes, high tech toys and vehicles of many recreational styles, being contemporary examples).
The duty of self-respect
We also are persons, and if “respect for persons” is the overriding moral consideration, then we owe it as a duty to ourselves.
But what does it mean to owe ourselves a duty of self respect?
The first thing to note is that, whatever else it is, it has to be distinguished from feelings of self-respect or self esteem, or feeling good about ourselves. These things are, indeed, very important, but they are not themselves our duty because they “arise” in us when certain conditions are met – they are not themselves acts. The duty does not go away, moreover, when feelings of self-respect are absent. We still owe ourselves the duty, even when we feel badly about ourselves.
Indeed, this may well be one of the most important occasions on which the duty needs to be recognised, and taken seriously. When we feel badly about ourselves, and become ineffective people because of it, we owe it to ourselves to find how to recover our feelings of personal worth, consistent with the duty of self-respect. We should not, for instance, attempt to regain our sense of worth at the expense of other aspects of our worth, at the expense of other people, or through self-deception. Thus one important thing about the role of such a duty is to encourage us to make efforts to restore ourselves when we least feel like doing so.
This is paralleled in the duty of respect for other people. Although it is true that people very often do hurt other people they love, it is also surely true that it is easier to behave out of recognition of the importance of other people when we love them, than when we do not – indeed, when we even may dislike them. The point of having a duty is to acquire an impulse to respect another person despite desires or urges to the contrary.
The importance of this in our emerging worlds of social pluralism should be rather obvious. We are likely to feel kinship and fellowship with people who readily join with us in familiar activities, who are predictable and who share our interests, than those who are, in various ways, alien or strange – in culture, religion, appearance, gender practices and sexual orientation, ability and disability, as well as those who have different interests and passions. Inevitably, respecting those who differ from us is often going to require effort, and even study. In order to meet them “halfway”, we will often find that we have to override habits and reflexes that we more readily take to be “natural”. Respecting “strangers” is not always natural. We often have to make an effort.
The duty to ourselves is to make an effort to live well. It is plausible to suppose that this is what everyone, in fact, tries to do, though we aren’t just inevitably equipped to do it. Presumably even the most destructive and confused of this world are nevertheless trying to make the best of the circumstances as they understand the possibilities that are available to them. With this in mind, some people clearly manage to make more of life than others.
But how can we say even these things without making all sorts of value judgements that other people won’t agree with?
At this stage, we haven’t tried to suggest what “living well” should look like, and we will never need to take a stand on this. At this point also, we don’t need to specify what counts as making the best of life, except perhaps to say that a person who is a death-camp guard who clearly would have had viable, alternative, non-brutalising lives available to them, had they “known better” is likely to be near the bottom of most people’s lists. There are also many people who end up feeling that their lives have been wasted, and with at least some of these people, we may find ourselves feeling compassionate.
But discomfort with these apparently dubious “judgements” needs to be addressed more directly.
Intelligent schemes of life
John Rawls made a contribution to contemporary Western ethical thought which has been under-appreciated, and the idea of “intelligent schemes of life” is a way of speaking about this. Within his A Theory of Justice, Rawls introduced an idea which he called “rational life-planning”, and he articulated this enough to give us a start on this problem. Some of the detail has to be disposed of, other elements need to be enriched, and some rejected altogether. It offers the potential, however, to generate an entirely fresh understanding of educational content and process, and of indoctrination, as well as enabling a framework within which good living can be explored and discussed with a minimum of imposition on very diverse ways of living.
Two words in the phrase “rational life planning” need to be flagged at the outset; both “rational” and “planning”. If they are carefully understood, they should cause no problem, but there are commonplace perceptions attached to both of these that need to be kept at bay. “Rational” carries the freight of Western conceptions of rationality, and particularly of the modern conceptions which have been discussed above in connection with science.
At this point, a start can be made from a very general (if not universal) recognition that some lives can be better thought-through than others. Any of us have had any occasion to reflect that we “wish we had understood more when we made that decision” – or we “wish that we had been able to do a better job of thinking through that decisions” – is in sufficient agreement with this idea to be able to proceed. Any parent who has ever despaired at a young child’s answer to the question “why on earth did you do that?” has sufficient recognition that some ways of living are better than others, and that useful considerations of reasoning can have important roles to play.
The second verbal problem is the term “planning”. Many people will feel – perfectly legitimately – that “planning” conveys more than the level of organisation they feel is appropriate to their lives, that it is part of the Western obsession with control, and that it flies in the face of spontaneity, intuition, and even the value of freedom itself. These concerns will seem worse to the extent that we understand planning to be a rigorous matter, as in the creation of a blueprint.
Firstly, the question of whether to plan, let alone what sort of plan we might devise, is a planning decision. Since it is not our business to judge the decisions people make about their lives, but instead to focus on the circumstances under which they are made (including educational background), a decision not to plan at all must be entirely accepted by us. To put the whole educational matter simply, the issue for us is that, educationally, they arrive at this position capable of assessing what may be at stake for them. At that point our primary educational responsibility to them must be considered discharged.
Secondly, Rawls suggested that we think of ourselves as plans, just as we are already. We are a plan insofar as we follow rules and have intentions that we act upon. To the extent that we depend upon some sorts of predictions in our everyday life and act upon intentions in the light of them, we should consider ourselves to be plans. Whether the sort of planning that we currently engage in is sufficient, is something we each must judge according to the price that our future moral selves will have to pay for any inadequacies.
These qualifications render “rational life planning” much more acceptable, but are not enough to ensure that our work with justification will not gravitate back to more rigorous thoughts of “planning” or “stronger” ideas of rationality. In our current language, such tendencies seem to be built in. For this reason, it is useful to employ a variety of expressions in our talk about these things, sometimes to reverse the undesirable emphases in “rational life planning”, sometimes to convey slightly difference shades of meaning. Hence the expression “intelligent schemes of life” and (below) “evolving life-schemes”.
“Life-scheming” instead of “life-planning” would not, however, be a happy alternative, but there are many other terms that can find useful employment in describing the process, such as “developing”, “inventing”, “creating” and “choosing”. “Choosing” is a very important concept, since it enables more specific discussion of things like “alternatives”, “options” and “possibilities”, but it also carries undesirable freight in the temptation to see life as a supermarket of conventional options, usually understood in trivial ways.
The duty of self-respect, then, requires us to develop a personal conception of a life that is worthwhile for us, that we believe ourselves capable of carrying through, and that we are willing to implement. The purpose of education is to equip people to do these things in the most intelligent and fruitful ways possible. We do this by developing in them appropriate powers of critical inquiry, and by helping them to learn how to expand the possibilities of interest.
A special case of the “Golden Rule”
If persons are to be respected, we must develop these things for ourselves and others. A difficulty in doing this, however, is that most of us come to the task with many of our decisions about our own lives already in place, and with all the influence that our own peculiar developmental histories imply.
It has been suggested that we use the Golden Rule – “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” – to conceptualise the task, but because we always come to it with a biased history of experience (which is, of course, an “educational” problem), the Golden Rule needs a special twist. This special case involves trying to apply it imaginatively to ourselves and to others as if before we, or they, are conceived. Hence we need to be able to ask what other people would want of education before their learning had developed in any particular direction, or had taken any particular form.
Similarly, “as we would have them do unto us” involves what we would have wanted of learning prior to our having begun to learn. However much of our own human nature has been learned, we need to bracket out that content as being problematic. It must not be presupposed in these fundamental decisions. At the same time, some if it must cautiously be bracketed back in as information about the richness of the possibilities of that learning. Another common expression can be of value here: “there, but for the grace of God, go I” (there but for the grace of God go countless millions of us).
Since we cannot literally toss off the minds that we already have, or the histories of our experiences already undergone, the proposal may seem absurd to some. But it is important to note that the problem rests with any application of the Golden Rule, and not just this special case. The Golden Rule requires us to do unto others, given who they are and our ability to do this partly depends upon the adequacy of our understanding of who they are.
When we try to apply such understanding as we have, we still have to do so in terms of what our eyes have seen, and what we have made of things in our own lives. To the extent that we cannot “put ourselves in their shoes”, we are unable to apply the Golden Rule, and if much thought is given to this, it surely becomes clear that we are entertaining the limits of morality itself.
In normal cases of the Golden Rule, we can sometimes interrogate the other person to fill out the understanding that we need. This is still far from perfect, of course. There may be language difficulties, or the other person may be inarticulate where we need the most information. More problematically, they may mistake their own interests. “Nobody should be allowed to get away with that. Just give me the gun, so that I can go an shoot him!” “Look, I just need a hit. Give me some money so that I can get more heroin!” “Get out of the way, I am going to jump!” Applications of the Golden Rule in such cases might involve the reflection that “if I were in that state, I would want my friend to resist. I hope that they will be able to forgive me later”.
These are the sorts of cases where morality gets tricky and troubling, and yet they are everywhere. It is so dangerous to take the right of self-determination away from other people. It is all too easy to think that we know better than another person through complacency about the life we have chosen to live, through ignorance of what it must be like to be the other person, or through the rush we sometimes get when we take charge.
There are also many tricky cases of indoctrination where other people have learned things that are seriously impairing their efforts to respect themselves fully. We can imagine thinking that, if we had learned something harmful like that, we hope that others would set us straight. Yet in most of these cases, the process that must be taken to rectify the problem needs to be educational.
If they are to recover their independence, they need to be consenting parties to the process of recovery. We may talk with them about it. We may advise them if they ask. We may help them to develop a learning plan, if they are willing. But taking over their decision-making, except in extreme cases may do little to advance their cause, since it may simply replace one dependency with another.
But the toughest case, which applies to everybody, is where we must do the decision-making for someone who has yet to grow up. In most societies, the right to make these decisions is virtually guaranteed through some traditional institutional arrangements – for parents, elders or community leaders, and it is a jealously guarded right. Far too often, through ignorance or an enjoyment of the power, the right is exercised at the expense of any genuine interest of the child.
The right decides the “who”, and is conferred with little more warrant than biological connection, social status, or age. These do not, in themselves, justify any decision primary care-givers might make. How the right should be exercised is something that needs to be justified separately, and with considerable thought, particularly since the decisions have to do with creating a whole new person who must be capable of respecting themselves and others and must, in their turn, take charge of their own lives. Chomsky’s rule about the justification of authority still applies.
Making good educational judgements (and indeed most moral judgements) are therefore highly dependent upon what we understand of others, and what we understand of ourselves. Both of these suggest life-long inquiries, complicated by the fact that the world changes over our life-time, by the continual need to attend to inherent processes that lead us to oversimplify our understanding of others, by our tendency to consider our own lives as something natural, and by how readily we engage in self-deception.
The myth of the “little soul”
Morality, and the Golden Rule in particular, depend heavily on acts of imagination and “thought experiments”. In philosophy, these tasks are often approached through story and myth, and Plato is well known as one of the great Western philosophical myth-makers. He appears to have believed that knowledge was innate, and that the process of education was one of “drawing”, or “leading out” that knowledge which was already present at birth. He imagined the soul as existing with all knowledge before birth, but undergoing amnesia; losing awareness of that knowledge, and access to it in the course of entering into a life as a new human being.
When we attempt to justify education, we must adopt some standpoint that is neither contaminated by what the learner has already begun to learn as they enter upon life, nor contaminated by our own predilections and conclusions. We need to do this to avoid imposing what we have made of life onto learners, where others might equally reach different conclusions, and also because the origins of our own reasoning is built on judgements that we acquired before we could reason; convictions set in place that very likely differ from person-to-person according to the uniqueness of their origins and upbringings. This is the deeply paradoxical character of education itself, and it means that educational justification must have a special character of its own.
Here we can draw upon Plato’s use of myth. We can conjure into our minds a contrived situation that can help us to discount or attempt to set aside the kinds of experience and judgment that we would not want to influence the decisions about the creation of an educational environment. Entertaining Plato’s idea, we can suppose that souls are eternal, and that before they embark on a human life, they know everything about its general possibilities, and the possibilities of human society.
They want to live well, but they know that their entry into life will be accompanied by amnesia, and that they will lose all knowledge of what living well might involve, having to work it all out again from scratch. They are aware, however, that human beings have tried to live well in uncountable ways, and that a very large proportion have come to regret the “good life” that they have been steered into, or have embraced without sufficient understanding. They will know that they will believe themselves to be mortal, and that their life may span only minutes, or that it may last ninety years.
They also know that they will develop interests and desires once they are embodied in human beings, but until they are made mortal, they cannot guess what these will be, except that they will be heavily influenced by culture and personal circumstance. Clearly, they are aware that what they make of life will depend largely on what they experience, and the powers of thought that they develop.
From conception onwards, what they can make of life, and do, indeed, make of it and of themselves will have to be constructed through processes of human learning and experience. In our myth, the soul is unable to choose which particular human being they will become, who their parents or caregivers will be, what language, sub-culture, or religion they will be born into, or the social status, knowledge and insight or other circumstances of their parents. All contingencies of birth are unknown – even including whether they will be able-bodied.
But we will allow that they can choose the society or general culture within which their sub-culture or surrounding pattern of life will be set, and the principles by which it has arranged itself and attempts to continue to maintain. They can choose among a very wide range of societies, each differing according to such things as social structure, level and nature of wealth, interests and attributes that they support in their members, ethical priorities, institutions and other cultural characteristics. How would they decide which society to choose?
To answer this, we need firstly to consider just what the contingencies of birth, and later life, might be. We need to know how we might fair if we are born feeble or ill or untalented, or with desires that many may find hard to understand. Secondly, we need to address what would be required of a society if it was to facilitate the learning necessary for developing good schemes of life. what sorts of institutions and practices would make it hard for people to figure out life for themselves? What would be really helpful?
And finally, we need to consider what would be necessary in order for people to practice widely differing conceptions of life. What kinds of things would be serious disincentives? What kinds of access to the wealth of the society would be important? What are the practical limits of the kinds of life that societies can facilitate?
The contingencies of birth and later life are important, because the soul must reflect on what will happen if they are born female or male, or with disabilities. Some of the latter prospects will depend upon the society, of course. In harsh environments children who would have achieved a life in some societies may not even survive birth. In others, where medical science is able to do a great deal toward keeping alive children who would formerly have died, the proportion of disabled people is likely to increase. To secure their life chances in any of these eventualities, the little soul must favour societies that enhance the life chances of those who might be born with disabilities, in case they are one of them. Similarly, they will favour societies in which females are treated with equal respect to males, since their chances of being either are roughly even. Should matters of “race” or ethnicity, or social class be considered?
But even though our myth is set up to concentrate on conception and birth, the soul will also have to consider contingencies that may occur later in life – contingencies of accident, disease, and aging. It is important to remember that human beings are not only dependent upon others in their childhood, but also become dependent later, not only because of accidents or violence in the community, but also just as they age. Societies with better nutrition and other requirements of health, and advanced medical science that combine to increase the life-span may also increase the period and nature of dependency later in life, as many more people survive to experience dementia, and other diseases that increase with age. The soul cannot count on the comfort of “there but for the grace of God, go I”, for indeed, they may be “there”.
While it has the knowledge and is able to make these key decisions before birth, and prior to any human learning once “embodied”, the soul has to decide what should be acceptable for its own good given any of these or other contingencies. It must do so prior to the new life, because societies can “resolve” issues of fairness over these contingencies of birth, not by ensuring that everyone’s best interests are served by the arrangements, but by bringing up those who fall into various categories to believe that how they are treated and regarded is the best that they deserve, even if this places them in a very impoverished and disempowered position in the social order. It is a commonplace across societies, that those who occupy less favoured positions come to believe that they deserve them.
Thus an eighteen-year-old women (or an eighty-year old man) might resign themselves to their situation, and “make the best of it”, when the soul before conception would never have done so. People are remarkably resilient when it comes to “making the best” of circumstances, but this does not mean that the circumstances have accorded them proper respect. Minorities are easily marginalised, particularly if they are very different from the mainstream. They can easily be denied opportunities that could readily have been available to them, and those in the mainstream typically take these disparities for granted, or fail to notice them.
The “taken for granted” comes to appear “natural”, and the marginalised can be just as easily grow up to believe, with the mainstream, that the differential treatment is natural. The little soul, however, prior to socialisation into any culture, must view these issues with their eyes open.
This leads us to the second question. What would be necessary in a society if it was to facilitate the learning necessary for developing good schemes of life?
The list of things that might be important could, and should, grow in length and sophistication the more we work with this approach. All that will be offered here will be a simple suggestive list to illustrate the power that this process of justification has, and that it does indeed open up a great deal for discussion and practical decision.
The soul would want to be able to choose a just society in which a strong sense of justice is maintained; one that sustains strong procedures of social criticism and active mechanisms to continue to develop and maintain just institutions. Justice is not only important to the distribution of educational resources, opportunities and experiences, but education is intimately bound up with the nature of justice – of what it is to “do justice to a person”; to value them.
It would choose a decent society. Beyond the justice with which education is deeply concerned, are the sentiments and practices of a generous good will. Our access to the most human kinds of knowledge are dependent upon widespread sympathy, and the ways in which people treat each other in their mutual vulnerability and naivety, having patience with each other over the limitations of knowledge and understanding that arise inevitably from the uniqueness of all our circumstances and our difference. The soul would, in the interests of their necessary inquiry, want to feel safe in exposing their doubts and uncertainties – and potential ignorance – without fear of shame.
It would choose a society in which the conceptions of worthwhile living and flourishing are diverse, rich and pursued with creativity, for a sympathetic knowledge of the different lives of others is crucial to our appreciation of the possibilities of choice that may be open to ourselves.
It would choose a society which has a well-developed culture of widespread respectful, disciplined and critical discussion of good living and its requirements. It is not enough that difference exists. It is important that differences in experience and understanding are freely expressed and are capable of being examined. For this there must not only be norms of respectful discussion, question and criticism, but such discussion must be widely practised and readily available, or else that difference can only be a “hypothetical” resource.
It would choose a society that is politically stable and can offer safety and security for all of its members .
It would choose a society that is capable of generating and maintaining a degree of wealth sufficient to enable the other criteria. This is not, however, to be confused with the kind of obsession with wealth creation that is a first priority in modern times, even over justice.
These are general conditions of the society that the little soul would likely choose. We should now turn to consider more closely the developmental conditions that such a soul might seek.
It would choose conditions that foster a vivid imagination – both an ability to imagine other lives and points of view, and an ability to entertain the possibilities of living such lives themselves, out of the conditions of their own.
It would choose a culture that understood the core of educational practice to involve inquiry on the part of the individual – that it is the task of each not only to seek knowledge, but to warrant it epistemologically at a personal level, giving and assuming their own responsibility for its authority. To this end, educational processes must empower the learner to engage in their own inquiries as early as possible in line with their own interests and motivation, and with as much sophistication as their development allows. And in all of those inquiries, the problem of knowledge and its authority must be maintained, by the learner, as a problem for them.
It would choose conditions that enable the ready awareness of the inner life and its development, particularly of self-deception and the partiality of experience, and also an inner life that favours courageous self-criticism, and a willingness to undertake the personal change that such criticism might reasonably suggest.
It would choose conditions that will enable it to be educationally aware, literate and sensitive, and to participate in its own educational decision-making as early and as fully as possible. Understanding education and educational judgment is not something that is currently considered a necessary part of everyone’s education, and yet it would be impossible to take control of our own education without it, which has the effect, at present, of leaving a good deal of the control of the development of our own lives in the hands of others.
It would choose conditions that enable it, with sophistication, to be alert to the wide possibilities of indoctrination, to protecting itself against it, and to removing it, where possible, from its environment; healing it from its heart and mind.
It would choose conditions in which all institutional sites that make up the potential learning environment – such as the family, the school, the workplace, sport and leisure, economic, commercial and public institutions, the media and the streets – are organized in ways consistent with educational principle – so that genuinely educational influence might be secured everywhere (and not just in schools) and the possibilities of indoctrination diminished.
It would choose a ready access to educational conditions and resources of all kinds. These would (crucially) not merely include ready access to knowledge and information that can be contained in text and other media, but also ready access to educationally sensitive and enthusiastic others who are intellectually and emotionally disciplined. It would not merely want the resources and opportunities for personal study, but an abundance of opportunities for disciplined discussion and collaboration. The possibilities for educational community should not be restricted to just a few sites, but should be available within all kinds of communities, across formal and informal settings, including the workplace, recreation, leisure, and domestic occasions. This social richness will not be restricted by social differentiation or by age-bands, but will involve people across the range of sub-communities.
What has been achieved through the story of the “little soul”? Though the list of criteria may be incomplete, and though there is plenty of room for the criteria to be modified and developed through further thought and debate, it seems reasonably clear that an argument can be made which will generate specific conclusions from the use of this special case of the “Golden Rule”.
The conclusions are specific enough to require cultural support for practices that are neither currently widespread nor clearly articulated in contemporary educational proposals. Moral imagination, independent learner inquiry, individual self-criticism and social criticism are not currently at the centre of educational discourse, as they should be.
Nor is there widespread, considered discussion of the value to be found in different conceptions of living, or their limitations. The absence of these things immediately does much to help disclose the real agendas of work and social control that are at the heart of conventional policy and practice. Though we must not leap to consider how these things might be better implemented in schooling systems, the practical implications of this approach should become vivid immediately. Whatever could emerge from such inquiry, it would not look much like the schools that we have put so firmly at the centre of our current “educational” preoccupations.
The gap is huge. But this should not lead us into mistaken discussions of the “practicality” of generating such principles for a redesign. Our current systems are not merely lacking in a worthy purpose. The purposes they can be seen to serve have histories that are quite at odds with respect, and reflect deeply manipulative and anti-democratic and anti-educational histories. Without a proper guiding purpose, they represent collections of agendas that are deeply conflicted, quite apart from the problem of their educational worthiness. Endless “educational reform”, always embarked on with great enthusiasm by some, merely contributes to these problems, and ineffectual reform becomes an endless process.
And what is offered here is not intended as a practical blue-print, in any case. It is an opening account of purpose, sufficient for us to go forward. What it has to offer is guidance about the direction in which changes should be heading. Without such a purpose, it is not even possible to determine whether something is, or is not, an advance. It is quite easy, operating as we conventionally have, to go backwards. There is nothing at all practical about pursuing a bad purpose. What we must do is work with diligence and integrity to resolve every practical difficulty we can in a worthy direction.
If we carry on thinking and unpacking the necessary concepts and principles from these very initial criteria, and apply these ideas to our personal knowledge gained throughout our own lives, a very powerful reconsideration of our educational nature is inevitable. If we carry these criteria with us into other fields of study, applying them to what is well known, and drawing on the many well-considered insights that currently exist, we cannot help but transform the ways in which we make decisions about our lives together. We would have to make some deep institutional changes.
But in order to make this progress, we need to reflect once, more, upon the nature of our whole task. We need to turn again to consider what we should be expecting of our educational ideas and understandings. What kind of decisions-making is educational decision-making? What are the theoretical and practical constraints upon educational judgement? What are we deeply justified in doing to people, in controlling their learning, and what should we have no business doing at all?
Education, in our practice, is so poorly justified that we literally don’t grasp what we are doing – or what is at stake. Even a modest attempt at a sound justification reveals a deep moral bankruptcy to our practice; a ready contentment to exploit learners in the service of others. Nothing is more hollow than the idea that we are “putting the learner first”. 
