[starbox id=RGO]
Our store of educational ideas
From the beginning, the idea of vocational training has sat uncomfortably with the idea of education. The idea of education was invented in Classical Athens, some thousands of years after schools were devised. Its greatest expression, and still unrivalled, is in Plato’s work, The Republic, in which two things at least are clear: firstly, education is not something that is limited to schools, but is conducted throughout the entire society and determined by its structure; and secondly, that its concerns are deeply humane, having to do with justice and the human good. Justice is not only to be understood in terms of larger social issues such as the production and distribution of goods, but also in the relations of each to each, as well as in terms of doing justice to ourselves. It is about good living.
But anyone exploring the birth of the idea of education, though they can hardly avoid giving primacy to its invention by the philosophers – its invention, indeed, hand-in-hand with humane philosophy – must also, in all honesty, if with a little discomfort, acknowledge the parallel and competing tradition at the time; the tradition of the rhetoricians, represented most notably in the work of Isocrates.
The rhetoricians were vocational trainers – preparing ambitious young men for the most prized positions in Athenian democracy, which always involved effective participation in its very public political processes. Teachers of rhetoric offered these men a crucial set of means to a desired end. These means were the skills of persuasion and influence. The young men who sought out Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle often did so, at least initially, with these same aims in mind. The end was political power. In contrast, education, as practiced by the philosophers, has always been understood to be an end in itself.
This contest was ultimately to be won by both sides in quite ironical ways. The idea of education won, in the sense that when politics was destroyed in Athens as it came to be ruled by foreign governors, the former ruling classes had acquired a taste for all that higher schooling, and though it was no longer “useful” for political careers, since they ceased to exist, it came to be pursued for its own sake. But the rhetoricians won because it was their interests in language, letters and persuasion that came to prevail as content over the philosophical questions concerning good living, the good society, or justice. A particular idea of the good life came to be the things that was intrinsically valuable about education. To live a good life was to wear the crown of letters. The philosophers had cemented into the concept of education that education was intrinsically valuable, and that value lay in good living, but the rhetoricians won by specifying what good living was, and they determined its content. To the philosophers, good living was problematic,
Education isn’t about vocational training, and never was. It has always been about good living. But there has always been this discomfort about vocational training. It comes up unavoidably, because whatever we want to say about good living, earning a living is mostly a necessity, and even when it isn’t, doing something worthwhile with your time has been associated with having a serious vocation, a calling, being called to some productive and satisfying work. As the possibilities of life become more sophisticated, so does the preparation for that fulfilling work.
Nevertheless the good living of a human being, and their value to themselves and each other, can never be reduced to a mere job, except by tearing down our humanity. Such a reduction is, indeed, slavery. For this reason the idea of education has always been higher. The possibility of life having meaning depends upon it; that is how work can come to be meaningful, and not the other way round. The only way in which job training can be educational is by being subordinate to education, and consistent with its demands.
This tension, which educational theory needs to resolve as it has never really attempted to do, is acute in our own day, and made worse by the simplistic equation of education with schooling, and our obsession with it. Plato was right at the beginning. Education isn’t just something that goes on in schools. The most significant educational unit is the society itself. When scholars look for the precursors to the idea of education, they don’t trundle back through the history of schools to their first invention. They look into processes that preceded the invention of education in Classical Athens; to the ways in which people learned their ideas of living well in their cultures, and came to live in accord with them.
But we live in an age dominated by the idea of universal, compulsory schooling, and we just can’t get our heads around the idea of education. Good living seems some pious abstraction, even though our worlds – from global problems right into the intimacies of our families and the perplexities of our own lives – are riddled with problems of living well, and we are rightfully suspicious that we may be failing to live well in all kinds of ways – some of them serious, even fatal. These failures we often see readily enough in others, and we sometimes have reason to wonder about ourselves. We just can’t get past our preoccupation with conventional schools though, and to that extent we have no chance of getting the educational problem clear in our minds.
As an undergraduate student of education many years ago, courses in the history of Western education, and Western educational ideas, were virtually obligatory. I think it unlikely that such courses exist today, except in some hold-out corner of some strange teacher education programme somewhere. This is probably a pity, since for most teachers it was the only contact that they ever had with the history of their own thought. Once, talking to a school principal, and thinking to explain something about a problem in our practice, I happened to check if I could safely recall Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. “I know the names” she said. The doubt had crossed my mind.
Those courses, though, showed the confusion quite vividly. They travelled more or less chronologically, and in that journey through time they mixed educational theorists with schooling theorists, and education with vocationalism indiscriminately and without discipline. They offered little more than a bland survey of the antecedents of where we are today, tramped through as history teaching so often does so terribly, without any critical tools or critical edge and with nothing much to explain. But these courses and their texts were, of course, designed in a context of teacher-training for the universal, compulsory, State schooling systems, and so the conceptual confusion and the lack of any critical edge were inevitable, and made no difference anyway. Where that history was sprinkled with educational insights, and the lecturers and writers occasionally displayed a little of that ambivalence about vocationalism, they were nevertheless working to serve an existing system that has little that is educational about it, and that is overwhelmed by the apparent “necessity” of vocationalism.
We can, however, learn something from the weak ideas of education that we have inherited, so long as we don’t just suppose, as so often seems to happen with the issues about good living, that they are weak because of something inherent in the subject matter – that our poor thoughts about education, like our poor thinking about life, are poor because the subject matter is too hard and intrinsically incapable of clarification or improvement. In the spirit that we really need to make an effort to do much better, I will crudely canvas three conceptions of education that I have heard most commonly offered, suggesting why they are incapable of arresting our practical imagination, but also how they contain clues that might enable us to wake up our educational ideas. These conventional ideas are; that education is cultural transmission, that education is an introduction to the academic disciplines in some breadth and depth (the traditional idea of a “liberal education”), and that education is for “growth” or “self-realization”.
1. Education as “cultural transmission”
“Cultural transmission” justifies so much and is a guide to so little that it is a good example of an educational idea that can be used to rationalize just about anything. It has two features. Firstly, it does at least support the idea that education is as broadly conceived as to incorporate all social institutions, though this would not inhibit schooling policy-makers from appealing to it. Secondly, it does have something to say about the educational process, though mostly as something we need to go beyond.
The problem with culture is the implication that all that is cultural is worth passing on. Unfortunately cultures are so often paraded in idealized ways (unless the culture is Western) that this point actually needs to be made. But cultures are riddled with contradictions, hypocrisies, and anachronisms, as well as sub-cultures that are sometimes oppositional as well as processes that marginalize. They are not logical structures of thought but dynamic and sometimes dysfunctional organizations of social relationships and processes living within history. Torture, oppression, exploitation and beheading are just as cultural as charity or nuclear physics. So are propaganda and indoctrination.
Schools and universities supposedly transmit culture, but within them, students also transmit to each other techniques and skills that they understand will get them through as easily as possible – get their “C” and get outta there – even though many of these practices miss the educational point as well as the schooling point. They condemn students to “C”s when they could more easily get “B”s or “A”s, quite apart from condemning them to unnecessary ignorance. It is all culture, and it is all “transmission”. Hence “cultural transmission” begs the question “what is worthwhile such that it deserves to be transmitted?”. This leaves the selection of educational content to whatever agendas of fashion or power happen to prevail at the time – without the guidance of any other educational principle. Sound familiar?
Transmission isn’t very helpful either. Messages have been transmitted by letter, by telegraph, by radio and by TV. The message is “sent” by a “transmitter” – a messenger, or a wireless transmitter, perhaps, and received, by a recipient or a wireless “receiver”. These things are mechanical, and what is transmitted between them is literal. But in the first instance the message has to be expressed to serve an intention by a human being at one end and interpreted by a reader, listener or viewer at the other. The meaning has to be reconstructed by a different human being. The idea of cultural transmission, though, is of culture being passed on from one generation to another as if it is a “thing” – an heirloom or a cultural artifact. The elder “passes it on” to the young, from generation to generation like a baton in a race. Hopefully, it is transmitted in some way that keeps its integrity intact.
This conceals the way in which each generation has to construct and reconstruct what they “receive” in their own terms, and in the world which they inhabit. The problems with this may not be very evident in cultures that are stable over extended periods of time in environments that are also stable and without much contact with other cultures, but the very idea of such “transmission” is more of a handicap to educational understanding than it is helpful in the world that we inhabit now.
(I will leave it to readers to follow up on the well-known critiques of this popular educational idea of “transmission” – to receptacle, sponge and “bucket” theories of mind – the latest version of which might be the hard drive. I recall a research fellow who came in from the schools who asked me if I could help him with his problem – how to transfer a “block of knowledge” into a learner’s mind. He mimed this for me, shaping and picking up an imaginary block of knowledge with his hands and lifting it into an imaginary head.)
As with the other conceptions of education, we can interpret this one as also addressing the problem of good living, insofar as cultures have traditionally determined these things for their members. They might do this partly through religions and their clergy, with which they are culturally bound, but to the extent that the religion is indifferent to important components of good living, the culture will likely have other rules for settling these.
In the West we might speak of the transmission of the common appeal to choice over the elements of good living, but we would also have to discuss the cultural mechanisms that constrain, control, manipulate and even determine these courses of life, since these are clearly transmitted as well. Christianity has its own historical contribution here.
In addition we would have to include the failure to transmit anything much that would equip people to negotiate this mine-field and work out a life for themselves, since this absence is an evident feature of the culture. To the extent that the culture comes to obsess about wealth at the expense of ideas of the good society and good living, and production and consumption overwhelm other considerations, then any recognizable concept of education will collapse into vocational training and conformity to commercialized fashion.
2. Education as a “liberal education”
The second conception of education – that of a liberal education – is the one that has the strongest claim to the meaning of the word in Western tradition. It is the strong historical tradition, going back to the Hellenistic period in the Ancient Mediterranean, and it evolved, in Europe, into the dominant educational idea in European history.
The word “liberal” here, simply means that it is the education for free men and women. On the one hand this suggests an education for the very small minority of the population that doesn’t have to work for a living, or whose efforts at doing so still leave them with time to have a life. For this reason it was the education for the ruling class; the aristocrats and those who were to come to replace them. At the same time, it was an education for a particular conception of good living which centred, as it had for the ancients, around the life of letters. It was not, in other words, an education developed for the purpose of making men and women free. It was to give you the refinement and make you the sort of person whose company could be enjoyed by the better class of people. This does not mean that the experience of a liberal education could not be liberating, as we shall see.
Originally this life of letters centred on Latin and Greek and the writings of the ancient world. Because of this, and the enormous respect for the ancients, it carried along with it many ancient intellectual preoccupations – mathematics, logic and grammar, for instance. It was also accompanied by two other strands inherited from the ancient world – a conviction about the importance of physical education, and some musical accomplishment. These had their educational justification in the balancing of body and mind – mind and body, and emotion and reason. Such arguments are still likely to be compelling today, and gyms and sporting programmes are ubiquitous in the institutions of schooling. Physical education also retained its importance because warrior leadership continued to matter. Music, poetry, drama and the fine arts because the popular cultures of radio, TV, movies and video-gaming had yet to be invented, and even the ruling class could display their refinement in entertaining each other with their own performances.
All of these things evolved as areas of private study, often with tutors, and as a university and school curriculum, centring on academic disciplines. As these areas of study tended to reference communities of people who were particularly skilled in them, and as they were organized to be taught, they evolved as “subjects of study”. Those subjects that found a place in university faculties and the university curriculum gained special status, and acquired a special independence – studied, supposedly “disinterestedly”. The “truth” is what mattered rather than any kinds of usefulness that flowed from them, and their pursuit came to be protected, at least in modern times, by an ideal of “academic freedom”.
By the mid-Twentieth Century, we might see a big American university with a large undergraduate faculty of liberal arts and sciences, with graduate faculties and schools across a huge range of subjects. A typical course of study would involve a liberal arts undergraduate degree followed by some sort of professional graduate school – law, teacher preparation, medicine, social work, business or engineering, for instance. Or a student might do graduate work in a particular subject, either because of its career value in the wider world – politics, economics, or chemistry – or with hopes of an academic career.
Elsewhere in the English-speaking world, an Arts faculty at the undergraduate level might compete with a science faculty, and with a range of vocational faculties – education, law, social work or management, for example. They would differ from the American model too, in the absence of a physical education requirement. Coming from such an environment, it was novel to see, in my American undergraduate classes, female students with their quivers of arrows, and I became aware of how some students brought their horses to college, being able to do so to fulfill their physical education requirement. Even American students, though, seem not to have been obliged to perform musically. The guitar has not fully replaced the lyre.
This model of education has had considerable influence downwards into the schools, mostly because the supposedly more able pupils had to be prepared for university study, but also because the model of subjects of study comes from the intellectual communities themselves. As the idea of a liberal arts education in universities has become overwhelmed by vocationalism there, it is hardly surprising that the sense of education in compulsory schooling has collapsed as well, since it can hardly be said to have ever had one of its own. Forty years ago, university vice-chancellors and presidents used to speak up publicly for an ideal of education. Now that they no longer do so, nobody does. The word “education” is used repeatedly every day in New Zealand, but it simply means whatever schools do. I have not heard education itself either publicly referred to or discussed for well over thirty years with any other conceptual content, or as an ideal. Although it is easy enough to identify the conceptual difference at the personal level, and through discussing the meaning of words, the concept of education has been lost to public consciousness.
The fact that the central purpose of a liberal education was bound up with an aristocratic conception of good living has become
one of the principal causes for its demise. The ideal of the “educated person”, which was so central to it, has lost much of its appeal. When students are asked to explain the qualities of an educated person, as these are revealed to exist in the language by some simple conceptual analysis, they readily enough agree that it is that of a “cultured person”, that it implies some academic or intellectual cultivation, some sensitivity to art and music, traditionally understood, some breadth of intellectual discipline across the arts and sciences.
They can see it, but it isn’t usually what they want from education, even if their interests aren’t merely vocational and they want to transform their lives. If education implies such a way of life, they are more than willing to pass on that. Though they may favour reading, they can’t imagine reading seriously in the literary classics, or serious history, or philosophy, or even political theory for the rest of their lives, let alone science. Not as a matter of personal enjoyment. Such an ideal might be fine for those who want it, but it has little appeal for them. They have no “taste for it”, as it had for people in the Hellenistic world and that made Greece, and what went on there, so attractive to so many living around the Mediterranean – or as the life of philosophy and letters appealed to the ruling elite throughout Western history. The appeal is gone, together with the sway of that class that held it.
That ideal was considered to be valuable in itself. It was a part of what it meant to be a fully grown person, one of the better sort of people, properly civilized and fit to make decisions for others. Fit to sit at the high table, and converse there. People who possessed this cultivation, and were good at it, were to be admired. But beyond this conception of good living which has been fading now, and is even widely scorned, it is important not to lose sight of the many ways in which that education was also empowering – that it had enormous utility. The industrial revolution, and capitalism itself were built upon the sciences created in this way, and the capacity to develop more representative and respectful social and political systems was vitally dependent, not only on the ancient classics, but on the history, political theory, philosophy and social study that they spawned. The new modern ruling classes that scorns that way of life could not have gained access to the power that it now has without the use of those tools by others in the past, and by using those few of them that they have come to master themselves. The modern heirs to a liberal education show an unacknowledged and incompletely recognized debt. Many of our contemporary problems arise from this lack of consciousness.
One vital educational contribution that we will not manage well without is the contribution that this form of education made to the development of reason and critical thinking in learners. In its later phases, throughout the Twentieth Century and before its decline and the deliberate project to destroy it, the contribution of a liberal education to critical thinking was well understood and strongly advocated as being important to as wide a range of students as possible. Students recognized this too. The undergraduate years at university were often thought of as an important transition time in the process of growing up, a period of self-discovery akin to that other enterprise for exploring life that has been so well-understood in New Zealand; the wandering overseas – overseas experience or the “OE”, as it was called.
At university, one could study English literature, or history, or philosophy or even classics, not for career reasons but for an exposure to the issues of life and society, to have one’s preconceptions challenged by the ideas, stories and intellectual struggles that might give power to one’s own self-understanding, breaking down the clichés and platitudes and replacing them with something more substantial – or problematizing them. The breadth required of a liberal education enabled some sampling of the intellectual disciplines, and this increased the chance of stumbling on one or more teachers who had the skill and interest to bring their subject to life – by which I mean to thrust it into the lives of students, and wake them up.
I was good at English at school, and studied the English classics there, including Shakespeare, and I remember the dread we all felt as we were forced to stand up and embarrass ourselves by trying to read the stuff out loud, when we couldn’t even follow the story. But literature at university woke me up, wide-eyed. I had read a good deal when I was younger, but it was at university that I was shocked that these authors could know some of the most personal things that went on inside me. Reading them with the help of good criticism felt like an enormous almost frightening invasion of my privacy. Things that I had taken for granted as being far too private and unique to me for those people out there ever to understand were suddenly being exposed and illuminated by these writers. These things were so much a part of my apparently secret life that I struggled to process it without the conclusion that other people had been reading my mind. How else could they know this stuff about me?
But this was also a personal revelation which grew my understanding of myself and my situation, as well as my understanding of others, in extraordinary ways of profound significance for my personal growth. It was a liberation. As a journey of self- discovery – as true adult education – its only equal was the ritual journey of overseas experience familiar to so many New zealanders – living as we do in a small maritime nation at the end of the earth. OE was an education in living out in that other world, and balanced the intellectualism of the self-exploration, that re-thinking of life, that a liberal education made possible. A liberal education meant that you went into the outside world and explored it with eyes that had been opened by sophisticated ways of seeing. When I meet young European tourists in New Zealand doing their own form of OE now, their eyes have been prepared by little more than their study of transportation, or of baking.
No matter how advanced the problem-solving abilities in any area of vocational training, vocationalism could never replace a liberal education in this role, because no form of vocational preparation is capable of addressing the whole life of the individual learner. Vocationalism is necessarily specialized. There is nothing about being a brain surgeon, or being able to design the next iPad, that equips anyone to understand political theory, good parenting, or love, or to be thoughtful about such things in disciplined ways.
For all its weaknesses – and the narrowness of its intellectual and academic character is one of many – a liberal education was intended to introduce learners to the broad range of disciplined thought as that differs across the range of human living. Equally importantly, it also introduced learners to these things as being intellectually problematic, rather than merely as received wisdom. It introduced learners to the quest for appropriate methods of inquiry and standards of reason, with the acknowledgement that these might differ with the subject matter. It introduced learners to the idea that knowledge needed to be distinguished from mere opinion, the better answers from the bad, even if we all need to struggle to find good ways of doing that.
For all its weaknesses.
I am not attempting here to defend a liberal education in the sense that we should return to it. I am pointing out the price that we are paying, and will more seriously pay in the future, by destroying it without attempting to do better – particularly in creating something that can offer more than it has done, and for the population as a whole, and not just those who now are perceived as “academically inclined”. It was the only systematic way in which critical thinking was developed at all, as a power for the whole of the learner, and in their interests. All that we have replaced it with is technocratic problem-solving for the purpose, not of the learners or their lives, but of the jobs and industries that they might find themselves shoe-horned into. Where we talk about critical thinking in schools – and it is little more than words – we reduce it to a kind of informal logic, which might serve to eliminate a few fundamental errors but has hardly anything to offer the true critical understanding of intellectual challenge. This simplistic informal logic is what we talk about at best when we consider critical thinking. At worst we have Edward de Bono and his hats.
The neo-conservative revolution of the 1980s ushered in a sustained attack on the idea and practice of a liberal education because of its association with the ruling elites of the past and their apparent indulgences. The life of letters and the arts has come to be seen as of a piece with the airs and graces of parasitic privilege, along with grouse shooting and hunt’n to hounds. Any real sense of the contribution to all our lives of a facility in a wide range of disciplines and an attempt to articulate that breadth into a larger conception of life has been completely lost. It has been promoted as a piece of fine lace on the collar of life – a personal possession and affectation which might be nice for those who want it as a private acquisition – the sports car, the marble bathroom bench-top or the liberal education. If you have the money, then you can get to choose your pleasures.
In New Zealand, if you want to study subjects in the Arts or Humanities – such as literature or history – the State has determined that you shall pay higher fees than if you choose a vocational degree. This is because the State economists in the Treasury argued that those subjects were “private goods”, in contrast to vocational studies. Private goods, as I understand them, are “excludable” and “rivalrous”, that is, charging people for these goods puts people in competition for them, and since the resource is not unlimited, the consumption of the good by one person makes it unavailable to others.
It is not clear why this is any more true of the study of English literature than it is of human development as a part of a teacher training degree, or strategic planning in management studies. All of them have to be paid for in fees, and in New Zealand universities, supply has been a problem at times, because of changes in demand, but not so much with Humanities subjects. On the contrary, Arts faculties have withered because demand has dropped. This problem existed before the increase in fees. Fees themselves have required huge student loans, and students are more likely to choose vocational degrees simply with a view to paying those loans back.
Competition for entry has only been an occasional problem across New Zealand universities, since New Zealand governments want to look good in the international credentialling race. Hence the description distinguishing Arts subjects from more clearly vocational subjects as “private goods” was inaccurate before the increase. It was not a “scientific” description of a state of affairs that existed. Instead, it was an ideologically driven political judgement made under the pseudo-scientific authority of Sate economists to convert these subjects into “private goods”, while ignoring the application of the same criteria to vocational subjects. Indeed, it is a mischievous piece of rhetoric designed to convey a personal character to these “goods” – the personal decoration to life that I have described above.
Economics apparently recognizes “mixed goods”, and this would make better sense of both vocational training and a liberal education as well. Both are potentially rivalrous and excludable once you charge for them. Both contribute goods in which we all share. A management degree presumably creates, among its graduates, better managers for all our public institutions, and hence benefits us all. But it is also to our benefit that we have in our communities people with considerable literary understanding and sensitivity as well as people with historical knowledge and appreciation. It is beneficial also, that we have people who can take the larger view, with sophisticated conceptual schemes, and minds well-disciplined across a wide range of studies. Indeed, any worthy conception of democracy would depend upon such understandings being widely available. In the interests of democracy, a better argument could be made that it is vocational training that should be the private good, and a liberal education available to all as a public good. Instead we have the opposite – the deliberate reduction of democratic possibility, in this case by a politically partial group marketing themselves as social scientists.
3. Education as “personal growth”
The third of the conventional major candidates for the purpose of education is the “personal growth” view. The basic point of this view is to be learner-focussed, and it represents the strongest view in terms of putting the learner first and studying learners developmentally – as learners and as whole people. It is this that has inspired child-centred and then learner-centred initiatives in schooling, and the greatest impact of the idea began with the very young, so that in schooling terms its influence starts with early-childhood education, and then elementary education, and has gradually been working its way up until its influence can be detected even in universities. Liberal education, in contrast, worked its way down from the universities, with the result that schooling still resolves itself around school subjects and a curriculum that continues to acknowledge the liberal education tradition, even if, in schools, its ability to challenge lives is limited.
The agendas of universal, compulsory schooling do not, however, involve putting the learner first, and hence they do not concern themselves with that challenging character of the liberal education tradition except to perform a role of preparing some learners for university study by offering basic academic subjects. Any real sense of disciplinary apprenticeship, particularly in freedom of thought and enquiry, is quite lacking. The child-centred and learner-centred impulse that has been introduced into schooling is therefore not concerned with the growth of the learner, as a person, at all. Child-centredness or learner-centredness is not an ethical position in schooling, it is a methodological one. It is seen as an important approach to make conventional schools more effective at what they are supposed to do.
The “growth” views are ethical to their core, however. They take the learner seriously as an intrinsically worthwhile human being, and this lies at the heart of their critique of conventional practice. They are concerned with enabling learners, as people, to come to make the most of life – to deal with it and make something of it as flourishing human beings, with insights, understandings, values and powers that are truly their own. It offers personal growth in contrast to the institutionalizing, factory process of conventional schooling, which creates passivity, dependency and conformity of thought and experience, opposing those agendas of schooling that serve to satisfy the various claims to having a stake in the learner that others make.
This is why it privileges processes that seem to emerge naturally out of the learner’s own growth. It builds, firstly on play; on harnessing and sustaining the curiosity and exploratory interests of early childhood. The natural willingness of the child is taken seriously. Their best interest are their actual interests, and their true selves will flower as these inner impulses, expressed in playful exploration, lead to a mastery of their world. Both the methodology and the ethics of education combine in the learner’s educational freedom. Since education should be about their lives, it must focus on the impulse to live that they really have, and the ways in which they perceive their world. Within bounds of health and safety they should have a very large say in what they learn, how they learn, and when.
The problem is that almost all enthusiasts for the idea of growth are too vague about growth itself. This vagueness sprin
gs partly from superficiality about the social or cultural dimension of human development. Intellectual and emotional development involves much more than a flowering from within. It is not just a bud that opens and blooms when it receives the right water and sunlight and nutrition. The mental life of humans develop interactively with experience in an evolving way, and what is crucial in the environment of that experience is the social. This gives considerable shape to their language, their thought and their reason-giving. Since social environments can be so different, and differently seductive, manipulative or controlling as well as liberating, and in addition, since development shows such plasticity, the crucial questions remain: what sort of growth is worthwhile, and what should be inhibited?
As one of my colleagues used to say, “cancer grows”. The problem here is just like the obvious problem with that tediously repeated and entirely empty schooling slogan about “realizing their potentials”. Which potentials? The woman’s movement has often been fond of saying that all men are potential rapists. So that’s all right then. Potential racism, misandry, fraud and self-deception are no doubt all right too. Fagin, in Oliver Twist, demonstrates how a little schooling can considerably enhance a boy’s potential at stealing “wipes”. I am quite sure that we could be equally good at promoting growth in people’s ability to torture, or to kill in cold blood. We may even be doing this today. Our little bud unfolding in the right sort of social environment, and given the appropriate resources and encouragement to play, could quite easily be bent in any of these directions. People who brightly reiterate that slogan about “realizing their potential”, without carefully qualifying the idea of “potential” are simply handing over the real agendas about what to make of that learner to whichever interests are really pulling the strings. They are writing an educational blank cheque.
This vagueness in the “growth project” is fatal to it, and it should be transparent whenever its advocates attempt to discuss growth, or educational purpose itself, at any length. Invariably it is too vague and empty to give any guidance at all. Failing that guidance, we can see what they really have in mind when they lead that growth towards any sort of self-conscious study. Even A.S. Neill, perhaps the most child-centred of all growth practitioners, had teachers in his school who offered classes – though voluntary ones. And these classes were clearly guided by the traditional school subjects, which, in turn, flowed from the disciplines of the traditional liberal education.
The same happened with John Holt. Holt’s work is a treasure trove of wisdom on educational method and practice, but his work falls apart at the conceptual level – in his inability to define education and to clarify the growth that he advocates. Again, as a result, the process gravitates inevitably to the traditional “arts and sciences”. Through a lack of any better guiding principles at the conceptual level, there is little else that an advocate of growth can do. But as we have seen, that tradition needs to be transcended if we hope to do any better. Growth theorists wanted to offer a radical critique of conventional schooling that was aimed at its failure to be educational at all. To do so they needed to advance a better purpose. But in failing to offer anything better than the liberal education tradition, currently on its death-bed, but reinterpreted by growth theorists to give meaning to a learner-centred but otherwise vague concept of growth, they make no contribution at all, except to educational method. And this methodological contribution has been coopted by conventional schooling to the extent that conventional schooling pleases, while the purposes of schooling have, if anything, have been getting worse.
When I remarked earlier that there has been no discussion of education in New Zealand for thirty years or more, I mentioned the silence of the previous advocates of the liberal education tradition – the vice-chancellors and college presidents who used to speak up for it. Equally noteworthy is the absence of any other voice in the community. There was a time when others – particularly parents – spoke up for the “growth” tradition; people who wanted some fundamental change in the conventional system that would align it with respect for the moral worth of the learner – their own children. These voices are silent now, too, despite the expansion of home schooling, and its evident success.
At the beginning of this chapter I drew a distinction between educational theorists and schooling theorists. Because of what I believe an educational theory must attempt to address, I consider that Western thought has only had three truly educational theorists; Plato, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and John Dewey.
Plato has already been introduced near the beginning of this chapter, and his influence will be found explicitly in later chapters. This in no way commits me to his theory of knowledge and the forms, of course, though his myth of the cave does represent an important educational and developmental truth all the same. I also depart entirely from his version of the “quest for certainty”, which I discuss later, and which is such a handicap to modern thought.
Equally, and obviously, I do not embrace his view of democracy, which I understand to be formed by the sort of democracy that he saw practiced, rather than by what democracy could be. Perhaps, in this respect, he would have done better to have sought its form, rather than to be seduced by its appearance, and in that search he might have learned more from his own processes of dialogue and dialectic. For a better view we should look to Dewey instead.
Rousseau wrote in conversation with Plato. Many find his constant paradoxes frustrating, but we would do well to learn from them. Reason, and life itself are deeply paradoxical, and not just because we are often confused. If we are in denial about this we are likely to underestimate and oversimplify problems. This isn’t anti-reason, as Rousseau’s work is sometimes portrayed. It involves very important insights about the nature of reason.
Plato’s Republic was a drama. Rousseau’s Emile was a novel. In it, he advocates educating Emile in isolation from society, which seems to run counter to Plato (and my) claim that education cannot be understood apart from the whole. On the contrary, his fiction is intended as a challenge. Rousseau responds to potential criticism that his proposal is impractical by asking if what we actually do is practical. When we consider the whole society as the educational domain, we have to concede that most of what it contains is systematic indoctrination. In such circumstances, how is it practical to send children to school, an institution that is the condensation of that society and its conventions? Anyone who takes the study of indoctrination seriously will have to be awed by the scale and difficulty of the educational tasks we would have to face. To understand Rousseau’s conception of education and its difficulties, you must also read the Discourses. To understand how he thought we could justify practices and arrangements, including education, read The Social Contract. These are parts of a theoretical whole. He had an idea of what might be done, but doubted our will to do it.
Rousseau’s effort was also the launching-pad for child-study and the birth of the discipline of human development. He can be seen as the inspiration for the “growth” conception of education, though his tutor is very much a “hands-on” sort of gardener whose cultivation goes a long way beyond sunlight, water and fertilizer. Despite the fact that he wrote three hundred years ago, he is still far ahead in his understanding of educational problems and possibilities than most people are today, including academics. Studying him seriously would be worth a thousand “studies that show”.
John Dewey’s work should make my book redundant, if it was widely and properly understood. Sometimes his writing is deceptively simple, but mastering as much as is really required is difficult, and involves careful reading well beyond his most obviously educational writing. His thought has been widely influential in educational and schooling discourse, but the power and sophistication of the whole of it has never come through, and its philosophical promise is seriously underestimated. As one of the few credible philosophers of the post-modern, his contribution is still largely overlooked. His conception of reason allows more to everyday life and experience than is common in the worlds of academia or conventional policy-making.
I have criticised Dewey’s work as continuing the reduction of education to schooling, but I think of this as a strategic error, rather than a philosophical mistake. He saw democracy and a democratic society as the limit and proper context of education, of which schooling is only a part. Democracy as education; education as democratic. Democracy, properly understood would be an educational process, and education would have to be conducted in the true spirit of democracy, both being expressed jointly through all of our social institutions. But when it came to considering institutions at all closely, he focussed on the schools. He could have focussed equally on the workplace, or the family, but he didn’t. In a culture obsessed with universal, compulsory State schooling, this was a mistake. Given the nature of conventional schooling, confused with education as it is, it has merely enabled the application of his ideas to have little more influence than just another bundle of method. The point is totally lost.
Dewey was “the” growth theorist who knew better than the emptiness and vagueness of the unqualified idea of growth. His solution was sophisticated, but not easily accessible. Growth for the sake of further growth. That is an idea that doesn’t just speak for itself.
My work is not an attempt to supplant his. I think that – if his work is properly understood – it will likely emerge that this present effort tends to converge with his. His is superior in philosophical sophistication and breadth, and also in being more organic. But my effort here is to make our educational problem more vivid to us, and use our more conventional ethics to issue the educational challenge that needs to be made by calling up our ethical intuitions and reflexes, and some of the ethical practices that we can readily acknowledge.
The idea of “growth” comes with rhetorical baggage. “Growth” conveys too much that has to do with horticulture and physical development to be ideal for developing educational ideas – all those acorns becoming oaks, those apples that don’t fall far from their trees, all that watering and sunshine and fertilizer that leads to all that sprouting and budding and flowering, unfolding from within. All those innocent little children, playing their innocent and endearing little games, all that cooing over babies, one day to grow naturally and inevitably enough into adults, regardless of what they learn.
The concept of “respect”, however, brings out the difficulties in our relationships, our practices, our institutions and our learning. It requires more thought, and it can’t be left to its own devices. The idea of “respect” gives us the power to stand up to nature, as we sometimes need to do, and it is ethical, which enables us both to articulate our duty to provide education, and our right to have it secured for us.
Respect captures the idea of the intrinsic worth of human beings, but it is more than just an abstract principle. It animates us to act, and it gives rise to feelings – of hurt, of anger and outrage when respect is violated. It is present, then, in our hearts; in our bones. More than that, there are practices of respect. We can act to make our institutions more respectful. If we point out that a government department has failed to facilitate our growth, not much is likely to happen. Show that it has failed to respect us, and we can create a media circus. And finally, we can see respect, and the lack of it, in our day-to-day relationships, including the most personal. We can wonder, and wonder in ways that are specific and constructive, whether we have been respectful of ourselves. Here is where we should look for the meaning and justification of education.
So let us begin.
