The perpetual debate

Even before I have found any blogs to post and share, I know what I will be searching for.  Since class started, I've found myself increasingly obsessed and monomaniac with regard to the relationship between school/education and society.  Constantly vacillating and torn to the very fibers of my pedagogical being.  Therefore, I've determined to seek out further perspectives on this issue in hopes of easing this turbulent ignorance. Specifically, I would like to find a blog that represents both sides of this issue.

Very quickly, this turned into a mini research project. The first blog I came across, http://langwitches.org/blog/2011/09/03/philosophy-of-education/, characterized the relationship between school/education and society in the manner typical of the discourse of today, namely education in this country is lacking, and we need to revamp the process of education in order to better serve our society, "The possibilities that are opening up through skills and emerging “new” literacies, often labeled 21st century, will allow us to see completely different patterns of studying, researching, connecting, creating and ultimately learning. These skills and literacies are vital in order for our students to succeed in a flattened world," says blogger Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano.


 On the other side of this issue, I found this blog: http://www.guardian.co.uk/teacher-network/2012/jan/04/philosophy-of-education.  This blogger argues that education is its own reward, and that a rich and full education leads to a more actualized and fulfilled existence, "Surely pupils should learn about Shakespeare, Darwin and personal financial management as ends in themselves to enrich their own lives. To paraphrase Matthew Arnold, young people deserve this "inheritance" as a right and treasure as its own gift – to fill schools with the sweetness and light of academic learning," says Sean Reid.

This exercise has taught me a few things.  Firstly, this debate is on going, and probably always will be- which in itself is a good thing, a mechanism for continual refreshment and invigoration of our profession.  Secondly, perhaps it has caused me to reevaluate my opinions based on new ideas and perspectives, which is exactly what I set out to do.  I now feel confident that there is some social end to education, inextricably, based in the fact that if we desire that education can even be possible in the future we need to ensure that society in some or whatever form self- perpetuates.  For me though, this is always a secondary aim; the purpose of life serves nothing other than life itself.  Consider this analogy, which I feel is exactly apt:  a student should serve the endeavor to attain good grades exactly as education should serve society.  A student should reap in the "sweetness and light of academic learning" in manners that are ends in themselves.

Evolving Education

I'm most likely incorrect in my definition, but I will start my philosophy of education as loftily as possibly and come down to meet the rigors of reality as I become more engrossed in my study. Therefore, I find education to be, primarily, an abstract endeavor. Meaning there is no end result, per se. Rather, education is the intellectual institution where consciousnesses are expanded, where students begin to escape their everyday experiences to see and think things that are not found in their dry day-to-day realities. It’s a process that seeks to expand and refine modes of thought and human existential perception. As such, education is rife with the machination of a spiritual and intellectual romanticism. Therefore, education's enterprise can be condensed to a methodology, which serves to instill interest and passion in the student.  This installation is the crux of education and the mechanism with which all other learning with take place.  It is comparable, if only in pragmatics, to Dewey’s approach when he asserts that learning can only take place if it is relevant to a student’s “interests and powers” via the immediate social context; a student will want to learn to sew because of the direct social implications.  In this I see Kohn’s warning about how education should not be directed by any other reward, other than the fruits of education itself; the reward here being social grace as opposed to the joy of sewing.  Going back to my model, if the installation of interest and passion is a success then, for example, social graces will follow.  For example, using sewing as our education analogy, once a student become so enamored with all things sewing, then not only will he possibly be more skilled than a student educated for a social end, but he will be more socially “graceful”.  This seems to make sense when we consider various passionate people in history and in our lives.  The passionate seem to be the most interested and skilled, and most possessing of broad and dynamic bodies of knowledge and culture.  This as opposed to those who are educated for a specific vocation, who when we interact with them seem somewhat angry and limited.

The social end of education

“We don’t need no education...” sang Pink Floyd.  Knowing what I know about the band and their beliefs, this quote cannot be taken at face value, i.e. that education, per se, is bad or undesirable.  Perhaps the quote begs the question: what is education?  Rather, I think the more apt question is: what is not education? 

John Dewey’s pragmatic pedagogy realizes that, first and foremost, students cannot escape the “social consciousness of the race.”  For Dewey, it seems like the process of education must conform to this context in order to prove fruitful; this is how the child learns to mold language out of babbling.  I think this circumstance leads Dewey away from what education could be, optimally.  Dewey uses society as the context in which students’ “interests and powers” are interpreted and understood. He is therefore inextricably tying the pragmatic process of education to the necessarily pragmatic end of education, i.e. what the student becomes.  In effect, this turns the student into a piece of a whole, a dependent, or to put it in more vulgar terms, a mere cog; passive, dutiful, obedient.  There seems to be two things wrong with this result.

First, it appears that Dewey’s pragmatism is rooted in the instinctual development needed for species wide growth and self-perpetuation.  Just because the transmission of, say hunting techniques or language development are facilitated in a social context does not necessarily imply that knowledge of mathematics will thus also require a social context.  Put another way, the context in which some aspect of consciousness develop, is not necessarily the same context in which other aspects will; how one learns to speak and feel emotion is vastly different than how one learns to abstract and philosophize.  Thus, I feel Dewey’s pragmatism has led him to the logical fallacy of composition, i.e. that something true of a part of the whole is true for the whole part.

Secondly, an entire society constituted of these types of former students would not be able to sustain itself just due to the fact that a society needs to be dynamic and thus made up of actors and movers; therefore the pragmatic end of Dewey’s students would create an unpragmatic society- an illogical result.  Furthermore, Dewey leaves no growth for personal ingenuity or revolutionary advancements because, for Dewey, the context is society as it is now.  Thus, we return to the Pink Floyd quote.  Maybe we don’t need the education which is geared at precise socialization; that which hinders dreaming and unfettered development and growth, not only because the process is unnecessary, but because its result is undesirable.  To contextualize education into the guise of Dewey’s pragmatism is to redirect thought, and as such, “…we don’t need no thought control.”