an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 7, July-August 2010, ISSN
1552-5112
The Aims of Education
My
fellow educators (by which I mean everyone, as we are all educators), since our
topic today is the aims of education, I thought I would start by imagining how
my students would approach such a question. I imagine the first thing they
would do is: consult the oracle. Not the oracle of
Not
long ago Jon Stewart’s guest on The Daily
Show was Tim Pawlenty, the human face of conservatism. While
Stewart lobbed surprisingly softball questions at him, Governor Pawlenty
explained how we can completely privatize education. Students will just buy
their education a course at a time via iTunes on their iPads. Along with
downloads of Lady Gaga videos and, for that matter, The Daily Show, you could just download Philosophy 101, or
more likely, Marketing 101. I’ll come back to this vision, both thrilling and
chilling, of education.
Students
don’t get all their information by consulting the oracle. They also practice a
complex kind of divination using randomly cast spells, or in other words,
Google. Using Google somewhat carelessly, one gets at least a fair glimpse of
what commonsense opinion is about the aims of education. This commonsense
opinion about education is curiously contradictory.
One
finds, for example, that American education is a complete failure, and yet it
is the best in the world. One finds that everything can be fixed so long as the
private sector does it, and yet the private sector can only fix education with
massive amounts of public money. As to whether education is working or not,
this is a simple matter of administering standardized tests. And yet what
education produces when it works is unique and creative individuals.
On
the more specific question of the aims of education, one finds surprisingly
little, other than this striking paradox: the aim of education is just to get
people jobs, and yet at the same time it is supposed to create well rounded,
ethical individuals imbued with the American spirit of service and citizenship.
This is what a student using Google may or may not discover.
Now,
it’s a commonplace among educators to make cynical remarks about our students.
And while I don’t doubt that my own
The
first thing I would imagine a critical student of education today would
discover is this: knowledge is supposed to be different from doxa, from the
received and unreflective opinion from which it struggles to free itself. And
yet education, the process of producing and reproducing knowledge, is nothing
if not surrounded by doxa.
For
those of us on the inside as it were, for those of us who are educators, the
struggle is to separate knowledge from doxa, from habit, from prejudice, from
the self-evident. We educators don’t take kindly to groupthink, or to
compulsory agreement. For instance, I took a job at SUNY once, and they made me
sign an oath of loyalty to
In
short, as educators, we are surrounded on the outside by those for whom
education is nothing but the continuation of doxa, of the contradictory world
of opinion, to which one is supposed to swear allegiance. Our position seems an
embattled one. Education seems to be in crisis. But when was it not in crisis?
Perhaps there’s comfort in the thought that crisis is our business – and
business is lively. At least we are not, like Socrates, obliged to drink the
hemlock, although if standardized testing makes its way into higher education,
hemlock might seem preferable.
In
the west at least, we tend to take the Greeks to be our ancestors in creating
institutions of critical knowledge, within and against the social realm. What
the schools of philosophy were to the Greeks: the Stoics, the Epicureans, the
Peripatetics, the modern university is to us. And like us the Greeks also had
institutions for producing doxa. What the theater was to the Greeks Hollywood
is to us. What Sophists were to the Greeks, lawyers, consultants and lobbyists
are to us.
One
would not want to push this comparison too far. Aristotle did not have to grade
papers. But three things seem to me worth dwelling upon. Firstly: in what way
did Greek thought diverge from the doxa of its time? How was it able to think
beyond its social conditions of production? Secondly: it what way were the
limits of Greek thought the limits, not of a form of knowledge, but of the
social order from which it sprang? Thirdly: what more ambiguous and
unacknowledged legacies have the Greeks left us?
Greek
thought diverged from doxa by a critical reflection on it in its own terms.
This is Socrates at work: what do we mean by justice? What do we mean by faith?
What do we mean by education? We can free thinking from certain habits. We can
use language with an awareness of what it is and how it works.
This
is the negative aim of education. This aim of education is to work in and
against common sense. At this the Greeks excelled. While the sophists were busy
teaching everyone how to be their own lobbyist, Socrates begins a quite
different practice. One that separates thought from interest narrowly and
immediately conceived.
The
limits to Greek thought are surely in the positive aims of education, in terms
of what one creates and maintains in the place of doxa. This is where the
limits of a social order start to impinge and set limits on what can be
thought.
As
the product of an aristocratic culture in a slave society, Greek thought is
famously uninterested in the practical arts. The Greeks were brilliant
designers, in architecture, in the applied arts, and their greatest achievement
in the sciences – geometry – surely owes as much to the skilled labor of the
artisan as to the philosopher, but you wouldn’t know it from reading their
philosophers.
Greek
thought was hostile to the performing arts, but nevertheless owed
unacknowledged debts to it. My
Kottman
is close here to a line of thought that is foundational for my own discipline,
media studies. Plato is ambivalent about his own medium, about writing. The
written text goes out into the world as an orphan, departing from the
aristocratic realm in which knowing the parentage of everyone and everything is
all important.
Put
simply: the aristocratic slave city-state produced a knowledge that could
separate itself in part from everyday doxa, but which was indifferent to the
design of things, ignored its debt to the performing arts, and was ambivalent
about its own form of communication.
If the
limitations of Greek thought derive from the aristocratic and slave nature of
its society, surely in our modern democracy we have transcended those
limitations.
It
seems every other month the New York Times
Book Review is giving space to some new rehash of de Tocqueville,
which makes me wonder if de Tocqueville is not now a very pure kind of American
doxa. Is it not possible that
To
cap it all, this new kind of aristocratic order also has one of the worst
features of Athenian democracy: the demagogues. Alongside Marketing 101 and
Lady Gaga, students might also be downloading Glenn Beck, or Rush Limbaugh
podcasts.
Spend
any time with our contemporary demagogues, and one is reminded of the
pioneering media sociology done at the
In
such a context, the first aim of education might be to endure. To persist
against a public that complains about the cost of education but still wants the
lifetime benefit of the higher income that a college education affords. To
survive against a pseudo-private sector which thinks business can do it better,
but only by getting government subsidized loans for students to whom it offers
marginally useful training programs. To survive against demagogues who threaten
the integrity of education because nothing is a greater threat to demagogues
than education. To survive against a kind of techno fetishism, which imagines
the solution to everything is a new product from Apple.
Of
these dangers I want to speak only about one. The economics of education I
leave to the economists. The less said about demagogues the better. President
Kerry has been prescient and articulate in addressing the dangers of for-profit
education. I want rather to say a few words about the last, about Governor
Pawlenty’s vision of an education – fully privatized – but also downloadable
onto your iPad.
This
is partly because this is closest to my field of media studies, and partly
because it’s the subject of a major conference being organized at the
Plato
is right to worry, in the Phaedrus,
about what happens to the written text that goes out like an orphan into the
world. But it is not as if orality, oral communication, was a guarantee against
it. Orphaned oral communication is called the rumor. Likewise, its’ not the
lecture downloaded from iTunes that’s the problem. It’s the severance of the
downloaded ‘content’ from the reciprocal practice of question and comment
between teachers and students. Education is not content, in other words, but a
particular kind of communicative process.
What
might lead one to forget this, however, is viewing education solely as a
commodity. Commodities by definition have measurable values and occur in simple
transactions between a buyer and seller, whose obligations to each other are
limited. Whatever education is, it is not just a commodity. It is always, at
the same time, a gift relation, a relation that binds its parties in mutual
obligation, and in which giving away ones attention is what produces value.
Education values the gift of attention. Education is the valuing of the gift of
attention.
Part
of the challenge of being at The New School is that the legacy of this school
prevents one from ducking the demands of a changing social order. Being at the
New School obliges us to come up with an education that can respond both to
what this social order is, and which is yet also aware of its deficits. Being
part of the
Interestingly,
the elements that did not come together for the Greeks are the same ones which
do not really come together in this strange new aristocratic
What
would a future education look like which did not divorce the making of the
thing from the creation of its concept? Which acknowledged the dependence of
knowledge on culture, as well as their difference? Which treated the new
digital forms of communication as a genuine domain of free inquiry?
Stanley
Fish is the author of a persuasive and influential argument to the effect that
the aim of education in any discipline is simply to produce good quality work
within the discipline. Of course the existence of the
The
founders of the
The
aim of education is to be a provocation to thought; the aim of thought is the
renovation of the world.
And
with that, may I wish you all a thought provoking academic year.
an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 7, July-August 2010, ISSN
1552-5112