The latest philosophical fuss in education - By Patrick Ainley

The latest philosophical fuss in education

A big philosophical row is brewing in England’s primary schools about the knowledge (sophia – or is that wisdom?) that should be taught to 5-11 year-olds in the revised national curriculum.

The existing curriculum is accused by Conservative Education Minister, Michael Gove, of being too ‘skills’ based. The argument typically centres on history which is actually developed as a subject more at secondary school but relates to conservative cultural concerns. Traditionalists – like David Cameron with his plans to ‘celebrate’ the pointless slaughter of the first world war – feel history has become too ‘skills’-based. By that they don’t mean anything practical in the way of manual skills but that history and other teachers try to encourage pupils to think about cause and effect and why things happen. Instead of this generalized knowledge, the government wants pupils learning lists of kings and queens and the dates of imperial victories – bits of information pupils can learn by rote to recite in tests!

Gove justifies his prejudice in favour of this traditional type of schooling he enjoyed(!) by borrowing from a retired US professor, ED Hirsch. (That’s not Ed’ but his initials without punctuation, the sign of a true prawn – like AC Grayling, the former-London Uni philosopher who has set up his own traditionally academic private University). Hirsch claims that he tried to teach poor Black kids in community college about their history by informing them about the American Civil War. This basic factual information would, he argues, enable them to become knowledgeable about their own past and do as well as anybody else in – guess what? – more tests!

It’s not as if nobody had ever thought of or tried this before. In the 1960s French educational sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, advocated what he called ‘rational pedagogy’ – booster classes for working-class and minority ethnic university students to help them to catch up with upper and middle-class students who had acquired through the way they were brought up the ‘cultural capital’ recognized by higher education. In England at the same time, educationalist Basil Bernstein argued that traditionally academic ‘Education could not compensate for society’. The implication was – and Bourdieu came to accept this too – that the education system would have to change to be of any use to the majority of the population it failed.

Although there were some pioneering experiments – especially in the old polytechnics in the UK – so that many more people were encouraged by progressive primary and comprehensive schools to go on to further and higher education, education as a whole since the 1976 so-called ‘Great Debate on Education’ was narrowed to only what was useful in employment. It became training without jobs as employment collapsed and the traditional skills of apprenticeships were reduced to making students ‘competent’ in carrying out basic tasks for – once again – more tests! (Nowadays we have education without jobs and apprenticeships that

are often indistinguishable from workfare.)

Meanwhile, schools compete to cram their pupils for an academic National Curriculum. Gove confuses tests of memory under pressure – like University Challenge – with ‘intelligence’. He thinks this is inherited so that all the education system has to do is pick out the ‘bright’ Men of Gold, just like in Plato’s Republic, failing the dull Men of Silver and Bronze. So Gove thinks you don’t need to train and educate teachers, for instance, because – so long as you know your academic subject – either you can teach it or you can’t. Anyone can therefore teach in Gove’s ‘free schools’ as they can in the private schools that are the model for them.

In fact, regurgitating disconnected bits of information in traditional exams is the equivalent of training for the competence-based assessment that replaced the real skills formerly acquired on apprenticeships. (Even state school teachers are ‘trained’ like this nowadays and the government last week proposed ‘competence tests’ for NHS doctors.)

Knowledge has thus been degraded to information and skill to competence so that there is now a hopeless confusion of terms and nobody knows what they mean any longer. Clearly a job for philosophers to sort out! As we do so, we should remember that there is nothing wrong with training; it is basic to putting the components of competent performance together in the exercise of a skill but you have to go beyond training to have education. (You can train animals after all but you can’t educate them!) But training for the assessment of competence is what much of education is being reduced to.

Similarly, Hirsch’s idea of education is cramming bits of information unrelated by conceptual and generalizable knowledge. ‘Funny phonics’ even teaches reading like this – training primary children to ‘sound out’ letters in words that make no sense which predictably inhibits reading for meaning. Meaning and imagination come in at the level of knowledge which is inseparable from skill because there is no knowledge so cerebral it does not draw upon some practical skill (since the mind is not separate from the body) and you need skill to apply knowledge.

Training for unthinking performance and schooling in the rote learning of information restricts pupils / students to their place in the hierarchy of competing institutions for which largely written exams function as proxies for cultural capital. This is what reforming the national curriculum is all about. Philosophers must contribute to resisting it!

By Patrick Ainley 

The Philosophy Takeaway 'Open Topic' Issue 34

HUMANITY WITHOUT HOPE - By Patrick Ainley

HUMANITY WITHOUT HOPE

Most people would say that it is impossible to live without hope. And yet this is just what most people are expected to do nowadays.

This is not just because of recession. There is a vague hope that recession will end and eventually there will be economic upturn – ‘something will turn up’, so meanwhile we can sit it out.

Perhaps it will turn up sooner if different policies are followed to ‘kick start’ the economy so ‘normal’ growth will resume. Except growth under capitalism is as normal as bust. It was only an illusion that deregulation and privatization in the 1980s to allow banks and big corporations to speculate freely would end this inevitable cycle.

In any case, endless growth to produce more and more commodities, while it may help some people to secure the necessities of life, does not make those who already have more than enough any happier or less insecure. Worse, growth is unsustainable; on the 23^rd August it was calculated that humanity began to take from the earth more than nature produced in 2012. For the rest of the year we live in debt to the planet and every year this day moves forward as we take even more from the earth than it can give back.

Again, as the hopes for our species’ survival diminish, we hope that something will turn up. ‘It’s happened before,’ we say, hoping for technical solutions so that humanity can invent its way out of impending climate and other catastrophe. But each of these temporary fixes have perverse consequences that threaten disaster in their turn; the worst of which would probably be the attempts at geo-engineering that are now being talked about as ways to slow global warming.

More far-sighted Utopians used to insist that social change was necessary instead of trying to patch things up technically so that we could go on as we were. This revolutionary transformation would happen more or less gradually and democratically but if necessarily violently to bring about a rational ordering of human affairs in the interest of the vast majority.

This old Utopianism has been trumped by the new Utopianism of free-market capitalism, to which all the mainstream political parties, dominant media and, of course, the global corporations and banks that profit from it are committed. If only the wealth-creating entrepreneurs are given the freedom to invest their capital to gain as much profit as possible for themselves and their shareholders, we will all benefit – so they all say. But this is the deregulated free-market capitalism whose boom ended in bust in the first place.

So, it is not surprising that many people place their hopes in dreams of wealth – winning a lottery, becoming a celebrity, or marrying one! Or they strive to live fully in the moment: ‘driven from distraction by distraction’, looking for the next high to become a legend. Hopes of such instant gratifications are easily manipulated by the advertisers of fashion. They are not so different from physically addictive behaviors and as easily controlled.

There are myriad other ways to adjust to an insupportable reality – from therapy to meditation, but religions offer the most desperate hopes of all. Their elaborate visions of other worlds that render lived experience illusory are tributes to the power of the human imagination, even if the reassuring feeling of being looked after by a benevolent deity derives from infant psychology, just as it is understandable that hopes of an afterlife comfort the dying and the bereaved.

Most people of course keep their heads down and don’t think about such things. We fill our lives with family and friends, following football or other sports and enjoying moments of relaxation from routine work. But even these modest hopes of a good life are removed from the younger generations by prospects of employment to sustain independent living that have become increasingly remote.

We are encouraged therefore to invest our hopes in education which has been substituted for employment and which is so tediously and interminably discussed instead of it. Conservatives typically advance the notion that education amounts to the preservation of culture – handing down unchanged the best that was ever thought and achieved. And of course, we have to learn from the past accumulated experience of humanity that constitutes culture but we have to learn critically to apply that knowledge to nurture new hopes of changing the self-destructive behavior of society in the present.

Instead, academic cramming on the one hand and vocational training for jobs that no longer exist on the other, only serves as an induction into the existing social divisions of knowledge and labour. These are changing with the relentless applications of new technology to deskill and outsource production, requiring a ‘flexible workforce’ to move from one mindless, short-term, low-paid and often part-time contract to another – if you’re lucky enough to find work.

Professional and managerial jobs are also being reduced in number and towards the conditions of waged labour, ending the hopes of a career entertained by so many overqualified but underemployed graduates. Hopes of escape through education leading to upward social mobility are dashed as the only mobility nowadays is down.

Philosophy – the love of knowledge – enables us ‘to confront with sober senses the real conditions of our existence’. So, as another Jewish philosopher wrote, ‘Do not laugh, do not cry but understand’. If the situation really is hopeless, we will then at least know how it happened that we threw away the heritage of humanity and we will still struggle to bring about the vast changes in our lives and in our societies that are needed so we ‘Do not’ – as a Welsh poet said – ‘go gently into that good night’ [but] ‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light.’

By Patrick Ainley with thanks in the last paragraph to Karl Marx, Baruch Spinoza and Dylan Thomas; T.S.Eliot in the middle – for we stand on the shoulders of giants, so let’s not crap on their heads!

 

The Philosophy Takeaway 'Open Topic' Issue 30

The meaning of life - By Patrick Ainley

The meaning of life

Life, in and of itself, can have no meaning unless it is given meaning. As ‘the movement of albuminous protoplasm’ – or whatever Engels called it in his materialist Dialects of Nature (today we would say the growth and reproduction of complex molecules) – life develops spontaneously from its inorganic background given the right conditions. But even this description is not definitive enough to distinguish the sparks of life that counter with their increasing complexity the entropy of the vast universe expanding to its dissolution. Since ‘All that lives must die/ Passing through nature to eternity,’ as Hamlet’s mother reminds him, it is sometimes difficult to know when something or someone lives or dies. Simple multiplying life forms are not so different from non-living crystals, for instance, or other self-replicating structures that are the ground of more complex and even conscious beings.

Nor is such description or definition of life the same as life’s meaning. Living systems also have purpose to maintain and reproduce themselves but this is not their meaning either, although it may be their meaning for them. As a famous biologist once said, ‘In the world of sea-urchins there are only sea-urchin things’ and observably sea-urchins, like all other organisms under natural conditions of selection, behave and evolve so as to survive and multiply. They do not mean to do so though; it just happens.

Meaning can only be given to nature by beings capable of making meaning. That is, beings with imagination using symbolic language to communicate their imagined and conscious reflections to one another, including importantly their self-consciousness of being conscious. The sort of signaling languages that other animals use to communicate with each other are too limited for this because they can only mean one thing at a time: a blackbird’s alarm call, for instance, means just one thing to other blackbirds and they react to its warning by sounding their own alarm as they fly off.

Human beings also use signals but we have to first agree amongst ourselves what they will mean. A red traffic light means stop, for instance, and there can be no ambiguity about this; although we could choose to change the signal if we decided to do so, as they did throughout China during the Cultural Revolution when red indicated go and green meant stop.

Human symbolic languages however are different from the unambiguous meaning encoded by the signals of other animals in that symbols, whatever form they take, can be and often are deliberately ambiguous. They can mean more than one thing which we have to agree on if we are to communicate effectively with one another. So, unlike Humpty Dumpty in Alice Through The Looking Glass, we can’t just choose what we want words to mean – at least if we want to be understood by other people.

In the case of ‘life’, scientists or medics can perhaps agree on working definitions, as above, to distinguish living from non-living things but this is not life’s meaning, which can only be its meaning for us as human beings agreeing this amongst ourselves for our common human purposes. Humpty Dumpty may get things upside down but he is not so silly; as he tells Alice, ‘The question is which is to be master – that’s all.’

So, unless we think that the meaning of life comes from somewhere else outside of or beyond the universe and its nature that we experience and the MoL is therefore to be discovered – in an old book, perhaps, or through some revelation which we would then have to interpret to make sense of the alien speaker’s symbolic language – we have to agree on as universal a meaning as possible to give it. This would be our master narrative, explanation and meaning that we would all agree upon.

Amazingly, despite all the twaddle about the sacredness and irrepressible vitality of human life, seven billion and more of us seem so far incapable of doing this. This is not just because there are different claims to ‘the truth’ advanced by various religions for example, or because some groups of people regard themselves as the masters who are entitled to impose their views on others at their expense, but because current global capitalist society is dedicated only to its own reproduction and expansion for profit regardless of the consequences for human and other life on this planet.

Of course, economic growth to manufacture more and more commodities for sale at a profit is presented by the few who gain directly and in the short-term from it, as enhancing life to ensure its best future. Many more buy into this illusory future because they cannot imagine any alternative to it and meaning is thus restricted to the terms of existing society.

But to more and more people, it is increasingly obvious, as climate and the seasons become increasingly erratic, while at the same time we reach and pass various natural limits to growth, that we cannot go on producing more and more stuff without physically destroying humanity and turning our environment into a wilderness. It would be a perversion of our situation as the only species and beings that we know of to have self-conscious awareness of our position as – in this sense – the highest form of life on earth, if we were to abrogate that responsibility.

We would then renege on the long eons of evolution of life on earth and the possibly unique physical conditions preceding them if we reverted to the level of unselfconscious life. Then we would have to ‘Think…’ with the recently deceased and sadly lamented Gore Vidal, ‘of the earth as a living organism that is being attacked by billions of bacteria whose numbers double every 40 years.’ Then, ‘Either the host dies, or the virus dies, or both die.’

To avoid this sui-species-cide we have therefore to inaugurate new shared meaning and value for human life to preserve its future survival on earth.

By Patrick Ainley

The Philosophy Takeaway 'The Meaning of Life' Issue 29

Do you believe in magic? - By Patrick Ainley

Do you believe in magic?

‘Who does not know Turner’s picture of the Golden Bough?’ begins one of the hoariest old explanations of the origins and progressive development of magic, religion and science – in that order, traced through 12 volumes of evidence from anthropology and history collected into a great scheme of things. Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough is the type of meta-narrative no longer approved of in these postmodern times. It is speculative and, in its own way, magical but it offers a simple and coherent explanation of magic – or, rather, magical thinking. What would baffle Sir James is the return of so much magic today. To do that needs resort to another hoary old Victorian denizen of London – Karl Marx and his concept of ‘commodity fetishism’ which he advanced in his grand and historical scheme.

According to Frazer, magic works on the principle of homology: if one thing resembles another, they are thought by people who do not know better to have some connection and influence on each other. The winter mistletoe on the Druid oak is sacred because evergreen like summer. If your liver troubles you, the remedy lies in the liverwort which looks like a liver, rather than perhaps stopping drinking so much alcohol. Indeed, ancient and indigenous medical systems typically present parallels between parts of the body and the natural world. This is the way homeopathy supposedly affects its magic – you take more of the same that is causing your allergy or illness in order, magically, to cure it.

Magical re-enactments of uncontrollable events can also seemingly bring them under control. So sports players often perform personal rituals – touch left foot with right hand, right foot with left hand – before beginning play. Students carry the same ‘lucky mascots’ into exams, hoping their presence on the desk or in their pockets will bring them the luck that got them through the last exam. Or they go through irrational actions – cramming all night before the exam, for instance, even though this reduces their chances of even staying awake the next day!

While such rituals may have psychological benefits – putting you ‘in the zone’ so you can concentrate – they are plainly not the basis for a coherent explanation of events. To find this, Frazer thought that as evidence accumulated humanity moved from magic to religion, typically reducing the many influences, spirits and gods of – for example – the oldest surviving religion, Hinduism, to concentrate on placating a reduced number of deities in ‘more advanced’ religions, such as the pantheons of Egyptian or Greek gods, usually families ruled over by a guiding king or sun-god, like Ra or Zeus. In monotheisms, this presiding deity became the sole remaining God – even if Christianity complicated things by giving him a son! Islam is therefore simpler and more advanced/ progressive than Christianity in Frazer’s view but, of course, simplest of all would be to have no gods at all and move on to science which ‘has no need of that hypothesis’ for its predictions, as the French scientist Laplace supposedly told Napoleon.

Despite the pragmatic scientific world view supporting so much of our lives and thought today, in situations of uncertainty people tend to revert to religious or even magical thinking; like the Irish playwright Brendan Behan who said that he was ‘a daylight atheist’ but when it got dark he fell down on his knees! ‘Do you believe in magic/ In a young girl’s heart?’ as the Loving Spoonful asked, relating to the apparent uncertainties of pair-bonding – though most people in fact find their partners within their own social class, however defined. The song also illustrates how commercial popular culture keeps such beliefs alive so that Marx argued that human relations under capitalism were ‘fetishized’. Like the example that Frazer gives of West African fetish kings, the masked ruler or his (occasionally her – as in the UK today!) effigy/ totem is credited with ‘control of the weather and so forth’ (not in the UK!).

So, in the ‘immense accumulation of commodities’ that Marx says makes up the wealth of capitalist societies and which the economy must go on producing and selling to maintain itself, ‘the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life’ and, invertedly, ‘relations between people assume the fantastic form of relations between things’. The use of the commodity produced for sale becomes less important that its price, so that ‘priceless’ and really incomparable art works, for example, are fetishized in an imaginary hierarchy of quantity over quality. As indeed, everything and everyone has their price which can be rated on a monetary scale. Money, the symbol of value and exchange, thus becomes more real than the things it buys.

This has a psychological underpinning in Freud’s notion of fetishists replacing the real object of their desires with a substitute – like women’s shoes, notoriously (though the Chinese did the same by binding feet)! The fetish is endowed with magical powers that we can see in advertisements where the commodity assumes a life of its own, like cars that speak and are presented as somehow ‘sexy’ or ‘powerful’. This tendency towards fetishism is heightened in the postmodern simulacrum that presents itself as more real (‘hyper-real’) than reality because, although depending upon science for their production, the inner workings of the fetishized commodities that fill our world become more arcane and unknown to most people. And so as we work them and they work themselves by so-called ‘artificial intelligence’, they assume magical properties and the world spirals out of human control or even understanding.

We cannot therefore be so confident that, as Frazer concluded his voluminous study, the ‘clouds and thick darkness’ of magic that envelop ‘the backward portion of the web… which the Fates are now weaving on the humming loom of time’ will be irradiated by the rationality of science. Especially as the productions of science are fetishized as the commodities of an unsustainable hyper-reality, our species must disenchant the world we have created in order to survive.

By Patrick Ainley

The Philosophy Takeaway 'Magic' Issue 25

What is the point? - By Patrick Ainley

What is the point?

A point for anything suggests that whatever process is going on in what we observe or take part in can be understood in terms of its own finality. It implies a development towards an end so that the changes taking place – and everything changes – can be made sense of in terms of where the thing is going.

This is like Aristotle’s idea that all mortal things – men, animals and plants – develop according to their own specific natures and this is their purpose for themselves in a sublunary world that is also following the rules for its own perpetuation.

However, if there is no ultimate purpose for everything save its own eventual dissolution and random dissociation into a void, which is what scientists now think will be the ultimate heat-death of the universe (since there is apparently not enough dark and other matter in existence to prevent its endless expansion), then the finality of anything, including humanity collectively and individually, is to fulfil our nature by becoming what we are in the brief time allotted to us as fully as possible.

This was Nietzsche’s idea for accepting what he thought was an endless recurrence in which the universe (as scientists then believed) would be repeated by a perpetual reordering of random events an infinite number of times. Nietzsche’s Superman was a heroic individual who rejoiced in joining this pointless dance and spurned the untermensch who could not live without myths and religions that all supposed some universal purpose guided by a supreme deity, even if only a watchmaker who had constructed the whole caboodle and wound it up to set it all going in the first place.

Darwinism for Nietzsche, as for Dawkins today, explained the emergence of increasingly complex living beings following the same physical laws that allowed the formation of non-living but regular objects and events from the original chaos of creation through further mechanically and statistically random events. Today scientists are experimenting with the sub-atomic building blocks of matter to model how if not why this all happened in the first milliseconds after the Big Bang.

Nietzsche’s existential individualism – aside from its implied moral and philosophical relativism (since what is true or not is what the Superman can get everyone else to accept, so that ‘might is right’) – was not intended to have a social appeal. To find a humanist doctrine that would have a collective appeal ‘to all mankind’ was the task of the European Enlightenment philosophers who sought to replace irrational religion with rationality as the guiding light of human progress. As distinct from other animals, human beings were uniquely able to reflect on their own situation and to make purposes for themselves, the first of which is surely our own survival. And not survival alone but betterment and improvement to increase the total of human happiness through progress.

Progress does not necessarily mean greater complexity; it might involve a return to some previous more simple and harmonious relation with nature. But it was understood as a feat of emergence, of a whole greater than the sum of its parts. In this, humanity, even whilst being different from other animals, shares with similar complex and living systems their being as centres of self-interest against the universal drift of meaningless events.

This leads us to systems theory, which sees reality as composed of hierarchically ordered systems open to determination by the systems within which in turn they are contained. So, the individual as a biological system maintains and reproduces itself throughout its lifetime by digestion, excretion, growth and regrowth, relying upon psychological and other subsystems while being contained within the various levels of its society as a larger system.

Societies also follow the tendencies of their own development, within – in turn – economic, ecological and other still larger systems. In this context, human needs are defined in terms of sustaining the necessary conditions for the continued successful maintenance of the social system and if they are not met the behaviour of the system is disturbed, either at the level of individual or group sub-system or at the level of the society as a whole.

However, human beings are unique in not only being informed by but in forming their own environment through the use of tools. Tools transform objects not only literally but also conceptually; they distance consciousness from its immediate perceptions by forming a new purposive whole of means to ends with thought before action. A new and symbolic subsystem is thus created which is capable of self-steering, as the phrase is. Unlike inherited genetic information and animal communication by signalling, symbolic consciousness and the self-steering system it creates is capable of learning from past mistakes to act differently in future. This is what makes human beings, as the nineteenth century artist and socialist, William Morris said, ‘the learning animal’.

For, potentially at least, humanity can learn from the accumulated knowledge and experience of human and natural history that is contained in the culture we pass down the generations to decide our own purpose or point of our collective existence, within which individuals can also achieve their own satisfactions. Utopian ideals of a fixed end state of human development, whether as ‘communism’, ‘a free society’, or any other ‘state of grace’, can be forsaken. Instead, we need to develop and implement the collective knowledge of what is required for human survival. In this sense, nowadays survival has become Utopia. We can then decide where we go from there!

But it may be that we are not alone as beings that have consciousness of themselves in a universe that, despite its vastness, is seemingly pregnant with the possibilities for life and that we may share with other conscious beings, as Michael Polanyi put it in the conclusion to his 1958 philosophy of science, Personal Knowledge that I discussed in the last issue of The Philosophical Take-Away, ‘a short-lived, limited, hazardous opportunity for making some progress… towards an unthinkable consummation.’

By Patrick Ainley