John Connell: The Blog

Dis­putes and con­tro­ver­sies and dis­agree­ments abound in every sphere of human knowl­edge and activ­ity. That is the very nature of human dis­course. The world would be a dread­ful, bor­ing place if we all agreed with each other all of the time on every­thing (some peo­ple, strangely, would define their heaven in just those terms). A lit­tle less dis­agree­ment here and there might avoid wars and blood­shed and point­less death and destruc­tion, but that pos­si­bil­ity does not appear to be a uni­ver­sal like­li­hood any time soon.

Dis­pu­ta­tion and debate dif­fer in kind though from one sphere of activ­ity to another. We can, for exam­ple, con­trast the kinds of dis­putes that sci­en­tists might have with dis­putes between reli­gious ‘schol­ars’: the for­mer might arise out of dif­fer­ing inter­pre­ta­tions of evi­dence whilst the lat­ter are more likely to be debates char­ac­ter­ized not only by a com­plete lack of evi­dence but often by a con­tempt for same.

My own prin­ci­pal sphere of activ­ity, edu­ca­tion, is an intense and con­stant bat­tle­ground of crossed swords, con­flict and con­tention, and it falls, I would attest, some­where between those polar­i­ties of sci­en­tific and reli­gious debate. The vigour of the man­i­fold dis­putes in edu­ca­tion is a func­tion of its intrin­sic nature as one of the human­i­ties, as an activ­ity aris­ing out of the human condition.

As one of the human­i­ties, there is sim­ply no absolute right or absolute wrong in edu­ca­tion. We make judge­ments and take posi­tions based on our rea­son­ing, of course, but also based on our val­ues and prin­ci­ples, philoso­phies and ide­olo­gies, inter­ests and self-interests, prej­u­dices and, indeed, big­otries. There are, oddly, very many peo­ple — teach­ers, writ­ers, philoso­phers, politi­cians, thinkers and non-thinkers alike — who will tell you, cat­e­gor­i­cally, that their stand­point on any par­tic­u­lar aspect of edu­ca­tion is unequiv­o­cally right, and there­fore that any dif­fer­ing take on the same issue is plainly wrong. Some­times, these same peo­ple will point to ‘evi­dence’ that ‘proves’ their stand­point, all the while for­get­ting that under­tak­ing research on edu­ca­tion is a bil­lion light years away from under­tak­ing research on par­ti­cle physics (for exam­ple). Edu­ca­tional research is in the same league as research in phi­los­o­phy or soci­ol­ogy or anthro­pol­ogy: out­comes are heav­ily depen­dent upon the ques­tions asked and the posi­tions taken by the researchers. Evi­dence is use­ful, of course, but it will rarely if ever con­sti­tute ‘proof’ of any­thing in edu­ca­tion — it gives us a start­ing point, if we are lucky, but never absolute validation.

Those who under­stand this dis­tinc­tion under­stand there­fore that they can never claim any absolute valid­ity for their views on edu­ca­tion, since they recog­nise that their per­spec­tive on any or all edu­ca­tion ques­tions is inex­tri­ca­bly bound up in the val­ues they hold, in the polit­i­cal ide­ol­ogy to which they ascribe, in the psy­chol­ogy of their own learn­ing expe­ri­ences through­out their lives, in their (or their family’s, or their community’s) self-interest, whether con­scious or uncon­scious, and in so many other impon­der­ables in their lives.

Such peo­ple under­stand that they must argue and debate their stand­point con­stantly, and that they must be pre­pared to lis­ten to other’s views, to learn from oth­ers and to change their own views through debate with oth­ers. Equally we are per­fectly jus­ti­fied in seek­ing to explain and affirm our own philoso­phies in edu­ca­tion, and even to seek to per­suade oth­ers to see learn­ing and teach­ing and ped­a­gogy and all aspects of edu­ca­tion as we hap­pen to see them.

Don’t mis­take my argu­ment as one that endorses unal­loyed rel­a­tivism: we must always be will­ing to make crit­i­cal judge­ments on the basis of our expe­ri­ence and, yes, on the basis of what­ever evi­dence we can lay our hands on (going far beyond just the out­comes of aca­d­e­mic research). But we use expe­ri­ence and intel­lec­tual argu­ment and evi­dence to sub­stan­ti­ate and sup­port our own judge­ments, not to ‘prove’ that we are absolutely right and oth­ers are absolutely wrong. We must con­tinue to judge, to eval­u­ate, to dis­tin­guish between good and bad logic. Edu­ca­tion, as a human­ity, has to be based upon rig­or­ous intel­lec­tual analy­sis and rea­son­ing, as well as on moral and eth­i­cal considerations.

It is in that flux of ideas and con­flict­ing opin­ions gen­er­ated, main­tained and devel­oped by thought­ful, autonomous and ratio­nal minds that the beauty of coher­ent edu­ca­tional debate lies. We need not respect oth­ers’ views, but, mostly, we do need to tol­er­ate them (I am with Frank Furedi when he decries the mod­ern ten­dency to equate tol­er­ance with accep­tance and respect, and even the trend towards devalu­ing the mean­ing of respect itself). The caveat to such tol­er­ance, of course, will be the extent to which we feel that oth­ers’ views on edu­ca­tion are actu­ally phys­i­cally or emo­tion­ally harm­ful to chil­dren, to young peo­ple, or to learn­ers generally.

And that is a whole other debate in itself.

Tagged acceptance, culture, debate, education, Frank Furedi, human nature, pedagogy, philosophy, respect, society, tolerance, values