Values and the Future of Education

Posted on | August 11, 2007 | 5 Comments

“We want one class of persons to have a liberal education. We want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity, to forego the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.”

So said Woodrow Wilson in 1909 to a group of trainee teachers, when he was Principal of Princeton University. Wilson, of course, was a child of his time and such views did nothing to detract from his enlightened internationalism when, as US President, he played a major role in the foundation of the League of Nations in 1919. But the values underlying Wilson’s words are precisely the values of the industrial age of schooling, precisely the values so derided, each for their own reasons, by the likes of RF Mackenzie, Ivan illich, AS Neill, Paulo Freire and so many others.

Unfortunately, whether we like it or not, they are still, essentially, the values that underpin the systems of schooling surviving in most parts of the world today. Thankfully, they are not always the values of the teachers and other key players in the system, but the fundamental pedagogies, the mass-production methodologies that still predominate in so many schools the world over mean that such enlightened people are having to struggle daily against a prevailing regime that has its feet planted firmly in the anachronistic rhetoric of Wilson from almost a century ago.

And, of course, young learners themselves are no longer so willing to accept the values of a bygone age. Young people across the world today are less bound by received wisdom than any previous generation in history. That seemingly uncomplicated acceptance by the young of the great forces for change occurring right now is the aspect that, above all others, will change education whether it wants to change or not. The young simply accept as given trends that some in the older generations are wont to typify as disruptive in some sense or other, even where they recognize and acknowledge the long-term benefits to be derived. Perspective is all, of course.

While many working in education systems around the world blithely soldier on against the rising tide of modernity and ‘disruptive’ technology, others recognize the changing reality and are struggling to prise themselves out of the factory-schooling straitjacket. Such people understand that the values they seek to reflect in teaching and learning are critical to their success in creating radical change in education. They know it is not enough to consider just pedagogy and curriculum, not enough to pin a simplistic faith on technology-as-a-good-thing-in-itself, and certainly not enough to reduce education to an instrument of economic advancement.

Amartya Sen – thanks to the Women’s Edge Coalition for the photo.

I previously praised the distinction, raised by Amartya Sen, amongst others, between Human Capital and Human Capability. Education is, we have to recognize, a primary driver for economic prosperity, but it is also the route to freedom, to knowledge as a public good (thank you to Danah Boyd for the phrase), and to a fairer society. The latter, of course, require some agreement – or at least a continuing debate – on a range of basic values that education should both reflect and reproduce. But with every new day and every new week that I spend in education, I have the privilege of meeting more and more people who strive to identify these values and who are working to bring the systems they work within and the people they work amongst into the reality of the 21st Century.

Conversations criss-crossing the globe – conversations that are exciting, disputatious, energizing, ironic, deadly serious, thought-provoking, contradictory, eloquent, heartfelt – fill me with optimistic expectation that education will increasingly outgrow the school, that monument to the industrial revolution, and become something that will happen more and more in the interstices between the complex strands of social relations that people build and colonize and disassemble and re-build throughout their lives, whether face to face or in the expanding panoply of virtual spaces that we now inhabit. Something akin to a school might well survive this process – it has already proved itself to be a concept with legs – but I, along with so many others, will work to ensure that schools (and colleges and universities and ‘learning centres’) become, not monuments to anything, but merely physical traces of a kind of education that is social, global and pervasive!

Technorati Tags: rf mackenzie, as neill, ivan illich, paulo freire, values, school, schooling, woodrow wilson, league of nations, danah boyd, disruptive technology, amartya sen, human capital, human capability

Category: curriculum, democracy, development, economy, education, enlightenment, pedagogy, philosophy, praxis, schooling, technology, transformation

Comments

5 Responses to “Values and the Future of Education”

Judy O'Connell
August 12th, 2007 @ 11:44 pm

Thank you for this post John. It is inspirational,a great summary, and a succinct reference point for us all to link to in posts or presentations! Love your style
Dave
August 14th, 2007 @ 3:14 am

Im a huge AS Neill fan and glad to see Im not alone. I was wondering how many techers understand the history of compulsory schooling and the industrial era? Sadly I think your correct, most schooling is about training good employees and not about real education. Im interested that your positive this will change and would love to hear more of your opinions on this.

You might like this video, although the language is graphic, an angry man indeed…

http://oneducation.wordpress.com/2007/08/08/george-carlin-education-and-the-owners-of-america/
Chris Hampton
October 27th, 2008 @ 8:57 am

Hi, John
I’ve been a big fan of “RF” – ever since I read “Escape From the Classroom” For the first time, someone with academic “cred” was voicing my own personal reservations. I promoted “Education Otherwise” in Scotland on behalf of Prof Meighan, the inspirational head Birmingham University Education Department for two decades. I believe he has now retired-battered but unbowed!
It was inevitable, I guess, that he and I would come up against the same brick wall of obdurate incomprehension that you have encountered.
In my opinion , one of our biggest challenges and fiercest opponents are “pushy” parents who see the educative process as a means of social advancement for themselves and their children. The price that is paid is a high number of “screwed-up weans” with a perverted view of themselves and society in general
Unless we finally agree, as a nation, that State education has been employed, for almost 140 years,as an instrument of social control and we, as teachers, were in collusion with a disastrous misappropriation, the reactionary forces which oppose any suggestion of liberalisation will prevail.
Let me say that the phrase “compulsory education” is a deplorable contradiction in terms. What people mean, of course, is “compulsory schooling” – a very different thing.
Keep up the good work, John! Let me know if you intend to hold any public seminars to highlight this vital and highly relevant educational issue. . Thanks! Chris
Emergent Education: The Power of Learning in a Networked World : John Connell: The Blog
June 24th, 2009 @ 8:58 am

[...] the words of Woodrow Wilson, spoken almost a century ago, might not pertain quite so explicitly to schools today, many of the [...]
David Willows
October 12th, 2009 @ 7:29 pm

Nice post on the necessity to rethink many of our traditional assumptions about what learning will look like in the future. You might like to take a look at a recent article that we have just written on International Education and the future of our schools, for next week’s Telegraph. You can check it out here: http://davidwillows.squarespace.com

Looking forward to the conversation.

David