Category: Teaching

On Bias: II. Wrong Bias?

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Click here to read On Bias: I. Disparate Bias

On Bias: II. Wrong Bias?

The school must conduct its affairs in some way or other; the curriculum must include some areas of human experience and omit others. In doing so the school thereby commits itself on these issues, often without proper, or any, consideration of alternative possibilities.

Mackenzie, 1997 (p. 499)

The first half of Mackenzie’s remark, a priori, I accept: school must conduct its affairs in some way or other, and the curriculum must include some areas of human experience and omit others.

As to the second half… hey, we all have opinions, and as we take each other to be informed to greater and lesser degrees, we agree and disagree. So, where I can imagine the dearth of “any” consideration of alternative possibilities, I’m still uncertain what Mackenzie means by “proper.”

So long as an attempt is made, wouldn’t literally any consideration leave us free to judge school’s conduct of its affairs… unless, of course, somebody’s gone and figured it all out on behalf of the rest of us. Did some school back in ’97 really manage to offer it all in one go? Who were the teachers and administrators demonstrating that kind of wisdom? Who sat for that District Board, staffed that government ministry? By all of which I’m really asking, who gets to say what’s proper and, thereby, what’s improper? You? Me? Mackenzie? Further still, who even gets to say who gets to say? Don’t say “Mackenzie’s parents.”

To be fair, “proper” in this case could be interpreted more procedurally than substantively, as some generic curriculum development protocol – a proper approach to considering alternatives versus proper alternatives per se. Yet similar questions remain about who sits as part of that process, and who chooses who sits, and who chooses who chooses, and on it goes, the politics of education.

If you ask me, i.e. thanks for reading, a conscientious teacher faces questions analogous to these every single day while enacting curriculum many times a day, balancing their own perspective with how they interpret each student’s needs and interests. And I say “each” student, but of course we all know things are sometimes less individuated than the world of idealism. Teaching anybody, much less young people, much less 2–3 dozen at once, is no singular thing, which the gerund “teaching” hardly conveys.

By the same turn, though, teaching is no crap-shoot, or maybe better to say it can’t afford to be. Isn’t the real trick of teaching learning to live with uncertainty? And isn’t that last sentence funny for juxtaposing teaching so cavalierly with learning? Teachers learning? as in, don’t they have it all already figured out – aren’t teachers already supposed to know things?

Don’t be misled as to what you imagine teaching to be, despite any time you may already have spent in a classroom.

Teachers owe a duty of care to meet people (if not each person) where they’re at, then help them along. So… how does a teacher balance their own knowledge and awareness with what matters to their own self? That’s a real distinction, by the way. And if they can balance this, how next do they balance this with their duty to help students learn what students feel matters to students? Trust me, that last sentence is even harder to do than it is to read because, sometimes, students just don’t know yet what matters to themselves – the same can be said of some teachers I’ve met, too, since we’re on the subject.

Convolutedly, the reverse is also true – for some other teachers, their politics is inherently part of their classroom curriculum, something I’ve heard insisted to be not only good teaching but moral teaching. This opens an always nuanced and often contentious discussion – he said from experience – such as precluding an opportunity for students to reach moral ground on their own terms in their own time. Rather than discuss it further here, though, I’ll suggest another way to ask my question about teachers balancing self with students: how might education be made “simultaneously both responsible and free” – it’s something Dr. Shulman wondered as far back as 1983. I gather he was leaning more towards teachers acting on behalf of students whereas I’m definitely asking on behalf of everybody in the classroom. For me, this ultimately seems a question of autonomy, the heart of which is bias.

Oh boy, I know this is a series on bias, but really? Always ‘bias’? It may be safe to say, or else totally ironic, that the principal curricular consideration we face is What is most worth teaching? That’s a collective ‘we’, by the way, not the royal one, and fair play if you disagree. In any case, this infamous question inevitably leads to an even bigger one, What is school for? What’s the purpose of this thing we call K12 education? Lately, though, as we’ve particularly hitched our wagons to constructivism, I wonder if these are the wrong questions.

Lately, I’ve been trying out something different, and just to be clear, I’m not referring to subject-specific curricular anything. To be clearer still, I’m considering what teachers bring with them through the classroom door each day because they’ll be bringing it, whatever question we ask. And what are we asking?

Up til now, where someone may have been asking, What is school for? I’m asking Who participates? and further, What are some suitable attitudes or expectations for participants? How best to proceed in K-12 with this thing called ‘constructivism’… I mean, if we’re genuinely committed to living it out, because I don’t yet see that we are – not even when we think we are. Yeah, long question.

And yes, still collective, not royal, only now I wonder if anyone’s upset with me lumping them into the collective. In responding to these questions about school and curriculum, I’ve obviously been considering neither content nor skill but people. So, as we’ve hitched our wagons to constructivism, I wonder whether people might be the purpose of school, making the principle curricular consideration not ‘what’ we teach but ‘who’ we teach, alongside which both ‘how’ and ‘why’ we teach find appropriate kinship.

If you disagree thus far, please don’t let your bias run away with you while, if you agree, please don’t go clicking ‘Like’ and ‘Share’ just yet – he said with smug presumption – because this is still far more nuanced than I’ve offered just yet.

I think it’s fair to say this idea is something I’ve wondered more broadly across The Rhetorical WHY, primarily as a facet of curriculum since teaching and coaching and mentoring are some things I’ve come to know fairly well – and, hey, write what you know.

There’s a common distinction between curriculum, mandated documentation about what to teach and learn in K-12 schooling, and pedagogy, the manner in which curriculum’s taught to this or that class of students. Both lack nuance for being oversimplified. From all my pondering, I’m lately gathering that an ill-advised separation of this dialectical pairing may be an ongoing source of trouble faced by teachers, students, and education in general. I think curriculum and pedagogy may be better considered one concept, and I think so because of bias, and I wish I had something more substantive to offer – as I say, it’s threaded throughout this blog, but that’s a lot to synthesise.

I’m no longer certain that school’s the place for any superseding authority, either the kind we commonly associate with curriculum or the kind we commonly associate with pedagogy.

I think how or why we’ve made this separation is an issue of a higher order; for now, suffice to say I suspect Illich was on to something. The bottom line is that I’m no longer certain that school’s the place for any superseding authority, either the kind we commonly associate with curriculum or the kind we commonly associate with pedagogy… what I mean by school is the sort of experience I had, where the superseding authority was largely into ‘telling’ and ‘explaining’ things – maybe that resonates for you, too. On the other hand, what I mean by “no longer certain” may not be what you think, so bear with me.

“… are we doing this right?”

We all come away from ‘school’ with an idea about what it is and how it works because we all went through those years, ourselves. Honestly, though, in this era of constructivist halos, I still see plenty of telling ‘how it is’ and explaining ‘how it’s done’, and ‘this is what’ and ‘here’s how’ and just all sorts of expectation and behaviour from teachers and instructors and professors that suggest, to me, how little has actually changed.

We find all sorts of ‘student-centred’ this and ‘self-regulated’ that in today’s educational circles, and we call it constructivism, but I’ve felt far less certain about the constructivist perspective since it came to, er… rule the day dominate the landscape become so popular since we adopted it. Apparently, we tend to repeat what ‘school’ is and how it works, even when we say we’re changing… is this because we all went through those years, ourselves?

But hey, changes take time and patience, and people who spend their time waiting to arrive miss that time spent. And I can only judge from my own perspective, but in the classrooms I know, what I take Mackenzie to mean by “proper” for schools may finally be gradually changing.

I say so with some unfinal gradual assurance because what I’ve been seeing is only four or five years old while institutional changes seem to be generational – did you notice, above, I chose a quote that’s twenty-five years old? Someone else might have embellished those twenty-five years for effect – “more than two decades” or “a quarter-century ago” – but I didn’t want any rhetorical ‘why’ to diminish all the teachers and students whose efforts at change over twenty-five years have arisen and are having effects all their own.

So fair play to all the teachers and students in schools I know. Also noteworthy… the roots of their change seem to reach well beyond any teen angst, or that world-conquering spirit of twenty-somethings. Their changes also seem to be found in more than one institution, even one as ubiquitous as school. It’s the cultural shift we’ve all been experiencing for a few years now, a stand-out willingness to confront assumption and habit and bias, and behaviour, and prejudice and bigotry and hatred. And it’s the determination against all these to assert an alternative superseding authority – although whether as a challenge or as an equal seems dependent on circumstance. I won’t label this change since most people probably call it something for themselves, but the overwhelming sentiment has seemed to be that this time is different.

As for me – and of this I’ve had far longer to be convinced… the greatest obstacle to change is the force of habit, which can manifest any number of ways and which is maybe just another way of saying bias. If I have one analysis to offer, it’s to be conscious of bias as its perceived by an audience, something along these lines: “… to the creatures outside looking in from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again, it was already impossible to say which was which.” So for me, anyway, not sure for you, I’d say we have a ways to go before we’re okay characterising any “changes” as thorough or convincingly different just yet.

Still, things sure seem different this time around.

Click here to read On Bias: III. Fun With Dialectics

Enacting ‘The WHY’

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Click here to read Decisions, Decisions

To borrow an earlier phrase, teaching is not a matter of act but a matter of character. Someone may already agree with this before understanding what I mean.

That previous post considered the pondering of decisions with phronesis, practical wisdom – an acuity of discernment and a benevolence in the weighing of options, something we might generalise more simply as savvy good will. Where ‘savvy’ is internal, note with care that ‘good will’ is inclusive, which is to say external – others as well as you.

And if that’s somehow alarming, because not everyone is your friend, then note with added relief that practical wisdom is something we can exercise in concert with healthy scepticism. I say we can because, of course, not everybody does. On the other hand, the reverse is equally true: we can exercise our scepticism without practical wisdom. In any case, we implicate education – things people profess to know – and also teaching.

So then… a matter of character, specifically of teachers. Practical wisdom informing decisions is a nuanced thing: why to act, why under the present circumstances to pick ‘this’ decision over ‘that’ one, the kind of nuance that we often call ‘the Why’. Of course, every question asked, “Why… ?” is answerable as some sought-after outcome, the corollary “Because… ,” and ‘why’ might be offered in different ways at different times. Where there may be some clever reason to withhold ‘the why’ and keep people wondering, surely any such decision would be good will at its savvy best, lasting only as long as necessary.

But this continual reasoned weighing of possible outcomes is, in very large part, the daily work of teaching. Justifying each decision is arguably the greatest professional responsibility teachers face. So where some chosen course is the outcome of practical wisdom, then maybe let’s consider this to be meaningful teaching.

The continual reasoned weighing of possible outcomes is, in very large part, the daily work of teaching.

Something curious here… where ‘course’ often means Social Studies or Math, as we commonly say “course,” in this case it means something like a path, that decision weighed to follow ‘this’ way over ‘that’ as we aim for some objective or goal, i.e. taking some chosen course.

Note further that “curriculum” derives from currere, which likewise suggests a flow or path to be run, as we might say “a race course” or a river that “runs its course.” Curriculum is coming from somewhere, and heading somewhere, and in between these, it is dynamic and influential upon encountering whatever’s already there. Add one bonus mark if you’re now also noticing a temporal past-present-future quality, but for me, the relationship most central to curriculum, far less abstract than tangible and personal, is the one between teacher and student. They’re not only the ones who face each decisional fork-in-the-course, whether ‘this’ way or ‘that’, they’re also the ones who finally take action as well.

More colloquially, you may have heard curriculum described as what teachers teach, ‘the What’. If so, then you may also have heard curriculum paired up with pedagogy, ‘the How’, but these simplifications really do little to convey their complexities, much less their concerted interconnectivity, much less their significance within the holistic scope of school and education, where a lot is going on all at once. Overall, of curriculum and pedagogy, I might say it this way… the better we know someone, the more meaningful our interactions become, and I wonder if curriculum and pedagogy, as two concepts, are better considered as one.

For now, though, for space and sanity, I’m satisfied to describe curriculum as relational – ‘what we do with someone else’ – which has a lot to do with abiding respect and time spent together – and pedagogy as purposeful – ‘what we do for someone else’ – which has mainly to do with motives and objectives. On behalf of others as well as themselves, teachers must know with whom, for whom, and up against whom they might be taking action as well as what such action might look like when they take it and, finally, who will likely be paying the cost.

On that note, I haven’t even addressed power and authority, which of course are central considerations to this broader relational concept – that last emphasis being my way to ask whether the common phrase ‘of course’ means anything more for you now than it did before. Of course it does, I’m sure.

So… a matter of character? practical wisdom? …remind me again how we arrived here? One last thing I should probably mention: that previous post was an obliquely political critique since, for all their connection to policy and legislation, the branches of politics just hang so low that, honestly, who can resist but be tempted. But true to healthy scepticism, any take on practical wisdom can probably do better than those posturing purveyors of politics, and me being a teacher, and there being nothing whatsoever political about school and education… well, therein the physician must minister to himself, I guess, and besides, you could always go start a blog of your own.

Seriously, which seems harder to sustain: being persuasive or being in control?

They’re obviously not, but say these were really the only two choices: which work would you rather be doing? How would you prefer to spend your efforts? Because wouldn’t that tell us something more about you.

I’m Right, You’re Wrong

“Tyssedal, Norwegen – Norwegian frigate HNoMS Helge Ingstad F313 in Sørfjord (June 2018). This ship sunk [sic] 5 months later after a collision with an oil tanker. Parts of a mining company on the left side and at the bottom of the photo. A symbol of military power and its transience.” – Mark König

Featured Image Credit: Photo by Mark König on Unsplash

I. Divisions

I used to help students prepare for written exams by unpacking the rubric. These were 6-point or 9-point scales with written criteria to describe each level. Understanding how the rubric was designed, I figured, would help them more ably respond to it, so I offered students three ways to consider how the rubric seemed to be designed:

  1. From the top down, where everyone is 100% perfect unless or until they make an error
  2. From the bottom up, where everyone is a zero unless or until they earn their way up
  3. From the middle out, where everyone is given some credit for capability to start with, i.e. no one is either perfect or a zero

Eventually, the students decided that the rubrics we used were designed middle-out, which as it happens was correct. As the top-down perspective is charitable and the bottom-up withholding, the middle-out can accommodate a little of both these attitudes. However, from the middle-out, you still need to decide from which way – up or down – your judgments will proceed.

That might seem an unnecessary nuance, but then, what is nuance if not seemingly unnecessary?

If you begin from the middle-out with a charitable attitude, yet you still reserve some scepticism, then we could argue that you’re more pessimistic – otherwise, why not simply trust people from the top-down? You’re no drill sergeant, not like the bottom-up who sees every initiate as unqualified. From that pessimistic middle-out, what your scepticism suggests is prudence, a “fool-me-twice” kind of insight that others might call cynicism. And fair enough if, while scoring an essay, it’s contrived, not really you – just remember, for the student receiving the grade, it’s plenty real when you hand back their papers.

Conversely, if you begin from the middle-out with a hardened attitude, yet you still grant some belief, then by the same token we could argue that you’re more optimistic. You’re no Pollyanna, yet what your belief seems to suggest is confidence, a “been-there, done-that” kind of faith that, yes, people can learn.

I bring all this up to make an analogy, which struck me while reading Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of Indignation. In Chapter 6, Freire writes:

“… education… is political in nature, though not necessarily partisan.… I could never think of the educational practice… as untouched by issues of values, and thus of ethics, of dreams and of utopia – in other words, untouched by the question of political options, of knowledge and of beautifulness, that is, of gnosis and of aesthetics. Education is always a certain theory of knowledge put into practice; it is naturally political…” (pp. 70–71)

For there even to be “politics” at all, I’m assuming there’s more than one party seeking power and, further, that these parties contest that power. And I acknowledge the teacher’s dilemma, as Freire poses it from the same discussion:

“If I must not, no matter what project I am working on, even suggest to my learners that my party possesses the saving truth, I must not, on the other hand, be silent before fatalist discourses according to which the pain and suffering of the poor are great, but nothing can be done because reality is what it is.” (pp. 70–71)

Freire alludes here to some very specific context, as does the rest of his book, as does his body of work, and his legacy.

Points for you…
Photo Credit: Brett Jordan on Unsplash

But, in general, if anything can divide us with passion, it is disagreement over the well-being of our children… to say nothing of the long-term consequences we desire for the society they will propagate… all of which is at stake in an education system. For all this, we might understand the ready acceptance of Freire’s wisdom more broadly across education, and I agree particularly that education is inescabably political. But I hesitate to accept that it is not necessarily partisan. As with so much else in education, I will say, “It depends” – in this case, it depends on how we define the parties comprising the partisanship.

II. Motives

Partisanship suggests one-sided passion, up to the exclusion of reasoning or even listening to alternatives. To borrow Freire’s phrasing… politics is partisan in nature, and partisanship impends, without necessarily guaranteeing, dogmatism. Politics of any kind is partisan if we understand the parties broadly as those with power to control the contested system and those without power to control it. Here then is the general essence of politics: on the one hand, those without control vie to control the contested system, thereby shaping potential consequences; on the other hand, those with control maintain control of the contested system while fending off, as the need arises, those without control. Indeed, those with the power to control seem to enjoy the privilege of saying, “I’m right, and you’re wrong” while those without control seem left to respond, “You’re wrong, and I’m right.” This reversal of claims is no arbitrary gainsaying or petty playfulness. Elsewhere, I’ve contemplated how we might warrant such judgments.

Those with the power to control enjoy the privilege of saying, “I’m right, and you’re wrong” while those without control are left to respond, “You’re wrong, and I’m right.” This reversal of claims is no arbitrary gainsaying or petty playfulness.

Politically, those without control can promote their own righteousness all they want, but by circumstance, they’re also compelled to point out the power broker’s control… probably as being flawed, and thereby as a justification for change.

However, unlike the power broker, they’re unable to refer only to themselves. They refer to themselves always in terms relative to the opposition, even without direct reference since, well, everybody knows who’s in control. Arguably, compounding their repression, they occupy a weaker political position though this is also dependent upon (i) their audience’s own position as well as (ii) their audience’s potential to leverage that position. [In this case, that ‘audience’ is most likely the electorate, at least those of voting age who are paying attention.] Meanwhile, having control, the power broker is politically wise to promote their own approach above all else. Indeed, they may feel no need to even acknowledge, much less reason, with opposition of any kind – that kind of arrogance is well-known, as is its maintenance.

Altogether, this struggle is what we call politics: by whatever means, between whichever parties, a fight for the power to control. Means and control… these are contextual, but presumably, something about having control is desirable, or else why bother? Quite apart from being necessary, partisanship in politics is inherent. That partisanship might be extreme is neither here nor there to its inherence but, rather, speaks to the character of the contestants. That partisanship might be polarised is down to two parties, or three, or a dozen – and I grant “polarised” is binary versus more diffused rhetorical battles between parties three or more – but it’s still not down to the nature of what it means to struggle. As I’ve said, all this is to describe politics broadly and generally.

Amoral or a moral struggle?
“La morte di Cesare” (1793–1806) by Vincenzo Camuccini
Museo di Capodimonte, Napoli

III. Positions

To educational politics, then… an education system exists institutionally as part of a larger culture, and any specific control, e.g. financial, industrial, curricular, is more diffused than centralised, conceivably right down to the classroom, as Freire enjoins the teacher’s dilemma… perhaps this is a reason why Freire dissociates partisanship. In any case, for me, the power to control requires brokerage, somebody exercising some control, which by my reasoning above makes educational politics no less partisan than all the rest: those with control and those without control. Defending Freire, one might label only his critics as partisan, yet still… there it is. Pedagogy meanwhile, just to finish the point, I take to be an educational mode of politics – all the more reason to respect the teacher’s dilemma, i.e. respect the learner’s autonomy, which is how I take Freire’s point, in the end.

Yet if learners are but pawns to some more powerful broker, how is it justified to make them also pawns of a contesting party? Perhaps this is a reason why Freire dissociates partisanship, and now I wonder whether he’s not being a little accidentally defensive. By partisanship, maybe he means troublemakers in the war room, not heroes in the classroom. As for adult learners, where they might have at least some account for themselves, surely the teacher’s dilemma is little more than a token when the learners are children. What Freire seems to mean by politics in education is not a struggle for power between relative equals but a struggle for survival by the relatively powerless. So he justifies the motive for struggle morally. Indeed, I think this is a more compelling reason for dissociating partisanship, however obliquely or nobly.

In any case, as those will know who advocate for children… what passions are stirred by morality as compared to any lesser motive! It should be noted that when the powerful, like the powerless, have children of their own, they can wield passion and morality, too: there are times with no recourse but to fight it out.

On behalf of learners, Freire fights from a place of belief, a place we might consider the optimistic middle-out, hardened but hopeful. Even so, on behalf of the powerless, he fights from the moral top-down, not with scepticism for their future but with hope, and justification. It is from the bottom-up that we find his scepticism and his criticism of the powerful. And it is from all these multiple perspectives at once that Freire fights, altogether, because educational politics are inescapably partisan, by which I mean politics is the struggle for the power to control, as well as to shape potential consequences. In this respect, Freire says as much, himself…

“The necessary insistence with which I have been speaking about [my understanding of education having a political nature] has led certain critics from the right to say of me that I am not an educator or a thinker of education, but rather a political activist. It is important to state that those who deny me my pedagogicalness, drowned and nullified, according to them, in the political, are just as political as I am. Except that, obviously, they take a different position from mine.” (p. 71)

Partisanship described, if not defined. Talk of taking different positions, talk of activism and denial, most certainly talk of the political right, as elsewhere he mentions “the social classes, the right and the left, the dominant and the dominated” (p. 25)… all this talk absolutely stands for partisanship in the struggle for power. Beyond this, though, what else is all this talk, if not partisanship in a more colloquial sense, of simply taking sides?

I gather what Freire means by “politics” is a struggle to overcome the power brokers who (to use his most oft-quoted word) oppress those with little or no power. He positions himself. More than simply taking a side with children, with rural workers, with learners, with democracy, he takes a position against pragmatism, against “technical-scientific training” (p. 19), against “the control and the dictums of globalizing power” (p. 25). He takes a position that not only bares his motives but provokes defaming criticism, criticism that he acknowledges. For Freire, education is political by nature and morally necessary to help the powerless.

As an educator, he takes a side as an advocate of education to empower the oppressed toward transforming themselves, such that they might next transform the systems and structures that dominate into systems and structures that accommodate. For all this, Freire clearly illustrates partisanship. So is “partisanship” pejorative? Is this why he deems it “not necessarily” part of politics? Defending Freire, one might label only his critics as partisan, yet still… there it is.

IV. Spaces

I was prompted to all this for having spotted in Freire’s discussion about educational politics a simple analogy to my lesson on rubrics. Analogies being instructive yet never perfect, I’ve since been provoked to further thoughts on power and control. For my students, the power to control was a clearer understanding of how to write an essay – theirs to control as far as it was a measure provided from beyond their control. In light of constructivism, today’s prevailing theory of learning, educators have been brought to reconsider education as something no longer provided to learners from beyond, like a rubric; I gather this will remain so as long as constructivism prevails.

The malpractice of education as revelation delivered by teachers we now more empathetically understand on the part of the learner as realisations collaboratively composed. Even so, as no one lives in a vacuum, and everyone has arrived belatedly to a history, what do we learn that has not in some way already been provided? Will an education help us to think mere original thoughts, or unprecedented ones? Is an education some kind of addition or renovation, or some kind of transformation – each of these seeming more radical, as we go – or is an education even something else again? Whatever it is, who gets to say what education is, and what it is for, which really is to ask who it is for?

Are lessons designed for a teacher to teach, or for a learner to learn, or is it some mixture of both?

I claim a say by taking the initiative to write this blog post; will anyone reading it claim the initiative by responding with a comment – preferably something more substantive than a tweet? The ball in your court doesn’t just materialise; somebody else must serve it. By the same token, I never claimed to be some Federer or Sampras – you pose the risk I take, and I pray you’re no McEnroe. Then again, I am apparently an educated, accountable adult now, not some powerless child too small to wield a racquet. To use the rubric analogy… is education for the learner-out, or for the teacher-in? Is it for the self, or from the other? I’m saying it’s dynamic, but is it one-way traffic? Are lessons designed for a teacher to teach, or for a learner to learn? Or maybe…

Maybe is it some mixture of both? Since numerous learners comprise an education system, at once and across time, can education even be singular, i.e. “personalised” to each learner, i.e. an education for you while another, separately, for me? Or is education something that occurs collectively, somewhere at once in between all the learners, and teachers, and whomever else we decide to include? One expresses, another perceives, and somehow, somewhere in between them occurs an understanding (even if it’s “I don’t understand you”), which connotes something further again. And on and on it rolls… except, if that’s where it ends, that’s a decision, too: to shut something down. We might be here and now, you and me, face to face; or we might be across space, me way over here and you way over there; or we might be across time, from either direction the one before and the other after. However we interact, though, we are indeed caught in Dr King’s “inescapable network of mutuality,” which transcends: we do all live together, but just not all at once.

For each of us at once, by both of us in turn, something comes simultaneously to light for one as well as for both. The pattern continues as we might describe the renovation of a building or the refitting of a ship: upon a pre-existing frame, something else, something newer. Engineers demolish, and shipwreckers scrap, but teachers and learners are neither of these. Yes, the more people involved, the more connotations, and the more potentially complex any understanding may be. And yes, there’s a certain finality to life, but can anyone accurately say, “I am educated,” when really we ought to say, “I’m clearing some space for you”? (… and hey, at least I’m merely asking.) The former is present, yet the latter progressive – grammatically progressive, that is, and what’s more, politically imperfect.

Ain’t life grand!
Photo Credit: fauve othon on Unsplash

As context is everything, so politics the process is not a result until we decide it one. “It’s all a process” …for educators, a familiar refrain. Little wonder, then, if everything “depends”? If everything’s political? I rest assured of one thing: we are definitely educating each other, no matter whom we take to be right or wrong.

V. Decisions

I often wonder about one last thing: what might be the legacy of any educational transformation?

In some new system – let’s have it arise, say, as the transformation of the older one – in that new system, what exactly becomes of those now who were formerly with power? Surely the new system will have its own politics, yet what will become of the partisanship so endemic to the previous politics of that system now faded away? Is it also transformed? Is it eradicated? Is it hard to say, without an example? Would roles simply reverse, i.e. those formerly oppressed now oppress their former oppressors? We’re all human, after all… are we so different, and some of us just better at leading, or teaching, or learning than some others of us? Is there some conceivable system “strong enough in its fusing power to touch those who think they lose, as well as those who think they gain”? … by which I mean a system without need of rhetorical promotion, as I gather Addams meant, too. Whose vision, so unifying? … or maybe just forget I mentioned.

Well anyway, may we reach some shared understanding… or else, in different spirit, shall all our misunderstandings come to bicker endlessly over fake news and alternative facts, and whatever lies beyond. Yet as our motive to take up learning at all might compete with our aversion to risk it all… could there be, for us, some spirit of conjectural adventure, some curiosity attributable to our existence? Or have we been destined from birth to live with a dialectical pairing of drive and brakes? As certainly as education can deliver us from division, its absence will spell our end. If there be in us some will to power or desire for control, might a spirit for mutual understanding imply something more on-goingly patient, some will to live and let live – I call it a “will” to suggest vitality… a will, a motive? a desire? some reason-for-being? … whatever.

And I don’t mean some platitude, “live and let live,” like a bumper sticker. I mean literally goodwill, a mutually respectful sharing of existence that’s humble in expression and appreciates community, including all whom we accept as well as tolerate, like as well as dislike, by which all our interaction and negotiating sets to thriving. As goodwill, its thriving welcomes more than any one’s selection of some but is inclusive of all – the preferred, the desirable, the undesirable, the unfamiliar, and all the rest as well. And no, not everybody’s so willing to be generous – therein to find at least one educational objective, if we’re humble enough.

It’s the fair mediator who’s able to broker that negotiation – “broker,” here, I use advisedly. Or does a rising tide speak for itself by floating all boats… and this is what I wonder: are we really so similar? Or must some boats be torpedoed and sunk, their crews maybe rescued or maybe just left to drown? If you are reading this, just now, and casting its partisan roles, how conceivably might the scene be played in political reverse? How humble are you, as compared to certain, about what you believe is right, and wrong? How anchored are you to the evidence you’ve chosen, by which to sink or swim?

Imagine former oppressors, swimfin now on the other foot, at last coming to see the error of their ways, now educated right from wrong, and joining the new system with gladder hearts… World Peace.

Now imagine education unequivocally, inescapably political.

Yeah, me too.

Life’s a beach
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