stephen kemmis charles sturt university wagga wagga campus contemporary schooling and the struggle...

STEPHEN KEMMISCharles Sturt UniversityWagga Wagga campus

Contemporary schooling and

the struggle for education

Overview

IntroductionEducationSchoolingAn historical journey: from

Marcus Aurelius to the present

Praxis: Right conduct, history-making action

Conclusion

Introduction

Education versus schooling

“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education”

Education, schooling, training, socialisation, indoctrination

Education

(Stephen Kemmis’s definition)

A definition of education: Education, properly speaking, is the

process by which children, young people and adults are initiated into (a) forms of understanding that foster

individual and collective self-expression, (b) modes of action that foster individual

and collective self-development, and (c) ways of relating to one another and the

world that foster individual and collective self-determination,

and that are, in these senses, oriented towards the good for each person and the good for humankind.

Education consists in

Initiation into: (in three dimensions of intersubjectivity) To foster:

(1) Forms of understanding

The cultural-discursive dimension (in semantic space)

realised in the medium of language

(1) Individual and collective

self-expression

(2) Modes of actionThe material-economic dimension

(in physical space-time)realised in the medium of activity and work


self-development

(3) Ways of relating to one another and the

world

The social-political dimension(in social space)

realised in the medium of power and solidarity


self-determination

FOR INDIVIDUALS:Education for living well

FOR HUMANKIND:Education to build

a world worth living in

Schooling

An institutional process Intended to nurture and defend the

practice of education But makes the practice vulnerable

to the needs of the institution (power, status, money)

Schooling has existed in many forms Each new form aspires to realise a

new good for persons and for humankind

Each new form has made education vulnerable, in new ways, to the “external goods” of power, status, money...

Alasdair MacIntyre (1981: 181) on the tension between practices and institutions

“… so intimate is the relationship of practices to institutions … that institutions and practices characteristically form a single causal order in which the ideals and the creativity of the practice are always vulnerable to the acquisitiveness of the institution, in which the cooperative care for the common goods of the practice is always vulnerable to the competitiveness of the institution.”

An historical journey

The philosophical schools (skholē) of ancient Greece (387 BC ff.)

The Christian Church (200 AD ff.)

The monastery schools (400 – 1000 AD)

The town schools: the rise of the university (universitates magistrorum et scolarium) (1088 ff.)

Medieval guild schools (1500 ff.)

Mid-nineteenth century: mass compulsory schooling (1850 ff.)

The twenty-first century?

An historical journey• The philosophical

schools of ancient Greece (387 BC ff.)

• The Christian Church (200 AD ff.)

• The monastery schools (400 – 1000 AD)

• The town schools: the rise of the university (1088 ff.)

• Medieval guild schools (1500 ff.)

• Mid-nineteenth century: mass compulsory schooling (1850 ff.)

• The twenty-first century?

An education in logic, physics and ethics: to learn to live well by speaking and thinking well, acting well in the world, and relating well to others.

The aim was not ‘philosophical discourse’ (as in philosophy today) but living a good life – living well.









Socrates(c.469 BC – 399 BC)

Student of the Pythagoreans; teacher of Plato

The archetypal figure of the philosophical tradition: a man who was willing to die for philosophy.

Shutterstock picture of the statue of Socrates from the Academy of

Athens, Greece; copyright Anastasios71









Photograph by Marie-Lan Nguyen of a bust of

Plato, Roman copy after a Greek original from the

last quarter of the 4th century; Museo Pio-Clementino, Vatican

Museums

Plato (c.424 – c.347 BC)

Founder of the Academy in Athens(387 BC – 529 AD)









Portrait of Aristotle, copy of the Imperial Period

(1st or 2nd century) of a lost bronze sculpture

made by Lysippos; photographer Eric Gaba.

Aristotle(384 – 322 BC)

Founder of the Lyceum (334/5 BC – 529 AD)









Bust of Zeno. Museo Nazionale, Naples.

From G. M. A. Richter, Portraits of the Greeks (1965),

vol. III, fig. 1089

Zeno(c.334 – c.262 BC)

Founder of Stoicism.

The school (301 BC – 529 AD) took its name from Stoa Poikile in the Athenian Agora, a public meeting space used by many different kinds of people and groups Stoa Poikile.

AgoraPicBk 16 (2003), p. 43, fig. 66









Shutterstock picture of a marble bust of

Epicurus. Roman copy of Greek

original, 3rd century BC/2nd century BC.

On display in the British Museum,

London; Photograph copyright Kamira.

Epicurus(341 – 270 BC)

Founder of Epicureanism.

The school initially met in the Garden of Epicurus’s house, between the Agora and the Lyceum. Founded 301 BC.









Instituting a new practice: the practice of Christianity through Christian spiritual practice and Christian education.

The Roman Empire was generally hospitable to the Greek philosophical schools after the conversion of Emperor Constantine the Great (272 – 337 AD) to Christianity.

In 529 AD, Justinian I of Byzantium closed the philosophical schools to put an end to the practice of philosophy.

300 AD +: into the Middle Ages: the barbarian invasions of the Roman Empire led to the loss of vast tracts of the knowledge of antiquity (e.g., several texts of Aristotle).









A new institution for Christian education – and to spread secular knowledge in the Middle Ages. Reaching out to the population outside the monastery gates.

The monastery

… the great focal point of civilisation in the early middle ages was the monastery, and increasingly the isolated monastery in the countryside. With its workshops it was a conservatory for crafts and artistic skills; with its scriptorium and library it maintained an intellectual culture. Thanks to its estates and its tools and workforce of monks and dependants of all sorts it was a centre of production and an economic model, and of course it was a focus of spiritual life, often based on the relics of a saint (Le Goff, Jacques (2011). Medieval civilization: 400-1500, trans. J. Barrow. London: The Folio Society, p.124)









A new institution for secular education. Initially universities were established by papal decree, but once created as corporations, they spread education outside the Church.

They were established to teach the Liberal Arts: logic, grammar and rhetoric (the trivium)

and mathematics, geography, astronomy and

music (the quadrivium).

The town school

… [t]he cultural translation which made the monasteries lose first place to the towns occurred chiefly in the fields of teaching and architecture. In the course of the twelfth century the town schools, which grew out of episcopal schools, decisively overtook the monastic ones. The new centres of learning freed themselves from controls by being able to recruit their masters and their pupils, and by choosing their teaching programmes and methods. Scholasticism was a child of the towns, and reigned in the new institutions, the universities or intellectual guilds. Study and teaching became a profession, one of the many activities which were becoming specialised in the urban workplace; the name itself is significant, for universitas means a corporation. The universities were merely universitates magistrorum et scolarium, or corporations of masters and students, though they varied to a greater or lesser extent from each other, from Bologna where the students were in control, to Paris which was ruled by the masters (Le Goff, 2011, p.84).









Another new institution for secular education, with roots in another kind of corporation: the (craft) guild.

Guild members wanted secular education for their children, to enhance their participation in public life as well as in commerce.









By the mid-19th century, schools were widespread but not universal. It was a short stretch for progressive governments in the developed world to make schooling universal.

The aims: to prepare citizens for the increasingly democratic nation states of the late C19, and for active engagement in economic life (stretching around the globe in world trade)

From the late middle ages to the mid-C19

the pupil-by-pupil teaching of the schools of the late Middle Ages (each pupil coming to the master’s desk to get feedback progress on set work and to have new work set), a mode of pedagogical ‘production’ that recalls pre-industrial modes of production in the economy beyond the school;

the monitorial system of the nineteenth century with its halls of students and teachers divided into rows, with each row working on different set tasks under the supervision of a different ‘monitor’, a more massified mode of pedagogical production influenced by the emergence of the factory and the industrialised production that spread throughout Europe with the Industrial Revolution;

the multi-teacher, multi-classroom schools of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries that have, in different ways (like ‘streaming’ classes by ability, or small-group work), tried to incorporate responses to students’ individual differences, echoing the much more organised, specialised and differentiated modes of large-scale industrial production in the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries.

To have mass schooling also required...

building, resourcing and regulating schools distributed across the whole territory of many C19 nation-states (education via schooling);

educating, examining and providing teachers and head teachers for all of these schools (teacher education);

developing state curricula and administering various forms and levels of examinations to assess students (curriculum formulation);

enacting laws and policies to govern the administration of whole education systems at various levels from the local and municipal to the state and national through the efforts of armies of educational officials (educational policy and administration); and

setting in train the work of educational research and evaluation capable of guiding and informing this vast educational enterprise – in forms ranging from school inspection to state-wide testing to commissioned research for education systems to independent research in universities.









The current challenge: Mired in its C19 history, and

schooling for the industrial age, the institution of schooling has struggled to re-invent itself for a new era. Oddly, nation-states have renovated the old industrial-era machinery of the schooling: mass curriculum, mass pedagogy, mass assessment. So far, they have failed to grasp the challenges and opportunities of a digital age.

Praxis in Marcus Aurelius

Praxis and education as praxis:

‘Right conduct’

‘History-making action’

Marcus Aurelius (120 – 180 AD)

Stoic philosopher and Roman Emperor161 – 180 AD

Shutterstock picture of bust of Marcus Aurelius

in the Vatican; copyright Stephen

Chung

Marcus Aurelius today

Stephen Kemmis meets Marcus Aurelius at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, September 12, 2012

Salve, Stephen

Salve to you,

Marcus

Marcus Aurelius and (some) family

Emperor Antoninus Pius

(adoptive father)

Marcus Aurelius

Lucius Verus(Co-emperor with Marcus)

Faustinathe

Younger (Marcus’s daughter)

Praxis in Marcus Aurelius

The three disciplines of the Stoics

The discipline of attention, according to which we must try to see each situation in which we are required to act clearly and ‘objectively’, without being unduly influenced by subjective factors like our own preferences or habitual ways of understanding and interpreting things.

The discipline of desire, according to which we must not be too attached to things that are pleasurable or too anxious to avoid things that are painful, but rather understand ourselves as acting “in accordance with Nature” in the sense that all of history has brought us to this moment and the situation in which we now find ourselves, and has prepared us precisely for this moment and our deliberation on how to act courageously for the best.

The discipline of action, according to which we must act always for the good of the human community.

Praxis in the modern university

The obligation falls on us, in our turn, as stewards for our times of the intellectual traditions of our disciplines and fields, to conduct our teaching, our research and our engagement with our communities as praxis – for the good of humankind, not just in the service of sectional interests. As stewards of our disciplines and fields, our praxis consists in acting for the continuing development of knowledge, responding for our times to the new problems that always emerge with changing times and changing circumstances.

Praxis in the modern university

John Courtney Murray, SJ (1960:14) on civility

“Barbarism … threatens when [people] cease to talk together according to reasonable laws. There are laws of argument, the observance of which is imperative if discourse is to be civilized. Argument ceases to be civil when it is dominated by passion and prejudice; when its vocabulary becomes solipsist, premised on the theory that my insight is mine alone and cannot be shared; when dialogue gives way to a series of monologues; when the parties to the conversation cease to listen to one another, or hear only what they want to hear, or see the other’s argument only through the screen of their own categories … When things like this happen, [people] cannot be locked together in argument. Conversation becomes merely quarrelsome or querulous. Civility dies with the death of dialogue.”

Education

(Stephen Kemmis’s definition)

Education for dialogue: the dialogical versus the monological

curriculum

A definition of education: Education, properly speaking, is the

process by which children, young people and adults are initiated into (a) forms of understanding that foster

individual and collective self-expression, (b) modes of action that foster individual and

collective self-development, and (c) ways of relating to one another and the

world that foster individual and collective self-determination,

and that are, in these senses, oriented towards the good for each person and the good for humankind.

Education consists in dialogues of

Initiation into: (in three dimensions of intersubjectivity) To foster:

(1) Forms of understanding

The cultural-discursive dimension (in semantic space)

realised in the medium of language


self-expression

(2) Modes of actionThe material-economic dimension

(in physical space-time)realised in the medium of activity and work


self-development

(3) Ways of relating to one another and the

world

The social-political dimension(in social space)

realised in the medium of power and solidarity


self-determination

FOR INDIVIDUALS:Education for living well

FOR HUMANKIND:Education to build

a world worth living in

Conclusion: The struggle for education

The task for the education profession today.

We need to revive the notion of a public education that educates, that aims to do more than inform. We need to revive the idea of education conducted as dialogue, not as monologue. We need to recognize that in our times, as in times past, the institution of schooling may threaten the possibility of education, and that we, too, have a role in remaking the institution so it can nurture and protect a practice of education worthy of the name: education for living well in a world worth living in. That is the struggle for education in a world of schooling. We may even find that we need to abandon the schools of today to find new kinds of real or virtual institutions through which we can conduct education as dialogue. But let us be sure not to abandon education.

Thank you

stephen kemmis charles sturt university wagga wagga campus contemporary schooling and the struggle...

Documents

education education

education slide

monastery schools

town schools

ad slide

medieval guild schools

education vulnerable

practice of education