Book cover for Wrońska & Stern (eds.) (2024). Taken from the Routledge catalogue.

Routledge, 2024.

ISBN: 9781032471693, Hbk.

ISBN: 9781003386100, eBook. 

RRP: £145.00 / £39.99, 238pp.

(This article is part of a series of blog posts from authors in a collection, Defending the value of education as a public good [2024], edited by Katarzyna Wrońska & Julian Stern). 

My contribution to the book Defending the Value of Education as a Public Good (Wrońska & Stern eds. 2024 ) is titled ‘Uncovering Education as a Practice in its Own Right.’ Here are a few paragraphs to introduce the chapter, in particular to say something about its context.

Central to the notion of a practice in its own right is that the practice has its own inherent responsibilities. It has its own distinct contributions to make – through the work of its practitioners – to human well-being. Example of practices in this sense include nursing, pharmacy, farming, engineering, medicine, and I would wish to stress, education. The warrant for including education here has an ancient ancestry, residing mainly in the example of Socrates rather than the prominent Greeks who came after him, like Plato and Aristotle. 

But the notion of education as a practice in its own right has all too often been eclipsed. There is an abundance of examples, historically, of how education in Western civilisations became the compliant instrument of the dominant powers in society, as distinct from being acknowledged as a practice in its own right. Consider for instance the long era of Christendom: roughly from the coronation of Charlemagne in 800 to the establishment of the first liberal universities in the early 1800s. During these ten centuries education largely came to be understood in the light of the Christian church’s teachings and powers. Up until the turbulent events arising from Luther’s revolt in 1517, Rome was the supreme authority for regulating scholarly endeavour in Central and Western Europe.  Educators who ventured to open up more independent paths for learning, albeit within a Christian world view, were likely to be referred to theological authorities, and sometimes to Rome itself, bringing trouble on their heads and their works. 

During and after the Reformation, the power to control what could be taught and thought didn’t disappear from Rome. But it became dispersed through being newly established in the hands of mutually opposed churches. In the later 18^th century however, Rousseau, Kant and others presented new challenges to this post-Reformation order. Indeed the French Revolution and its Napoleonic sequel overturned that order and established new precedents, and not only in France. But these precedents didn’t recover the idea of education as an undertaking with its own inherent responsibilities. Rather they signified the replacement of an ousted clerical regime by a centralised state regime.  Following these upheavals, the nineteenth century witnessed ongoing conflicts between church and state in many countries for control of education. Such battles occurred during a time when schooling for a minority was being replaced by schooling for the majority, first at primary, and incrementally at higher levels.  Given the widening scale of educational provision, it’s hardly surprising that the state ultimately gained the upper hand. But in most countries the churches also secured enduring rights and privileges in the provision of education. These conflicts and their outcomes did much to normalise the idea that education was a subordinate or ancillary undertaking. In turn, this development had some dramatic consequences when mass schooling became the predominant pattern in the twentieth century.

Prominent among such consequences was the forceful take-over of education by   authoritarian states in their jurisdictions. Here we can instance the fascist rationale for schooling produced by Mussolini (and Giovanni Gentile) in Italy. Other examples include the control of education in Spain by Franco’s dictatorship, in Germany by the Nazis, and in the Soviet Union and its satellite states by totalitarian forms of communism. Other regions of the world witnessed comparable developments during the middle or later twentieth century.   Then in the 21^st century new and penetrating controls of teaching and curricula emerged. They include the manifest examples of Putin’s Russia, Xi’s China and the embattled cases of Brazil under Bolsonaro, Poland under the Law and Justice Party (PiS) and Hungary under Orban. But there were also more subtle forms of coercion. These arose in democracies where neoliberal educational reform policies became the prevalent pattern in recent decades. Here, performance management systems using digitally managed data gathering, and linked to increases or reductions in school funding, are designed to ensure compliance.

It is in this historical context that the task of uncovering education as a practice in its own right can be viewed in its fuller significance. Despite being frequently eclipsed or obscured, this notion was never extinguished. It was reaffirmed in the practice and writings of courageous educators through many centuries of Western learning and constitutes an invaluable if also a curtailed tradition. I’m keen to show that uncovering the insights and possibilities of this tradition is a venture with singular promise for personal and societal well-being; a venture moreover that can advance the long-delayed educational maturity of states where leaders often remain prisoners to shrunken understandings of being human.

Reference:

Wrońska, K., and Stern, J. (eds) (2024) Defending the Value of Education as a Public Good: Philosophical Dialogues on Education and the State.  London and New York: Routledge.