Education for Diversity

Making Differences

Andrew Stables

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138709188
• eBook ISBN: 9781351776400
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book was published in 2003. Certain social and cultural changes have problematized many of the assumptions that underpinned educational thinking in the 20th century. These can be grouped under three broad headings: individualization, globalization and the ecological challenge. Each of these has potentially profound implications for education that have been little explored. Rising to the challenge, this volume examines individualization in relation to changing attitudes to childhood and the positioning and identity development of students within educational "markets". It discusses globalization from several crucial perspectives, including the reduced sovereignty of the nation state and the problematizing of notions of distance and proximity. The ever-increasing environmental crisis is considered in terms of the possibilities for education for sustainable development.

Chapter 1
Education and the Triple Challenge to Modernity: the case for diversity

From a period of standardization, we should now look forward to a period of diversity. In educational terms, this means an emphasis on learning as interpretation, and on an acceptance that certain tensions, such as that between cooperation and competition, can never be fully resolved. The first chapter provides an introduction to the book as a whole by defining trends in late, or post, modernity that serve to challenge key assumptions about educational policy and practice.

Education is interpretive activity, for all participants and at all levels, and interpretation brings freedom and challenge and demands choice. However, educational policy makers have consistently failed to recognize the central role of interpretation in education, preferring totalizing solutions that can stifle the kinds of questioning and creative activity that can make educational experience meaningful, interesting, exciting and valuable. Such incomplete formulations include both the belief that education exists to 'pass down' cultural heritage, and the opposite conviction that education exists to 'promote creativity', where the creative self is seen to exist as free from historical, cultural and social context. By contrast, interpretation depends on interested engagement with histories, traditions and practices, and is always unpredictable in its outcomes. From a policy perspective, the belief that there can be a 'best practice' model for all educational institutions in all contexts is equally flawed, whether this belief is driven by ideology or by empirical evidence. Hans-Georg Gadamer has written of 'historically effected consciousness';¹ Gadamerian hermeneutics provides one of the bases on which the argument for education as diversity will be developed.

Interpretation results in diversity. Indeed, the taster contexts change, the more interpretations will differ. In recent years, there has been an increasing recognition that the world needs both biodiversity and cultural diversity, and that the two are interrelated.² For example, different cultures' ways of understanding flora lead to different uses for plants, and to the possibility of new medicines and new understandings of human physical and psychological health. However, all too often, where this has been recognized in the educational debate, it has resulted in either a glib futurism ('We must educate for the future, not the past'³), or, less often, an extreme conservatism ('We must return to the ways of ancient cultures'⁴), ignoring the simple fact that every move into the future is the result of elements drawn from every aspect of the past. Paradoxically, education must look backwards to go forwards: it is the spirit in which this is done that matters. The past is all we have, while the future is to be made. There is thus also an element of conservative thinking in the generally pragmatic argument that follows for education as diversity: new practices must grow organically from the conditions which preceded them and not be too strongly engineered, for the future is never quite predictable, as Richard Lewontin and others have shown in their work on genetics.⁵ The danger of too much emphasis on educating for something, whether sustainable development or social justice, is that interpretation can only be stifled by too much dedication to prescribed ends. As we seem compelled to give ourselves educational aims, let us make those aims as broad and unprescriptive as possible, by educating for diversity.

Overall, this book, therefore, should be seen as part of a move from an age of standardization, in which a narrow instrumental rationality prescribes the 'best' way forward and stifles the alternatives, to an age of diversity, in which different ways of thinking, knowing and acting are encouraged, and that acknowledges paradox.

The case for educational diversity is based on an understanding of the conditions of late (or post) modernity, as identified by a range of theorists. While commentators disagree on whether what we are now experiencing is the flowering of modernity (Giddens' 'high modernity'⁶), a change of emphasis (Beck's 'risk society'⁷) or a rejection (Lyotard's 'postmodern condition'⁸), there are several common elements in these apparently disparate analyses. These can be grouped under three broad headings:

1. the individualization of reflexivity and risk (the decline of traditional social class allegiances; the increased pressure to do your own life-planning form an early age, aided and abetted by the mass media; the invitations to deconstruct and to assert cultural differences);
2. the globalization of abstract systems (the global economy, but also the global interactivity of the Internet and other communications systems; the problematizing of traditional notions of time and place; the increasing exploitation of the mass media for political ends); and
3. the ecological challenge, with its ambivalent relationship to the modernist project, given that while the ecological crisis poses a challenge to modernity, sustainability is itself one of the grand narratives so mistrusted by postmodernists.⁹ Each of these calls for the revitalization of a non-prescriptive, exploratory commitment to learning that can simultaneously respect traditions and challenge paradigms.

Individualization

The phrase 'individualization of risk' is, perhaps, most commonly associated with Ulrich Beck's Risk Society (1992), though it is an idea strongly embraced by many, though not all, recent social commentators.

At the heart of the individualization thesis is the idea that, as geographically centred, relatively immobile and largely unchanging social structures have been replaced by technologically advanced, often international 'networks', the place of the individual in society has become less taken-for-granted and secure. Thus, continuing a trend that has characterized modernity (i.e. the post-medieval period) as a whole, people have become less and less the unquestioning recipients of a role allotted to them by society, and more and more the conscious agents of their own career and lifestyle choices.

Anthony Giddens has written of the manifestations of this as a move towards a 'life polities', under which the individual feels compelled, from childhood to make active choices in areas as diverse as fashion, leisure interests, careers and political and religious beliefs.¹⁰ By contrast, in the earlier part of the twentieth century, political and religious belief, alongside dress and career, were more widely accepted as aspects of family tradition. The concomitant expectation that voters could no longer be expected to vote along traditional social class lines was one impetus in the reform of social-democratic politics in Britain and elsewhere that Giddens and others have referred to as the Third Way.¹¹

Individualization poses significant challenges to some assumptions that have underlain much educational policy and practice. Even less than in Dickens' Hard Times¹² are we in the position of being able to regard our students as 'empty vessels' to be stuffed full of unquestioned facts and narrowly enculturated. We cannot even rely on our old Romantic assumptions about the innocence of childhood; children can be seen increasingly as consumers of educational services. In a sense, the individualization thesis offers us the challenge of formulating an 'education after childhood'.

Globalization

In The Third Way (1999), Giddens acknowledges globalization, alongside individualization, as a key agent of social change. While it could be argued that homo sapiens is a globalizing species, given that inter-group communication and trade seem always to have been characteristic of human life, modernity has been distinctive in the increasing globalization of (what Giddens refers to as) 'abstract systems'¹³. First, there was time. The increasing ubiquity of the mechanical clock, in conjunction with the increasing standardization of what it measured, meant that time was no longer measured in terms of light and dark, and the passing of the seasons, but as a commonly shared abstraction. In a similar way, information has become increasingly abstract and globalized, so that high status knowledge is no longer that which relates to, say, local conditions for planting, but is rather that which has become globally accessible and avowedly equally applicable to all contexts. The World Wide Web is, perhaps, the most powerful manifestation of this.

Most recently, there has been a much stronger globalization of monetary systems, enhanced through the interests of huge multinational corporations, and enabled by the revolution in mass communications. It has been widely recognized that this has already had huge effects on employment patterns and may impact strongly on all forms of personal and social organization.

The consequences of globalization for educational thinking have also been undertheorized. Educational policy and planning are generally undertaken in the national context in an increasingly international world, and many of our educational assumptions – about social justice, equality of opportunity, cultural heritage – are rooted in increasingly outmoded nationalist, or statist, assumptions. While commentators disagree on the extent to which the nation state is weakened by globalization, there is no doubt that its role must be redefined. In many respects, therefore, the globalization thesis presents us with the challenge of 'education after the nation'.

The Ecological Challenge

Giddens is again among those who note that ecological, or environmental, concerns pose significant challenges to the modernist 'cast of thought', with its almost unquestioned post-Enlightenment belief in social progress through science applied as technology. That very technology is now often seen as causing problems seemingly as great as those it has been able to solve: people, for example, may live in warmer houses but breathe dirtier air. The modernist project, among other assumptions, took the continued availability of natural resource for granted, whereas nowadays we feel forced to consider this an important aim.¹⁴

Ecological thinking has also served to make us question many of our assumptions. For example, Bill McKibben has proclaimed the complete death of wild Nature, on the grounds that no spot upon Earth has now been untouched, directly or indirectly, by human hand.¹⁵ Coupled with this, we are, as some commentators have pointed out, caught in a 'double bind' over the ecological crisis, insofar as the means we have inherited to solve the problems – science, technology, rationality, capitalism – are its immediate causes.¹⁶ For education, then, the ecological challenge raises fundamental questions of curriculum as well as of policy. So much for the 'natural sciences'. There are important senses in which we must now be seeking an 'education after nature'.

Each of these 'challenges to modernity' has, therefore, potentially profound implications for education which have, as yet, been underexplored. In the rest of this book, it will be argued that our response to the new uncertainties regarding nature, the nation and childhood call not for tighter stipulation and greater intra-national standardization, but rather for a cultural diversity as vibrant and full of surprises as the biodiversity argued for by the ecologists. Inspired by both John Dewey's anti-Cartesian and pragmatic concept of the unity of body and mind¹⁷ and by Samuel Taylor Coleridge's conviction that words are 'living powers',¹⁸ I shall argue that our being-in-the-world is most richly promoted through diverse educational practices in a climate that is tolerant, even welcoming, of paradox, practices that embrace variations arising from our differences in being in the world and in the language games we play.

The succeeding chapters focus, in various ways, on the issues detailed above. Chapters 2 and 3 consider the individualization of educational opportunity and risk, with the implications for educational markets, and for the positioning within them of parents, pupils and other agents, as producers, consumers and products. There is discussion of the implications for education of the 'death of childhood' implied by the superseding of the educational stage theories of Piaget ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Education and the Triple Challenge to Modernity: the case for diversity
• 2 Individualizing Educational Opportunity: the learner as producer, consumer and product
• 3 Diverse Experience; Diverse Childhoods
• 4 Words, Words, Words: the decentred subject of education
• 5 Schooling, the Nation and 'The Culture'
• 6 Conditional Literacies and the Case for Educational Pragmatism: the use of literacy in curriculum planning
• 7 Environmental Literacy: functional, cultural, critical. The case of the SCAA guidelines
• 8 Can We Educate for Sustainability?
• 9 Why Teach? Effective Teaching as Positive Identity Development
• 10 A Pragmatic View of Learning
• Bibliography
• Index