Education in an Age of Nihilism

Education and Moral Standards

Nigel Blake, Paul Smeyers, Richard Smith, Paul Standish

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780750710176
• eBook ISBN: 9781136370113
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book addresses concerns about educational and moral standards in a world increasingly characterised by nihilism. On the one hand there is widespread anxiety that standards are falling; on the other, new machinery of accountability and inspection to show that they are not. The authors in this book state that we cannot avoid nihilism if we are simply laissez-faire about values, neither can we reduce them to standards of performance, nor must we return to traditional values. They state that we need to create a new set of values based on a critical assessment of contemporary practice in the light of a number of philosophical texts that address the question of nihilism, including the work of Nietzsche.

Part I

Working Without Values

Chapter 1

Education Without Risk

School effectiveness and school improvement have become mini-industries in educational research in recent years with their own dedicated posts and postgraduate degrees. These endeavours are characteristic of current preoccupations with the management of teaching and learning and of an increasingly technical conception of education. School effectiveness researchers, we are told, are ‘the first to point out the technical and statistical difficulties in drawing firm conclusions about an “ideal school’” (Lynn Davies, in White and Barber 1997: 32), yet the vocabulary of these approaches to education is characterised by ‘test instruments’, ‘operationalising’, ‘mechanisms’, ‘mapping’ and above all ‘outputs’. The 1997 Government White Paper Excellence in Schools promotes the idea of ‘Laboratory Schools’ (DfEE 1997: 47). Writing in the Times Educational Supplement about teacher education in Taiwan, David Reynolds remarks, with some approval, that teachers in Taiwan are ‘proud to be applied technologists, not philosophers’ (Reynolds, 1997a: 21).

In recent years school improvement has turned in a new direction. Here is Reynolds again: ‘We all enjoy pushing up the ceiling of good practice – raising the floor is less popular’. And, varying the metaphor, he argues that school effectiveness needs perhaps to move from its focus on effective (or well) schools to the consideration of ineffective (or sick) schools. This, he suggests, constitutes a radically different agenda. The way forward, it seems, is the Highly Reliable School (or failure-free school), currently being promoted by Reynolds himself. Let us consider his (grammatically infelicitous) characterisation of this:

What are the characteristics of the Highly Reliable School?

• limited range of goals which require total success
• recruit proactively and train extensively, pre-service and in- service
• formalised logical decision making
• include measures to identify flaws and generate changes, for example, the simulations which test human and physical components in the nuclear power industry
• pay considerable attention to evaluating performance
• alert to lapses and pay considerable attention to detail to prevent any minor error cascading into major system failure
• highly co-ordinated and interdependent
• crucially data-rich organisations which continuously monitor their decision-making
  (Times Educational Supplement, 19 January 1996: 10)

It is reasonable to see the Highly Reliable School as a logical extension of more general trends in educational theory and in practice. Reynolds’ current project with Avon schools – one of several – involves three annual cycles. It is proposed

• in year one, to use in-service training days to bring to the schools the world’s greatest knowledge in school and teacher effectiveness, and school improvement
• in year two, to use the information systems to help the schools to make internal comparisons between their own departments and external comparisons against best practice elsewhere
• in year three, and beyond, to move trailing edge practice ever closer to leading edge practice.

Sam Stringfield, Reynolds’ collaborator in the United States, explains how the approach is based on examples of organisations where failure must be eradicated at all costs – for example, air traffic control and the nuclear power industry. This requires a highly rational institution that aims at clearly specified, realisable outcomes and which, crucially, is data-rich. Stringfield suggests that the performance of such High Reliability Organisations provides –the metaphor is significant – ‘a lens through which to revisit’ schools’ educational improvement efforts. Such organisations are required not to engage in trial and error improvement: they are expected to operate ‘trials without errors’ (Stringfield n.d.: 20–1), and they ‘extend formal, logical decision analysis, based on standard operating procedures (SOPs), as far as extant knowledge allows’ (ibid.: 23). When the first Handbook of Research on Teaching (Gage 1963) was published, a sufficient body of educational research did not exist to guide rationally the development of standard operating procedures for schooling. Since then the situation has changed considerably and ‘the rudiments of a science of education’ now exist (Stringfield n.d.: 24). This new confidence leads Reynolds to say: ‘We believe we “know” [sic] that some practices actually work, yet this knowledge is not reliably spread’ (Times Educational Supplement, 19 January 1996: 10). Failure-free schooling then, as their slogan has it, is now clear for take off.

If these developments seem surprising, it is worth saying that Reynolds is not voicing some heresy here but rather highlighting tendencies that are already very clear in (competence-based) teacher training, and in the concern for underachievement and school failure he is nicely responding to the political moment.

We want to acknowledge highly desirable elements in the approaches in question: the sharing of good practice in different schools; collegial decision making, close interdependence, and readiness to side-step hierarchies: relationships that are complex, coupled, and sometimes urgent; the very laudable aim of improving schooling for those who benefit least from the system. A number of questions arise at this point, however – concerning the logical relationship between failure and success (cf. examinations without failure grades), and concerning the aim of moving ‘trailing edge practice ever closer to leading edge practice’ and the levelling effect this would have. We shall not address these questions but will confine our discussion to the related issues of the technical conception of education and the removal of the risk of failure.

The objections to the Highly Reliable School are obvious, it might be said. Education just is not like air-traffic control. No doubt some would like schools to run with the efficiency and precision provided by air-traffic control or the nuclear power station but there are good reasons why they should not. Most obviously these industries deal with predominantly physical processes while education deals with human development. Physical processes are predictable in a way that human development is not. Nor is this simply a complicating factor regarding means. For the ends of the activity in each case are markedly different: those of the industries easily specifiable, those of education notoriously controversial, and this difficulty is bound up with the unpredictability and depth that there is to human life. So, if the objections are obvious to some, the intriguing thing is why they remain opaque or insignificant to others. To understand something of this we need to look carefully at the implications of taking teaching or the running of a school to be something technical, and we need to say something about the nature of technology.

Teaching as a Technology

It is quite commonly held that technology is applied science. (Knowledge of physics is applied in the nuclear power station.) Teaching as technology might then be understood in terms of the kind of approach promoted by behavioural psychologists in the past. The theoretical insights of the research psychologists were applied in the practice of education. With the failure of this, and as the influence of behaviourist psychology waned, pretenders to scientific status came forward – for example, in 1980 David Pratt claimed the near-scientific status of curriculum theory and design (Pratt 1980). (Of course, physical science is the model here, not the broader conception implied by Wissenschaft.) The current conception of teaching, however, is not well understood in terms of the application of scientific theory to practice; rather it is characterised by its use of instruments of measurement. If instrumentation is foregrounded, it exposes a different relationship between technology and science. Rather than technology being applied science, and hence derivative of science, it comes to be seen as (in part, at least) what makes modern science possible. To a considerable extent the development of modern science has depended on the instruments at its disposal, and these have in turn been developed in the light of the kinds of research that they made possible. To some extent, as in medicine, for example, the development of the technology has driven what is done. Modern teaching as technology then may perhaps be understood not as the application of science, but rather as the utilisation of various instruments or quasi-instruments.

Just as scientific theories are taken to be ‘objective’ in the sense not only of being ‘value-free’ but also of relating to the world as something other, so too an instrument is neutral, it is assumed, and can be put to good or bad uses in operating on that world. If we consider the relationship between instruments and world in a little more detail, however, these conceptions of neutrality and ‘objectivity’ come to seem less clearly determined. Let us try to see if anything can be said, albeit in the broadest terms, about the effects of instrument use. Technical instruments, it might be argued, refine or extend our sensory perceptions. Sometimes the process of fining down can have explosive effects. To take examples given by Don Ihde (1979), the dentist’s probe enables the dentist to register fine differences in the surface of the tooth of a kind that would not be evident to the fingers directly. It amplifies the sense of touch. The microscope and telescope enable us to see with clarity objects which otherwise would be invisible because of either their small size or their distance from us. But just as this amplification occurs, so too there is a reduction in other aspects of our normal perception of the world such that what might otherwise be available is concealed. The probe does not register the wetness of the tooth; the microscope and the telescope alike present things to view in a kind of flat, homogenised, and framed near-distance that is strangely insulated from us, both limiting in curiously identical ways the visual field. The amplification that is achieved, undoubtedly fruitful in so many ways, brings with it a reduction or concealment of certain aspects of our ordinary experience of the world.

(Of course, many instruments do not directly amplify a sensory perception but provide analogical information; this correlates nevertheless with such a narrowing – as, for example, in seismography. Virtual reality supplies a rich sensory field but through simulation, with interesting implications regarding risk.)

As the similarities between the telescope and the microscope show, there is a kind of levelling of perceptions as a result of the severance of the experience from its ordinary sensory accompaniments or background. The importance attached to the observation effectively downgrades or even erases the embeddedness that is a feature of our normal experience of the world. It prioritises what can be made explicit and in effect denies the ineffable. Most strikingly, as the senses of sight or hearing are amplified, the sense of touch is concealed, as for example where we might examine something too hot to touch. Moreover, where the sense of touch is itself amplified (the dentist’s probe) it is one aspect of diat sense (rough/smooth) that is enhanced at the almost total expense of others (wet/dry). Touch in its normal complexity perhaps shows better than other senses something of our complex locatedness in the world, and it relates most closely to our vulnerability.

Modern science has not developed solely as the disinterested contemplation of nature. Its development has been determined at least in part by its instruments. In some ways the process this generates is self-fulfilling and self-perpetuating. Instruments provide improved access to those aspects of the world that they were developed to explore and they point to ways in which their improvement or refinement could further amplify our perceptions. Their development is guided by a tacit assumption that the refinement of the instrument and the amplification it provides will progressively give access to the way things really are, and progressively offer completeness of view. This comes to be understood teleologically in terms of the kinds of things the instrument is designed to reveal. One reason that this concealment is difficult to recognise is that the instrument generates its own criteria for correctness. Truth becomes a matter of correctness. The microscope is designed to magnify and greater magnification constitutes greater accuracy. There is no doubt that judgements of correctness can be made in this way. The very justifiability of this, the confidence it gives us, stands in the way of recognition of the concealment that successful use of the instrument effects (cf. bewitchment by IQ testing and psychometry). But this brings with it a kind of myopia, as David Cooper puts it (Cooper 1995), or tunnel vision, one might say. Wittgenstein talks of the way thinking then runs on railway tracks. Technology uniquely has the power to displace other possible ways of revealing the world to us, and it fosters the illusion that things can be viewed in their totality. Technology overcomes the stubborn resistance of things to facilitate access into a world that, in losing its recalcitrance, loses its depth.

It is clear that the kind of technology involved in running schools or teaching does not involve the use of instruments associated with conventional technology. Rather it seems to involve the implementation of systematic procedures and the extensive use of information technology. Highly Reliable Schools crucially are data rich. These data relate primarily to the measurement of performance within the school, but they also facilitate extensive comparison between institutions and across the system. This technology should be considered then in relation to the technology of instruments considered above.

The astonishing success of new technology in providing information storage and processing is one of its most striking features. This success gives further impetus to the desire for information and the structuring of organisations around this. If there is an instrument here it is the computer. But it is not clear that this stands to what is being thought of as the technological in the way that conventional instrumentation does. It does not provide an amplification of perception but digitalisation and coding. The user relates to the machine not as to a conventional instrument but as to a quasi-other in the manner of communication.

The advantages of this availability of information are obvious. It offers controllability and predictability and precision in a way admirably suited to accounting and planning practices. It makes possible the mapping and targeting of populations and client groups so that changing products, information and demands can fill the experience of people, at the same time instilling in them commensurate desires, knowledge and capacities. So in education there is the promise of a tidiness of fit between curriculum, the student and the larger world beyond the institution.

There is no doubt that the gathering and processing of data have a powerful appeal, not least to those who have an interest in the efficient and effective management of an institution. For teacher and student alike – not to mention the manager, the inspector and the potential employer – there is an attraction in forms of learning that divide what is to be studied into clear and readily identifiable units. We should recall also the appeal, associated with technology, of completeness and correctness. How readily this dovetails with the current concern for accountability.

On the strength of the successful use of new technology in so many respects, it is now widely held that businesses and schools should themselves become ‘learning organisations’. Thus, Reynolds explains: ‘The Highly Reliable School aims, simply, to transform education by generating schools which can “think”, based on high quality performance data, and which can “act” upon a knowledge of what constitutes their own and the world’s best practice’ (Times Educational Supplement, 19 January 1996: 10). The scare quotes in this sentence – on ‘think’ and ‘act’ – have a double derivation perhaps, borrowed not directly from human life but from that quasi-other, the thinking machine. It is artificial intelligence that comes to shape the social space of the institution and to define what it is for a person to think and act. Reynolds’ scare-quotes concerning his own usage suggest that something is adrift here.

The amplifying effects of this technological approach to education have as their correlate the concealment of something of the embeddedness in the world of manager, teacher embeddedness-in-the-world and learner. In the technology of air traffic control or nuclear power stations this is readily justifiable, it might be said, in terms of the clear purpose of the activities. In education in contrast the activity is itself constitutive of the end, and ends are not so clearly defined. In fact, in general education, at least, they depend on a recognition, on the part of teacher and learner, of the multi-faceted involvements of that embeddedness-in-the-world. Concealing this is then deeply at odds with education.

With the concealing that this new technology effects there may also be deeper metaphysical shifts. As Albert Borgmann has put it:

Of course, even in a nineteenth-century railroad company there were plans, maps, schedules, bills, and books that captured and pictured the past and present of the organisation. Without such texts, as it were, the railroad would have been mired in collisions and confusions. Electronic texts, however, contain vastly more information. And while traditional texts provide coarse-grained snapshots, electronic texts can provide a densely structured moving image of a corporation, an image, moreover, that can...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I: Working without values
• Part 2: Overcoming nihilism
• Part 3: Raising standards
• References
• Index