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Introduction
Education, Nature and Society
I argue, in this book, that it is important to think about the three elements âeducationâ, ânatureâ and âsocietyâ together. My case is that, in a way, language has let us down. We ought really to have at our disposal a single word to describe the set of things that properly belong simultaneously under all three of these headings: educational things that are inseparable from nature and society; natural things that make a fundamental difference to education and society; and social things that reveal the workings of nature and/or impact on, or come about through, education. That no such single word exists is no oneâs fault, and not very surprising. We havenât really needed this currently non-existent word before: But now, I will argue, we do need it, or at least we need a way of thinking that such a word would greatly facilitate. This is because there now exists a range of problems for which thinking separately about education, or nature, or society, is doomed to miss the point.
Critically minded readers will at this point want to ask who, exactly, is included within the scope of the word âweâ in the foregoing paragraph. It is, after all, a very common failing among graduate students, and even at times certain academic colleagues, to speak as though they are competent to solve the problems, and even dictate the future actions, of the whole of humanity. Environmentalists, in particular, have sometimes shown an unbecoming fondness for announcing very confidently what it is that âweâ all need to do. I hope it will become clear through the course of this book that I am making no prescriptive claims of that sort. On the contrary, my case rests above all on recognition of the importance of uncertainty and variety. I simply want to say, at this early stage, that it may well be true that there are problems that humanity now confrontsâand can only effectively addressâcollectively as a species at the present time. If this is so, then it is a relatively recent development which stretches the vocabulary of everyday vernacular and academic discourse, and therefore a word that describes the nexus of these three entitiesâeducation, nature and societyâwhich our thinking and language usually keep separate, would be helpful. To anticipate, in summary form, a later and more detailed argument, I am agreeing with the philosopher Richard Rorty (1999) that words are tools by means of which human beings engage and cope with their environment and suggesting that we could presently use an extra tool of that sort in our collective toolbox.
No such word exists. âEducation, nature and societyâ will have to do as a descriptor of my topic. That topic is, quite clearly, very wide ranging. The following chapters will draw on works of philosophy, economics, educational theory, natural history, neuroscience, ecology and more. If the project is to have coherence, it must be addressed from a particular and consistent vantage point or perspective. That perspective will be the philosophy of education, which provides, I believe, both an appropriate openness to an eclectic range of ideas and the requisite intellectual discipline. I want to show that, on the one hand, education as a topic of enquiry should not, and in fact cannot, be reduced to either a subset of the natural sciences or a poor relation of other social sciences. On the other hand, I will show that educational thought cannot cut itself adrift of secure knowledge generated by other disciplines, but must, rather, work within and through the insights they provide, even when these exclude desirable possibilities or lead to unpalatable conclusions.
Words, then, not only form the substance of this book but are also, to an important degree, its subject matter. We use language to recall the past, explain the present and plan the future. It is a collective artefact. It is, at least arguably, the most distinctive characteristic of our species. We learn it in society, and contribute to the processes that develop and change it. It is, to use the phrase of the philosopher Friedrich Hayek (1960), an instance of spontaneous order: a highly coherent and complex phenomenon that comes about through the unplanned, uncoordinated actions of many different agents. It enables human communities to make collective sense of the circumstances that confront them. It chops reality into thought-sized chunks, attaches agreed sounds and symbols to them and links them together in useful ways. It makes it possible to be both intelligent and sane at the same time in a universe of infinite time, galactic space and microscopic smallness. It permits explanation and control, at least sometimes and in the here and now, and so shapes our habits of behaviour and of thought. It makes possible the greatest insights of science, even as it enriches our human gift for elaborate self-delusion.
All of this will be further discussed at some length later in the book. For now, however, I simply want to ask: What if the language we use to recall the past were for some reason to become inadequate to explain the present? What if the âchunksâ into which our habitual thought processes chop reality are no longer useful for planning the future? What if our explanations no longer give us the control we expect, and what if the more rigorously intelligent we try to be, the closer we come to the outer limits of sanity? These are not rhetorical questions. I cannot say with any more certainty than anyone else what the immediate future holds, but we do know that, in the past, there have been real societies where the ways in which the world was understoodâthe absolute certainties about which good people agreedâbecame catastrophically out of line with how the world actually was. Instances of this have been catalogued by Jared Diamond (2005), whose use of Shelleyâs sonnet âOzymandiasâ as a preface to his work serves to remind us that the problem is as old as civilisation itself. Many readers will already believe that climate change, biodiversity loss, deforestation, desertification and a host of other problems show conclusively that twenty-first-century social habits are already dangerously out of line with underlying material realities. Others will draw the same conclusion from the apparently irreducible catalogue of human miseries in the form of war, displacement, slavery, persecution, hatred, indifference, neglect and the rest.
The first set of problems is essentially about the environment, the second about social justice. Many good people will link these to common causes, such as globalisation, neo-liberal capitalism, industrialisation, population growth or an excessive fondness for scientific method. They will regard as incredible the arguments of other, apparently also good, people who say that globalisation, capitalism, industry and science generally tend to make things better not worse, and that population growth might have significant advantagesâat least from the perspectives of the extra people who will be alive as a result. Once these battle lines have been drawn, neither side is likely to be much interested in listening to the other. Each is supported by its body of academic literature and by a selection of impeccably âhardâ and âscientificâ evidence (even by those who think too much science is the problem). Each is engaged, or at least so its advocates firmly believe, in a struggle of right against wrong, and knowledge against ignorance. In this way, an extremely complex set of problems are recast within a well-understood and simple tribal dynamic: one that both sides are comfortable with, not least because it means they no longer have to actually listen to each other.
In this context, the aim of this book is quite modest. I am going to suggest that there are some different, and logically prior, questions that, if addressed, might lead the âgood peopleâ I have been talking about to have a better and more productive exchange of views. I am not writing for bad people, who are anyway unlikely to read books that aspire to be measured and open-minded, as this one does: But I am asserting that for someone to hold, for example, that the desire for profit is an important source of human motivation does not make them wickedly selfish, any more than believing that equality is a fundamental human value would make them dreamy and ridiculous.
To begin, there is a need to set out how key terms will be used throughout the book. The purpose of doing so is not to claim that the word ânatureâ, for example, has a particular âtrueâ meaning that everyone must agree with, but simply to be clear. Much public debate is deeply unedifying because the protagonists use words in inconsistent ways. For present purposes, the key words are, of course, âeducationâ, ânatureâ and âsocietyâ. To illuminate the relationships between these we need, for a start at least, two more key terms: âenvironmentâ and âeconomyâ. In what follows, the notions of âsustainable developmentâ and âsustainabilityâ are also briefly introduced and discussed, as they are in widespread use and bear directly on the topic at hand.
Everyone knows what education is. Anyone who is reading this book, or thinking about its subject matter, has had some. Most will be paying for some, for themselves or someone else, either directly or through taxation. In the rest of this book, âeducationâ is defined broadly, and with a certain amount of licence. It is taken to include formal and non-formal education, along with forms of informal education that are purposive. Any attempt to define these terms in a completely watertight way is probably doomed to failure and hardly likely to be worth the trouble. In essence, formal education takes place in schools, colleges and universities. Non-formal education exhibits structure and purpose as well as some kind of distinction between teacher (or instructor, or facilitator, or, in environmental education, âinterpreterâ) and learner. An important example of non-formal education within the context of this book is the educational activity of non-governmental organisations (NGOs), such as the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) or Oxfam, and organisations such as zoos and outdoor activity centres. Informal education is what happens when, for example, I advise my sons on how to conduct themselves at a job interview, or they advise me on how to stay upright on skis. It also happens through the whole range of modern media, including television, social networking and video games.
We should note that what people learn is not the same as what they are taught. This point is nicely illustrated by Wringe (2009, pp. 242â243) when he writes:
On following a course on the Nineteenth Century English Novel, two students may achieve the course objectives of acquiring a knowledge of the novels of Thackeray, Trollope and Hardy, especially if they have been adequately taught, but one may have learned to value compassion and modesty while the other has learned that, in order to get on in life, it is advisable to make oneself discreetly agreeable to oneâs superiors, both of these being valuable lessons in their different ways.
The focus in this book is on deliberate instructional intervention and the learning that results from it. Learning that happens as a by-product of normal social intercourse (say, in the process of a discussion between my sons about the worth of my advice, or the defects of my skiing), is outside this focal activity, but not uninfluenced by it. The same can be said about âorgan-isational learningâ, or learning by society as a whole.
In rich societies, attitudes towards education are sometimes strangely ambivalent. In these societies educational expenditures are highest, and compulsion to attend school is greatest, but truancy and poor classroom behaviour are often also frequent. Qualifications are well respected, especially those in high-status disciplines; but there are also plenty of self-made-millionaire folk heroes who announce their own lack of certification with pride. Einstein is famously supposed to have been a poor pupil, and this fact and others like it are regularly rolled out in debate, as though to suggest that classroom inattention is a prerequisite of true genius. Pink Floyd sang, âWe Donât Need No Educationâ and people are still singing along: âTeacher Leave Us Kids Aloneâ. Even so, whenever a social problem raises its head, whether it be AIDS, binge drinking, declining moral standards, pay-day loans, biodiversity loss, bad driving, domestic violence or something else, you can be fairly sure that someone will solemnly announce to concerned journalists that the answer is more and/or better education. Meanwhile, among the worldâs poor, and perhaps most especially where it is unobtainable, education is usually prized above almost anything else.
However, the fact that everyone knows what education is does not mean that everyone can be expected to give the same answer to the question âwhat is education?â Rather, this turns out to be a question with a lot of different right answers. Perfectly sensible individuals may even give perfectly sensible different answers on different occasions. So, for example, the claim that education is about âtransmitting skillsâ quite clearly meets with widespread approval. If we ask why transmitting skills is such a good idea, the answer is rather likely to come back that, well, itâs obvious: People need skills that they can sell in the labour market. At this point, however, objections will be heard from a very substantial constituency who will maintain, broadly speaking, that something of such long-term social significance as education should not be driven by something as individualistic, short-term and venal as markets. This, they may well say, is whatâs âobviousâ. Letâs examine this disagreement a little more closely, noting along the way that as we do so we are straying away from a discussion of education pure and simple and into a discussion of economics, while at the same time raising rather deep questions about how something comes to be thought âobviousâ.
What are markets? At the most general level of principle, a market is just a way of coordinating the human activity of exchanging things (Nozick, 2001). Wanting to exchange things seems to be a pretty fundamental aspect of a normal, social human life (Sen, 1999). Without doubt, people sometimes do bad things in markets, and markets sometimes produce bad results: But a view that markets are bad as such seems hard to defend, and markets have certainly proved hard to stamp out, where this has been attempted. There are other complications too. Ronald Dworkin (2000) has argued, with about as much cogency and logical discipline as a human mind could ever hope to achieve, that no coherent concept of equalityâa value more associated with critics of the market than its advocatesâis even possible without reference to market mechanisms.
In this respect, it is also interesting to note that both anti-market and pro-market sentiments may shift dramatically if the topic of discussion shifts from markets to marketplaces. The latter term is, it seems, suggestive to some of localism, tradition and fair exchange, and to others of under-regulation, opacity and hard bargaining on unequal terms. The anthropologist Polly Hill (1989) provides interesting insights into the complexities of marketplaces and the charming, if dubious, practices they may institutionalise. Ellis (1993) draws attention to the potential of futures markets to improve the lives of peasant farmers, an essentially mathematical truth that will surprise anyone who thinks that large-scale asset trading and traditional lifestyles belong on opposite sides of a clear divide. The lesson, perhaps, is that the world is under no obligation to order itself in line with binary systems of human prejudice. Whether a particular market is good or bad depends on the behaviour and the values of the people associated with it. However, while it is true that markets deserve some respect, it is also true that they sometimes get much more respect than they deserve. In particular, âthe marketâ does not provide a foundational explanation of human behaviour. We are not driven by genetic evolution to log on to Amazon or attend car boot sales, though what bearing our genetic heritage has upon our more general propensity to exchange things turns out to be an important, complex and controversial question. Particular markets are social institutions embedded within an historical, cultural, legal and economic context (Hodgson, 2007). They need to be explained. This explaining, and the issues that underpin it, will be an important theme throughout the rest of this book.
If, one way or another, the relationship between education and markets matters, a topical next step in our discussion of education is to consider the concept of neo-liberalism, which is, foundationally, a sociological term. A sociological sceptic might be tempted to say that âneo-liberalâ is just a word used by people who donât like markets to describe people who do, but that certainly wonât do. Neo-liberalism is more than just an intellectual viewpoint, and so is opposition to it. Neo-liberalism is a trend or movement in the world inseparably entwined with globalisation. It explicitly appeals to notions of capital, cost and benefit at-the-margin, efficiency and markets, but it does not have a monopoly over these things. They can all sometimes be put to useful service in the interests of quite different points of view. When academics, politicians and activists define themselves, wholly or partly, by opposition to neo-liberalism they may subsequently find that they have abandoned, without sufficient reflection, intellectual tools that might very well serve their purposes. The conservati...
