Education and Wonder: What calls for learning?

"It is through wonder that men now begin and originally began to philosophize" Aristotle

In our times, education continues to be justified by a myriad of extrinsic aims and purposes. Goals such as economic prosperity, good citizenship, sustainable development, and let us not forget, health and well-being, all vie to resolve the question of what education is good for. I am not going to discuss the desirability or otherwise of these aims here. My interest in this post is not with such extrinsic aims, but with the question of what lies at the other end of the educational endeavour. That is, what lies at the origin of learning? Or, more precisely, what calls for learning?

It is undoubtedly true that much of what we learn in a place or course of education has been purposefully selected, for one reason or antother, from the large corpus of human knowledge, beliefs, sentiments etc. that have been handed down to us. But regardless of this, learning is not in itself some arbitrary human invention. Rather, it appears to me that there is something about learning that is intrinsic to human being.

Education for Uncivilisation - Part Two

"In the west, particularly with the growth of post-Enlightenment humanism, the dominant stance has been uncompromisingly anthropocentric, placing a certain largely economic-materialistic conception of human welfare as the underlying goal of our everyday intercourse with, and explorations of, the natural world." Michael Bonnett, 2004

This quote, and the one from John Dewey in Part One of this posting, serve to remind us of that modern mode of thought that Martin Heidegger termed 'enframing', in which the earth is ordered and challenged to stand forth as a resource or 'standing reserve'. According to Heidegger, this enframing is the very essence of modern technology. It is the modern way of revealing truth. This revealing in itself is not a bad thing, as to bring forth the essence of things from concealment into unconcealment, (that is, the pursuit of truth) is what makes us human.

However, it would seem that the modern epoch of enframing has sent us down a wrong, if rather inevitable, path. It seems to me that an alternative way of revealing truth, an alternative way of relating to the earth, is now needed more than ever. A mode of revealing which does not have as its primary aim an ordering of things so that they are at hand for further orderings. This would be a way of revealing and a way of dwelling that lets things shine forth in their essence - a poetic way, if we understand poiesis in the way that Heidegger did, as a 'bringing-forth'.

Education for Uncivilisation - Part One

Photo by Flickr user hfrank71 and made available under Creative Commons

"Children... Start off in the position of the barbarian outside the gates. The problem is to get them inside the citadel of civilisation so that they will understand and love what they see when they get there.” R.S. Peters, 1965

Education has historically been allied with the project of civilisation, that flight of humankind away from a primitive and savage state of nature. Such a view has been expressed many times, and this quote from Richard Peters, a philosopher of education, is an almost archetypal statement of such a view – children begin their lives as barbarians, in a state of nature, and it our task to initiate them into all that is good, just and beautiful about civilisation. In another quote, the conservative thinker Michael Oakeshott puts forward a view that is not too dissimilar. Education, he writes, "is not learning to do this or that more proficiently... It is learning how to be at once an autonomous and a civilized subscriber to human life..." (Oakeshott, 1971) Here is an argument for education that sees its purpose not as a means to any particular, extrinsic ends. Rather, being educated is here understood as the process of becoming an autonomous and civilised human being, highlighting in addition what has always been a constant source of tension in educational philosophy: how to lead a child towards becoming a responsible citizen whilst still retaining their autonomy.

I want to step back a little bit in this two-part article and ask what may seem a rather peculiar starting question. If these previous quotes have begun to elucidate what an education for civilisation might look like, what, then, would an education for uncivilisation look like? Or is this in fact a contradiction in terms?