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?

The notion of 'uncivilisation' that I am engaging with here is one that is currently being expounded by a new arts and literary movement that calls itself The Dark Mountain. This movement aims to reassert he importance of storytelling grounded in a sense of place and time, and with this to move beyond the stories and myths of progress and human centrality that we have been hitherto been telling ourselves. Their idea of exactly what 'uncivilisation' means, and why we need it, is made a bit clearer by this quote from their manifesto:

"We tried ruling the world; we tried acting as God's steward, then we tried ushering in the human revolution, the age of reason and isolation. We failed in all of it, and our failure destroyed more than we were even aware of. The time for civilisation is past. Uncivilisation, which knows its flaws because it has participated in them; which sees unflinchingly and bites down hard as it records—this is the project we must embark on now. This is the challenge for writing — for art — to meet. This is what we are here for.” From Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto (2009)

I want to be clear from the start that this paper is a thought experiment of sorts. My purpose here is not to propound a theory of primitivism, with which there exists many theoretical and practical problems. It is simply that, as I see it, so many people have thought so long and hard about education as a civilising and humanising project that it seems appropriate, in the spirit of open-minded exchange of ideas, to think once in a while outside of this particular box. Sometimes it befits us, anyway, to take a line of thought that challenges our entrenched beliefs lest we continue to walk a wrong road.

Recall that Peters said that children start off in the position of the barbarian. But let us ask, what is a barbarian? A quick glance at Wikipedia reminds us that the term originates in the ancient Greek civilisation, and literally means 'anyone who is not Greek'. A barbarian is really a foreigner, a stranger, someone who is 'not us'. It is a derogatory term given to those whose world-view is so different, so apparently backwards compared to ours, that we simply cannot understand them. Whilst we live comfortably in the citadel of civilisation, they live in the uncultivated wilderness of ignorance. But, as a first step in the thought experiment, let us ask: Is being a barbarian really so bad? Would it hurt us to take a long walk outside of the gates, amble amidst the uncultivated, and feel our bare feet upon the earth? What would education look like if we were not so afraid of what lay beyond the gate, if we embraced the strange and the stranger and moreover found that we are the stranger – each and every one of us?

We live in a time in which we are facing ecological devastation. I'm not dwelling on this point – we’ve all picked up newspapers, logged on to the internet, and seen this message staring us depressingly in the face over and over again. There are many who argue that this situation has been caused by a wrong relationship with nature, a relationship in which nature is seen as a mere resource to be exploited by humans. The hubris inherent in such a view, and the way it has been perpetuated through education, is perfectly captured by this quote from the progressive educationalist, John Dewey, writing in the early 20th Century:

"Nature is the medium of social occurrences. It furnishes original stimuli; it supplies obstacles and resources. Civilization is the progressive mastery of its varied energies… From the standpoint of human experience, and hence of educational endeavour, any distinction between which can be justly made between nature and man is a distinction between the conditions which have to be reckoned with in the formation and execution of our practical aims, and the aims themselves." John Dewey (1916)

So, nature supplies 'obstacle' and 'resources'. Civilisation, and hence, education, provides a means of mastering these. Humans set practical aims and nature provides the conditions that we have to overcome to achieve those aims. This 'overcoming' is precisely what we call civilisation, or education. Perhaps as a result of this conception of things, 'nature' and the 'environment' have hitherto been presented in the school curriculum in a very particular way with privileged access to them being seen as gained chiefly through science. As Michael Bonnet (2004) has noted, the dominant stance has largely been an anthropocentric and economic-materialistic one, with little attention being turned towards the value of nature in and of itself.

Even the much vaunted idea of 'Education for Sustainable Development' sustains this conception. Talk about sustainable development typically carries with it the assumption that we can, bar a few lifestyle changes, keep calm and carry on as normal in the face of impending ecological devastation. Furthermore, it implicitly conveys the notion that we ought to, and indeed would be insane not to want to, carry on in this manner. Thanks to science and innovative thinking, we are told, we can fix our way out of this mess. This is the culture of ‘solutions’ and it is as present in school as anywhere else.

If the time has come for new stories, as The Dark Mountain Project proposes, then they are perhaps needed, above all, in the school.

To be continued...