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'.

Despite the notorious difficulty of his thought and the charges of romanticism, mysticism and worse that have been levelled towards him, I believe Heidegger presents us with what I personally see as a very compelling insight into our modern condition and the possibilities of moving beyond it. I want now to see what happens when we think about education as a way towards 'dwelling poetically' on the earth. What if we were to foster a more receptive, accommodating and caring response towards this earth, and how might we go about this? One core question that keeps asking itself to me is this: Should we, can we, ever feel totally at home in the world? Towards getting a hold of this question by the horns, I have been engaging not only with Heidegger but with the thought of that other 20th century philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas. I will not repeat these musings here but direct the reader to the posts Learning as response and What do we talk about when we talk about home?

Sustainable development as we know it is but the latest in a long line of stories that we keep telling ourselves, to reassure us that we can make ourselves fully at home in the world. But what kind of a home-maker, what kind of a dweller, perpetuates the kind of wholesale destruction of that very home to which recent centuries have borne witness?

Has we have seen, to be a barbarian is to be a stranger, a foreigner, and we must come to realise that we are all truly barbarians in this sense. For despite all our attempts to classify and order and account for the world, there is always an excess from which we are estranged and that remains partly concealed and hidden from our gaze and which lies always beyond our authorship, analyses and management.

Poets, storytellers and other artists have traditionally been the ones who have gestured towards the ineffable and drawn it out of the darkness. But there is a sense in which everyone can be an artist in what he or she does. Perhaps there is something to be gained from thinking of the teacher as artist who gestures towards the ineffable, but not in a way that delivers it to us for consumption or exploitation. Rather, such an artist would sing the earth in a way which allows us only to catch a glimmer, a mesmerizing flicker, of this hidden beauty and truth.

Let me repeat our main question. What would an education for uncivilisation look like? I imagine that it would certainly not be judged purely in terms of its efficiency, output and contribution to either economic prosperity or good citizenship. Rather, it would have to speak to the barbarian in us. It would decentre us; help us reconsider what it means to be human, and to look outwards beyond the city walls. No, it would have to do more than make us merely look. We would have to scale those walls and tread on the bare earth; cast away the urbane illusion of being safely at home, and to sing the wild places. Upon this earth we are a bit like strangers sojourning at an inn, yet we have come to treat it as unscrupulous landlords. An uncivilised education would disclose the world to us in a way that fostered responsiveness and appreciation towards what is Other.

At this time in which once seemingly permanent edifices are breaking down before our eyes, we need new stories in schools, not ‘functional skills’. A myriad of well meaning but clumsy and disjointed government initiatives only manage to cloud the elemental underlying question. This is nothing more or less than the question of how we should henceforth dwell on this Earth. Are we going to insist on sending our children along the crumbling precipice of progress, to cling onto the shattering walls of the citadel for dear life? Or are we going to encourage them to look down? It may be well for storytelling to be at the heart of education; storytelling that has origins in place, in the day to day geography of the child. I must stress that this does not exclude global learning. Rather, we might conjecture that place is our doorway to the global... Though this is a point that needs further working on.

At this point, and with the awareness that this is the kind of suggestion that isn’t going to be taken up in any education policy documents any time soon, I suggest that a less conceited kind of education is needed. One in which we are daring enough to go beyond the gates and be prepared to stand still in awe and incomprehensibility at what we meet and then to keep that sense of awe alive in art and language. This will be an education in and of, but certainly not bounded to, place.

There must always remain a degree of ineffability in what we teach and learn. We can no longer labour under the vain illusion that we can master everything. To do so, it may be that we need not dispense with the ideas of humanism, civilisation and ‘being at home’ completely. But it may be that we have to put some work into re-thinking what being human means, to dig deep and reconsider the idea of civilisation and to open up the concept of home along the Heideggarian and Levinasian lines I have begun to trace here. This is indeed precisely what I intend to do.