Subjects and tradition

A few words about tradition…

We keep hearing from certain quarters the need for a return to 'traditional subjects'. I'm not exactly sure what these people have in mind when they talk about tradition in the context of education, or even if they have taken the trouble to examine the term at all, but it seems to bring to mind the vision of a teacher, at the front of the class, reciting important dates, locations and other facts to be absorbed and regurgitated. But is this the only way we can think about tradition? Is the only alternative, as those pedagogues who talk about 'learning for the 21st century' seem to believe, to surrender ourselves to the future and to be urged along by passing fads and the pressing needs of our times? I don't think this is so. As we are about to see, there is also a potentially radical sense of tradition that we can draw from.

Jacques Derrida once talked about 'an appeal to tradition that is in no way traditional'. What on Earth did he mean by this? The philosopher Simon Critchley explains it very well indeed. A conservative sees tradition as an inheritance (the conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott actually defines education as a sort of inheritance) and something to be passed down, from generation to generation as a kind of doxa, or body of unquestioned knowledge that, at least in theory, every individual should have access to. However, a radical conception of tradition sees it in a very different light. Here, tradition is something produced through a critical or deconstructive engagement with that inheritance. Doxa is now interrogated, questioned and made to answer for itself.

If we adopt this radical sense of tradition as an educator, we still, like the conservative, recognise the need for an inheritance of knowledge that helps us to make sense of the world, but rather than accepting it with blind faith, this sort of tradition calls for an attitude of critical engagement, a sifting through, or a recovery of sorts. As Critchley notes, "what this radical idea of tradition is trying to recover is something missing, forgotten or repressed in contemporary life" (Critchley, 2010: 32). The radical traditionalist understands that we have to sometimes look back in order to go forward. Engaging with tradition in this way might help us to avoid a situation in which education is reduced to a concern only with themes of contemporary relevance, and with preparing young people for 'the 21st century'.

This leads me to another point, that of society's ongoing obsession with the future. Critchely makes the interesting claim that talk of the future is actually reactionary. A relentless insistence on the future tends to curtail interesting, original thought. We are discouraged to cultivate memory and engage with tradition. For Critchley, "the future is about amnesia, and that's what's behind this ludicrous love affair with technology and forms of social networking… these are forms of oblivion, the desire for oblivion" (Ibid: 116). These will sound like awfully strong claims, but I do see his point, for I too experience social networking as a kind of oblivion, an unworld in which our identities are surrendered and where people endlessly 'communicate' but rarely seem to actually say anything.

Following from this, the frightening thing for me is any idea that education as we know it could be adequately replaced by the likes of Google, Facebook and Twitter. This is perhaps not so far-fetched an idea, and Ian Gilbert (2011) has indeed just written a book on this very topic. What would such an 'education' look like? I suspect it would be defined largely by amnesia towards the past and a fixation with the everyday. Genuine education must look to tradition as well as the present and future, but do so in the radical, rather than the conservative, sense. This requires teachers who have a wide appreciation and understanding of their subject and who will be well equipped to engage their students critically with the various forms of human knowledge that are their inheritance.

Critchley, S. (2010) How to Stop Living and Start Worrying. Polity.

Gilbert, I. (2010) Why do I need a teacher when I’ve got Google? Routledge.

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