Heidegger and technology

 

In March of last year, newspaper readers in the UK were met with headlines along the lines of 'Primary pupils to learn Twitter instead of history' and 'Exit Winston Churchill, enter Twitter'. These articles were written in response to the publication of Sir Jim Rose's proposals for a new primary curriculum, which have since been overturned by the new coalition Government. Predictably enough, conservative papers such as the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph were deeply disapproving towards such ideas. Now, let us put aside for the moment the question of whether these articles have distorted Rose's report. Let us also put to one side the absurdity exhibited in the idea of teaching the next generation of pupils about a strain of technology over which they will no doubt have a level of mastery over and above that of many of their teachers!

Let us instead cut to the chase. These newspaper headlines help us to focus our attention on a very important matter, that of the relationship between education and technology. Let us note that 'technological understanding' is one of the six 'core areas' identified in Rose's review. We see technology pervading every subject area, not least in geography where Geographical Information Systems (GIS) are playing an ever more central part. Is this, on the whole, a desirable circumstance? Is it anything new? Has education ever in fact been detached from technology? Or has a technological understanding of being always permeated education? In coming blog posts I will be considering these questions through Heidegger's critique of technology. First though, I need to take a closer look at what Heidegger actually had to say about technology, again with the help of Michael Zimmerman.

This is made all the more difficult because Heidegger's attitude to technology changed significantly during the course of his life. But we can say that, in general, he saw the modern technological era as but the latest and most degraded phase in humankind's forgetting of being, an era in which entities are viewed as mere resources to be exploited in the name of human power and security. To understand this, we need to get our head around what Heidegger understood by 'being', and in particular by 'Dasein'. For Heidegger, being is not an entity, but rather the event of the 'presencing' or 'unconcealment' of an entity. Dasein names the very distinct kind of being pertaining to humans. Only Dasein exists in the world in such a way that its own being and the being of others is an issue for itself.

Heidegger put special emphasis on the role of Dasein in enabling the being of entities to come to presence and manifest itself, by providing the 'clearing' in which entities can show up as entities. In case this all sounds a little too anthropocentric however, Zimmerman reminds us that Dasein did not own or produce this clearing, but rather is appropriated as this clearing. Dasein is in this fashion summoned by being and finds itself always already thrown into the world of entities and the ontological play of concealing and unconcealing. Authentic Dasein denotes a kind of embodied being-in-the-world whose essence is 'care', where 'to care' refers not only to ontic intervention but principally to the simple 'letting be' of entities; of not submitting them all the time to the calculating reason of human subjectivity. Authentic Dasein can be seen in this way as the 'shepherd of being'.

According to Heidegger, the degeneration of our understanding of being began in ancient Greek thought. Though Plato was to an extent still alert to the 'presencing' aspect of being, it was nevertheless he who first interpreted being as constant presence or eidos, the eternally unchanging form, thereby founding Western metaphysics. At a later date, Christianity would further embed this understanding of being as permanent presence, now produced by and grounded in a creator God. With the coming of Descartes and the age of reason, humanity would finally arrogate this creation and grounding to itself, "by asserting that for something 'to be' means for it to be representable as a clear and distinct idea of the human subject." In this critical phase entities, or 'things in themselves', were once and for all swallowed up by the human subject who was now the source of all knowledge and value.

This deteriorating historical, metaphysical understanding of being is what ultimately paved the way for the modern, technological, nihilistic era. The technological understanding of being is first and foremost a metaphysical one; hence Heidegger's famous claim that "the essence of technology is nothing technological". In the modern age, entities are 'challenged forth' to be interchangeable raw material to service human needs. Nature is thereby "deprived of any status apart from that of an object for scientific analysis or raw material for modern technology." This highly calculating and rationalistic era may not mark the end of history however; Heidegger appeared to believe that a post-metaphysical era of being was imminent. This would not be a straightforward return to an archaic way of life, but rather a new receptiveness to being as is exemplified in the work of art.

There is much that could be expanded upon in this short account, but this is far as I am going to delve into Heidegger's philosophy of technology at the current time. Needless to say, Heidegger's perspective on technology was, and still is, seen as rather idiosyncratic and has been subjected to much criticism over the years. However, though Heidegger's precise delineation of the 'history of being' might be disputable there is certainly something in his overall analysis that chimes with my own thinking. In the coming months and years I look forward to contemplating carefully the relationship between education and the objectifying, technological understanding of being that may still even now constitute our fundamental way of being-in-the-world. Does technology necessarily restrict the authentic disclosure of being, or can technology actually aid in renewing and revitalising our connection with being, or with nature? Can education, properly thought, bring us 'back to being' and facilitate a less domineering, more respectful attitude towards nature that would meet the aims of environmentalists whilst remaining progressive and optimistic about the capacities and future of humankind?

Zimmerman's 2002 essay 'Heidegger's Phenomenology and Contemporary Environmentalism' makes for excellent further reading and can be found at his departmental web page.

Photo is by Flickr user mandyxclear and is made available under a Creative Commons license

On reconciling progressivism and environmentalism

In my last post I remarked on the similarities to be found in Kathryn Ecclestone and Dennis Hayes' controversial thesis that a therapeutic ethos is becoming prevalent in our culture with the arguments made by humanist critics such as Luc Ferry against the theory of deep ecology. In the former we are told that there is in our culture an increasing and dangerous preoccupation with our emotional and irrational self and in the latter we see the emergence of a theory that seemingly wants to expel humanity from its position of superiority and views us instead as being of only equal importance to any other part of nature. It is arguable that both trends point in the same ultimate direction: towards a diminished notion of the human being that views it as fragile and vulnerable with little of the capacity for rational thought and willed, autonomous action so beloved of all those of a progressive stripe. Since writing that post I have been reading an essay by Michael Zimmerman (2003), who surveys some attempts that have been made to philosophically reconcile progressivism and environmentalism.

Many thinkers are in agreement that the emergence of European modernity saw a definite break from previous understandings of our relationship to nature, largely due to advances in natural science which have enabled us to predict, control and exploit the natural world. Meanwhile, in modern times 'man' developed "a new mode of subjectivity, egoic rationality, and a related ideology, anthropocentric humanism, which portray man as the source of value, the standard for truth, and the master of nature." (Zimmerman, 2003: 4) For many radical environmentalists, it would seem that only a turn towards a post-anthropocentric horizon could remedy the environmental and societal ills that have been caused by such an egotistical attitude, as it is simply not possible to fix the ecological mess with the same rationalistic, calculating tools that instigated it. From the perspective of radical ecologists, humankind is often portrayed as but one strand in a 'cosmic web' and only an attitude of compassion, empathy and submission to the greater whole will enable humans to get over the current ecological impasse.

The progressive response to such ideas is one of alarm and consternation at the apparently regressive tendencies that they display. As Zimmerman notes, in "demanding that humans conform to an allegedly more 'natural' way of doing things, and proclaiming the need for a mystical reunion with nature, radical environmentalists ostensibly promote an anti-humanism that... is inconsistent with progressive views of history." (Ibid: 5-6) These anti-humanistic views are seen to be all too compatible with reactionary politics, and we may indeed see in some of them (as Luc Ferry certainly does) the disquieting trace of the kind of ecofacism that drove anti-modern Nazi rhetoric. It is of interest here to examine the thought of Martin Heidegger, as Zimmerman does. Heidegger is a philosopher I have a considerable interest in, but his contribution to Western thought is often overshadowed by his engagement with National Socialism and his now well-proven early allegiance to it. Nevertheless, it is perhaps this dangerous tension in Heidegger’s thought that makes his work so fascinating and so crucial to engage with.

Heidegger saw the current phase of technological modernity as but the latest expression of humanity's degenerating relationship to the being of entities. According to his 'history of being', the domineering, exploitative relationship to Nature that typified his age could not be explained in purely social or economic terms but only with reference to metaphysics. In pre-Socratic times, humans existed in an authentic 'ontological openness' that allowed the being of entities (or Being) to reveal itself or 'shine forth'. However, with the coming of Socrates, Plato and their followers, humanity began its quest to find an underlying ground or foundation for reality. This search intensified and culminated in the philosophy of Descartes and others who saw humans as possessing a self-grounding rationality and free will that made them quite separate from nature (that infamous mind/body split). This changing conception of humanity and of Being paved the way for the typically calculating modern relationship to entities in which they are viewed as a 'standing reserve' to be 'challenged forth' and ordered. This is the essence of modern technology which Heidegger termed Gestell, usually translated in English as 'enframing'.

The modern way of revealing entities is thus essentially an objectifying one: "technological modernity is simply the working out of the claim that for something to be it must be the object for the autonomous, self-grounding human subject." (Ibid: 18) If we accept this as an accurate portrayal of modernity, then we can reasonably ask: where next? We have already seen some of the criticisms levelled at radical ecologists and others who would have make us return to a more primitive, 'authentic' way of dwelling upon the Earth. Zimmerman turns to the thought of Ken Wilber, who has developed an integral approach that tries in many ways to accomplish a reconciliation of environmentalism and progressivism. I haven't read any of Wilber's work myself, though now I have read this essay I expect I shall do. It would seem that Wilber perceives a future course for postmodern humanity in which body and nature 'below' and divine 'above' are reintegrated into a new evolutionary consciousness. In such reintegration, "the individual selfhood of rational-egoic subjectivity is both included and transcended in a more comprehensive form of awareness that is open both to nature and divine."(Ibid: 31)

For Wilber, progressives and environmentalists alike share a 'flat' ontology, largely influenced by natural science, in which the material and the physical alone comprise reality. According to Wilber, however, reality is not at all like this. The physical is but one plane in a many levelled reality, and the biosphere is contained within the 'noosphere'. In this vision, self-reflective consciousness constitutes a different level of reality that evolves from and surpasses the physical and organic planes. This seems akin to many Eastern philosophies that I have read. Wilber maintains that humans must develop this postmodern awareness, which is certainly not a regression, but which rather "transcends customary boundaries" such as the physical, organic, mental and artificial. Interestingly, as Zimmerman clarifies, "a prerequisite for the rise of this more integrative awareness is that the majority of people need to develop modern consciousness and institutions, although such development must avoid critical damage to the biosphere. Hence, the need for environmentalists and progressives to cooperate in reminding each other of what the other finds so important." (Ibid: 40, my emphasis)

So, in order for humanity to advance to the next level of consciousness, it would appear that the contemporary modern era of rational-egoic selfhood is, if you like, a necessary evil. It is a troubling but obligatory stage in our evolution. What’s more, despite its disdain by many primitivists, technology itself might be a crucial element in this evolution. The key may be in finding ways to use technology in ways that enhance rather than constrain human awareness. As Zimmerman writes, “there is no inherent reason that such technological innovations will impede rather than develop freedom, or that they will undermine rather than contribute to the higher, more integrated forms of consciousness.” (Ibid: 37-38).

With this blog posting I realise that I have somewhat strayed away from my usual field of geography education. I am treading in relatively unknown land. This is purposeful. Sometimes it befits us to look far beyond our immediate discipline, our intellectual comfort zone, in the hope that we may bring something back. Indeed, I hope in future posts to think through what the ideas explored here might mean for education and geography education in particular.

You can access Michael Zimmerman's 2003 essay online from his departmental web page.

You can also view Ken Wilber's remarkable looking website.

Photo is by Flickr user UIC Digital Collections and is made available under a Creative Commons license

Truly human?

In my last post I explained how Ecclestone and Hayes (2009) see the rise of therapeutic education and its focus on 'personal relevance' and 'soft skills' to be a grave threat to established liberal notions of education. Indeed, they deem it to be profoundly 'anti-educational'. Such techniques, they claim, turn young people's worlds inwards and instead of broadening their horizons cause them to see themselves as fragile, vulnerable and 'diminished' selves. Ecclestone and Hayes make it clear that they do not see this as a predicament facing education alone, as the idea of the diminished self has now come to permeate our entire culture and they attempt to chart why and how this has come to be the case. The withdrawal from subject based teaching to what they dismiss as 'faddish innovations' such as 'learning to learn' reflects an anti-intellectual climate in which confidence in the potential of human beings has tumbled. This view they make startlingly clear in perhaps one of the most controversial sentences in their book. Regarding the decline of the ideal of liberal education they state:

"Part of the reason for its loss is that many educationalists and teachers see children as incapable of education because they are no longer seen as truly human: there is no point offering an education you do not believe in to children you believe cannot benefit from it." (Ecclestone and Hayes, 2009: 143)

So as well as being anti-educational, it would seem that modern trends in education are also anti-human and reflect the misanthropic sentiment that humans are no longer masters of their destinies. Ecclestone and Hayes cite Bookchin (1995) as identifying this problem over a decade ago, in his contention that human society was suffering from a 'failure of nerves', a waning belief in our 'uniquely human attributes' and a general decay in our self-confidence as a species. The decline of traditional subjects in schools mirrors this large scale trend. The outcome of all this, for these authors, is a disastrous paradox: despite the rhetoric of empowerment and increasing happiness, the incursion of therapeutic education results in a population that is unconfident and unsure of itself and which turns to the state in order to receive instruction on what to value and how to behave. They claim that this is why the New Labour government has been so eager to adopt these ideas into its educational policy. All in all, the current drive towards happiness and well-being looks to be authoritarianism by another name.

Now, surely most if not all educationalists can agree that education should enable those educated to become confident and happy individuals, even if this is not the foremost aim they have in mind. If Ecclestone and Hayes are right then there would seem to be a strong argument here against the variety of techniques they group together as 'therapeutic education'. But despite adding a whole section of their book subtitled 'a response to our critics' I still remain unconvinced in a number of areas. For a start, throughout the book the evidence for the case remains at a very anecdotal level, usually consisting of short interviews with friends and colleagues and their children! In addition, there seems to be something very arbitrary about what they choose to bundle together under the 'therapeutic' label. Of course, any teaching practice whose sole focus is on instilling proper attitudes, values and behaviour into children is really rather undesirable, as is any practice that instills a feeling of vulnerability and weakness. But do all of the diverse pedagogical methods that these authors put under this banner really have this insidious effect? With such anecdotal evidence I really find myself with no way of knowing.

Their arguments remind me of these put forward by the philosopher and one time French Minister of Education Luc Ferry in his book The New Ecological Order (1995) which I read whilst researching my MA dissertation. In this book, Ferry mounts a case against deep ecology, which he considers to be threatening human culture and self-confidence in the same way as Ecclestone and Hayes think the therapeutic ethos is. According to Ferry, the entire world of reason and the mind is endangered by the emergence of radical ecology. This dangerous theory papers over all that is truly special in human culture and jeopardizes our democratic societies and institutions. For Ferry, deep ecology is fundamentally undemocratic and as a fundamentalism it has arisen to fill the void left by the demise of other ideologies. It represents a new ideological order that, left unchallenged, would seize the hearts of those battle hardy militants who have been 'left in a state of shock' by the 'death of communism and leftism'. This is somewhat similar to a point made by Ecclestone and Hayes to the effect that therapeutic culture has replaced the gap left by the passing of collective forms of working class organisation and the consequent 'absence of politics'.

In both these cases, the opposition depicted seems to be one of human reason and autonomy against looming and sinister forces that would undermine that hard won reason and autonomy. These forces might take the form of peculiar ideas about humans as mere parts of a living, interdependent system called the Earth or they may be more general doubts about our ability to reason, tackle difficult areas of knowledge and to cope with our emotions. These are big claims and all I am doing at the moment is setting out the scene. These are issues that I will be confronting again and again in my work, and I feel sure that some reconciliation can and must be made. Ecclestone and Hayes state with conviction that 'the majority of young people are not damaged'. On the contrary, based upon my own (anecdotal!) school experiences and from conversations with my partner who takes yoga into schools, I see that there are a lot of young people out there needing some healing. I am also unafraid to acknowledge that the Earth itself is desperately in need of healing.

The big question is, what kind of humanity do we aspire too? As the Ecclestone and Hayes are at pains to point out, we are not going to get very far if our human capacity for self-belief and self-will are reduced to such a level that we come to consider ourselves as inherently flawed beings, who can't even lift a finger without harming the Earth. In order to stand a chance of changing the world, we first need the requisite confidence to do so. We also need the requisite knowledge, and for me that's exactly where geography education comes in...

References

Bookchin, M. (1995) Re-Enchanting Humanity. A Defense of the Human Spirit Against Anti-Humanism, Misanthropy, Mysticism and Primitivism. New York: Cassell.

Ecclestone, K. and Hayes, D. (2009) The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education. London: Routledge.

Ferry, L. (1995) The New Ecological Order. Volk, C. (Trans.) Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

Photo is by Flickr user Cold Press Publishing and is made available under a Creative Commons license

Has the geography curriculum become self-obsessed?

In recent years we have seen a number of pedagogical interventions that claim to make learning more 'engaging' and 'relevant' to young people. From 'personalised learning' to the ubiquitous 'personal, learning and thinking skills' we have seen a noticeable drift of emphasis away from the teaching of subject knowledge to the development of these generic personal skills. As we enter a time of change, with a new Government in office promising a return to 'traditional' subjects, it is perhaps time to take stock and consider if the pedagogical adventure might not have indeed gone too far. In this piece I am going to take a look at the claim that education in general, and geography education in particular, has become preoccupied with the self and with making itself relevant to young people, all at the cost of emptying itself of substantive intellectual content.

In a book entitled The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education, Kathryn Ecclestone and Dennis Hayes (2009) chart the escalation of therapeutic principles and techniques in all phases of the education system and in the workplace. Such an approach to education has become possible, they argue, because of a wider shift in popular culture towards a therapeutic ethos. According to Ecclestone and Hayes, 'populist therapeutic orthodoxies' reflect and reinforce the concept of 'a diminished self'. That is, a fragile and vulnerable self with a diminished sense of human potential. Therapeutic education invites children and adults to see themselves as inherently flawed and at risk, and to lower their educational and social aspirations accordingly, the upshot being that therapeutic techniques, paradoxically and despite claims to the contrary, actually create more unconfident and unhappy individuals. Overall the authors judge therapeutic education to be 'profoundly anti-educational' and an abandonment of 'the liberating project of education'.

I am not going to present here a fully fledged critique of the book but instead want to focus purely on the implications of what the authors categorise as 'therapeutic' approaches to teaching and learning on the structure and content of the school geography curriculum. I think there can be little doubt that we have seen a marked shift in recent years away from the teaching of subject disciplines and towards more generic pedagogical techniques such as 'learning to learn', 'personalised learning' and 'building learning power' (see Claxton, 2008). These approaches are usually defended as offering an 'engaging' and 'relevant' curriculum for all learners, including those who are 'turned off' by traditional academic subjects. They focus on providing children with the skills they need to think and learn for themselves, whilst content (that is, subject knowledge) tends to take a back seat role. In general, they also emphasise 'soft outcomes' of learning such as emotional literacy and well being, as opposed to the cognitive knowledge and skills that subject disciplines have customarily favoured.

The chief critique that Ecclestone and Hayes direct towards these methods of education is that they are increasingly 'turning young people's worlds inwards'. Pedagogic methods that encourage and even compel young people to disclose their innermost worries and anxieties are portrayed as innovative ways of engaging disaffected youth with schooling. Yet, their real effects are more insidious. According to the authors of this book, such pedagogic adventures are sidelining the cognitive and intellectual dimensions of learning for a preoccupation with one's own emotions and feelings and an obsession with one's own self. It is at this point that teachers of geography should really take note, for what is geography if not a sustained study of the world outside of our self and of the many places, processes and interconnections that comprise that world? If Ecclestone and Hayes are correct in their perception of an increasing self preoccupation within education, then this might seem to spell the end of geography as we know it. Extending this trend into the future, we might imagine the subject eventually being replaced by therapy sessions, such as group reflections on places that seem emotionally significant for example.

Recent developments in geography education would seem at first glance to support this hypothesis. To take just a few examples, a recent issue of the journal Primary Geographer had a focus on 'the geography of happiness' and carried articles on children's attachments to 'special places' and ways of 'incorporating happiness' into the geography curriculum. A recent edition of Teaching Geography, a journal aimed at secondary geography teachers, carried an article about students involved in a project called Young People's Geographies in which they were able to 'choose what they wanted to study' and another one all about young people's personal experiences of fieldwork, in which the focus of the fieldwork seemed to be not so much the objective, physical features of the landscape, but on how that landscape made them feel. These examples are no longer unusual and indeed they represent the general zeitgeist that underlies most cutting edge geography education in the UK as promoted by the Geographical Association. I suppose that Ecclestone and Hayes would consider these examples to be perfect illustrations of the dangerous 'inward turn' that education has taken.

I believe that the real picture is actually less dismal than these authors portray. On the whole, I actually support the 'turn' towards feelings and experience that the examples above display, on the grounds that they provide a much needed balance to earlier versions of geography curricula that have over-emphasised objective, detached and analytical ways of knowing the world. Subjective and emotional ways of knowing are equally valuable, and a good teacher knows how to integrate these disparate 'ways of knowing'. I do nevertheless recognise that there is an important message in Ecclestone and Hayes's claims. There is a profound difference between reflecting on one's emotions during an educational experience and more insidious attempts to engineer well-being and happiness. It is this latter scenario that geography teachers must avoid and be vigilant for. The critical role of geography education in broadening young people's horizons is another ground for vigilance. Engaging and relevant geography that begins with young people's everyday experience is one thing, but it would be indulgent and irresponsible, to say the least, to limit their learning to that everyday sphere. As Michael Oakeshott once said, the ultimate reward of education is precisely "emancipation from the mere 'fact of living', from the immediate contingencies of place and time of birth." (Oakeshott, 1998) Sure, let us take time to explore and acknowledge our emotions and feelings about a place, but let us not dwell there.

I think that there is a wider issue to be discussed here about the balance between self-knowledge and world-knowledge as outcomes of the educational endeavor. I truly believe that both are essential and, moreover, that they are certainly not mutually exclusive. Though my spiritual practice of yoga and my readings in this area, I am confident that striving to truly know oneself is a most worthy goal in a human life. However, I also happen to believe that such self knowledge cannot be sought in total isolation from knowledge of the world that exists outside oneself. In this way, I find it hard to accept that classic ideal of the ascetic soul, meditating in isolation, away from all worldly concerns. In the same way, in the field of education, I suspect that coming to an understanding of oneself goes hand in hand with an understanding of the wider world. In coming years I hope to devise a sound and positive argument that geography, partly due its holistic and integrative nature, plays a crucial part in advancing both of these sorts of understandings and in their integration. In brief, I want to argue that geography enables the learner to come to an understanding of themselves as an authentic, emplaced, knowing and feeling self in a world of human and non-human others with whom they are fundamentally and inevitably interrelated.

And a final point on the so-called 'geography of happiness' mentioned earlier. The nagging problem I have with this, and other similar instances of 'happiness education', can be expressed in the following query: should education aim to make us happy and is there not rather something inescapably difficult about this journey we call education? In this world in which we all find ourselves, it is almost certain that we will feel unhappiness, pain and suffering at some point and to some degree. To me, it seems counterproductive therefore to insist zealously on happiness and instead it seems that a better tactic (and here I borrow from Alain de Botton (1997) who himself borrows from Proust) is to learn how to 'suffer successfully'. To bear the capricious fortunes of a human life, and to realize and accept that, after all, we will not always be happy and that our being may not always be well.

References

Claxton, G. (2008) What's the Point of School? Rediscovering the Heart of Education. Oxford: Oneworld.

De Botton, A. (1997) How Proust Can Change Your Life. London: Picador.

Ecclestone, K. and Hayes, D. (2009) The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education. London: Routledge.

Oakeshott, M (1998) [1971] ‘Education: The Engagement and its Frustration’ in Hirst and White (Eds.) Philosophy of Education: Major Themes in the Analytic Tradition, Volume I: Philosophy and Education. London and New York: Routledge.

Photo is by Flickr user blueiii and is made available under a Creative Commons license

Geography as holistic discipline

In a previous post concerning the need for continued justification of geography as a school subject I suggested that one possible route towards such a justification is to call attention to geography's holistic nature. What evidence do we have that geography has such a nature, and why might gaining a holistic understanding of humans and their environment be of any use to a young person growing up in this century? I didn't have the room to delve into this issue in that post, and I don’t believe it is one that can be dealt with hurriedly. However, I will begin my investigation with a look at the work of Alistair Bonnett (2008), who has written a very impressive introduction to geography, one that should be read by all with an interest in the subject.

A poem

 

Closing

I opened, unaware of this world.

Naïve, a patient hand nurtured me from the soil.

I transformed, took leave of the trellis

That had been erected to support me.

I found my freedom, reached out with

My thin, tender stems to feel the sun.

I grew, looking everywhere for that light.

With the passing seasons I became bolder,

Put on a passionate display. Violent floral reds.

But inside me, in my roots and cells,

I felt empty. I witnessed foliage to the

Left and right of me dying, shriveling up.

I felt feeble. Then I came to acknowledge

My impermanence. I was a fragile being,

Just a straw, not even that. Then began my

Laughing days. I laughed as the leaves

Turned brown and the days shorter. Laughing,

As I knew I was dissolving, returning to

The soil. Now I am folding.

I am closing.

I'm here.

Benjamin Major

No new post this week as I have been working on writings that I hope to see published. The collection from which this poem comes, along with several older essays that will never see the light of day, can now be found on my brand new Scribd account.

Photo is by Flickr user hepp and is made available under a Creative Commons license

Nature as a teacher

The 'organic concept' as developed in the writings of the early German romantics is perhaps not as well known as it might be. In brief, the concept, a fusion of the philosophies of Fichte and Spinoza, sought to unify the natural, physical world and the mental world into an organic whole (see Beiser, 2003). In this model, nature is the absolute and the mind is one part, the most highly developed part, of that whole. There is only a difference in degree and not a distinction in kind, between the mental and the physical. According to this theory, the mental activity of the genius (the artist or the philosopher) is but nature coming to its self awareness. Nature remains indeterminate and inchoate without humanity. But as plenty of Romantic poets have demonstrated through their work, it may also be true that humans can discover or reflect on their own self through exposure to nature.

There can be little doubt that humans have transformed their environment to a far greater degree than other species. This capacity for transformation and rapid change lend to humankind a somewhat precarious destiny. We may use our extraordinary capacities of imagination and love to live in friendship with and amongst human and nonhuman others, or we may continue to believe that the earth serves man and remain 'masters of the mystery that the earth breathes'. As the most complex manifestation of nature, the romantics understood quite well that humans bore a heavy burden. With the benefit of an aesthetic and moral education that taught the individual how to truly love what is not of themselves as a family, as community, we might at least approach wholeness. Friedrich Schlegel once wrote that to 'follow nature' is the only precept of a moral education. (See Beiser, 1996: 152) Why did he say this? Because Schlegel thought that despite humanity's elevated position, nature may remain the best teacher of all. Nature can teach us how to live well…

Geography and educational aims

This post follows on from the previous one on Justifying geography.

The kinds of aims we should have for the living of a fulfilling human life are clearly highly debatable, as is the idea that we can provide any kind of objective list of aims in the first place. However, I am not delving into this particular issue here (see White, 2005 for more on this). In this post I am more concerned with examining how we might go about justifying geography in light of the kinds of aims which actually have been enshrined in the latest version of the KS3-4 National Curriculum (and I assume here that these have been decided upon after lengthy and painstaking deliberation). I must also add that at the time of writing a new government has just taken office that holds some very different conceptions of education from its predecessor, and so it could be that these aims are revised again in the not too distant future. Nevertheless, the aims as they stand are not overly contentious, and they provide a good starting platform from which to begin our justification for geography. I see this as an unavoidably slow and meticulous task that really requires empirical evidence to back it up. However, we can at least make some headway here.

Justifying geography

In the last post we saw that subjects cannot simply appeal to tradition to justify their place on the curriculum. Each subject has, instead, to continually justify its place by examining itself against the set of aims and principles that have been decided in advance as being core to a good education. By doing so, we will not have proved that initiation into the subjects is in fact the best method of education but we will at least have demonstrated that learning a particular subject contributes to our wider educational goals. This is perhaps the best we can hope for.

This process of justification may be easier for some subjects than for others. It is my view that when it comes to geography the justification seems, initially, relatively easy. Not only does it seem intuitively important to understand human and physical worlds and their interconnections, but in addition it is hard to image a time when such an understanding wouldn’t be important for a life worth living. Indeed, we might feasibly conceive of a scenario in which we needed no such understanding, for example, one in which we were all pre-programmed to behave, like robots, in a particular way according to an extrinsic plan. But even in this case, which after all is not too dissimilar to some theological worldviews that have held sway over the centuries, some minimal world knowledge might still seem desirable. Such knowledge might consist of some downloaded information that enabled us to orientate ourselves, perhaps a kind of personal Geographical Information System (GIS) wired into our heads for instance. The important point is that so long as life is considered not to be so controlled, and ourselves to be autonomous beings, some understanding of the physical and human world in which we live out our lives seems essential.

A traditional fallacy

In the previous two postings I have attempted to demonstrate that school subjects still matter. I have done so largely in response to arguments to the effect that 'traditional subjects' are irrelevant in the information age and also to trends, particularly in academies, that see such subjects undermined in favour of vocational training.

At this point I wish to first single out the rather emotive use of the word 'traditional' as it is used by both critics and ardent supporters of a subject-based curriculum. When a critic adjoins the word 'traditional' to 'subject' they are surely referring to content heavy, fact rich subjects of the grammar school style. Yet we can cannot overlook the clear and well-documented fact that subjects can be other than traditional, so certainly no effective arguments against a subject-based curriculum can be made simply on the grounds that they are too traditional (assuming that the critic has shown beyond reasonable doubt that the tradition is in itself a undesirable thing).

Academies and curricular freedoms

The UK's new Department of Education's first bill is to give thousands more schools around the country the opportunity to become academies. One of the often asserted benefits of becoming an academy is increased curricula freedom, but freedom from what exactly? Freedom from overly rigid curriculum constraints is, from the perspective of most, a good thing. But when exactly does the much welcomed freedom to foster innovative and response approaches to teaching and learning become freedom from the responsibility to give our children a broad and balanced education? How can we facilitate the former whilst avoiding the exceedingly unfortunate scenario that the latter presents? How are we to react when we hear of schools dropping entire subjects at whim solely in order to improve league-table performance?

These are the kinds of questions stimulated by a report published by Civitas last December called 'The Secrets of Academies' Success' by Anastasia de Waal (2009).

Do subjects still matter?

In my last post on education and wonder I upheld the thesis that all learning begins in our emplaced and embodied experience of the world. In particular, in the experience of wonder, in which the startling fact of encounter itself comes to the fore – the fact that we are in the world, belong to the world, and are compelled to therefore question and comprehend that world. I am aware that this may lead some readers to enquire whether I am thereby arguing for a kind of education that is guided solely by the dictates of experience and relevance. For example, do I take the position that subjects or disciplines, those traditional conduits of knowledge that hitherto comprised the form and content of education, are misguided and outdated? I must declare straight away that I do not subscribe to such a view. Let us reflect for a moment on Kant's acute remark in his first Critique:

"But though all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it all arises out of experience" (My italics)

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?

A Book of Migrations

This is a very nice book I am reading full of reflections on landscape, identity, migration, belonging and exile. It intertwines these musings in amongst accounts of Solnit's journey along the west coast of Ireland, in a narrative that is almost as winding and unhurried as the country tracks that this landscape itself contains. Strangely, although I was aware that Solnit is a good writer, this is one of those books that has been sat on a shelf for ages, ever since I picked it up cheap at a festival a two or three years ago. I'm glad I finally delved in. What follows, for example, is one intriguing reflection on home and attachment that she offers whilst discussing the rather ordinary and faceless suburb in which she grew up and the wild and beautiful Californian landscape that surrounded it:

All geography is homesickness

Photo by Flickr user ☻mrhappy☻ and made available under Creative Commons

We could say of the study of geography, as the German Romantic philosopher and poet Novalis once said of philosophy, that it embodies a kind of homesickness; "the urge to be at home everywhere in the world". It was observations of an escalating divorce of humans from nature, our original home, which partly accounted for the emergence of Romanticism at the turn of the nineteenth century. In a recent study of the rise of the 'geographical imagination' in this period, Tang's (2008) intriguing thesis is that the origin of modern geography as it arose in the work of Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Ritter can partly be found in the Naturphilosophie and landscape aesthetics of the early German Romantics. This rich body of thought provided much inspiration for these early geographical luminaries but most pertinent for our theme is that in their search for a "deeper, pre-reflexive unity" the Romantics "contributed, knowingly or unknowingly, to the making of the modern geographical imagination that was predicated on the fundamental unity of man and nature." (Tang, 2008, pp.12) Although theories of the close interrelationship between man and the earth can of course be found much earlier than the nineteenth century, it is arguably only in this period that such theories moved substantially beyond a rigidly deterministic stance represented in a somewhat encyclopaedic fashion. With the emergence of geographical science, this interrelationship was now seen as altogether broader and more complex. Indeed, for the most optimistic it suddenly appeared possible to

The future of geography

Photo by Flickr user United Nations Photo and made available under Creative Commons

25 years ago, Ron Johnston made an appeal for the future of geography...

"Geographers have disengaged themselves from studying and promoting the uniqueness of place, and consequently have contributed to a general ignorance of the world as a complex mosaic. This disengagement must be corrected... and geographers must once again take the lead in portraying the complex variability of peoples and environments" (Johnston, 1985)

It seems to me that in academic geography we have seen this 'correction' occur to the extent that the positivist approach to geography seen in the 60's and 70's now seems to have withdrawn into the background. In the last quarter of a century we have seen Marxist, feminist and post-structural approaches, alongside a renewed interest in phenomenology, and many more. These may all have their differences but common to them all is the commitment to recognising the variability of place (even in those cases where place is seen to to be no more than a social construction) and to penetrating the 'real mechanisms', as Johnston put it, as opposed to that tendency that positivist approaches have to generalise and observe only the surface of things.  

But has school geography followed in the wake of this diversification of approaches?