User:RobbieMcClintock/Tester

On (not) defining education

Note that we do not begin with the overworked question, What is education? To ask for a definition of education would throw us into a realm of abstract speculation. Let us ground discussion in experience, not simply research, which is often too narrow and disembodied in relation to life and its circumstances. Each person has experience that can ground a response to our question, What educates?

Attending to the verb

Too often, scholars concentrate on nouns, not verbs. To define education requires that we explain precisely a very abstract noun. Prominent scholars have thought they must start by defining education. Their efforts have not served their work well, for pursuit of the generality deflects attention from concrete action, the locus of significance and meaning.

Abstractions enter the field of human experience very late in the development of both person and culture. Much of what educates occurs independent of the rubric, education. In personal life, much experience educates long before one can talk about education. In social, cultural life, much of what educates occurs outside of formal activities of education or in their interstices where education seems not to be at stake. Let us start with real activity — past, present, and future. Scholars will make their work relevant to the problems and possibilities that people experience as they try to do justice to the verbs that describe the existential force of experience. Let us understand the action of the verbs at work in our lives. Let us, in StudyPlace, ask, What educates?

This question is important because it leads us to consider not only what educates, but also when and how such action may fail outright, or work with ironic consequences contrary to those intended. Our question carries implicit in it the question, What miseducates? Our question also points inquiry to the who, the why, the how, the when, and the where. It makes inquiry concrete, experiential, and observant. We find that all sorts of experiences contribute, with marvelous convolutions and ironies, as each infant develops into a unique, maturely formed person. And with that profusion of paths by which possibilities become lived actualities, we find insight into the complex textures of educative experience stimulated by all sorts of sources — introspective reflection, family lore, films, novels, reportage, memoirs, biographies and autobiographies, essays, arguments, treatises, reports of research, and on.

Educative experience

In starting with the question — What educates? — we change the language game controlling the study of educative experience. Inherent in the verb, to educate, are concrete situations reflected through tense and conjugational form — "She educates him," "I was educated by it," "This will educate them." Actions are taking place; our language describes these acts. We speak about educating, the gerund that describes the substantive process occurring when something or someone educates. We qualify something as educative when it has particular power within educating actions. We describe someone as educated, well or ill, when he clearly manifests how particular educating actions have shaped his character, skills, stock of knowledge, and values. Finally, as we come to know a lot about what educates, about educating for diverse purposes in a myriad of ways, about what proves to be educative in all that educating, about the many different ways diverse people appear to have been educated, — on the basis of all that, perhaps we can say something significant about the nature of the general process, education.

Educating causalities

As a concept, education denotes many different types of experience, ranging from an infant learning to walk and to talk, to the acquisition of innumerable ideas, skills, and values through instruction, formal and informal, to the developmental passages of adolescence and coming of age, culminating in the complex experiences of higher education for some and for all a compulsory apprenticeship to the adult responsibilities entailed in forming a family, a livelihood, and a place in the community. Throughout such experiences, a peculiar causality operates in which an array of agents — parents, teachers, authorities — act on a person to impart capacities and shape actions that the person may or may not manifest in a distant, indeterminate future. And all these agents in all their actions only appear to act on the person, for they can do no more than act through the person, who exercises a modulating control on even the most insistent influence. As a result, rigorous study of education proves to be very difficult. The scholar confronts countless potential variables each with an ineffable link between cause and effect.

These difficulties lead to strategies of inquiry whereby researchers depersonalize educative experience by seeking to show the effects of specific educational causes in the measured characteristics displayed by statistical constructs. We call such strategies empirical, and so it must be, for usage reigns. While learning much from the behavior of these constructs, however, on StudyPlace let us remember that what educates, educates persons, and that what seems to educate statistical constructions really aggregates a complicated mixture of influences and responses that educate, that fail to educate, and that miseducate particular persons in their concrete circumstances. Recently Katherine Boo, a wonderfully observant reporter, unpacked the complexity of such particulars in a New Yorker essay showing how "educational change," writ large, must be won, if won at all, in a difficult myriad of specific actions, large and small, whereby each of those changes involves a change by small, yet discernible increments, hovering between the better and the worse. What educates changes a person. At the opposite end of the spectrum that stretches from observation to reflection, Walter Kaufmann came to a similar insight towards the end of his Critique of religion and philosophy — "Plato's centeral importance for a humanistic education — and "humanistic education" is really tautological — is due to the fact that a prolonged encounter with Plato changes a man." On StudyPlace, let us ask what educates across the whole spectrum, spanning from the lived actualities of educative experience in the many anonymous settings of our world to the most demanding works of abstract reflection that have sprung recurrently from such roots throughout human culture.

To ask what educates is to ask what has the potential, the power to change a person. It challenges us to explicate how and why and when and where that potential works or fails to work. It provokes us to see that what educates, what changes a person, may work for good or for ill. When we ask about what educates, we inquire into a certain kind of causality experienced throughout the course of life in diverse situations with complicated, problematic results. Humans are culture-making and culture-bearing animals. Through culture-making, people have created for themselves an infinity of human possibilities. What educates is that complex causality, operative by, for, and through each person throughout life as she actualizes her determinate, acquired characteristics from the myriad possible ones. The causality is complex, a compound of the person's will and insight, the necessities and opportunities of her circumstances, the churning of events, near and far, and countless actions by parents, teachers, acquaintances, and chance entanglements with others. Understanding the causality, both as it may aggregate into discernible educative trends and as it may work in the existential experience of the person, is important but hard. Yet that is our task.

"Those who seek for gold dig up much earth and find a little."

Heraclitus, Fr. 22