The Social Context of Education
The complex relationship between our collective and individual interests is evident in the way we frame the purpose of education and how we balance its competing objectives.
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At one level it is clear that education serves social needs by providing cultural continuity, necessary knowledge and skills, familiarity with the basic structure and operation of a nation-state, and numerous other things to do with physical and mental well-being as they impact the relationship between individual citizens and the collective.
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At another level it is - or should be - equally clear that education should enable individuals/persons to make the most of their lives, optimise their fulfilment and contribute to the lives of others, their country and the world in a relationship of mutual benefit.
The two objectives are not always harmonious, sometimes felt to be incompatible, opeb to exploitation, and for a great deal of history at different times and places have seemed to conflict: what governments and employers want sits somewhat uncomfortably with what individuals believe themselves to benefit from.
For most of human history there was either no formal education, or the bare minimum to satisfy the needs of a collective ruled over by an élite. Insofar as education was provided at all it was geared towards perceived collective necessities: agriculture or soldiery for males; housekeeping and motherhood for women. Both, while they served the needs of villages, ultimately also served the needs of the rich and powerful for whom quite different kinds of education were often provided. During the Industrial Revolution more widespread education arose not so much because of its importance for human thriving as because workers were needed who could operate machines and understand complex processes. The rise of what we might call “education for its own sake” is a recent phenomenon, and far from universal even now; something that scarcely predates the Nineteenth Century for any but a ruling élite.
The way we educate reflects our prejudices about who we think worth educating and to what extent.
Nevertheless it is difficult - perhaps impossible - to separate this history from the prevailing view of what for want of a better expression we might call “human self-understanding”. For much of human history societies and tribes believed, or at least professed to believe, in deities and their purposes, in leaders and their goals and wisdom, and that there was a natural order of things established by deities that dictated how we should each see ourselves, our place in the world, our roles and duties. For most of us that position was one of subservience and obedience to others more wealthy and powerful than ourselves, those whom God or the gods, “nature” or “the order of things” had blessed with superiority from their birth.
That we would now see these attitudes and beliefs as old-fashioned, exploitative, ignorant and misplaced does not in any way diminish their influence over the way we continue to see ourselves. The difference is that we have come to believe that we adopt our reverence for wealth, power and celebrity freely on the basis of some kind of meritocratic values. This may not be the language of “the divine right of kings”, but it is the language of “just desserts”: that those who deserve more rightly benefit most.
The way we educate reflects our metaphysical, political and psychological prejudices.
An Obvious Objection
A natural, obvious and to-some-extent justifiable objection to this analysis is that for much of the same human history we have been outlining individuals, families, tribes and nation-states lived under the permanent threat of natural and human-contrived disasters. We had literally no choice but to work from dawn until dusk to make our bread, earn our keep and defend our property, our territory or our country. Governments had little option but to co-opt their citizens into armies to defend against aggressors, and failure to grow enough crops or raise enough cattle led to starvation for everyone.
This is clearly true. But what happens when we live in and age of plenty, live long lives well-fed and generally in good health, and even more so when we live in an age of abundance?
Is education ready for a world of abundance, or is it still pursuing the same necessary, back-breaking goals of a bygone age?
We currently occupy a transitional space between hardship and abundance. We may tell ourselves that we are destroying the world, creating disastrous changes in climatic conditions, and utilising an unsustainable and exponentially-accelerating amount of energy in our thirst for AI and robotics, but the reality is that this doom-mongering is motivated at least as much by an instinctive fear of progress as it is by reality. Sometimes it is necessary to spend vast resources in achieving progress in order to break into a new world of plenty. That is exactly our current situation.
It would be consummate folly to curb the advance of AI because of a primitive fear of change and the unfamiliar.
To add to the prejudices counselling caution we have the vested interests** of literally millions of educators around the world who are starting to wake up to the consequences for themselves of an AI world more skilled and effective in delivering education than human teachers can ever be. At least in a general sense: there will perhaps always be room and need for some individual tuition.
All this is reinforced by the same educational structure we have already described: we merit education only in proportion to our worth, to our place, to what we need to know to be employable, to make our contribution to society, to “earn our crust”. So whether we are consciously aware of it or not we all live our lives in accordance with the role accorded to us by some prevailing narrative, some story that tells us what life is about, who we are, what we have any right to expect, and what we owe in return. The tendrils of such a narrataive are so subtle and deep that we barely question it unless and until something happens that jolts us out of a acquiescence and complacency by challenging us with some kind of existential threat.
AI poses such an existential threat,
not because it is intrinsically dangerous
but because it undermines every sense of worth we rely on to establish self-esteem.
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