Education Post #2 - The ecology of education

Nature is the vessel into which we fill all things apolitical: gender, sex, self and sordid details of existence, written off to the intrinsic. Nature exists as a projected space prior to contact by our conscious mind – the things true without ‘tainting’ by humanity. Wilderness is one manifestation of this phenomenon – the place without human influence, untouched, with empirical features identifiable prior to human influence. However, the use of the term ‘nature’ in psychological, social ways shows that human involvement doesn’t void nature, nature can influence humanity. Nature, rather, refers to the repeatable, the things seen in all people (or at least enough people) to cordon off agency and transformation. More than anything, the natural refers to the stable, the self-sustaining elements of existence. ‘Natural’ things have the status of a scientific truth, they will be the same thing to all people, make the same type of appearance, the same type of appeal, remain forever outside any sense of agency or change. Science requires some notion of the natural to remain science.

Scientific truth is not truth: it is a carefully crafted appeal to a valorized and contingent emotional response that assigns value to ideas that resonate with a postulated group of people who make similar appeals. Truth echoes: it resonates with any number of people, it is meant to have universal status, truth must remain the same for all, all must remain the same for truth. People submit themselves to science because it seems so natural, prior to our selves, foundational to understanding other forms of knowledge and self. However, science remains a social phenomenon. In order for a postulate to become a theory, or a theory to become a truth, it must be confirmed by a community of scientists, who repeat experiments to elevate an isolated phenomenon to a truth. Science isolates particular qualities of an event to make them into a truth: the a-human, the non-emotional, the constants. Essentially, everything about the world that can be bracketed out from human influence, that stands un-mediated and changed by thought (or so we think). The natural.

Scientific truth is a form of language that turns everyone into the teachers to whom we look when writing: we postulate notions of agency, appropriateness and disposition onto other people in order to articulate a truth. No more than a language, but a compelling one. So, who are we talking to? Science echoes in a cultural reality that is relatively limited, a presumption on the part of the speaker. People know things in extremely personal ways – its hard to understand the motivations of people we don’t have intimate awareness of. Then, positing a scientific truth relies on assumed forms of human agency which arise out of our personal contexts, a particular masquerading as a universal. To change the status of the scientific, and the natural, we must open ourselves to forms of humanity previously unknown.

This explains how certain practices, while present in human society, can become deemed unnatural: the closed spaces of social systems, which create communities reaffirming each other, repeatedly. Isolation begets particular truths, affirmed as universals, building fervor for attacks on groups outside isolation. The status of a truth, its violence, slides on a scale according to the power of that isolation. Access to the means of control transforms a particular truth into a weapon, the blackmail of capitalism makes it a death sentence for some. Communities can be constituted in time too – an ancient occurrence becomes a current truth because of the communal nature of history, implying repetition in its own right: cardstacked community.

This makes truth multiple. First, truth emerges because it is produced within a community, but that community has holes and so can also homogenized community. Truth develops because of its resonance for a particular group of people, but claiming a truth also produces resonance by bringing people into line: it articulates a presumed relationship between people, a productive act. Truths reveal something about a community in that they result from a social process. They also conceal community in the projection of certain ideas onto other people, attempting to bring them in line. Common sense is the ideological shorthand of a community – the truths revealed in their empirical application in particular situations, rather than verbalized. Like religion, truths can be the cry of the privileged, as religion the cry of the oppressed. Rather, this relationship is definitional: the ideas of an era are the ideas of the ruling class, articulated as naturalized truth, defining as their underside the truths of the subordinated groups as irrational (religious).

For this reason, truth and nature are untenable. First, because of the inherent instability of our world. Things move faster, people destroy ‘nature’ faster than ever before. Second, because of continual and trenchant critiques of scientific truth (I am certainly not the first, nor last, some other angry vegan doubtless will rear their rhetorical head at it).

The question I think should be raised is the role of fiction in education. Why study the un-true? I think that it depends on the treatment of nonfiction text. I think that the format of English classes reveal something about how reading texts function as a disciplinary/ideological tool – they teach a way of reading, a strategy. Literary analysis serves to deconstruct texts written as evidence of a particular time period – a historical document with prior meaning held in a structured form. The role of the student is to interpret and understand through particular filters the meaning predisposed in a text. Particular analytical tools are validated, and they construct an authoritative meaning. Students employ established tropes and filters to uncover meaning. Reading fiction is about reading as a practice, an established discipline of creating knowledge about the world using literature as an artifact of that world. For fiction, truth is posited explicitly in a way of reading, a practice. Education, then, primarily consists of ways of orienting ourselves to texts and ideas, becoming a particular type of subject in relation to ideas, as much as the specific content of an idea.

However, schools still, on some level, claim to teach truths. The status of truth plays a role in the establishment of discipline and self-regulation on the part of students. An absolute truth, locked in a text or teacher has a relationship to a particular moment of modernizing education for large groups of students, who required a basic level education to participate in an industrialized workforce. The scale of the task of educating millions required self-regulation by the students, a certain level of silence to create efficiency, and so the status of truth had to remain universal, singular and distant. The model of schooling followed the model of capital. Industry now relies ever more heavily on the creation of affect and fictions in the mind of consumers, about relationships and about mutual concern. This means that education for the workforce becomes an ever more social process – social events constitute the primary learning space for service economies – which rely on how to relate to people. Education surrounds schooling, expands into the space of social life. Education describes as well as prescribes the skills for later life. If I grow up to resell cars, or to create advertisements, my education comes through my knowledge of social processes that did not come exclusively from school. IN this sense, education describes – what was educational simply arose out of a situation without necessarily being labeled such. In other ways, education prescribes, disciplining and shaping students as readers or writers. These factors remain constantly in tension, causing them to overlap, detach, or interfere. A changing workplace transforms the types of skills necessary to become successful (read: wealthy), creating ‘demand’ for particular courseloads (in whatever form: capital P-political ‘so American can keep up in a modern economy…’, or through demand for certain courseload). Or, at the same time, positing demands on education institutions can create certain skills proactively to transform the types of jobs skills students have, shaping the economy. The interrelationship between economy, education and the demands they place on each other means that we have to ask questions about how education continues to change. The pivot point around which it moves involves the status of knowledge, the qualities of knowledge we value, and how people view themselves in relation to that knowledge.

This raises one point that should be made, which is the ways educational reform already coincides with practices of power. There are certain elements of political discourse already de-centering the text and reading in new ways – politicians talk about maneuverings of politics as political, we get insight into the way campaigns are run, behind the mask, and media is beginning to train us in the processes of media criticism. Cultural products, like the Simpsons, consist of more than a media text, but of different strategies of reading texts. Certain forms of alternative educational forms already seek to make education a practice, de-centering a curricular canon, entering situations beyond the institution. The goal of deconstructing and reconstructing education must take these into account, and, because of the interest of institutional power in their development, leave education more than merely dissolved. On some level, undermining the naturalness of knowledge needs to do more than just transform it into aesthetics. Instead of saying ‘no’ to the idea of truths, there should be an effort to say “yes, why…” when employing them. The supposedly apolitical must be turned into discourse to let them be challenged.

I should point out here the different levels of educational reality – the explicit and the implicit at least – there are highfalutin Bill Gates led expressions of how education should occur and there is the functional reality in places that disappear from the maps of policy makers. Elisions of inner-city schools or rural poor schools mean that fragmentation is one characteristic of subjectivity in schools – more often than not how you learn has to do with who you learn with in a community, particularly in school systems segregated with increasing ferocity.

The changing social and economic environment, a product of political demands developed by social movements, like multiculturalism, and economic and ethnographic changes occurring as a result of technology and economics requires a different type of reading and writing in students. The final question, then, is: how are students made to feel free in education, and why are certain freedoms rewarded, while others condemned? In a world where nature is decaying, by means of multicultural educations requiring sensitivities to body types, backgrounds and nationalities or by simple necessity of through the inclusion of more and more ‘foreign’ bodies into the education system, what skills, and ways of relating to truth must be created?

Duncan