Homo Educandus

Front matter

JAN BRANSEN

HOMO EDUCANDUS

WHY OUR SCHOOL SYSTEM IS BROKEN AND WHAT WE CAN DO ABOUT IT

Table Of Contents

PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION ...000 occ eesseessesseeessneessessneesenessnane 9

Appreciation Self-üunderstanding iruin i THE DRAMATURGICAL MODEL NORMAL inan A na ia t oaa i aa PABU S A A A Aa AEA Causality Normativity

Functionality ...ssssssssssssesssssrsrsrrrrssssnesnsnssenennninnnnnnunnnnnnnnnnnnnennrnnnnnnnnnnnnansnennnnrnnnnnnnnanns LIVING IS LEARNING AND LEARNING IS LIVING

Preface To The English Edition

Early in 2019, I entered the world of education as a relative outsider with a strong message. Upon publication of the Dutch edition of this book, Radboud University gave a press release entitled ‘The current education system is truly bankrupt’. Although I do not literally defend this statement in the book, I immediately embraced the premise and have since positioned myself as both the representative of the joint creditors of the current school system and the liquidator who is trying to restart it using only the healthy parts.

In the first twenty-five years of my career I was a philosopher of mind and action, dealing with issues of self-knowledge, autonomy, authenticity, personal identity and practical rationality. I developed a vision of edifying reflection, in other words the ability of human beings to relate to their own acting, thinking and being in a way that is intrinsically focused on growth, development and improvement. This vision led to an exploration of the relationship between science and common sense, published in Dutch in 2013, and translated in 2017 as Don't Be Fooled. A Philosophy of Common Sense.' In this book, I argue that science cannot simply be seen as an enhancement of our common sense. After all, one crucial dimension of our common sense concerns the quality of our mutual positioning. I argue that this quality cannot be adequately represented from a perspective based on the distinction between a human being seen as a knowing subject and a human being seen as a known object. My position is a form of pragmatism: primarily, people are actors, beings who do something, who interact socially. If we believe that in our actions we are partly or sometimes knowing subjects and partly or sometimes known objects, we are simply misleading ourselves twice. We are ‘minded agents’, all the way down, beings for whom events are experiences because we participate in them as agents. Besides being minded, we are also passionately engaged. We are social beings and in my work this has led to the focus on love as a competence that is at least as important to human existence as cognition.

My account of the relationship between science and common sense, in which I emphasise edification, led quite naturally to a vision on education. This vision was greatly influenced by the changes I had been experiencing over the past 20 years in the student population that I was working with at university. I hasten to add that the students and most teachers are not at all to blame for these changes. It is the system that doesn’t work anymore and it is basically our mindset that prevents a thorough revision of our educational practice. Our mindset not only perpetuates the distortion of our education - our teaching, learning and developing - but also exacerbates it year after year. In this book, I analyse and criticise the workings of this mindset, of our mainstream contemporary educational ideas. Moreover, I propose an improved mindset as a substitute - a mindset that does justice to our fundamental need for belonging and permanent development - and I show which changes in our educational system are Suitable to this improved mindset.

This book is emphatically not a scholarly text. I do not aim to make an original contribution to the academic philosophy of education. In the text, I barely enter into a discussion with existing scholarship. I have a different goal. I see there is an important task for academic philosophers, namely to become actively involved in educational practice. This suits my pragmatic approach, or, to borrow a quotation from Marx: as philosophers, we should do more than merely interpret the world in various ways; we should actually change it. That is why in this book I do enter into a discussion with anyone who holds everyday views on education: parents, teachers, pupils, students, tutors, principals, educational administrators, educational advisors, politicians. Of course, this group also includes educational researchers, educational scientists and educational philosophers, but not as interlocutors within independent academic specialisms. Certainly not. Such specialisms have existed in isolation for far too long. It is high time we change the tone, and no longer conduct the discussion within the boundaries of an academic discipline, but rather do so in the workplace, in other words in real life. After all, this is where we can find those implicit notions about learning, developing, teaching and testing, about certificates, learning trajectories, knowledge transfer and student monitoring systems, about reading comprehension, scheduling, learning goals and effective instruction. And it is where we can find the people who do the work: teachers, parents, lecturers, and, most importantly, students.

As this book has been written for this everyday audience, it contains hardly any footnotes. As stated above, the book is not an introduction to an academic field but rather an incentive to think carefully, thoroughly and critically about the mainstream contemporary educational ideas that have become so familiar to us. I have included few references in this book, but this does not mean that I claim originality for my ideas. Similar ideas have been around for centuries and the time seems right for some of these ideas to claim centre stage. Whether or not the view developed here is actually mine is not something I am particularly interested in. Words belong to us all, and understanding is always a co-creation, the result of multiple ‘minded agents’ who understand one another. This certainly also applies, often quite literally, to this book: I will repeatedly be asking you, as my reader, for help and advice, for understanding, for accepting co-responsibility for the ideas that I am trying to develop. If you cannot follow my way of thinking, if you cannot understand my voice, then in fact I literally have not communicated anything, then my words are just dead letters on paper - or, perhaps more likely, merely dots on a screen. I would, of course, appreciate it if you were to refer to this book when you quote from it; still, I would prefer it if you internalised these ideas so much so that you could recount them yourself, in your own words. Then these ideas will have really become your ideas, and the great thing about ideas is that I will not lose anything if you own them. Ideas multiply for free.

I hope that this book will be a catalyst, giving words to an undercurrent of resistance that has been present in many of us for along time. I hope that thanks to the words in this book, the feeling of discontent, the feeling that the current school system is not good for us, will gain in strength and direction in such a way that many of us will take action. I hope that in this way this book will contribute to a transition that is already in the air. The zeitgeist - admittedly, a somewhat weird concept - seems ready for it.

One final word about the translation. Also in English, this book is and remains fundamentally a Dutch book, and this will sometimes be noticeable. But in its new language, at certain moments it is also no longer a Dutch book. After all, a translation always brings along the culture of the new language. In several places, the translators have given my ideas a place in the British context. Of course English is the lingua franca of modern science and of our contemporary knowledge economies, and in this sense also the language of the citizens of the world. Nevertheless, when discussing such an everyday phenomenon as education and our educational system, it is impossible to speak in English without constantly relying on connotations of and associations with concrete, local educational practices. Occasionally, this meant an extensive quest for the translators, Fulco Teunissen and Kate Kirwin of Twelvetrees Translations. As far as I am concerned, they have solved this conundrum successfully.

INTRODUCTION: EDUCATION IS A HUMAN ENDEAVOUR

OUR PLAYING FIELD

This book is about us, about human beings. As a result, it is about younger people and older people, children and adults, and about the different generations who will be needing each other for a long, long time. After all, this is how it works for us, specimens of what Linnaeus named Homo sapiens. For centuries, philosophers have not recognised this generational interdependency. When they were philosophising about human beings, they usually turned their thoughts immediately and exclusively to adults. An adult, however, has been around for a while, and much of what happens during the process of developing into an adult is crucial for what it means to be human. Of course, it does not mean that you should conclude that children are slowly developing into human beings. They are slowly becoming adults, but they have been human all the time - as a child, as a young person and later as an adult or as an elderly person. Human existence is an existence in time, a long and continuing process of change.

The fascinating thing about human existence is that we relate ourselves to this process of change. We meddle with it. We have ideas about ourselves, about what a human being is, and about what being human is. Such ideas matter, and in all sorts of ways they play a role in this permanent process of change. These ideas matter when we criticise each other’s behaviour, when we influence each other, imitate each other, impersonate, correct, instruct, or punish each other. And they do not only matter in these everyday forms of human interaction. They have also taken another shape, a much more permanent, institutional shape. Our ideas about ourselves, about what it means to be a human being, have become firmly embedded in the crucial institution in which younger and older people deal with each other: education. That is why this book - even if it were only about human beings - is inevitably also about our educational system, about the school buildings, the curricula, the teachers, the pupils and the diplomas.

Of course, you already know that this is a book about our educational system: this is what it says on the cover, in the title, in the brochure, in promotion texts and in other references that you had seen even before you laid hands on this copy and started reading. Nevertheless, I think it is important to stress that to me this is first and foremost a book about us, about people. This is the perspective from which I consider our educational system in this book. What made us decide to create the system that we now have? Why did we divide human existence into two parts: one part in which, as young people, we are mainly supposed to learn, and a second part in which, as adults, we are mainly supposed to be productive?

I will ask many questions to gain insight into the ideas about human existence that we have based our school system on. I will argue that some of these ideas are flawed. Such ideas thwart our efforts and misshape us rather than help us shape our humanity.

Incidentally, my critical analysis of our current school system will not end ona sad note. It will do so if you stop after reading Part I, but I certainly hope you do not. If you only have time for half a book, I would advise you to read the uplifting second part. This is where I design my ideal educational system, a coherent package of forms of education that will be beneficial to humanity. This second part is speculative, as I anticipate what I think should be the meaning of the concept of human education. I reckon that I could progress quite some way with this, but of course I cannot do it all by myself. So I hope that my design appeals to you and that you are willing to develop, promote and realise it together with me. If you do not feel like doing so after reading Part II, you might want to go back to Part I. In this critical part, I analyse all that is wrong with our current school system, to instil you with sufficient courage to take on the challenge of my proposal. Simply because you feel you must, because you agree with me that our children should be shaped rather than misshaped. You will need this awareness to appreciate my proposal. Hence the structure of this book and my hope that you will have sufficient stamina to read both parts. Part I puts you firmly with both feet on the ground, in order to provide you with enough motivation to jump into Part II. In this introductory chapter, I outline the playing field in which we find ourselves: education as an anthropological fact.

HOMO EDUCANDUS

There is something peculiar about Homo sapiens. Try and look at us as a biologist would do, as a scientist who is interested in the different life forms on Earth. You will soon come across something striking, an anthropological truth with two, or even four, different aspects.

On the face of it, we can conclude that there is no other species whose offspring are so utterly helpless for such a long period of time. Just consider how quickly young birds, kittens or lambs can stand up on their own, and become independent. Then compare this to our young people, who nowadays remain dependent on their parents until they are well into their twenties. A closer look shows us that, conversely, there is no species whose adults are so totally committed to their offspring for such a long time as human adults are. These situations complement one another. If you depend on your parents for a long time, then they must love you very much to be willing and able to take care of you for this length of time. Caring, selfless parental love is the correlative of prolonged helplessness, and it is necessary for survival. This correlative also puts children’s helplessness in a different light. These children are not only helpless, at the mercy of their parents’ willingness to provide loving care; undeniably, children also excel in reciprocating loyalty and trust. They have little choice. Children need to focus strongly on their attachment to their parents. They need to have blind faith, or they will not survive. These first two aspects of our natural existence are thus two sides of love: on the part of the children there is a great capacity for attachment, and on the part of the parents there is an equally great capacity for care.

The years of mutual involvement of two different generations do not only become apparent in the love between these generations, but also in the development of our abilities. The unparalleled long period of dependency gives children an ideal opportunity to learn an awful lot from their parents. And not just from their parents, but from the complete adult context in which they grow up. The significance of this opportunity can hardly be overestimated. Here we can see the third and the fourth aspect of the anthropological fact that young human beings remain dependent on their parents for such a long time. Children are very eager to learn things; they are true learning animals. And here, too, there is an adult counterpart: the older generation has an unparalleled enthusiasm for educating. Adults are always busy encouraging, supporting, facilitating - and often even enforcing - their children’s learning. Sometimes this is a matter of endearing, hardly controllable automatic responses. Consider the high-pitched, exaggerated expressive voice which adults use to talk to babies, thus helping the baby in its language development.? Or consider how adults open their mouths when a spoon approaches the baby's mouth, in order to suggest imitation. However, adults are - equally obviously and uncontrollably - always involved in schooling their children, instructing them, methodically and systematically influencing, controlling, indoctrinating, correcting, punishing and rewarding their children’s behaviour. Just as it is normal for the younger generation to learn, so is it normal for the older generation to teach.

Homo sapiens is the name Linnaeus gave to our species in 1758. In those days, it was a matter of course that people considered only adult specimens of a species, and thus it is understandable that Linnaeus chose the word sapiens - ‘wise’ in Latin - to characterise our most essential characteristic. But if we take into account that people ‘live in time’, that they are and always will be developing, that they are therefore always involved in their own development and in their own learning and teaching, and also that they remain young for a very long time, then it might be better to call ourselves Homo educandus: the educatable human being.3 This species may not be wise, or not yet wise, but is always trying to become wiser. This book is about Homo educandus - and in particular about the social setting in which they have to live their life in Western Europe.

Homo educandus has gone through an enormous evolution, which is no longer simply a question of biology - at least not if we see biology as exclusively focusing on the life processes we share with animals and plants, and if we try to isolate these processes from the influence of language, religion, history, art, science, culture and education. This evolution has guided us into the twenty-first century and is now letting us grow up ina country with thousands of school buildings. Nowhere can we identify Homo educandus better than in these school buildings: loyal young people who are learning and dedicated older people who are teaching.

THE SCHOOL BUILDING: SHACK OR SPACE?

There are many thousands of school buildings in Western Europe: large, small, accessible, closed, boring, surprising, integrated, isolated, and so on. Many schools, and in all shapes and sizes. But despite all the obvious differences, there is also something that all these buildings have in common: they represent the institutionalisation of Homo educandus. They show us the walls within which our existence is shaped in accordance with today’s wishes.

Institutionalisation is a good thing. It simplifies and streamlines our lives to an enormous extent, and as Arnold Gehlen put it so articulately, it creates a nest built in nature.4 Thanks to institutionalisation, none of us needs to start from the beginning. We no longer need to invent human existence by ourselves, but we find it in all kinds of ways that are practicable and above all liveable. But these ways also have something compelling, and this, unfortunately, is the downside.

The two sides of institutionalisation can be observed in the school building, in the practice space that this can be, but also in the rehearsal shack that it might become.’ The school building can be a wonderful space to practise, a protected area where we can experiment and try out life to our heart's content. The school building can offer us this educational space in which we are encouraged, invited and welcomed to participate. In this space, we are protected from the consequences that our impulsive, childish, primitive, ill-considered and investigative behaviour might have had if we had immediately been left to our own devices. Musicians also need a practice space: a domain where they can explore melodies, rhythms and arrangements without any limits, without an audience, a space where they can try out things and where the outcome really does not matter yet.

As a writer, I am familiar with such a space. The text that you are reading now has been formulated, rewritten, cut and pasted, moved and removed, time and again. All this time, I was alone, I was my own reader, the only reader, as writing is mainly reading, tasting words, trying out phrases, deleting and starting over again. You are reading this now - the final text - but you have no idea how many words and phrases have stood here before, or how I stared at the screen in my own office, was in doubt, got into the flow of writing, only to look back later and return to that paragraph and make it vanish into thin air with a click of the mouse. As a writer, I need that practice space, so that without an audience, with only my own, well-meaning but also critical judgment, I can shape the text that has become this book. Musicians have try-outs before they go on tour. I do something similar by submitting my manuscript to my first readers.¢®

A school building is just such a practice space, a protected, educational space where we can try out what it is like to be a human being, where we can practise our writing and maths, our reading, our singing and drawing, using all the skills that are on offer to help us lead our lives as human beings. We do this without an audience, not in a public space, not in the street. We do this under the guidance of an encouraging, well-meaning, honest and critically constructive teacher, who demonstrates to us time and again how things are done, and who does not have an axe to grind with us, but who teaches us. This is the beautiful, enriching, formative power of institutions: they help us develop our existence in such a way that it can be a flourishing, healthy, happy, human existence.

But there is also the downside that I mentioned earlier: institutions can be oppressive. The school building can become a stifling rehearsal shack, a stuffy place where our spontaneity is disciplined, where we lack oxygen and in the end we only long for space, for escape, for an exit. After all, there is no innovation in a rehearsal room: there is only rehearsing, rehearsing and more rehearsing. This is where we revise for exams, in a mind-numbing atmosphere.

Such a mind-numbing climate is not inevitable, of course. Musicians need their rehearsal rooms: once they are on stage with an audience, they need to have songs to play, which they have rehearsed, which they know backwards, which they can perform in harmony with their band members. This takes a lot of rehearsing, a lot of hard work, and rehearsal after rehearsal. If the songs are beautiful, if it is music to your heart, then you will also be able to feel the inspiration in the rehearsal room, you will be able to get into the flow and become part of the playing. I remember that when I used to play football, we sometimes played better and more gracefully during the training matches than during the ‘real’ events. But I also remember and recognise the suffocating, mind-numbing side of other rehearsal rooms, where you were only allowed to do exactly what you are supposed to do and where a critical, inquisitive attitude was frowned upon. I recognise the disciplinary compulsion emanating from institutions, the ridiculous mantras that need to be repeated.

Part I of this book deals with this suffocating side of our school system. To me, this book tells a classic emancipatory story: the institution which we have formed and reinforced together is hemming us in. This institution does not deliver what it promises. Shaping has turned into misshaping. The school building has become a rehearsal shack, in the bad meaning of the word. It is high time to reclaim our practice space, to regain it and to re-create it.

ROLE EXPLORATION

In order to be able to claim the school building as a practice space again, we need ideas about what such a space should look like and about what we should and would like to practise there. A fundamental idea about this comes from John Dewey.’ I would like to use what Dewey calls dramatic rehearsal - or role exploration - as the fundamental idea to characterise the essence of the school building as a practice space. In discussing this concept, I will use two other ideas from Dewey: intelligence, in the sense of the ability to deal successfully with ambiguities, and democracy, as a joint, investigative way of living.

To introduce the idea of role exploration, I use - like Dewey - Darwin's naturalism as a departure point. As living beings, we are dealing with an environment that regularly challenges us because it is ambiguous in all sorts of ways. We can find ambiguities anywhere: vague, empty spaces in our experience. Under a shrub you see a black shadow moving and you wonder whether it is a blackbird or a rat. The clouds are turning grey and you wonder whether it is going to rain or not. Someone is approaching you on a narrow pavement, and you wonder whether they will pass you on the right or on the left.

What do we do in situations like this? Dewey says that this is when we use our intelligence, that we imagine a space between stimulus and response in which we can explore different scenarios. We try to gain insight into the consequences of these different scenarios and try to find out whether we can discover clues in the current scenario that point towards a particular outcome. If it is a rat, it will scurry along the ground, it will not be able to fly away and there will be a long, thin, round tail for you to see. If the oncoming person intends to pass you on your left, then they will veer slightly to the left at an appropriate distance to make room for you. This is how we use our intelligence to anticipate how the scenario will unfold in each case. In this sense, intelligence is the ability to explore the future, to anticipate what will happen so that we will be able to respond better and more quickly when that future occurs.

Role exploration is a variation of this use of our intelligence. Role exploration is imagining the course of a social scenario, a scenario in which there are several people who all have a certain role which they can play in a certain way. The example of the man approaching you on the pavement is one of these social scenarios. It is a very simple scenario in which there are only a few possible alternatives. In the two obvious, normal outcomes the man will either pass you on the left or on the right, and depending on the route he chooses, you choose the other side.

However, in this scenario you need to take a third outcome into account. After all, you might also bump into each other because neither of you is paying attention to the other, or because one of you intentionally tries to collide with the other. And similar to this third alternative, there might also be an unexpected fourth outcome, in which you clumsily and embarrassingly ‘dance’ in front of each other for a while, because you keep choosing the same side to pass.

In role exploration, you imagine these four possible outcomes. You explore the emotions that can occur in these outcomes, you try to articulate the values that are expressed in these emotions, and then you determine an action plan. You cannot carry out that action plan completely on your own. After all, it is a social scenario, in which several actors play a role. Sometimes, for example in the scenario of the person approaching you on the narrow pavement, there is little opportunity for communication and mutual finetuning. You will then alone, in your mind, play out these alternative scenarios, no doubt just like the oncoming person is doing. You are both intelligent and you will have to come up with an action plan in which you take that communicative limitation into account. If you really want to avoid that embarrassing fourth outcome, you might come up with an action plan in which at a great distance you start making exaggerated courteous gestures indicating that you are making room for the other person.

When it comes to coordination and fine-tuning, people are brilliant. On the one hand, we can clearly observe this in the formation of institutions, of culture, of entrenched common habits. People keep to the left. This is what they do as soon as they enter the public road, on foot, by bike and by car. This is a habit that everyone internalises in their early days and then you never have to think about it anymore, except of course when you are on the continent. Coordination problems often have several solutions. Passing on the right works just as well as passing on the left, but you need to organise it collectively. And this is where Dewey's third idea comes into play: democracy as a joint, investigative way of living.

The idea is as follows. When on their own, people can imagine alternative scenarios to determine what could happen in a certain situation and what would be the best course of action to take. This is what intelligence looks like if we confine ourselves to individual specimens of Homo sapiens. But people do not live alone, people live in a shared world, for many years, with older and younger people together. People are specimens of Homo educandus. Fundamentally, people live in a language community, with the words they have learned to describe their lives. And, as we saw above, as an independent individual working on your own you cannot proceed very far in developing an intelligent action plan for social scenarios. After all, in social scenarios, you work together. You can only build a railway line or have a fun evening in the pub if you can react constructively, if you inform each other about your intentions, if you discuss how to approach certain tasks and align each other’s plans and interests. This communicative alignment is crucial for a successful society. People need to live successfully together on a daily basis and in every possible situation, which is why they really have to invest permanently in communicative coordination. This is what people learn to do throughout their lives. Above all, they have to do it continuously, just as they have to learn continuously. That is what living together requires in every new situation.