Two weeks later …

Helen McCormack, November 16th 2009.

It has taken me a long time to get down to writing my thoughts on our meeting at the abode. This is partly due to my hectic family life and partly through my own hesitancy at putting these thoughts down on a blog. I enjoyed the three days that we spent discussing our various approaches to learning and teaching although, personally, this brought home to me just how “unprepared” my own approach is.

What struck me most about the few articles we were directed to during the three days was the emphasis on Martin Heidegger’s writings on education and I have been following up these ideas (very randomly) in an attempt to find a way in to this subject area. Heidegger’s notion of embodied knowledge is particularly relevant to teaching in the crafts and I was familiar with his essay “The Question Concerning Technology”. While this gives the impression that Heidegger was anti-technology, recent writings have suggested that he was, in fact, much more aware of what we might recognise now as “supercomplexity” in Barnett’s words. Which is why Postmodernists are attracted to Heidegger’s work. Reading Michael A Peter’s Heidegger, Education and Modernity, I came across this extract which seemed to touch on our discussions around the commodification of education more generally:

“Education as ‘soft technology’ in the so-called knowledge economy, treats people as ‘human resources’ or ‘human capital’ and is designed to turn out flexible, multi-skilled knowledge-workers for the twenty-first century”.

“When one has explored in some detail the way in which Heidegger’s thinking moves beyond objectivity, beyond ‘humanism’, beyond technological rationality, beyond traditional concepts of language, truth, and thinking as such, one cannot escape the sense that this is a path resolutely outside and beyond the general horizons of modern thought”.  (Richard Palmer, 1979).

“What might an education look like in these terms?”

“The answer to this question may well involve a critique of modernity and the nihilism of modernity and modernisation that levels everything and reduces human beings to flexible raw materials in the service of the world technological system. Exactly what can Heidegger contribute to an education that starts from this premise, rather than from the very opposite or opposing premise – one based on principles of the modernisation of education, that seeks to enhance education’s maximum contribution to national competitive advantage in the world techno-economic system? …”.

Clearly, in pursuing a sense of “being” Heidegger seeks to emphasise what we may consider to be “humility” and “authenticity” about what we do as teachers. My challenge to the suspicion of what a “commodification” of education entails is based on recent explorations of the anthropology of consumerism and how this allows us to consider the wider complexities of consumption theory. For example, it is only because we exist in a privileged, educated, Western European economy that we have the luxury to question other cultures for whom the economic imperative of life is prescient. Supercomplexity, in my basic understanding of it, encompasses these much wider implications of consumerism in the early years of the twenty-first century. Heidegger’s ideas, therefore, are useful in providing a “position” that can be determined as in some sense a form of “being” but that doesn’t require us to think of education as always looking to the past.

Also, I am thinking about the ARP – more about this later in the week.