Unmaking Sense

Episode 2.28: The industrialisation of education placed knowledge and skills before human well-being

Something akin to Hegel’s view was adopted enthusiastically to supply the industrial revolution with a literate, numerate workforce. Knowing mattered more than being; it mattered so much to inculcate knowledge and skills that it did not matter much if the body and spirit were broken in the process.

Episode 2.27: Hegel’s appalling educational philosophy contrasted with coached personalised learning

Hegel on crushing individuality and the contrast with personalised learning delivered by coaches whose skills are matched to the needs and interests of each pupil.

Episode 2.26: The waste of talent entailed by education’s interest in only a narrow range of gifts.

IQ tests, Gifted & Talented programmes, Prize Givings and the other paraphernalia of a self-congratulatory education system’s determination only to measure what it is set up to produce and to cast aside those who cannot demonstrate their gifts when assessed on such narrow scales. To take responsibility for our own education someone has to help us to get started, to reach the stage of self-understanding needed before we can undertake such a demanding exercise.

Episode 2.25: Education chooses systems of assessment that are self-reinforcing to validate itself.

Education first defines what is to count as success and then blames those who cannot meet those criteria for their failure to do so. This is scapegoating: blaming innocents for the failures of the system as a whole.

Episode 2.24: Participative education; why the system must be changed from within as we go along.

Contemplative attitudes that point the finger because they deny that we are all involved. Neurath’s ship that must be repaired while under way because there is no island, no solid ground to beach it while we make repairs.

Episode 2.23: Scapegoating as a way of pretending that how we have made sense of the world is fine.

Localising blame on individuals, groups, tribes, races, nations is a form of scapegoating designed to absolve ourselves from responsibility for how the world is.

Episode 2.22: Education embodies indeterminateness of ends by plurality of means in intelligent play

Indeterminateness of ends by a plurality of means deployed by intelligent experimentation and play leads to education in which socially embedded individuals can achieve trivalent happiness.

Episode 2.21: Playing, experimenting, studying and exploring are all part of teaching and learning.

We denigrate play and experiment to our educational cost and loss. Learning is easier and more efficient when we enjoy it. Play is enjoyable. Teaching style needs to change as much as syllabus content for effective enjoyable learning.

Episode 2.20: How conservative social forces tend to inhibit educational change.

Traditional thinking, concerns not to disadvantage children and a narrow understanding of how experimentation works conspire to militate against imaginative, innovative educational reform. We need to reimagine educational experimentation along lines indicated by play rather than monolithic studiousness.

Episode 2.19: Obstacles to the implementation of the system so described.

All kinds of things militate against the implementation of the programme as described: tradition; founders; governors; parents; curriculums; assessment; national expectations; employers; universities; league tables; generally “the way we have historically made sense of and implemented education”.