Edited by Anna Orridge, Monday, 20 Jul 2015, 21:50
Today, I stumbled on a podcast from the 'Philosophy Bites' team about the aims of education. The interviewee in this episode was an American philosopher called Meira Levinson, who spent a number of years teaching in high schools in some tough districts. She made quite a few interesting points, but I was really struck by the observation she made at the end. She said that education often aimed at lifting individuals out of their circumstances and helping them to improve their quality of life. However, what this essentially meant for many of her students, who were often born into poor and historically marginalised groups, was 'moving away' from their families and the communities which had nurtured them. This dislocation could be physical, when they pack up for university, but could be emotional too, since there is often a detachment which goes with 'pulling yourself up by the bootstraps', as the saying goes.
It made me think of another podcast I heard recently. (Yes, I know. I'm a newly converted and overly zealous podnerd. It appears to have become an addition to my gleaming arsenal of eccentricities, so I may as well own it.) Anyway, it was from 'This American Life' ('Need to know basis'' I think it was called) and it told the story of an incredibly gifted student from the wrong side of the tracks, who won a full scholarship to a prestigious university, but who then failed to turn up or engage with the course and ultimately dropped out. It was stressed on the program that dropout rates for kids in this situation are troublingly high. The presenter suggested that the reason for this was that these young people, who had never really been exposed to affluence and privilege, felt somehow as though it didn't belong to them and they didn't deserve it. Quite often, they had no family members who had taken a similar path, and they felt they had no example to follow.
There are elements of truth in this, of couse. But I think Levinson is really onto something when she says that education which aims only at 'saving' the odd individual effectively means leaving entire communities behind. That sense you might be deserting your family and betraying your roots when you go up a few rungs on the social ladder is nothing new, of course. It's why so many people can relate to Pip in 'Great Expectations'. He's mean and snobbish to kind old Joe, but I think most people can understand the pain of feeling you've 'outgrown' childhood friends in the process of becoming who you are meant to be. You get more than a hint of the of the 'boy done good' bitterness in 'Working Class Hero' by John Lennon:
Keep you doped with religion, and sex, and T.V. And you think you're so clever and classless and free But you're still fucking peasants as far as I can see
A working class hero is something to be A working class hero is something to be
There's room at the top they are telling you still But first you must learn how to smile as you kill If you want to be like the folks on the hill
How to tackle this? There has certainly been no lack of political noise about this. You can barely get through the first sentences of a manifesto without tripping over a reference to Social mobility or Aspiration. And then there is the whole 'No Child Left Behind' drive in the States. But none of this appears to have done much to shake up social stratification.
Levinson says that the key is to teach young people about citizenship. In that way, they will learn to organise and mobilise, in order to claim what is rightfully theirs and to change society for the better. That sounds fantastic, but I don't really see how we can 'educate' people out of apathy and propel them into community activism. Most people I know who are involved in that kind of thing have been inspired by events or life experiences out of school. Perhaps I'm being unduly pessimistic.
Do you think we can educate people to be citizens?
What's education for?
Today, I stumbled on a podcast from the 'Philosophy Bites' team about the aims of education. The interviewee in this episode was an American philosopher called Meira Levinson, who spent a number of years teaching in high schools in some tough districts. She made quite a few interesting points, but I was really struck by the observation she made at the end. She said that education often aimed at lifting individuals out of their circumstances and helping them to improve their quality of life. However, what this essentially meant for many of her students, who were often born into poor and historically marginalised groups, was 'moving away' from their families and the communities which had nurtured them. This dislocation could be physical, when they pack up for university, but could be emotional too, since there is often a detachment which goes with 'pulling yourself up by the bootstraps', as the saying goes.
It made me think of another podcast I heard recently. (Yes, I know. I'm a newly converted and overly zealous podnerd. It appears to have become an addition to my gleaming arsenal of eccentricities, so I may as well own it.) Anyway, it was from 'This American Life' ('Need to know basis'' I think it was called) and it told the story of an incredibly gifted student from the wrong side of the tracks, who won a full scholarship to a prestigious university, but who then failed to turn up or engage with the course and ultimately dropped out. It was stressed on the program that dropout rates for kids in this situation are troublingly high. The presenter suggested that the reason for this was that these young people, who had never really been exposed to affluence and privilege, felt somehow as though it didn't belong to them and they didn't deserve it. Quite often, they had no family members who had taken a similar path, and they felt they had no example to follow.
There are elements of truth in this, of couse. But I think Levinson is really onto something when she says that education which aims only at 'saving' the odd individual effectively means leaving entire communities behind. That sense you might be deserting your family and betraying your roots when you go up a few rungs on the social ladder is nothing new, of course. It's why so many people can relate to Pip in 'Great Expectations'. He's mean and snobbish to kind old Joe, but I think most people can understand the pain of feeling you've 'outgrown' childhood friends in the process of becoming who you are meant to be. You get more than a hint of the of the 'boy done good' bitterness in 'Working Class Hero' by John Lennon:
Keep you doped with religion, and sex, and T.V.
And you think you're so clever and classless and free
But you're still fucking peasants as far as I can see
A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be
There's room at the top they are telling you still
But first you must learn how to smile as you kill
If you want to be like the folks on the hill
How to tackle this? There has certainly been no lack of political noise about this. You can barely get through the first sentences of a manifesto without tripping over a reference to Social mobility or Aspiration. And then there is the whole 'No Child Left Behind' drive in the States. But none of this appears to have done much to shake up social stratification.
Levinson says that the key is to teach young people about citizenship. In that way, they will learn to organise and mobilise, in order to claim what is rightfully theirs and to change society for the better. That sounds fantastic, but I don't really see how we can 'educate' people out of apathy and propel them into community activism. Most people I know who are involved in that kind of thing have been inspired by events or life experiences out of school. Perhaps I'm being unduly pessimistic.
Do you think we can educate people to be citizens?