Horizontal Education
An attempt to decouple education from productivity
Although the news is constantly publishing content that is worthy of the turbulent descriptor, the purpose of this piece today is to take an initial stab at dissecting the current state of education. Empathy is a prevalent theme in most of my writing, specifically how the conservative apparatus uses hierarchy to extinguish the presence of and necessity for empathy. It is this process that we will attempt to tackle today. However, this will not be a political or historical analysis, but more of a philosophical analysis of what contemporary education is, how it functions, and how it contributes to the current turbulent situation.
For starters, I want to state that this piece will not be focusing on schooling, teaching, or learning. Those are entirely separate entities that require entirely separate analysis. What this piece focusses on is education. In essence, education is the evaluation of selfhood within context or culture. We will delve into this primary definition of education by understanding that education is not a process grounded in the fixed past or future; it is a fluid process of the present. Indeed, we will look at how education has become intimately linked to the market idea of productivity, a productivity that is distinctly vertical.
Education is a tricky term to define. Goodlad noted that it is often paired with descriptors such as “better education” or “moral education.”[1] However, when left alone, education is a daunting word to come to terms with. It is difficult to pin down and as one continues to investigate the meaning of the word education, more definitions appear to fit. The definition I have come to adopt is one derived from Dewey and Goodlad. Dewey stated that society must “cease conceiving of education as mere preparation for later life, and make of it the full meaning of present life.”[2] Similarly, Goodlad noted that education alludes to the process in which selfhood is explored in the context of one’s culture.[3] With these definitions in mind, we will combine them to create a uniform definition of education as a continuous process of evaluating and exploring one’s present selfhood in context. To this end, as Maynard Hitchins asserted, “education is everywhere the same.”[4]
Now that we have a basic definition of what education is, I think it is important to delve into why this specific definition of education is important. To evaluate and explore one’s present selfhood in context assumes that the individual is studying both the self and the context. Therefore, education is not explicitly focused on selfhood, but how one’s selfhood resides within the greater context of society. To me, this process of education closely aligns with Dewey’s understanding of democracy. Democracy, in this sense, is not a form of majority governance, but an understanding that society is a comprised collective of individuals who strive to utilize the self for the betterment of the whole.[5] In a different vein, Freire and Mezirow both asserted that education is liberating. Liberating in the sense that education is imperative for understanding how selfhood interacts with power and the social structures power creates.[6] In short, education is now the continuous process of evaluating and exploring one’s present selfhood with the purpose of liberating the self through an understanding of how power intersects with and commands society.
This definition of education might appear confusing if not foreign to most people. After enduring well over a decade of schooling at the primary, secondary, and tertiary level, one might question how on earth anyone could arrive at this definition. To me, contemporary education is intimately linked to the idea of productivity. Specifically, a market understanding of productivity that relegates the exploration of selfhood (and consequently self-worth) with what I will call, vertical productivity. Interacting with, internalizing, and reflecting on information and experiences are central to education. However, in today’s market sense of the term, one must constantly see interaction, internalization, and reflectional as a process of vertical growth. This begins early. Children and teachers are encouraged to constantly increase. Increase test scores, increase one’s ability to achieve, and increase one’s ability to create more. In essence, one’s selfhood becomes continuously defined by what one was and what one will be, notably leaving the present absent of any scrutiny.
It is important to note that yes, this is deliberate, and yes, it is malicious. These words might appear to be a little charged to some, but if you look at the past 200 years or so, it is evident that those who benefit from this model of education are not found in the collective. Relegating an individual to base their selfhood on vertical productivity exclusively benefits the market and those who reap the benefits of a competitive market (I will leave you to read your own theory on this phenomenon but if anyone is interested in further insight there is a great author whose name rhymes with marks). To better understand how this market framework deteriorates the meaning of education and one’s understanding of selfhood, I would like to use a maze to help illustrate my point. Imagine one’s education or progression of life as being done in the hallway of a maze. The current market understanding of education frames the evaluation of selfhood in vertical terms; meaning, the individual can only conceptualize movement in two dimensions (forward = progress, backward = regression). To me, this is a perfect recipe to create a society that can only function in a competitive environment. If one cannot see or interact horizontally, then the problems of neighboring hallways need not be of concern.
Unfortunately, this narrow definition of education only equips the individual with the necessary tools to stay within the confines of their individual hallway (think how the “self-help” or business book industry focuses solely on improvement of self while willfully ignoring any critique of societal structures). This, to me, is how you end up with a society that cannot comprehend, much less apply, empathy. If we are to adopt the previous definition of education based on what Dewey, Freire, Goodlad, Hitchins, and Mezirow outline, then it is apparent that education should be focused on granting the individual the tools and skills necessary to understand the maze in its entirety. Indeed, for one to evaluate and explore their selfhood (their existence within their unique hallway) they must understand how the hallway resides within the entirety of the maze (individual cultural context, societal structures of power, shifting social dynamics). This grants the individual a different understanding of education. For education is no longer explicitly linked to productivity or progress within one’s hallway, but how each of our unique hallways change the formation of the maze.
To be sure, this is what I mean by horizontal education. Vertical productivity conditions the individual to see education as purely selfish in the sense that the only goal of selfhood is to find the end of the hallway. This does not mean that one is free from the maze. It takes a birds-eye, or horizontal, educative process to see how one can navigate through the maze. An understanding of the collective is imperative for navigating the success of the self. Success is therefore exported out of the individual domain and into collective society. One’s individual autonomy and their vertical ascension through their hallways is no longer the focus of education, thus freeing the self from the idea that any integration of horizontal ideas is threatening. To put it simply, if one engages in horizontal education, or rather if society begins implementing horizontal education, then empathy is surely to follow.
Now, how do we insert horizontal education or how do we undue vertical productivity? To me, this begins both in and out of the schools. Goodlad rightfully remined us that schools “mirror society; they do not drive it”[7] Furthermore, Goodlad noted that making schools the sole party responsible for education absolves the public of any sort of educative responsibility.[8] But more on that later. For now, let us focus on the first quote. If schools mirror society, then we must look at what schools are doing to better understand society. To me, the major contributor to the contemporary pairing of education with vertical productivity lies in the overemphasis on quantitative achievement data. While quantitative data is essential for understanding where a learner is, it is often used to define what they cannot be.
Essentially, this forces the learner, the instructor, and the school to see education not as a process of the present (addressing the needs of the learner regardless of age, grade, etc.) but as a process fixed in the past and the future. Therefore, it is not hard to see how individuals then emerge from the school system believing that education is anything other than quantitative growth or decay as an indicator of one’s current or future standing within society. Learners, instructors, and schools are focused on what once was or what can be, not what is. Reflection is now paired with growth. Vertical growth instead of horizontal growth. Instead of equipping the learner with the ability to reflect horizontally to understand how power and societal structures might impact their educative process, thus linking them to a collective community, we simply equip them with the tools to stumble down their individual vertical hallways.
This manifests in society because now, as we can see, society strictly sees education as an individual endeavor. Political, social, moral, economic, etc. crisis are seen only through the lens of one’s individual hallway. It is difficult to acquire the tools to see the labyrinth. It is almost impossible to track the shifting landscapes of power (something like the shifting staircases in that one harry potter movie) and how each individual hallway creates a collective tapestry of humanity. It is through a societal focus on vertical, quantitative productivity that education has been warped to exclude context. When I hear that conservatives simply need “more education” I always wondered what people meant by that. This is my attempt to understand and unpack that assertion by explaining they do not need more education, we all need a different educational focus.
It is not knowledge or intellectual ability that is lacking. It is the inability to equate education with a collective responsibility. To foster a society in which collaboration is deemed more worthy of implementation than competition, we must integrate horizontal perspectives. Interacting with perspectives can be transformative (Mezirow wrote extensively on this) but I would like to push this a bit further. Interacting with perspectives and engaging in internal conflict (critical reflection) encourages an education grounded in but not limited to context. Ultimately, the purpose of education is to equip the learner or the individual with the ability to understand and analyze how one’s selfhood interacts within the greater context of humanity by engaging with the endless number of hallways that make up the complex labyrinth of society. This is how empathy is introduced, fostered, and becomes engrained in society, through collective, horizontal education.[9]
[1] Goodlad, John I. In praise of education. New York: Teachers College Press, 1997.
[2] Dewey, John. “Self-Realization as the Moral Ideal.” The Philosophical Review 2, no. 6 (1893): 652–64. https://doi.org/10.2307/2176020.
[3] Goodlad, John I. In praise of education.
[4] Ibid, 9.
[5] Dewey, John. “The Ethics of Democracy.” Philosophical Papers, 2, no. 1 (1888): 1–28.
[6] Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the oppressed. Penguin Education, 1968.; Mezirow, Jack. “Perspective Transformation.” Adult Education 28, no. 2 (1978): 100–110.
[7] Goodlad, 17.
[8] Goodlad.
[9] The texts I included are informative but daunting. For anyone curious about some introductory texts, I recommend: Education a Brief Introduction by Gary Thomas, College: What it was, is, and should be by Andrew DeBlanco, The Public Purpose of Education and Schooling by John Goodlad & Timothy McMannon.