Power and Models of Education

Ages ago I wrote an article called “Auditland” which I never published. In it, I wondered a lot about the new micro-controls over education. Since then, I’ve been thinking a lot about these in relation to other aspects of education—the ease with which many of these controls are assumed as natural, the strangeness of the debates that surround education (for example, in which the Christian right in the US objects to cognitivist-based “mastery learning” because it doesn’t “break the will” of the child), but most of all I’ve been thinking about the relation between models, technics and what happens when these are brought into the mess of everyday experience.

So I’m interested in the power of models, their messy arrival in actual events, and in the power of education as a way that models come into the rest of society.

So this blog is about models of education for the most part, although I’ll also link up to interesting discussions and so on about other things to do with education.

The question I’m currently thinking about with regard to our media programs “network literacies project” (being convened by the amazing Mat Wall-Smith who is a great theorist as well as technician and educator), is again one of models. I can put this simply if I don’t have to answer the questions that arise. There are lots of models of education, but the most prominent since WW2 has undoubtedly been the “cognitivist” model. Human brains are like computers, with inputs, symbolic processing, and outputs, and human systems, such as education, should follow this. Thus the supposed need for everything to be defined in terms of learning outcomes, attributes etc. This seems to line everything up particular well when you bring education and technology together. However, what happens when you introduce feedback, when you can’t predict where the system will go? In short, how many of the standard models of education are thrown in the air, precisely by open access and new media interventions in the experience of learning? Michael Bauwens sums the event up well as “the maturation of network cultures as counter-institutions”.

I find this throwing in the air of the old models pretty exciting. It’s also something of relief. Here I will only quote a great book on Gregory Bateson by Noel Charlton:

He believes it possible that we can recover “the grace” of realizing our interrelated membership of the community of living organisms on the planet. The route to this realization is iva personal engagement with the more-than-rational processes of the natural world and of human art. Poetry, painting, dance, music, humor, metaphor, “the best of religion”, and “natural history” all offer to us the possibility of renewed access to the wisdom that we, as species, have gained during millions of years of evolution—now overlaid and rendered unavailable to us by our “self-conscious purposiveness” … he means that we have learned, through the centuries, to identiy single goals for our purposes. We have come to think of causality as a series of straight-line, “knock-on” effects that be managed by a single human “self”, in its own personal interests—without allowing for all the interpenetrating influences and effects flowing between each of us and the wider living world. (Gregory Bateson: Mind, Beauty, and the Sacred Earth, p1)

I’m not sure if I’m currently as optimistic as Charlton or Bateson, and I should quality the “spirituality” here as meaning something—in Bateson’s terms—to do with reconnecting to the world at large (Deleuze and Guattari said the problem is that we don’t believe in the world anymore). However, what excites about many aspects of education (and technology, networks, open access, new concepts, methods and models) is that there is so much movement towards inter-connection, relationality, complexity. It’s a great time to be involved in education.