Education, Lockdown, and Becoming Human
Dr. David Lewin · September 1, 2022
These are strange times for education. With astonishing speed students and teachers had to adapt to the fact that our educational systems were to be switched off or radically altered for months—in some cases years—as we were locked down. Technology came to the rescue, of course. We discovered we might never have to leave the house again, and some of us secretly delighted in this novel reclusion. But then we were expected to resume. And like an old, rather unreliable engine, starting up again has not been straightforward. The engine still just about runs, but it seems that our direction is unclear: where exactly are we going, again? And why?
The thing about education is that it is grounded in optimism: it needs to have faith in the future since its direction is set by that faith. But can we still be optimistic? The prognosis for humanity in the age of the so-called Anthropocene [1] is not good, and so we might well ask: how are we to prepare for the future? With increasing urgency and reality, the headlines continue to point to a bleak future for our children[2]. As well as supporting social mobility and working to bridge the ever-growing chasm between rich and poor, education is supposed to equip the next generation to earn an honest wage. Yet it is failing on both counts, never mind the more universal struggle for the future of the planet. The functionalist logic of education, it seems, is failing.
The crisis of the pandemic over the last two years has done nothing to change the structure of this functionalist logic. If anything, functionalism has been given a new lease. Students have been curtailed, their bodies disciplined by the panoptical presence of the cameras that frame them. Their attention has been commodified through what Yves Citton calls “media enthralments and attention regimes”[3]. Students have had little opportunity for the sociality of educational life, which is to say, of education itself. For education is nothing if not social—and, as a fascinating parallel to this point, Citton persuasively argues that attention is also best understood as a social act. The heart of teaching is the gathering and drawing of attention—of bearing witness—to something in the world. The conditions for this include being with students so that something can be studied together. Children must be taught together but they must also—and this is probably more important—play together, plot together, and misbehave together. The Zoom “classroom” is no more a place for education than it is for plotting or misbehaving. And rather than see misbehaviour as educational failure, or perhaps an unfortunate by-product of educational structures, it could rather be seen as children discovering, exploring, and enacting their own forms of sociality, and of taking up the world in their own terms—of seeking, finding, and making a common world. Perhaps this is the single worst dimension of Zoom: that children can’t hang out together.
Yes, there is the space—or the emptiness—of the zoom room. But it is not designed for hanging around. Hanging around has an important pedagogical heritage in the medieval concept of otiosity, for instance, which means many things, from laziness to serving no useful purpose to being at leisure[4]. Otiosity serves no measurable purpose. And yet it is central to the formation of an educational space in which the young, freed from necessities of work, are able to discover themselves and a world without being enframed by the otherwise inexorable logic of functionalism. Leisure, as Josef Pieper reminds us, is the basis of culture. This link between leisure, culture and an education freed from functionalism is implied when Pieper says: “Leisure in Greek is skole, and in Latin scola, the English ‘school,’”[5] a point already noted by Brent Waters in an earlier blog in this series.
In the sphere of education, the crisis of the pandemic has certainly not gone to waste. We might imagine that lockdown is over and that for most of us normal life has resumed. But it hasn’t. One doesn’t need to have lost a close friend or relative to feel the impossibility of a return to normality. The politics of lockdown provided those in charge with an opportunity to reshape social life. A kind of lockdown lingers in how life goes on “after” lockdown. The act of lockdown was itself a collapse of politics and of democracy. All aspects of society, from friendship and love—to work and education—were instantly collapsed and reframed by the inexorable and unquestioned logic of health. This logic was itself a presumption borne of big data, gathered and reported to control and to justify the new conditions of our lockdown life. And it has provided educational institutions with a golden opportunity to control, to discipline, and to reduce education to base transmission. Education systems are looking to rationalise, to discern whether the short-term pivot to online can be sustained indefinitely to ensure the crisis is not wasted[6].
If we don’t think about where we are going, what education is for, or what it should do, then this crisis will truly have been wasted. The suspension of the workaday world might have given us a unique insight into what suspension could mean for education. Like Pieper, Jan Masschelein and Maartin Simons have persuasively argued that education is fundamentally a kind of leisure, in which the functionalist logic of work must be suspended:
Firstly, the teacher must free the child from all expertise that ascribes an immediate function, explanation or destination to what that child does. In a sense, “letting a kid be a kid” is no empty slogan. This means allowing a child to forget the plans and expectations of his parents as well as those of employers, politicians, and religious leaders in order to allow that child to become absorbed in study and practice. It means allowing a child to forget the ordinary world, where everything has a function and an intention. It means keeping out the ordinary world of experts for whom every kind of conduct is either a call for help or a symptom to be remedied. It means suspending the question of usefulness or value and eliminating one’s selfish intentions for students [7].
We must not forget that schools offer more than education. Of course, that might depend on what we mean by education—or school (skole; scola). We normally have in mind something pretty functionalist, something involving processes we can anticipate, control, measure. But something happens to human beings in the course of “education” (or it is schooling?) which is almost impossible to predict, control, or measure. Children don’t just grow: they learn to become who they are. Perhaps that sounds tautological: to become who they are. But it names the paradox of education, which is that we aspire to become human, what we already are. This isn’t functionalism. It is humanism. It is theology.
Jens Zimmerman expresses this theologically when he says we are created in the image of Christ in order to become like Christ. The call to become oneself is a wondrously open one. It reminds us that our lives are an ongoing invitation to explore what it means to be human. We are not fixed. We are not locked down. The best prospect of success in this exploration is to work together.
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[1] The Anthropocene is defined as a new geological epoch in which humans have become the single most influential species on the planet. See Katie Pavid “What is the Anthropocene and why does it matter?” The Natural History Museum, https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/what-is-the-anthropocene.html
[2] See, for instance, Nadeine Asbali, “There is very little to celebrate about these A-level results – inequalities just got worse,” The Guardian, August 18, 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/aug/18/there-is-very-little-to-celebrate-about-these-a-level-results-inequalities-just-got-worse.
[3] Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention (Cambridge UK: Polity, 2016), 27.
[4] Karsten Kenklies, “Dōgen's Time and the Flow of Otiosity—Exiting the Educational Rat Race,” Journal of Philosophy of Education 54, no. 3 (2020): 617–30, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9752.12410.
[5] Josef Pieper, Leisure the Basis of Culture and The Philosophical Act, trans. Alexander Dru (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2009), 46–7.
[6] To this, see Kalyn Belsha and Matt Barnum, “Sticking around: Most big districts will offer virtual learning this fall, a sign of pandemic’s effect,” Chalkbeat, June 6, 2022, https://www.chalkbeat.org/2022/6/6/23153483/big-school-districts-virtual-learning-fall-2022.
[7] Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons, In Defence of School: A Public Issue, trans. Jack McMartin (Leuven: E-ducation, Culture & Society Publishers, 2013), 86.