The platonism of the education system

Imagen:  James Joyce – Pixabay

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Alfonso A. Gracia Gómez

I rather doubt that the education system has ever been so deeply afflicted by Platonism as it is today. The thought may seem paradoxical, given that we also inhabit a kind of golden age of positivist empirio-criticism. Everywhere one turns, one finds appeals to the supposedly scientific foundations of educational planning—schemes more concerned with what “the evidence” is meant to tell us about how learning happens than with what, in fact, ought to be learnt. “Why must every pupil know the same things”, the pedagogue asks, “if people do not all share the same interests?” Let us, then, amass a handful of methodologies and ensure that our pupils “learn well”, irrespective of what it is they (allegedly) come to learn “so well”.

The outcome of this mindset is a practice condemned to disdain content in order to focus exclusively on form. The question is not whether “something” is, in practice, still being taught. Plainly, all teaching is the teaching of “something”; “learning to learn” is a redundant and faintly ridiculous fiction, for all learning does no more than serve the purpose of continued learning. And this is especially undeniable when we are talking about compulsory education.

The issue of content, therefore, is necessarily of another order: it concerns something which, in Kantian terms, cannot be properly grasped by reference to the interests inherent in our practices (in this case educational ones, for this is what we do as teachers), but only in relation to the maxims that lend our actions their meaning. And it is precisely here that the Platonism of today’s education system resides: in this absurd obsession with form—an obsession that attends only to method, instrument and objective, and does so at the expense of everything to do with content, activity, or indeed desire itself.

It is perhaps in assessment that this formalist fixation shows itself most clearly. What the champions of pedagogical reform currently call “assessment” has become a kind of Doppelgänger—a metaphysical stand-in that, in practice, concerns itself with nothing except the exhaustive formalisation of whatever the teacher has done in the classroom. The whole thing culminates in a perversion: the consequence (the justification of what has been done in class) is mistaken for the cause—the formal cause, as Aristotle would have put it.

Such is the importance attached to recording everything that is being done, has been done, and will be done—to ensuring that documentary evidence exists for every last how of that so-called “process”, which, with a flourish of ponderous pedantry, is solemnly labelled the “teaching–learning process”—that one is sometimes tempted to ask whether it wouldn’t simply be easier to film the lessons outright. For that, after all, appears to be the bureaucratic ideal: an administrative machine designed to extract what might otherwise remain implicit and thereby turn any possible trace of the teacher’s increasingly suspect subjectivity into “data” (and thus into an objective in its own right).

Our work is thus not merely guided but coerced by this demand for objectivity—an injunction that needlessly duplicates our practice into two co-dependent spheres of reality: on the one hand, the facts, what is; on the other, their explanation, what ought to be. As a result, we have banished from the classroom not only knowledge but any space for subjectivity. And in this opening-up of our experience to an ontology that doubles every entity, one sees just how thoroughly the pedagogue mistakes “form”—the ought, the sanctioned and consecrated ideal—for genuine reality. It is this ideal that is endlessly signed off, filed away and sacralised in an ever-expanding thicket of paperwork: the pedagogical “idea”, the method, the objective.

What actually takes place in the classroom is never an “in itself” for the pedagogue; hence his haughty astonishment when confronted with trivial statements such as “exams only assess the ability to take exams”. And what else, one might ask, could they possibly assess? Here we find his answer to a question no one has posed: “competence” and the “exit profile”. For how else could the neo-Platonic pedagogist conceive the assessment process, if not as a path of approximation towards some supposed ideal—an ideal that can, conveniently, be stipulated in advance?

Thus, behind the purported benevolence that characterises contemporary pedagogical currents lies a veritable prison of anti-subjectivist formalism—one that refuses to acknowledge anything resembling the teacher’s desire to teach or the pupil’s desire to learn. Just as, for Saint Augustine, evil did not strictly exist but was understood as a matter of one’s distance from the divine Truth, so for the pedagogue there are no “bad” pupils, merely pupils more or less removed from an ideal to which they must, inevitably, be brought closer. Yet this pupil whom he claims to have placed at the “centre” of the education system is not the real pupil at all; he understands the real child only as a “reflection”, a defective “copy” of the ideal fashioned by the pseudo-theoretical tangle of objectives, key competences and learning instruments—the most refined jargon-laden “technology” pressed into the service of the same old religious fetishes.

As a corollary, bound as we are by the maxim of “making the pupil competent”, teachers are no longer permitted to teach—which is precisely what makes them teachers—nor, by the same token, are pupils permitted to learn, which is what would truly make them pupils. At best, teachers and pupils alike are obliged to teach, on the one hand, and to learn, on the other, despite the circumstances, all of us constrained by an ontological error which, it seems, most professionals in the education system could not care less about, notwithstanding the catastrophic consequences it promises. Chief among these is that we are condemning didactics to become ever more subjugated to the supposedly “scientific” discipline of pedagogy—just as, in another age, philosophy declared itself the handmaiden of theology. Schools of education would do well to read some Nietzsche. The trouble is that, once they had, I am not entirely sure any of them would still be standing.

Source: educational EVIDENCE

Rights: Creative Commons