Teaching for life

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THE GREAT SCAM. Opinion section by David Cerdá

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David Cerdá

“Teaching for life” is a mantra much loved in certain pedagogical circles and by teachers with a somewhat pseudo-revolutionary vocation. It sounds so wholesome and harmless—rather like the slogan on a tub of organic yoghurt—that no one, except perhaps a “reactionary”, would dare oppose it. One could print it on T-shirts, stickers or phone wallpapers, or turn it into a catchy Instagram hashtag: #EducationForLife. I suspect that already happens. After all, who in their right mind would argue for teaching for death—or for teaching with no connection to life at all? The problem lies in the emptiness of the proposal, and above all in the way it is deployed as yet another weapon against the much-maligned “transmission of knowledge”. The word transmission, if you have not noticed, is carefully chosen so that it sounds like a bank transfer—something vaguely financial, faintly grubby and suspiciously capitalist. You know the idea.

Let us start with something obvious: life is already happening, and we learn about it every day—at the very least when we step outside our front door. It does not require an academic programme to teach it. Life is learned by walking, stumbling, working or playing. Parents—when they are present—teach life through gestures, rituals, examples and mistakes. Neighbourhoods, grandparents, friendships and even a fair amount of entertainment occupy that central place of practical learning which some educational theorists now seek to shoehorn into an already overcrowded curriculum. Besides, the slogan “teaching for life” assumes that life takes place outside while school happens inside—which is plainly absurd.

The pages of certain educational publications overflow with an almost liturgical vocabulary of “life” and “meaning”, though the meaning itself is rarely specified (even though it certainly could be). The copy-and-paste idea is always the same: more and more things must be crammed into the same school system, which is already stretched to breaking point. Schools—treated as though they were the sole source of learning—are expected to take responsibility for everything that life demands, replacing the immensely complex web of experiences that ought to unfold in the home and the wider world. After all, we have spent years dismantling both of those spheres while immersing ourselves in a suffocating form of expressive individualism. If schools are not teaching “for life”, might it be because other domains—family or community, for instance—have stopped doing so? Are we going to confront that problem—or not, because it might be branded ideologically suspect, or perhaps not yet, because those we dislike are not yet in power?

It is no coincidence that in societies where parents have more time to live alongside their children—to talk, read, be frustrated and laugh with them—the supposed deficit in what we call “life learning” is far less noticeable. Yet in a world where work, digital entertainment and economic pressures consume most of adults’ time, expecting schools to make up for this existential deficit is, at best, naïve. Schools are not the family, nor the workplace, nor the community, nor the neighbourhood; they are spaces for systematic learning. That does not mean they are detached from life, but rather that they attend to those parts of life that are specifically their own.

Allow me to say something about life. Mediocrity is becoming harder and harder to sustain. In the knowledge economy, levels of expertise will have to rise, like it or not—especially as artificial intelligence accelerates the trend—and we already lack many of the professionals we need. A strong system of vocational education, with far more places than currently exist, would certainly count as “teaching for life”—including civic life. Have you noticed that we may soon have more programmers than we need, while we are desperately short of electricians and skilled machinists?

And what exactly is meant by ‘life’, for that matter? Those who repeat the slogan rarely clarify the point, perhaps because doing so would give the game away and expose the emptiness behind it: La Celestina is not life, the Duomo is not life, diabetes is not life… knowledge is not life. As though living meant only feeling and never knowing. One can almost hear the familiar refrain already forming: the return of the ‘school of happiness’, the anti-humanist turn—the same old nonsense.

Life is learned through conversation around a table, through reading for pleasure, through arguing with friends, through earning one’s first salary or facing one’s first disappointment. What schools must do is recover their essential role: to be the place where much is learned and where a love of knowledge is cultivated. Knowing history, literature, science, mathematics, art and philosophy is not merely instrumental to ‘life’; it is part of what it means to be an informed, critical person capable of engaging with the world intelligently. Learning a great deal—and learning it in depth—is not opposed to learning how to live; it is its essential condition. Only lives enriched by knowledge become rich and interesting.

As Bertrand Russell once observed, education should cultivate the mind rather than simply prepare people for practical life—and life itself is already out there to teach us everything else, if we are willing to engage with it.

So here is a thought: what if we educated for the mind?

Source: educational EVIDENCE

Rights: Creative Commons