Disoriented

 License Creative Commons

Andreu Navarra

In an ill-judged tweet, a pedagogist (educational theorist) claimed that wicked teachers exclude unruly or violent pupils simply because they cannot stand teaching poor or vulnerable children. A phrase as classist as it was casual slipped out, and he failed to backpedal in time: it was self-evident to him that all unruly or violent pupils are poor, and that they are so because they are poor. There’s no need to trouble ourselves with the name of such a pedagogical luminary; just as this tweet “slipped out”, so too did it “slip out” from one of the chief architects of LOGSE and LOMLOE that a pupil from the province of Badajoz need not be taught what a pupil from Madrid’s wealthy Salamanca district must be taught. I’m sure you remember.

These sorts of classist aberrations might pass for jokes or throwaway remarks—were it not for the fact that our current Organic Law on Education outlines a “graduate profile” that is philosophically dubious, not to say macabre, sordid, or flatly anti-democratic. And it is worth noting that a book has just appeared from Herder publishing house that fits our moment perfectly: Remarques sur la désorientation du monde, by Alain Badiou. It helps us make sense of the current moment in Spain, where so many organic intellectuals and supposedly leftist activists are mouthing off with such glaring nonsense. One of Badiou’s key theses is that the left is today thoroughly “disoriented”, having broken with the emancipatory, materialist rationality from which it originally sprang in Europe’s liberal dawn.

A whole chapter of Badiou’s essay is devoted to education and its present wreckage across much of Europe. Let us listen: “From all sides, I sense that teaching—from school to university—is today gravely disoriented. Let me go straight to my diagnosis: in the face of omnipresent information circulating through all manner of networks—information that fosters utter passivity and even entrenched ignorance (a mobile device answers the questions I raise or am asked)—the education administration, particularly its state leadership, does nothing to teach young people, across the board, what it means to think, to know, and to argue” (p. 59).

On the following page, Badiou unpacks this diagnosis—and you’ll forgive me for quoting at length again: “Yet the aim of a true education, at the very least since Plato, is not to collect external answers, but to know how to pass, personally and with one’s own resources, from ignorance to knowledge. For Plato, knowledge is not a dictionary, and that is precisely why his hero, Socrates, insists that at the starting point of a question, it is important to know that one knows nothing” (p. 60).

This is precisely why our own pedagogism is so destructive in its technopopulist obsession: it imagines that artificial intelligence, or the torrential flood of biased, incomplete, fragmentary, binary, manipulated, and often outright fabricated misinformation, can serve as a source of knowledge.

You may also recall what the Spanish current Minister of Education, Pilar Alegría, said on 28 March 2023: “Alegría warns that educating by accumulating content ‘no longer works’ because Artificial Intelligence is now a reality” (Europa Press). As though it were not social media, vapid websites and AI itself that generate extremism and manipulated content—as though we did not all know how much AI invents simply out of ignorance. As though AI were not, in the end, just a machine for accumulating statistical content.

And then come the well-meaning souls who accuse those of us who think otherwise of being technophobes or Luddites—simply for believing that before using technological tools, one must first learn to read, to think, and to interpret the world. The official wager is now on the table: cyber-rubbish for the majority of students—poor and institutionally marginalised—and real education for the economic elites keen to reproduce themselves.

Knowledge is not accumulated information hurled into the cognitive dump. Knowledge requires structure and dialogical contrast. Human beings learn in the company of other human beings. There is a form of knowledge that must be made possible within the classroom—and a hysterical counterfeit of knowledge, ubiquitous and state-sponsored, that distorts and perverts everything: “The mobile phone knows everything, and therefore knows nothing. Today, education must begin by radically eliminating this false knowledge, made up of unchecked opinion, and return—more urgently than ever—to the kinds of knowledge that pose real problems: those which must be learned how to approach, and within which each of us must learn to trace our own path towards understanding” (p. 60).

In short, “the teacher is a guide on a journey of thought—and that is the ideal definition of their vocation: to show how we move from ignorance to knowledge, not through the accumulation of surrounding opinions, but through the discovery of a personal capacity, present in each of us, to select, from the chronic torrent of formless information, only that which helps illuminate the complex path at the end of which we may speak of truth” (p. 61).

Official Spanish pedagogism has abandoned working-class pupils, precisely because it seeks to exclude them from rational thought, humanistic inquiry, the scientific method, and civic participation. The state teacher-phobia is not remotely progressive; in fact, it has more in common with the authoritarianism and anti-public-sector zeal of the electoral autocracies currently in power in Hungary, the United States, and Argentina. Well-meaning pedagogists who genuinely want to improve education are deeply disoriented when they devote themselves to hounding and defaming traditional or subject-specialist teachers. But in truth, they are Foucauldian reactionaries serving Big Tech and global capital. The real question is whether they know it—and are covering it up—or whether they have yet to realise who they are working for.

The European competency-based reforms are little more than a textbook case of capital concentration and labour-market restructuring. They will not be able to fool us for much longer. In a country where self-styled feminist Marxists defend the Islamic veil for women, and where so many “social-democratic” pedagogists organise witch-hunts against those who resist the class warfare waged by the OECD and the banking elite—how necessary these words are, coming from one of the founding voices of the French Socialist tradition! How healthy it would be to return to Emma Goldman and Karl Marx, and to reorient progressive pedagogy toward the defence of reading and collective reflection. The individualist revolution of “Me, me, me” has clouded their minds; they now confuse the appetite of each consumer-libido with the civil rights of all. They no longer know what a teacher is, or a pupil, or a citizen. Their compulsive deconstruction has led them into a cynicism beyond redemption.

But of course, to reorient oneself, one would have to read some political philosophy—and risk not being able to queue up for a seat at the most lucrative ideological stalls. The truth is that Spanish pedagogism, in its present state of disorientation, has become frankly embarrassing.

___

¹ Page numbers refer to the Spanish translation by Guillem Usandizaga

Source: educational EVIDENCE

Rights: Creative Commons