Kant, teacher

Our competency-based laws trap students within their class of origin

License Creative Commons

Andreu Navarra

While a student of Kant, Herder took detailed notes of what the master explained during his lectures. Today, those notebooks are pure gold, as they not only reveal what Immanuel Kant thought prior to publishing the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) but also highlight the earlier elements of the eclectic philosophy Kant practised, which later became the foundations of his critical system.

However, from these Herderian notes, we are particularly intrigued by a few isolated phrases that may well open up a wealth of promising possibilities. For instance, Herder wrote, “The educated person must be able to converse with all social classes because he stands outside all classes“. Upon reading this, I had to rub my eyes and read it again, this time more clearly: an educated person is “outside all classes” because he can engage in conversation with all of them. Alternatively, people from all social classes may “converse” with one another because the class of the “educated” is a distinct category or an interstitial sector, acting like a sort of lubricating oil that exists between all social classes, allowing the social machinery to function smoothly.

Immanuel Kant, the son of a modest leather craftsman, experienced social mobility firsthand. When he began preparing to enter the academic community at the University of Königsberg (which, it must be said, was not exactly a model of progressivism), he left behind a narrow future (becoming a saddler, as guild members’ children would typically inherit their parents’ trade) and entered a different world— the literary-philosophical and scientific circles of the city. There, he thrived, eventually rubbing shoulders with magnates and kings. His best friend, Joseph Green, was an English merchant with whom he discussed Hume and Fielding.

In other words, leaving one’s class, whether high or low, allows for enrichment and liberation from moral enslavement or economic limitations. To explore, to read, to research, and to dismantle dogmas and rigid identities. Going to school, seeking education, should mean changing one’s class, discovering the world not only horizontally but also vertically.

We do not know if Herder, who was somewhat socially withdrawn, embraced this lesson from Kant. What we do know, however, is the impact that European competency-based reforms, designed during the 2000 Lisbon summit with the Delors Report as their doctrinal background, are having. And what we are witnessing is precisely the opposite of what Kant asserted in 1764. Our competency-based laws trap students within their class of origin and prevent them from engaging with those beyond their own to compare inherited ideas, prejudices, dogmatisms, and sectarian extremisms.

As a result, hardly anyone today knows how to understand others beyond their immediate circle. The effort of cultivating an informed, reading life is demonised in the media. Families and schools increasingly resemble prisons, where not only what you think is dictated to you, but also what you should feel and how. Free conversation is outlawed, the classics have been reduced to ashes, and shared reading is regarded with suspicion by the political authorities. The atmosphere is becoming suffocating. Surely, in Kant’s moral philosophy class, it didn’t smell so much like a stagnant bilge.

Competency-based reforms promote compartmentalisation, the civil war, the anti-politics of those incapable of sharing, building, transmitting, persuading, and accompanying. Everything is becoming loud and chavvy, surreal, confrontational, and rigid. The evaluation decrees weigh like slabs of steel, with incomprehensible syllogisms that demoralise and depress. Our public discourse is poisoned with hate; everyone eyes their neighbour suspiciously, especially those below. Those at the top got bogged down in their lack of accountability; anachronistic laws gain ground, worrying outbursts abound, and in the parliamentary chamber, only blows are exchanged—thinking and compromise are considered heretical activities. And this only happens when there are personal advantages at stake, when lowly calculations and a purely extractive instinct come into play.

Herder also noted another phrase in that 1764 course on moral philosophy: “The entire world would be as nothing without rational beings”. One wishes someone would hear these words and act accordingly. But let’s leave it here, as it is unwise to lose the optimism of hope when the school year is just beginning.

Source: educational EVIDENCE

Rights: Creative Commons