Reclaiming Education in the Age of PISA

Challenging OECD's Educational Order

Vasco d'Agnese

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351979054
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

Reclaiming Education in the Age of PISA provides a critical analysis of the OECD's educational agenda and its main tool, namely, PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment). Based on an analysis of the OECD's public documents, including publications, webpages, and videos, d'Agnese argues that PISA is not just an assessment tool, but rather an all-encompassing framework that intends to govern education, schooling, living and society worldwide. This creation of what d'Agnese calls a life-brand raises concerns that education and learning are becoming wares and that, consequently, we run the risk of transforming schools into providers and teachers into agents of preconceived learning packages.

In pursuing only one concept of education, and a very narrow one at that, d'Agnese argues that OECD not only narrows down education to a mere reproductive process, but that such an approach also erases the basic rules by which living develops and evolves. In this sense PISA is but another form of authoritarian teaching, authoritarian teaching being understood as any and every educational project which sets aims and purposes of education without giving the possibility to discuss and challenge such aims and purposes.

Reclaiming Education in the Age of PISA suggests a different educational logic, emphasizing that schooling is not just a place to produce the correct skills, but is also a matter of experimentation, hesitation and wait, one in which teachers and students attempt to dwell in pure potentiality for growth.

Providing a strong argument that a different way to conceive of schooling deserves our attention, this book will be essential reading for academics, researchers and postgraduates in the fields of educational philosophy and theory, inclusive education and social justice. It should also be of interest to policymakers and educational activists.

Section II

Chapter 5
Shifting perspective

Deweyan account of thinking, knowledge and subject

In the first part of the book, I have presented OECD’s view of education arguing how such a view is a severe narrowing down of what education is supposed to be and bring about. I have also analyzed the consequences of what I see as a sophisticated form of authoritarian teaching on students, teachers, education and society at large. Now, in the second part of the book, I attempt to present an alternative understanding of education to that depicted by OECD. To make my point, I will draw heavily on Deweyan work, his conception of education, subject, thinking and imagination. It is my contention, in fact, that a thorough analysis of how such questions are developed in Deweyan work, and of their interplay may furnish a completely diverse basis for education. While in Chapters 5 and 6 I exclusively focus on Dewey, in Chapters 7 and 8 I intersect Deweyan work with Arendt, Foucault and contemporary educational literature. Specifically, I shall refer to Foucauldian analysis of “subjection” and “becom[ing] other than what one is” (Foucault, 1997/1976, p. 327), and Arendtian understanding of human condition (1998/1958), “disclosure” and “natality” (Arendt, 1977/1961). Let us begin by introducing the Deweyan account of thinking, knowledge and subject.

Dewey’s disquieting side

From The Metaphysical Assumptions of Materialism (Dewey, 1882) to Knowing and the Known (Dewey and Bentley, 1949), the question of thinking is pivotal to Dewey’s work. It is not only the focus of several Deweyan works but also at the intersection of Dewey’s conception of experience, education and inquiry. Nevertheless, according to Johnston (2002) and Rømer (2012), a Deweyan understanding of thinking has been victim to several simplifications. One type of reduction involves considering Dewey a positivist or an advocate of individualistic approaches to education, which is ironic given that the very question of education in Dewey is grounded on sharing and communication (Dewey, 1930/1916, pp. 6–7, 101–115). There is also another type of reduction of Deweyan thought that is perhaps less evident but likewise misleading. This reduction works by equating the broad question of thinking to the questions of “inquiry” and “reflective thought”, thus reducing the “mind” to the production of knowledge, experience to “intellectual experience” and human beings to inquirers. Of course, inquiry and reflective thought are central issues to Deweyan thought, and only by means of intelligent action can human beings grow and gain a meaningful existence. However, when analyzing them, we must ask about the ground on which inquiry and reflective thought lies and the office to which they attend.

Specifically, it is my contention that despite the grouping of thinking and reflective thought that has largely appeared in the interpretation of Deweyan work, Dewey discloses an inescapable uncertainty at the core of human thinking. When analyzing reflective thought, we need to ask about its aim and origin. Such “genealogical work” is important to remain faithful to the Deweyan aim, namely, to understand and leave intact “the cord that binds experience and nature” without taking knowledge as primary (Dewey, 1929/1925, p. 23). Thus, along with the identification of the Deweyan account of “thinking” with “reflective thought” and “inquiry” – an identification that has served as the background for a significant portion of the educational research on Dewey – we can say that “there is another side to the picture” (Wilshire, 1993, p. 257). This is a side that is more concerned with uncertainty and undergoing than with stability and equilibrium; that boldly questions the amount of control over the very process of thinking, thus forestalling the question of the “death of subject” (Boisvert, 1998, p. 35) as a coherent center of agency; that is unsettled by the “mystery, doubt, and half-knowledge” of the world in which man lives (Dewey, 1980/1934, p. 34) and fully aware of how in experience, “the distinct and evident are prized […] but […] the dark and twilight abound” (Dewey, 1929/1925, p. 20); that is concerned with “[t]he difficulties and tragedies of life” and boldly states that “the stimuli to acquiring knowledge, lie in the radical disparity of presence-in-experience and presence-in-knowing” (Dewey, 1917, p. 48, emphasis added); and that openly speaks about “risk […] ill-omen […] [and the] evil-eye”, which dwell in our “aleatory world” (Dewey, 1929/1925, pp. 41–42).

Thus, if, according to Biesta and Burbules, Deweyan philosophy “takes action as its most basic category” (2003, p. 9, emphasis in original), then, according to Dewey, “[t]he distinctive characteristic of practical activity […] is the uncertainty which attends it. Of it we are compelled to say: Act, but act at your peril” (Dewey, 1929, p. 6). Putting Biesta and Burbules’ argument into Dewey’s own words, we may even say that the heart of even the “most basic category” of existence entails peril. Moreover, if the key question of Deweyan pragmatism was “[w]hat shall we do to make objects having value more secure in existence?” (Dewey, 1929, p. 43), then we ought to recognize how, at the same time, “[t]he existential conditions of any existence are indefinitely circumstantial” (Dewey, 1938, p. 319) because, ultimately, “[e]very existence is an event” (Dewey, 1929/1925, p. 71).

This disquieting side of Dewey, of course, did not go unnoticed. Several scholars have noted it: Garrison (1994, 1996, 1997, 1999, 2003, 2005), above all, who clearly recognized that the Deweyan challenge to Cartesian metaphysics (2003) entails a questioning of the auto-grounded subject that lies in such a metaphysics; Alexander (1987), who analyzed the relationship between art and experience and highlighted the role of “‘prereflexive’ experience in Dewey’s thought” (p. 10); Wilshire (1993), who openly spoke about Dewey as “a tragic figure” (1993, p. 257); and Saito (2002, 2005), who challenged the “apparently optimistic worldview” (Saito, 2002, p. 249) that some perceive in Dewey’s work, thereby linking Deweyan thought to “the sense of the tragic that we have lost sight of” (2002, p. 249). In a sense, we can find traces of this Deweyan “dark side” in the works of several scholars who, although not involved in highlighting it directly, have shown how the radical Deweyan challenge to Plato’s and Descartes’s “theoretical gaze” entails the dismantling of any safe ground for thinking (Bernstein, 1961, 2010; Biesta, 1994, 2009, 2010; Jackson, 1994/95; Boisvert, 1998; Biesta and Burbules, 2003; Semetsky, 2003, 2008; Margolis, 2010). In their works, the easy and misleading interpretation of Dewey as the promoter of an irenic path to democracy and knowledge is challenged, and Deweyan thought comes to light in all its abyssal profundity. Working in the light of these scholars, in what follows I wish to analyze this “disquieting side” of Dewey’s thought and, remaining faithful to pragmatist principles, I shall attempt to argue the consequences of such an emphasis on the Deweyan conception of thinking, knowledge and education.

My point is that Dewey, throughout his work, conducted a systematic dismantling of the concept of rationality as mastery and control. Thus, the Deweyan understanding goes straight to the core of the subject’s question. Such an understanding, rather than becoming a nihilistic/relativistic account of education, results in a reinforcement of education as the way to engender new meanings, new experience. Through such a dismantlement, we also create the conditions for new forms of subjectivities to arise. In this chapter, I shall also argue that throughout his work, Dewey dismantled the understanding of the subject as a detached and self-assured center of agency. In Deweyan understanding, on one hand, the subject is empowered to reflect on experience and to use this reflection to evolve new ways of acting, thus pushing experience forward. On the other hand, by acting, the subject can create new points of interaction within experience. This understanding of thinking and subject has far-reaching consequences for education, which must be conceived not so much as the attempt to master and control experience but as the means to create new, unpredictable experience by putting new points of interactions into our relationship with the environment, changing our being-embedded-in-the-world.

It should be noted that this move is even more challenging given Dewey’s firm faith in the power of intelligent action, and in education as the means by which human beings grow and create meaningful existence. Dewey repositions educational, intentional agency away from control and mastery and in the direction of growth and openness. Such a repositioning, then, is at poles with any preconceived conception of learning and education, any narrowing down of education to frameworks coming from above, frameworks sinking their roots outside of education itself – frameworks consistent to the picture OECD presents.

Thinking, the need for security and human fragility

The question of challenging Western “ontological knowledge” (Dewey, 1882, p. 210), or overcoming the “exclusive identification of the object of knowledge with reality” (Dewey, 1929/1925, p. 157), was one of the central questions in Deweyan reflection. Nonetheless, as stated above, the Deweyan conception of thought has been the victim of several simplifications in terms of both methodology and content. Thankfully, the situation has changed. Based on the works of Biesta (1994, 2009, 2010), Garrison (1994, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2003, 2005), Jackson (1994/95), and Biesta and Burbules (2003), we can say that the “mainstream” interpretation of Deweyan work has moved away from such a reductive understanding to a deeper and more consistent one that clearly recognizes the Deweyan challenge to the roots of Western thought. Thus, the interpretation of John Dewey as an advocate of cognitive procedure only concerned with assuring “expected outcomes” on the basis of univocal methods has been overcome, as have interpretations that see in Dewey the champion of an easy and irenic path to democracy and knowledge. Then, given such precedents, I wish to argue that when analyzing Deweyan work, reflective thought and knowledge need to be understood in relation to their origin; they are a means that human beings have developed to face their fragile and uncertain condition.

I will begin my analysis by recognizing that for Dewey, the first “fact” of living is that human beings are “thrown” into life; life and its conditions are anything but a choice. As Dewey states, “[man] cannot escape the problem of how to engage in life, since in any case he must engage in it in some way or other or else quit and get out” (Dewey, 1922, p. 81). Thus, we need to identify the conditions in which man finds himself. My point is that Dewey, from How We Think (1910) to Knowing and the Known (Dewey and Bentley, 1949), clearly recognized the danger and the awful that dwell in our aleatory world:

Man finds himself living in an aleatory world; his existence involves, to put it baldly, a gamble. The world is a scene of risk; it is uncertain, unstable, uncannily unstable. Its dangers are irregular, inconstant, not to be counted upon as to their times and seasons. Although persistent, they are sporadic, episodic. […] These things are as true today as they were in the days of early culture. It is not the facts which have changed, but the methods of insurance, regulation and acknowledgment.

(Dewey, 1929/1925, pp. 41–43, emphasis added)

This passage is sufficiently clear. I wish only to linger on the terms “facts” and “uncannily unstable”. In a way reminiscent of Pascal,¹ Dewey views the world’s irregularity and dangerousness not as features of our relationship with the world but as features that belong to the very nature of the world. I shall return to this issue later. The world is “a scene of risk”, “uncannily unstable”, and what separates us now from “the days of early culture” (Dewey, 1929/1925, p. 43) is only the means by which we attempt to face such uncanny uncertainty. Moreover, to call the world “uncannily unstable” is not only to say that we cannot understand and predict the world; it means that we cannot even understand the world’s instability.

Such a world “of perils and hazards” (Dewey, 1929/1925, p. 71) demands effective responses so that human beings will survive. In stressing this concept, we should add that in Dewey, the human condition is “firmly grounded” on need and uncertainty. Then, we come to see how Dewey’s aim, as we know, was never to address education from an abstract, ‘philosophical’ perspective. Quite the contrary: throughout his work, Dewey was concerned time and again with how we must understand education “as a [n]ecessity for life”, as the title of Chapter 1 of Democracy and Education so powerfully suggests. Stressing the question, one could even say that Dewey was mostly concerned with understanding how education works, such a working being understood as not limited to specific aims – as in OECD’s educational picture.

As a result of such a vision, knowledge and inquiry necessarily commit their “original sin”, namely, venturing forth in an unsure and problematic equilibrium with the environment. This equilibrium, which is continually threatened by hazards and precariousness, needs to be continually reset. Thought and inquiry, in a sense, are anything but a choice; they are the only way in which the human organism can face a “fearful […][.and] awful” world (Dewey, 1929/1925, p. 42). This is not to deny that living, to Dewey, is “an intelligent exchange between an organism and its surroundings” (Rømer, 2012, p. 136); it is to say, rather, that to understand the quality and outcomes of such an exchange, we need to understand its aims and origin.

Human beings, since their appearance on Earth, have been thrown into such an aleatory world. To survive, they are called on to transform unsettled and indeterminate situations into more stable and clear ones, thereby finding, in the flow of experience, elements on which to ground: “Indeterminate situations are marked by confusion, obscurity and conflict. They require clarification. An unsettled situation needs clarification because as it stands it gives no lead or cue to the way in which it may be resolved” (Dewey, 1929, p. 185). A human being is forced to modify a pre-cognitive experience into a cognisable and manageable one “by modification of its constituents” (Dewey, 1938, p. 118). For Dewey, knowledge is literally a matter of life or death.

As Rømer has noted (2013, p. 643), Dewey does not limit such understanding of the human condition to fortuitous passages. In one of his masterpieces, Experience and Nature, Dewey clearly frames knowledge as springing from need and man’s fragility: man finds himself in a universe framed by contingency – and, indeed, “[e]very existence is an event” (Dewey, 1929/1925, p. 71). In such a universe “[t]he need for security compels men to fasten upon the regular in order to minimize and to control the precarious and fluctuating” (p. iv). The means by which human beings try to face precariousness is reflective thought, namely, human beings’ specific responses to their state of necessity toward the world. We may even say that reflective thought springs from fear, and fear, “whether an instinct or an acquisition, is a function of the environment. Man fears because he exists in a fearful, an awful world” (p. 42). It is important to recognize that for Dewey, the existence of a perilous and fearful world is a fact: “The world is precarious and perilous” (p. 42, emphasis in original). In this statement, Dewey emphasizes the term “world” as the basis of the question. Neither our understanding nor our relationship with the world is fraught with precariousness or dangerousness; the world itself “is precarious and perilous” (ibid.). We may even say that the only exception Dewey makes to his transactional approach, in which things emerge by interaction and communication, lies in the ‘objective reality’ of such an awful world.

By means of reflective thought, human beings strive for harmony by facing “the character of contingency which [the universe] possesses so integrally” (ibid., p. 46). In human beings’ lives, “[t]he striving to make stability of meaning prevail over the instability of events is the main task of intelligent human effort” (p. 50). That is why Dewey establishes “the natural continuity of inquiry with organic behaviour” (Dewey, 1938, p. 36): by inquiry, which “began presumably as soon as man appeared on earth” (p. 5), man guarantees his own always-uncertain equilibrium.

Here lies the immense importance of refle...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• SECTION I
• SECTION II
• Index