Education, Learning and the Transformation of Development

Amy Skinner, Matt Baillie Smith, Eleanor Brown, Tobias Troll

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317358602
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

Whilst education has been widely recognised as a key tool for development, this has tended to be limited to the incremental changes that education can bring about within a given development paradigm, as opposed to its role in challenging dominant conceptions and practices of development and creating alternatives.

Through a collection of insightful and provocative chapters, this book will examine the role of learning in shaping new discourses and practices of development. By drawing on contributions from activists, researchers, education and development practitioners from around the world, this book situates learning within the wider political and cultural economies of development. It critically explores if and how learning can shape processes of societal transformation, and consequently a new language and practice of development. This includes offering critical accounts of popular, informal and non-formal learning processes, as well as the contribution of indigenous knowledges, in providing spaces for the co-production of knowledge, thinking and action on development, and in terms of shaping the ways in which citizens engage with and create new understandings of 'development' itself. This book makes an important and original contribution by reframing educational practices and processes in relation to broader global struggles for justice, voice and development in a rapidly changing development landscape.

1 Rethinking education and development

1 A NEW DEVELOPMENT PARADIGM OR BUSINESS AS USUAL? EXPLORING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE POLITICAL SUBJECT AND SOCIAL CHANGE

April R. Biccum

DOI: 10.4324/9781315667607-2

Introduction

This chapter is a theoretical exposition into the connection between social change and the political subject via transformative education, and a critique of the current paradigm for development being marshalled in the World Development Report (WDR) for 2015. There are two reasons for this. First, the intrinsic value of ‘development’ as a way of organising political and economic life has been challenged from a variety of different quarters. Foreign aid has come under sustained critique, and global governance institutions have had to account for its ‘effectiveness’ (OECD, 2005/2008; Moyo, 2009). Social movements, both progressive and regressive (such as the anti-globalisation movement, the Occupy movement and various Islamist movements including ISIS) challenge the legitimacy of the globalising capitalist order and call for alternatives (Amin, 2004). The global financial crisis has prompted a profound questioning of capital (Piketty, 2014). Likewise, the WDR Mind, Society and Behaviour (World Bank Group, 2015) calls for a ‘redesign’ of development policy and economics and, at face value, appears to be a significant departure from the economistic paradigm of human subjectivity and behaviour – rational choice theory (RCT) – that has dominated political science and economics and informed the free market development policies of global institutions throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

The second reason is because the social and political function of education has also undergone enormous transformation in the twentieth century. It has moved from being a purely bureaucratic, instrumental and economic function of constructing the state to being a means of inculcating the values and capabilities conducive to civic participation and progressive social change, such as rejection of injustice and critical thinking. Historically, this kind of education has been expressed by the activism of anti-colonial nationalism from the 1920s to the 1960s, by the ‘awareness raising’ of civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and by the explosion of the various adjectival educations (such as citizenship, development, human rights, environmental and global education educations) of the 1980s until now (Abdi and Shultz, 2008). A closer connection has been established between activism and education and the personal, subjective changes required for a more democratic and just social order. These developments have gone hand in hand with the continued instrumentalisation of education and knowledge in developmental paradigms around human capital and the knowledge economy, represented by the World Bank's self-transformation into the ‘knowledge bank’. As this chapter shows, despite a change in rhetoric and acknowledgement of some of the discursive arrangements of power pointed out by some of the twentieth-century activisms listed above, the Bank continues to marshal its instrumental approach to knowledge and human behaviour for economistic developmental outcomes.

The report is significant in development policy because, as a departure from conventional paradigms in development, it incorporates the innovations of behavioural psychology, communications and cultural studies for understanding the role of social context, mental models and the social production of norms of human behaviour. These are approaches which are excluded from RCT but which are germane to the social movements that have inspired adjectival educations and whose claims about the relationship between power, knowledge, culture and ideas and political outcomes of subjection, exclusion and exploitation have been absorbed into the critical social sciences. This chapter argues, however, that on closer inspection, the report is not such a radical departure from conventional development paradigms. It proposes to bring about developmental change through interventions intended to affect individual, not social, change for the purposes of continued economic growth, not social justice or transformation. The aims of its policy recommendations are to socially engineer the ‘rational subject’ presupposed by RCT.

The first part of this chapter examines the intellectual antecedents of education for personal, political or social change within a long tradition of liberal political thought that has its fomenting grounds in early modern humanism and the Enlightenment. The second part of the chapter outlines RCT and its alignment with classical rational liberalism, the hegemonic place it has occupied in economics and political science, and its connections with neo-liberalism. The third part of the paper points out the significance of framing the WDR as a departure from RCT while demonstrating that, in fact, it is not.

Education and the political subject

The social function of education is an ambivalent hinge in modernity that links together the political subject with the social order. Western European modernity is defined politically via the state, economically via capitalism, and organisationally via individuated subjectivity and social, institutional and territorial division (Onuf, 1991). Education is central to the construction of the state as modern, rational and bureaucratic (Dale, 2000: 431). This doesn't mean that education is not an integral part of the reproduction or change of all social orders; it is just that in modern societies, education is set apart as a separate institutional function for the reproduction of particular subjectivities, class divisions and power arrangements. Several theorists of the social have pointed out that education in modernity is a central feature of social control and reproduction (Bourdieu, 1977; Leask, 2012). Yet education has also come to function ambivalently in modernity as a source of political mobilisation and activism, ethical cosmopolitanism and emancipation (Rizvi, 2009; Shultz, 2007). The purpose of this section is to trace how education comes to occupy this ambivalent site by tracing its antecedents in liberal political thought and governance.

The intellectual antecedents of personal subjective and social change have a long history in modern European political thought, which begins with a central organising principle that either the social order or particular subjectivities can change or be improved by human agency. This is a marked departure from the medieval social order conceived as divinely ordained with human behaviour as the will of God. The natural rights and social contract tradition which emerged from early modern humanism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries centralised human subjectivity as the organiser of knowledge and order, regarded human nature as rational, calculating and static, and imbued humans with natural rights (life, freedom and property) that are not conferred by the social order but have been in existence prior to it. The social order is entered into as a rational, self-interested choice to protect private property and can be organised to align more closely with ‘human nature’. In this formulation, the subject is natural and society and government are artificial; people create society to protect their rights.

This tradition developed from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth century into a liberal tradition in political thought that regarded developmental changes in the social order as dependent upon the perfectibility of the human subject. Liberalism is the first political ideology to emerge out of the ‘rupture’¹ of European Enlightenment thought with medieval Christian thought. It was ideological first because it made principle assumptions about human nature (the individual or the political subject), historical change (developmental and progressive) and the social order (rational and capitalist). It dissociated ‘man’ from Christian notions of providence and replaced it with the notion of a human nature predicated upon reason. The political subject emerges here as a secular subject that is universal, immutable and behaves according to natural laws which are knowable. It is not only that ‘man’ is no longer the instrument of God's will, but also that ‘man’ can know ‘himself’ through the application of ‘his’ reason. The truth about history, society and politics can be known scientifically and the social order can be remade to be consistent with ‘natural law’; it then becomes irrational to subject humans to social systems that are incompatible with human nature.

These assumptions were crucial to the critique of monarchism and all forms of arbitrary rule, to the possibility of democracy and to the transformation of political institutions. They were also central to the designation of Europe as the seat of civilisation and the construction of a philosophy of history that placed Europe at its apex and areas outside Europe in the realm of backwardness, tradition or barbarism. They offered rationales for dehumanising, racialising and dispossessing populations occupying lands that Europeans coveted and for enslaving the labour required to open them. They also provided grounds for designating the preferred form of government, the state, as rational as well as natural and as the highest form of human government, the best expression of humanity and yardstick by which to judge other modes of social organisation. This, according to Isaiah Berlin, has been the programme of ‘enlightened rationalism’ in a long tradition from Spinoza to the present (Berlin, 1997: 403) and is the foundation for the political subject constructed by liberal thought. Humanity is divided between the ‘higher self’, associated with reason and calculating, self-interested behaviour that will achieve freedom and autonomy, and a ‘lower self’, encumbered with irrational impulses, uncontrolled desires, baser animal instincts. The rationality that makes man an economic agent capable of autonomy is also the faculty that makes man a political agent capable of ‘civic virtue’, in contrast to the ‘traditional’ subject who is bound by custom, patronage and culture. These ideas became instrumentalised and institutionalised via the shift in European empires from those based on trading and slaving to those based on governance (Hall, 2008). There has been substantial scholarship that argues for the isomorphism of liberal political thought with colonial structures (Mehta, 1999) but also considerable scholarship arguing that liberalism was a site of anti-imperial critique (Muthu, 2003, 2012; Williams, 2014).

Education was a central feature of both the reproduction of European empires, through the creation of bureaucratic functionaries prepared for rule, and of the replication of the aristocracy but it also became a central feature from the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century in the shift in imperial governance. In colonial settings, education became a form of governance (Hall, 2008: 787) – the means by which colonial settlers and native populations could be transformed and pacified to accept colonial rule. Liberal political and economic thinkers (such as Adam Smith, James and John Stuart Mill, Zachary and Thomas Macaulay) were instrumental to some of these shifts in policy and thinking around governance (Hall, 2008; Williams, 2014), which were about the construction and disciplining of ‘deviance’ in the dispossessed at home and in the colonies (Himmelfarb, 1984; Stoler, 1995). Social reform was to be conducted in part through education and the production of the appropriate subjectivities with the right values, appropriate behaviour and capabilities. Part of the pedagogic means through which this was done was instruction in European language, culture (particularly its literature) and letters, which both working classes and colonial subjects would absorb and assimilate (Hall, 2008).

The application of liberal political thought in colonial governance and domestic social reform had ambivalent results. The first of these is the marked shift away from the classical liberal assumption that human nature is static and natural to the idea that human behaviour can be determined by social and political conditions. This shift is particularly evident in the thought of John Stuart Mill, a colonial administrator in the British Raj for at least part of his career. For Mill, freedom is achieved through individual self-development, and for this, education is central. The freedom to choose becomes the basis of human moral development, so the social order should perpetually expand morality and realise freedom and human potential. In Mill's thought emerges the notion that the political subject is socially constituted, developmental and transformational. Continual transformation and betterment of the self through education contributes to continual transformation and betterment of the social order. Second, the same thinkers, historians and governors that were active in the shift in colonial policy and poor reform were also the abolitionists and missionaries which historians now identify as the earliest expressions of civil society activism based on awareness raising (i.e. public education), lobbying and advocacy. Moreover, the need to educate, in Thomas Macau...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART 1 Rethinking education and development
• PART 2 Education and development alternatives
• PART 3 Learning, agency and citizen engagement
• Index