Social Efficiency and Instrumentalism in Education

Critical Essays in Ontology, Phenomenology, and Philosophical Hermeneutics

James M. Magrini

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317801016
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Curricula

Distinct among contemporary philosophical studies focused on education, this book engages the history of phenomenological thought as it moves from philosophy proper (the European phenomenological-hermeneutic tradition) through curriculum studies. It thus presents the "best of both worlds" for the reader; there is a "play" or movement from philosophy proper to educational philosophy and then back again in order to locate and explicate what is intimated, suggested, and in some cases, left "unsaid" by educational philosophers. This amounts to a work on education-philosophy that elucidates, through various permutations within the unique foci of each essay, the general phenomenological theme of the fundamental ontology of the human being as primordial learner. Reflecting his experience as scholar, teacher, and perennial learner, the author suggests how research in phenomenology might prove beneficial to the enhancement of both the theoretical and practical aspects of education; readers are invited to envision education as far more than merely a means by which to organize an effective learning experience in which knowledge is assimilated and skill sets are efficiently imparted, but rather as a holistic and integrated process in which knowing, acting, and valuing are original ways of Being-in-the-world.

1
The Historical Milieu of Social Efficiency

Locating the Problem of the Loss or Forgetting of Phenomenological Self-Hood

In this chapter I present a definition of the human being as phenomenological subject so that this understanding might be mapped onto the conception of “original learning” that will be developed in the chapters that follow, culminating in a view to the existential subject that underlies the curriculum philosophizing of both Pinar (2011) and Aoki (2005). It is my claim that the historical milieu, or context of high-stakes standardized testing in education, coincides with the rise of positivism and science as they engender and facilitate the “rise of scientific curriculum making” in America (Kliebard, 2004). In this chapter I expose the effects of social efficiency in the age of the standardized curriculum, which I term, risking the danger of coining yet another catch-phrase at a time when educators are inundated with catch-phrases, the Gilded Age of Standardization. This chapter progresses in four parts: (1) I offer the reader a philosophical and historical overview of positivism and the development of scientism and the subsequent influence this has on our conception of learning and the ways in which we claim to “know” things; (2) I trace the rise of what Arendt (1958) terms the “social” in order to draw a connection between mass society and education, although it must be noted that I do not endorse or develop an Arendtian notion of education; (3) I elucidate what is happening in the educational trenches, so to speak—i.e., I demonstrate how it is that social efficiency insidiously infects our educational practices as related to both students and teachers. Here I explicate the devastating influence that standardization has on our subject-hood, our Being-in-the-world; and (4) I conclude by offering the reader a nuanced portrait of the human being, developing a notion of phenomenological self-hood from which we’ve been alienated in the contemporary milieu of standardized education in America. To reiterate, I ask the reader to map the understanding of phenomenological self-hood onto the notion of “original learning” as it will be presented in Chapter Two.

A Philosophical Overview

The Influence of Positivism on Education

Greene (1987) warns of the dangers education faces when it perceives human beings in terms of “resources for the building a technological society” (214). When adopting the instrumentalist industrial model for production, as occurred in the early part of the 20th century, education was transformed into a “means to the end of achieving economic competitiveness and military supremacy in the world” (214). In Heideggerian (1977) terms, we might say that the condition Greene is describing is linked to the attunement of modern technology, or the attuning effect of “Ge-stell [Enframing]” (19), which limits the scope and power of our modes of world-disclosure; all things show up as resources to be used and discarded when their use value is exhausted. This phenomenon, according to Heidegger (1962), is linked with the “metaphysics of presence,” or the “metaphysics of substance,” which limits the manner in which the world discloses itself for our appropriation. According to Heidegger (1998), if we trace the phenomenon of truth back to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave we find that a change has occurred in the understanding of truth as aletheia (or, “unhiddenness”) as it was previously conceived and experienced in earlier Presocratic thought, most particularly in the thought of Heraclitus and Parmenides. Heidegger claims that truth in Plato is equated with “correctness” (orthotes)—“henceforth the essence of truth does not, as the essence of unhiddenness, unfold from its proper and essential fullness but rather shifts to the essence of the idea… with this transformation of the essence of truth there takes place at the same time a change of the locus of truth… as the correctness of the ‘gaze,’ it becomes a characteristic of human comportment toward beings” (176–177). Thus, as Thomson (2005) articulates, the Presocratic “understanding of being as phusis and aletheia was ‘forgotten,’” it was “ossified into the ‘permanent presence’ of ousia and thus swallowed up into the metaphysics of substance,” and, as a result, the “implicit role of thought and temporal dynamism inherent in the manifestation of being, although preserved in the fragments of Heraclitus and Parmenides, were thereby obscured and subsequently forgotten” (41). Truth becomes what is present before us, that which can be expressed in a locution or proposition, which can be either affirmed or denied with certainty and understood in terms of the Correspondence Model of truth. What presences is the presence of the “eternal,” whether in terms of a physical object or entity that is appearing “now” before us, or an eternal supra-sensuous idea (eidos) as we find in a doctrinal interpretation of Plato’s philosophy.

I do not follow Heidegger’s interpretation of Plato, which might be labeled, at the risk of vulgar reduction, idealist, for in Chapter Four I read Plato in a decidedly non-doctrinal manner, inspired by Continental readings of the dialogues (e.g., Gadamer, 1980, 1989, 1991; Hyland, 2004; Zuckert, 1996). However, despite offering a different reading than Heidegger, I endorse the epoch-founding influence of philosophy on our history in terms of contributing to and shaping our view of the world, and, although I am not tracing it directly to the effects of Platonic metaphysics, it is still possible to understand this world-view in terms of the metaphysics of presence. In educational research, the positivist and post-positivist paradigms, with distinct character traits, modes of information gathering and analysis, and methods of verification, are of course rooted in the history of philosophy, and might be traced initially to Auguste Comte’s (1798–1857) philosophy of “positivism,” which unfolds in three interconnected stages, with the last being the “positivist” stage, characterized by technology, explanation via mathematics, logic, observation, and experimentation. From Comte, the father of sociology, we inherit the reverence for the universal capability of science to explain the universe at the strict exclusion of the explanations offered by either theology or metaphysics. I am certainly not making the simplistic and reductive claim that quantitative educational researchers are literally embracing the tenets of Comte’s positivism or studying the tracts of the logical positivists. I am arguing, however, along with Howe (2009), that a “tacit form of positivism lives on in educational research as an important influence, now resurgent in the new scientific orthodoxy” (428), which “presupposes a positivist conception of science” (428), i.e., privileging analytic-empirical-technical ways of knowing the world. This view, according to Howe, expressed as the “rhetoric of science,” is “codified in the National Research Council’s (NRC) Scientific Research in Education (2002) as well as in the American Educational Research Association’s (AERA) Standards for Reporting on Empirical Social Science in AERA Publications (2006)” (428). Educators in the era of standardization, which includes the dominance of quantitative research in education, whether conscious of it or not, live in the shadow of positivism! As this “positivist” view is intensified, it gives rise to what is termed “scientism,” which is a view embracing science in an all-encompassing manner, functioning as the salvation of humankind, delivering us from ignorance leading to an eventual utopia grounded in the foundational “truth” of scientific of laws. We encounter this pernicious view of science embodied in neoliberalism’s secular myth of human progress through science as it is criticized in the work of Gray (2003), who argues that as “secular cultures” search for “salvation,” the practice of politics is “replaced by technology as the focus of eschatological hope” (66). The ubiquitous, oppressive presence of positivism continues to haunt contemporary education. Scientism is not, however, a position one adopts or espouses. Rather it is a charge that is pejoratively leveled at the views of certain philosophers and thinkers embracing empirical science as the final arbiter within epistemological debates, such as the “logical positivists” of the Vienna Circle (circa 1930).

These philosophers, with their focus on language, logic, and the unwavering trust in empirical explanation, held the following views about philosophy and its importance, function, and validation in its enduring relation to science: (1) science is more important than the arts for understanding the world and science is all we require to understand the world; (2) scientific methodology is the only acceptable method for acquiring knowledge, i.e., forming, assessing, and justifying propositions about the natural world; and (3) philosophical problems are in fact scientific problems, and they should be dealt with through the incorporation of the scientific method. As Baldwin (2001) points out, the logical positivists, who were inspired by Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the atomistic notion of the language of propositions forming an accurate isomorphic picture of the natural world, held that “science provides the only genuine knowledge of the world since it restricts itself to what can be properly justified on the basis of observation” (5–6). The positivists opted for empirical validation for all propositions of an empirical nature through the application of the “verifiability principle,” which states that a “proposition is meaningful if-and-only-if it is empirically verified” (7). This view restricts “meaningful” propositions to the realm of “analytic” truth, as in truth by definition, or tautology, and “synthetic” truth, or truths of an empirical nature. Through adopting this positivist mindset, they set out to rid philosophy of any and all meaningless pursuits, such as metaphysics, which was not a proper realm of inquiry because the statements incorporated to express its claims were deemed meaningless utterances when put to the test of the verifiability principle. To follow this line of thought as it moves into education and the field of educational research, I return to Gray (2009), who discusses “positivism” and its subsequent effects on the social sciences as they emerge from Comte. Gray claims that in “positivist methodology social science is no different than natural science. The model for both is mathematics. Nothing can be known unless it can be quantified,” and “the social sciences are no different in their methods from the natural sciences. Both seek to discover natural laws. The only genuine knowledge is that which comes from scientific inquiry” (270–271). Positivism, and further, scientism, continues to exact an influence on contemporary “standardized” education (and its quantitative research), and this is glaringly evident, especially when keeping in mind what Pinar (1998) states about the dominance of concept empiricism in contemporary curriculum research. Maxwell (2008) helps us put these thoughts in perspective when stating that rather than the misguided “idea of learning from scientific progress how to achieve social progress towards an enlightened world,” we should work toward “developing social inquiry, not as social science” (110), but rather in terms of a social philosophy.

Just as there was the rise of “scientism” in philosophy in the 20th century, there was also a rise in scientism in the philosophy of education and its research: the rise of social efficiency, as outlined by Pinar (1994, 2013), Kliebard (2004), and Taubman (2009), all of whom trace the rise and influence of social efficiency on education in terms of managerial science, i.e., the move from the “factory model” to a “corporate” model, the rise in behaviorism in psychology and its contemporary mutation, cognitive psychology, all culminating in what we have come to know and experience in education as the “science of learning” (Bransford, 2000, 6). As Taubman (2009) points out, the “learning sciences, in sublating behaviorism, cognitive psychology, and the early research in information processing and AI have implicitly and indirectly carried the work of those fields forward,” and in doing so have influenced education’s determining of “performance outcome, training, executive functioning, programmed instruction, instructional design, information processing, and the rationalizing of the curriculum” (170). American schools were created over 100 years ago with the explicit purpose in mind of preparing students to become citizens holding jobs “in an industrial economy,” and, as Pinar (1994) points out, “on this issue, little has changed in the last 100 years” (239). Schools continue to exist “for the sake of job preparation, despite continuing if empty rhetoric linking education with democracy and a politically engaged citizenry,” and thus the “economic function of schools remains unchallenged” (234). Thus education is still represented, according to Peters (2011), in terms of an “input-output” system,

which can be reduced to an economic production function. The core dimensions of new public management are: flexibility (in relation to organizations through the use of contracts), clearly defined objectives (both organizational and personal), and a results orientation (measurement of and managerial responsibility for achievement). (55)

As of this writing in 2014, with the continued influence of neoliberal governmentality, it is not only the purpose of education to “produce” democratic citizens who are equipped with market skills to contribute to the growth of the GNP, but education itself is viewed as a “a new market, one worth billions of dollars” (Taubman, 2009, 103). It is not only presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush who should be criticized for espousing a pro-business and economically driven philosophy of education; with the Obama administration’s educational policies and initiatives in place, education-as-corporation is a fact, for as Pinar (2013) observes, “under Obama, billions of taxpayer funds have been squandered to encourage the conversion of public education from a public text to a profitable market” (41).

Taubman (2009) states that “corporatism” is occurring because the field of education has been hijacked by “the discourses and assemblages of business practices associated with neoliberal business policies,” and the “discourses and practices that have accelerated the standardization and quantification of educational experience” have produced an “educational market” (13). According to Taubman, this engenders the “rhetoric of blame and fear and the promulgation of heroic narratives of exemplary teachers, which, coupled with widespread use of tests, render teachers and teacher educators susceptible to the language of policy and the lure of business practices...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• DEDICATION
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Practicing Education-Philosophy Curriculum as Phenomenological Text and the European Tradition in Existential-Phenomenological Philosophy
• 1 The Historical Milieu of Social Efficiency Locating the Problem of the Loss or Forgetting of Phenomenological Self-Hood
• 2 The Destruktion of the Language of Learning in Social Efficiency Language and Conceptualization in Phenomenological Ontology and Original Learning
• 3 Phenomenology and Curriculum Inquiry Understanding the Methods of Willis, van Manen, and Heidegger
• 4 Philosophical Hermeneutics Socrates and the Ethos of Dwelling in a Philosophical Community of Original Learning as Bildung
• 5 Huebner’s Reading of Heidegger’s Fundamental Ontology The Authentic Reconceptualization of Learning, Historicity, and Temporality for Contemporary Education
• 6 Cosmopolitanism and Curriculum in a New Key The Complicated Philosophical Conversations of Pinar and Aoki
• Epilogue: Releasing Our Potential-for-Being Into the Indeterminate Future of Education’s Past
• Index