Can we see education? Can we point at it? If I said to you, âShow me education!ââwhere would you begin? Would you walk me over to the gates of the nearest school and point at the building inside? Or go further by entering a classroom and gesturing at rows of desks full of smiling pupils? Or perhaps you would open a dictionary and highlight the various definitions given underneath? Or simply underline the word itself in type on a page: âeducationâ?
Is the meaning of education in each, or any, of the uses above, clear? If I were as ignorant as my request suggests, then perhaps any of these responses would leave me feeling satisfied that I now know what education is. But are you satisfied with what you have been able to show me? Maybe you leave wishing that you had objected to the logic of what Iâd asked for because the idea of education is not really compatible with an act of showingâit canât be contained in a gesture. It canât be seen. Or you go away puzzled, thinking instead that I must have been disingenuous in my demand, as I couldnât possibly have made it in complete ignorance of the word (unless English was not my first language). Immediately, the meaning of education has become clouded by a whole set of contextual considerations, not to mention feelings of frustration, indignation, and insufficiency.
If we imagine conducting the experiment again, but this time with a young child making the request instead of meâhow does this change what you do, and how you feel afterwards? Is there a good chance that gesturing at the school or classroom in this instance seems a more than adequate introduction to the word, given that you suspect that the child wonât have encountered it on many other occasions before? And perhaps you leave this time feeling less burdened as to whether you have done justice to the whole idea of education because you have less cause to believe that the childâs view will be narrowed or limited by this picture. Say the child had made the request because her parents had said to her, âDonât underestimate the value of a good educationâ, and she hadnât understood them. Would the pictures of a school or a lively classroom have contributed helpfully to her understanding? If, on the other hand, you had taken the child to a scuba-diving lesson, or handed her a dictionary, wouldnât this understanding be very different? Wouldnât you question whether you hadnât left her a bit confused?
The Educationalistâs Dilemma
If I were to call this experiment an investigation into what education is, it might be tempting to say that the exercise had already gone awry. After all, it might be argued that education is simply not something that can be pointed at. And maybe nor should it, because in pointing at one thing we overlook or ignore another. Education, it might be argued, happens not just âout thereâ, in a world that can be pointed at, but âin hereâ, inside parts of me that your sight will never access (surely it would not work to try and point at my mind, my heart, or my soul in this instance?). To point at things in the way suggested doesnât provide the complete picture of what we feel and understand education to be. But this then begs another question: can there be such a thing as a complete picture of education?
This is not just a simple dilemma of knowing what education is or isnât. The pointing exercise picks up something of an existential dilemma in relation to our knowledge of the concept of education. We think we know enough in order to have a go at showing others what we take it to be, but we immediately feel dissatisfied with our efforts. Or perhaps we refuse to have a go, but then wonder about the futility of our purpose as people who should know something about education (I take it that the educationalist feels the dilemma of this particular pointing exercise with greater consternation than most).
A variation of this conceptual-existential dilemma is described early on in Wittgensteinâs Philosophical Investigations , with reference to a particular moment in the writings of St. Augustine:
Augustine says in the Confessions âquid est ergo tempus? si nemo ex me quaerat scio; si quaerenti explicare velim, nescioâ(PI, §89)
Augustine has stumbled on a similar conundrum to that of pointing at education: if no one asks me what time is, I have no trouble in knowing what it is; but as soon as someone asks me what it is, I doubt my ability to give a true account of it. Wittgenstein follows up on the quote from Augustine by describing the phenomenon as:
Something that we know when no one asks us, but no longer know when we are supposed to give an account of it, is something that we need to remind ourselves of. (And it is obviously something of which for some reason it is difficult to remind oneself.)(ibid.)
This brief observation captures, in large part, the main thrust to this bookâs enterprise. It captures, first of all, the fact that we allâin some senseâknow what education is, enough to be able to talk about it. After all, it is a word commonly used and spoken of in the news, in parent-teacher meetings, and over dinner. There must be some common understanding, and it must have come from somewhere. But under scrutiny, it is a concept that can start to blur, and our tongues trip over themselves in trying to place it. Where has it come from if we canât point directly at it? And do we really share in the same understanding if none of us would point at the same thing? So Wittgensteinâs observation also captures that moment of doubt, of hesitation, that arises when we are called upon to say what exactly education is (or point directly at it). How is it that education can hover so equivocally between certainty and doubt?
What the observations from both Augustine and Wittgenstein attest to is a kind of cognitive slippage that arises in our language from a tension between what is known on the one hand (i.e. time), and what is suddenly cast into doubt (i.e. our ability to express what time is) on the other. In Culture and Value, Wittgenstein tells of how he and Bertrand Russell would frequently encounter this slipperiness when trying to pin down concepts logically:
Again and again a use of the word emerges that seems not to be compatible with the concept that other uses have led us to form. We say: but that isnât how it is!âit is like that though!âand all we can keep doing is repeating these antitheses.(CV 30b, quoted in Bearn, 2012, p. 97)
Every time we try and discover consistency among things and across properties, their reality confronts us with other possibilities that refute that consistency, leading to what seems to be a slip âtwixt thought and lip. The pointing exerciseâwhat Wittgenstein refers to as ostensive definition âalso enacts this slippage for us. In many ways, none of the things pointed at are necessarily ârightâ or âwrongâ, they just have aspects to them that we all commonly recognise as being related to education (i.e. family resemblance), while failing to provide a complete picture of what something is.
âEducation Is âŚâ
The anxiety over what a thing âisâ comes about because we feel we ought to be able to grasp the essence of a thing, a complete picture which is not contingent upon the immediate situation in which we encounter it:
We ask: âWhat is language?â, âWhat is a proposition?â And the answer to these questions is to be given once for all; and independently of any future experience.(PI, §92)
The desire for this answer is the compulsion towards metaphysics, the hope that things somehow can be established beyond our experience of them, and can therefore be taken as stable and fixed. The educationalist will understandably want to fix this position also. What exactly is happening when the educationalist takes as a starting point in their discussion of the concept the position of âEducation is âŚâ? Letâs consider some examples:
Education is ⌠a fostering, a nurturing, a cultivating, process. (Dewey , 1916, p. 10)
Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it. (Arendt , 1961, p. 196)
Education is what it is and not some other thing ⌠But what it is is seldom made clear. (Peters , 1973, p. 82)
[A]ll education is ⌠an aesthetic experience that teaches us both to see and to unsee, to hear and to unhear, to feel and unfeel in equal measure. (Lewis, 2012, p. 53)
In each of these instances, it is probably to say that what our educationalists are really doing in these expressions is simply omitting to say âI think that âŚâ at the beginning. We are being presented with a point of view, much like the pointing exercise except in words rather than gestures: the meaning of education is being ostensively defined from within the sentence as a whole (the point at which we could say that education has no meaning outside of language). What we perhaps donât know is the degree of assurance being given in each of these instances, the sense in which the worldview (Weltanschauung) being offered via the expression is strong or weak: âHow does the degree of assurance come out? What consequences has it?â (OC, §66), asks Wittgenstein. We also donât know whether these statements are truly meant to reveal the essence of the phenomenon that is education, or simply make an interesting claim upon our judgment. Am I being informed as to what education is, or asked to consider what it might be? And what if I feel as if the definition doesnât quite âfitâ with my own understanding? Am I wrong, ignorant, or simply of a different opinion? And if it is the latter, does this make education always a matter of competing worldviews, or can there be agreement also?
Wittgenstein points to one of the troublesome things about ostensive definition in philosophical thinking: âthe ostensive definition explains the useâthe meaningâof the word when the overall role of the word in language is clearâ (PI, §30, my emphasis). Definitions are helpful, in that they teach us the use of expressions, avert specific misunderstandings, and confirm shared understandings (Baker & Hacker, 2009). All three of these are essential to our continuing capacity to âspeak togetherâ as part of a community with shared interests and ideals, rather than over or past one another. But sometimes the sharedness of words continues in a language where the interests and values attached to them are no longer shared. In this instance, what is shared is no longer a matter of meaning (as definition, as semantics), but a matter of what things mean to us, their meaningfulness. Wittgensteinâs concern throughout Philosophical Investigations is that we shouldnât take language to stop at the need for clarity of definition, but that we should both be wary of letting mere observations turn themselves into scientific definitions (PI §79), and pay due attention to our capacity to use the same words in different contexts under different condition...