Issue XI: pp. 24-27: Education for Culture

VOX - The Student Journal of Politics, Economics and Philosophy

EDUCATION FOR CULTURE

By Clement Wee

E

DUCATION AND SOCIETY ARE INSEPERABLE. Education produces

participants in society and society in turn creates an education system to perpetuate itself. As the radical Reimer (1971) argues, schools are “creators of social reality”. The manner in which society conducts itself will be reflected in what the education system teaches.

The purpose of education is the purpose of society. This purpose of society was labelled as the “covert curriculum” by American political writer Alvin Toffler (1980). In Toffler’s view, the covert curriculum of an industrial society consists of training in punctuality, obedience and repetition. The covert curriculum is necessary in order to train workers for their life in a factory, which requires these.

The purpose of this article shall be in the first instance to challenge the narrowness of Toffler’s interpretation, and in the second, to argue that the social character of education implies that education needs to embrace a wider purpose than simply serving industry, whether that purpose be ethical formation, such as proposed by Martin Luther King Jr (1947) (2009 ed. on24

line) and Benedict XVI (2008), or be individual liberty, such as is proposed

by Reimer (1971) and Freire (1970).

Hence, this article defines culture generically as that which applies to the character of society. Firstly, I shall examine the economic imperative of education, including Toffler’s principles of “indust-reality”. Secondly, I shall analyze the ethical perspective of education. Following which, will be a critical look at the emancipatory purpose of education.

The Catalyst of the Economy Toffler (1980) divides the education system into two components: the “covert” curriculum and the “overt” curriculum, and charges the covert curriculum with producing the workers for industry, as part of the “superstructure” of industrialism that all modern countries share. The characteristics trained by the “covert” curriculum are part of a general philosophical worldview called “indust-reality”. In fact, he goes so far as to call countries the disciples of indust-reality. Indust-reality consists of three main principles: utopian hope in progress, uniformlydivided space-time and atomism. It is

Issue XI - Spring 2010

not my position that I disagree with Toffler’s characterization of the covert curriculum, but to note that he neglects to apply “indust-reality” to the overt curriculum as well. For instance, atomism could be said to exist in the divisions of textbooks (overt curriculum) as much as in the division between recess and lesson-time (covert curriculum). (The atomism in the chronological division is the demarcation of where play belongs, which was debunked by Maria Montessori. [See Montessori, 1914, 1965 Ed.])

What Toffler fails to see is that indust-reality is part of an attitude towards the locus of industrialism, which is what he calls the “invisible wedge” between production and consumption. This wedge creates the marketplace, and this wedge is the Corporation. The Corporation is the modern focus of submission. Just as policies in the past were designed to appease “divine” nobles, whether these nobles were aristocratic or clerical figures, so policies in the industrial world are designed to appease Corporations.

The clearest examples of these are in the countries known as the Asian Tigers. Toffler presents the workers’ song at Matsuhita Electric in Japan which basically consists of “Grow, industry, grow!”. In a more elaborate analysis, Sharpe and Gopiathan (2002) demonstrate the primacy of economic objectives in Singapore.

Thus, Singapore had first the Vocational and Industrial Training Board,

followed by the Institutes of Technical Education, in order to produce a welloiled workforce for the multinationals that the government wished to attract to Singapore. As Singapore’s Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew attested at a recent interview by National Geographic Magazine, “in Singapore, if you are out of business, you are out of food” (Lee, cited by The Online Citizen).

The Student of Culture But such an approach essentially reduces an individual to the status of Toffler’s “industrial man”, that is the archetypal cog in the machine. Is there not more to society than the impersonal mass of the Corporation? As Toffler himself noted, industrial society served to “tear people loose” (Toffler, p111) from the interpersonal networks that held on to them in the old feudal orders. It is precisely these interpersonal networks, however, that provide meaning to human life, and the absence of these that results in the alienation of man from his envi25

VOX - The Student Journal of Politics, Economics and Philosophy

ronment, a point that Marx understood well when we wrote Das Kapital.

Two possible ways to solve this alienation problem have been identified.

The first is to restore the broken interpersonal networks; the second is to promote emancipation through education, thus allowing each individual to create his or her own interpersonal networks.

The first way is the choice of cultural and religious leaders, who stress a return to the old ways. They stress the traditional matrix of authority and how education should provide the ethical foundations to fit the individual back into this matrix. The late American civil rights leader Martin Luther King (1947) refers to this as the “accumulated social experience of living”, emphasizing that ethics is a core component of a truly educated person. Pope Benedict XVI (2008) likewise writes that the main purpose of education is to instil a love for Truth, and to impart the knowledge and understanding of truth to the student, and this truth includes the moral truths held by society for generations.

The second way is usually the choice of radicals like Everett Reimer (1971) and Paulo Freire (1970). This way argues that education ought to be a tool to rescue or prevent people from social oppression. Reimer argues for the abolition of schools in order to end their functioning as agents of societal control by the elites. He stresses that a proper education should begin from “philosophy based on the right of maximum freedom from societal constraint”.

26

Freire demonstrates this in his account of teaching reading to Latin American peasants. He argues that peasants learnt to read faster when they were taught concepts relating to their own life, or as he characterizes them “the relationship between the theoretical context ... and the concrete context”, and hence made able to express what they were not able to under the “culture of silence” that pervaded among them while they were still illiterate.

More interesting is Freire’s philosophical justification for this programme. Freire argues that all educational programmes have as their core topic the relationship of man in the world, and thus to be successful, need to be able to stimulate the ability of the student to describe the reality he or she is in: the physical, practical reality and the psychological, emotional reality. In order to achieve this, there must be a constant “critical analysis of the social framework” being conducted in the background.

...that is the final goal of education: to allow man to make sense of his environment and life in general.

There are certainly merits to this opinion. The Italian educator Maria Montessori (1914) devised a method of educating children that was based on helping them find their position in the world around them, beginning with simple

Issue XI - Spring 2010

motor skills, and ramping up eventually to language, arithmetic and ethical education. The Montessori Method, as it is called, relies on giving children the space to explore the world around them, and permitting them to “invent” understandings and relationships in their social environment. In her Handbook, she argues that the “right means of development” (emphasis hers) and “full liberty to use them” negates any potential for “naughtiness”.

Although Montessori’s topdown perspective is different from Freire’s bottom-up perspective, they share significant similarities. Both stress the role of the educator as a facilitator of knowing, rather than a ‘feeder’ of knowledge. Both emphasize the importance of liberty in the implementation of education. Montessori, however, possesses a more directed focus than Freire and Reimer. While Freire and Reimer are trapped in an endless cycle of seeking social mythologies to combat –a necessary implication of their dialectic – Montessori sets her goal as achieving “calm and goodness” and “the organization of the world”. She views liberty not as an end to itself, but as a means to the end of “perfecting of the activities” and “beneficial and calming satisfaction”. In this sense, we might look upon Montessori’s approach more favourably.

Conclusion: A Synthesis Education these days is tied largely to the attainment of economic goals, with

countries like Singapore taking this to the extreme. But this is woefully inadequate as it lacks a social dimension; King (1947) warns that such an education will develop “a group of close-minded, unscientific, illogical propagandists”.

The alternatives sketched out above rely on re-establishing that social dimension, giving man room and direction to sketch his own pathways for the future. Despite how it may seem, the “conservative” and “liberal” approaches share the common thread of providing meaning to the life of the individual. In the end, that is the final goal of education: to allow man to make sense of his environment and life in general. And as a parting note, a quote from Montessori on the soci-cultural component of education: “How great should the results [of education] among little children [be] if the organization of their work is complete and their freedom absolute?” Perhaps, someday we might finally achieve Montessori’s full vision.

Until then though, we all ought to bear in mind that holism should be the final end point of education.

Bibliography: Toffler, A. (1980). The Third Wave. New York: Bantam.

Reimer, E. (1971). School is Dead. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Ratzinger, J. (2008). Letter of His Holiness Benedict XVI to the Faithful of the Diocese and City and Rome on the Urgent Task of Educating Young People. Available at www. vatican/ va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/letters/2008/ hf_ben_xvi_let_20080121_educazione_en.html.

27