MosesWrites
On the campaign trail in early 2000, then Presidential hopeful George W Bush spoke of his ambitions to reform and improve education: “rarely is the question asked,” Bush wondered aloud, “is our children learning?”
Grammatical malapropism became fodder for elite criticism that eclipsed a good bit of serious debate over what would become “No Child Left Behind.”
A quarter-century hence, Bush’s words seem quaint given the dramatic turns of world history that have followed his inauguration a year later.
I recall this moment as I’ve been reflecting on the idea of progress, especially of how we think about and suppose to measure progress in education.
First, I consider progress for individual students: do they seek out challenges? Can they read and understand more demanding texts, can they solve more advanced mathematical problems? Do they have a healthier, more encompassing relationship with themselves, and with others?
Second, I wonder about social or institutional progress: on the whole, have our children become adults desiring, and creating, a better world for themselves, their peers, and their posterity?
Since 2000, personally and globally, I would suggest on most any meaningful metric we have failed profoundly. Emotional well-being has plummeted, childhood obesity has reached epidemic proportions, and achievement gaps have grown, with least well-resourced children enduring perpetual structural disadvantages within and across countries. Self-congratulation abounds, but I still say: F.
Further, access to tertiary education, economically unsustainable higher educational systems, and the impacts of AI and further automation on employability bound aspirations. Each year a new iPhone, but less and less a sense of a promising future: even the most nimble and optimistic of emerging economies succumbs to a pallor of global misdirection.
What do we do, then, if we’ve no sense of progress? Without progress as the very heart of our educational mission, how can we afford children as they grow to inherit tomorrow’s earth?
Progress carries enormous historical and emotional baggage: personal salvation and Enlightenment truth, satisfaction in learning new things and a sense that we can become better as a person: smarter, stronger, kinder, healthier, wiser.
Progress has the power of science, of a scientific revolution that has sustained technological advancement from basic mechanics to the pressure-pushing work of internal combustion. Progress has harnessed electric current to pulse through silicon wafers that instantiate an increasingly more powerful dimension of reality.
Progress has linear comfort, just as we move from first grade to second and so forth, from one level to the next. From Rousseau to Dewey to hooks, a sense of “better,” even against all odds, pushes education to expand, to prioritize inclusivity, to propel opportunity. Better schools, more knowledge for more children, and a happier life for all.
Even the horrific tragedies of the First and Second World Wars, the intellectual disenchantment that fueled post-modernism and a solipsistic obsession with language, even the brutalities of the Cold War across erstwhile third world battlegrounds, didn’t fully erode the optimism of an overall still improving world, a world that welcomed increasingly greater numbers into the folds of prosperity.
I came of age on a wave—perhaps the last wave—of unrepentant American optimism: personal computing (hours at an Apple IIe as a six-year-old), Berlin Wall fallen (freedom prevails!), improved health (ban smoking, curtail air pollution), expanding environmental protection (don’t litter, sort and recycle), difference embraced (the world is flat!).
Still I try to muster hope: three years ago, I could barely order a coffee in Chinese; today, I can sustain a dinnertime conversation. That achievement has real value and rich, experiential meaning. I don’t want to undercut any such sense of self-worth, of hard-earned achievement, for myself of for anyone else.
I especially don’t want to belittle the heroic efforts of teachers around the world who make transformative differences in the lives of so many students. Education still remains the greatest means of empowerment, especially for girls and for those who lack familial wealth or social status.
I do mean to contextualize such achievement, though, and to question how we’ve so exhaustively individualized progress that in many cases it has become meaningless—whether in the sense of grade inflation, or of a radicalized notion of equality that flattens unique talents and capabilities for fear of critique or offense.
Education ought to be at the heart of any philosophical reflection, as the means by which we transmit and reproduce our values and vision. Why else do we try?
On its own terms, progress has failed. Despite amazing strides with digitization and communication technology, despite the prospect of near universal access to reservoirs of knowledge, despite the advent of compelling AI tools for learning, children have become less happy, less motivated, and less healthy. On the whole, too, they’ve become less successful at rudimentary analytical tasks, even if those at the tippity top of the achievement pyramid appear to propel herculean advances in theoretical and applied knowledge: how, exactly, does my smartwatch work, other than magic?
Progress has failed, too, when it comes to expanding and extending opportunity. Base-level achievement has improved, yet the social and economic space to actualize that potential has not grown apace.
Further, while fantastic and world-transformative development has alleviated huge amounts of poverty, first and foremost as achieved by China, still the overall cost—catastrophic climate change propelled by those originally industrialized countries, most especially the United States—forecloses rather quickly the wellbeing currently enjoyed by those formerly destitute.
As global habitability becomes more precarious, I enjoy near infinite media available with the click of a button. I can create near infinite content with free software. Yet I often feel more lost, more anxious than I ever did before. My students say the same, anxiety all the more youthfully acute.
We have an astounding abundance yet still ever enough; we often lack profoundly a sense of satisfaction in the choices we’ve made. Profit, non-profit— for whom? —cynicism confounds distinctions.
I worry that even when we gain a real sense of purpose, even when we discover inner drive and conviction, we’ve been so fully entrapped by contemporary distortions that we’re simply reproducing the very worst of the oppressive systems that have and continue to destroy our environment, our personal well-being, and our relationships and capacity for love.
I’m happy to share insights on social media, and I yearn for a space with substantiative conversation that’s freely accessible to everyone. Yet I can’t help but find, on the whole, amidst abs and ads, amidst influencers and endless AI-fueled artifice, a greater void of endless scrolling that consumes all other value.
I feel similarly about the established structures and formats that exist for education, the long legacy of industrialization in modern society: the need for disciplined, modestly capable labor, and the need for childcare, for those parents in a workforce already apart from the home. After more than a dozen years of school, and often with further education or training, huge percentages of young people remain unemployed.
The World Economic Forum Global Social Mobility Report 2020 notes, “The Global Social Mobility Index shows that very few economies have the right conditions to foster social mobility and consequently income inequalities have become entrenched. On average, across key developed and developing economies, the top 10% of earners have nearly 3.5 times the income of the bottom 40%.”
That’s before COVID, and before the dismantling of USAID and other enrichment programs around the world. That’s before interrogating inherited wealth or perpetuated structural exclusion, apropos of Thomas Picketty.
Philosophically, too, I’ve found a paucity of inspiration. Formerly neo-liberal advocates for a “post-historical” world now more often seek insights from Great Powers diplomacy, the struggles of 19th century imperialism, and the catastrophic wars of the first half of the 20th. Even the most ardent techno-utopian types can’t avoid the likely alienation of a vast underclass for whom The Future will remain forever out of reach.
Perhaps those who lead schools and who educate future teachers have better insulated themselves with greater hopefulness, yet I yearn for a more honest reckoning with our current intellectual condition. I seek more serious, rigorous, historically and analytically robust conversations about how and why students learn.
I find his prose cloying and often self-defeating, but I’ve still found inspiration in Slavoj Žižek’s recently published thought pieces, Against Progress. I don’t imagine it will be assigned any time soon in education programs or even graduate courses, but his critiques of politics, of contemporary values, and of our incipient climate crises provoke worthwhile reflections:
“The very idea of being able to move forward (let alone meaningfully address) the climate crisis is dependent upon a total reorientation of our sense of reality and our relationship to the phenomenological world” (20).
I’m not sure the latest chatbot will get us there, but I am truly, genuinely curious to engage with those who wish to fathom together what such a “total reorientation” in education would entail. I’m eager to think as much in philosophical terms as I am drawn to practical matters, daily patterns and routines of institutions, from the scope of childcare to primary and secondary learning.
For starters, I think we need to embed education in our communities much more deeply, and to see relationships—with others, with the environment, and across time and space—as the foundation for learning, versus abstract or disembodied knowledge.
If Žižek has been a challenge, I’ve found more meditative solace in Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass. Both offer compelling, alternative conceptualizations for how we understand knowledge as such. Both challenge how we think, our assumptions, our default aspirations.
Whatever may come, we need to be prepared, as what we’ve now begins to collapse around us.