Education: Forming the Life Course

I

Any review of what takes place nowadays in the “education system” soon reveals that no account, let alone theory, covers everything to be found there. It embraces not only schools and universities but also kindergartens and institutes of adult education, further education courses and “educational travel,” vocational training and general education. Nor is there conceptual underpinning for – largely state – funding unless one counts expanding or downsizing existing facilities as a concept. Every terminology, from child to adult education, from Erziehung to Bildung, ^* from pedagogy to schooling captures, at best, part of the endeavor. We appear to be dealing with a historically evolved conglomerate legitimated by the good intentions of its agents and their staff. Where concrete difficulties are to be handled, theoretical umbrella concepts are not missed. Where social-theoretical interests are at issue, however, the unity of this multeity and its singularity as one functional system among many comes into question.

The issue of the unity and the specific modus operandi of the system can be raised with respect to various distinctions, for example that between general and occupational education, but would scarcely extend to kindergartens and driving schools. In what follows, we focus on another volatile difference, that between children and adults.

The distinction between childhood and adulthood is a construct, as are all such distinctions – for example where drawing the line between children and adults as mobile objects able to free themselves from where they happen to be is influenced by considerations of family or social status. In other words, there is no distinction-free, no non-constructed reality, no “child per se.” The question whether there “are” children or adults is too general. ¹ All one can possibly ask is what distinctions are used to identify children and adults.

Educational theory was initially propounded in relation to children and adolescents under the label “pedagogy,” from the Greek “leading children.” There are therefore clearly semantic if not theoretical problems when it comes to including education for adults under this roof. Education qua Erziehung addresses those in need of it. ² Education qua Bildung is for people with the time and inclination to engage in it. Where child education reflects on itself, the exercise is called pedagogy. The aim, as the name indicates, is to shepherd children into adulthood. When this has been achieved – Humboldt sees this turning point as the precondition for university entrance and autonomous learning – Erziehung comes to an end. Maturity criteria and “certificates of maturity” (Reifezeugnis, Abitur, Matura, etc., R.B.) in the sense of school-leaving qualifications mark the threshold. These clear breaks appear to be blurring. With increasing longevity, we are becoming younger and younger; ³ even 30-year-olds still count as young and lay claim to Erziehung or at least to financial support for it. Maturity criteria have degenerated into cognitive criteria, to preconditions for knowledge. But, somehow, we hesitate to describe people in midlife as children or adolescents. They can be treated as students as long as they carry the corresponding ID cards, but even this is not sufficient reason to classify education for adults, let alone for older adults, under “pedagogy.”

These difficulties may be primarily terminological. If in German we are reluctant to speak of Erziehung when speaking of adults, we have the alternative term Bildung. Furthermore, the concept of learning is not tied to a specific age. Life-long learning is accordingly desirable, partly because things now change so fast and knowledge becomes obsolete, and partly because we can always have learned something wrong that we have later to forget or rethink. However, mere terminological corrections block access to consideration of theoretical problems. We would then speak of Erziehung when talking about child education and Bildung when talking about adult education. But we would then have to explain whether and why both should belong to the same social system (whether we call this education system an Erziehungssystem or a Bildungssystem). We therefore look into the operations and structures that could justify treating children and adults as clients of the same system. We take the child/adult distinction as point of departure for a theoretical venture, and accordingly take it seriously. But it does not appear to be a distinction that could explode the system. Despite all the striking methodological and organizational differences, there could be good reasons for leaving school and adult education in the same functional system. And there is more at stake than the well-meaning appropriation of public monies.

II

One possibility (among many) is to consider the medium that the education system uses to build forms. This formulation of the problem draws on the psychology of perception. In a long-forgotten article, Fritz Heider seeks to clarify the conditions of the possibility of perception with the aid of the distinction between medium and thing. ⁴ Perception finds its forms (not in the outside world but in the perceiving system itself) by positing innumerable possible combinations and searching in the resulting space of possibilities for convincing combinations. Most convincing is what holds out the promise of repetition, thus regulating the relationship between forgetting and remembering. Every recognizable form (Heider: every “thing”) also determines what can be forgotten, indeed, what must be forgotten, because it is not essential for recognition but only disruptive or irritating.

In a similar sense, language can also be understood as a medium that provides sufficiently large numbers of words to be combined into sentences. What is learned and remembered are the words used most frequently, which can be combined most productively (regardless of whether they express a particular distinction in the external world). If need be, new words can be added. We thus reject the so-called Whorf/Sapir hypothesis that language as such already limits what can be said, replacing it by a sort of theory of use that posits that and how socially evolving communication needs can be mentally implemented.

Perception and linguistic communication can be brought together under a general theory of meaningful experience and action. Meaning would then be the most general medium, which both psychological and social systems must make use of in the search for a dynamic order for their own autopoietic processes. It is also the medium that enables recursivity, that is, recursion to and anticipation of a repertoire of forms that can also be used otherwise. This fits in with a phenomenological concept of meaning that stresses the continuous co-production of surplus references to other meaning. As we would put it, every choice of form reproduces the medium that imposes the selection of specificities from innumerable possibilities, making it unpredictable for the external observer.

These general media can be specialized and tailored to the special needs of functional systems. The best-known case is the medium of the economy, namely money, which assumes quantitatively specific form only through concrete payments, but which in so doing reproduces the possibilities of payment. Other functional systems evidence comparable states of affairs. Thus, science is far from accepting everything that can be strikingly put into words. With the aid of theories and methodological programs, it fashions itself a special medium that provides both more and fewer possible combinations than can be formulated in everyday language. ⁵ The same holds for the medium of art. ⁶ Art produces art forms, which can be elaborated in various ways and thus provide latitude for widely differing aesthetic realization. ⁷ Only with the functional differentiation of societal subsystems and their particular media does the dynamic develop that characterizes modern society, a dynamic of expansion through restriction, of the development of complexity through the reduction of complexity, and, above all a dynamic of reproducing media through continuous changes to the forms it permits.

For the education system, the first consideration is the child, presupposed as potential for various abilities even though it is already in a certain physical and psychological state that is so and not otherwise. ⁸ The medium child is hence read into a given state defined by the past in order to obtain possibilities for building forms, even though the past can no longer be changed. ⁹ These cursory reflections alone show there could be structural contextual conditions in society that encourage (or oblige) us to assume mobility in relations between past and future, even, under certain circumstances, to sharpen the distinction if we can find out how to deal with it, how to fill the gap – how, indeed, to educate a child.

When it comes to adult education, this answer to the question of the medium of education qua Erziehung comes up against a difficulty. The concept child is defined through the counter-concept adult, and accordingly excludes adulthood. It can be used only with respect to upbringing in the family and school education. Even education at universities (if it is Erziehung), let alone all subsequent efforts at adult education, further education, training courses, education for older adults, would no longer fall within the ambit of the Erziehungssystem. Officially, political and administrative circles in Germany therefore logically speak not of Erziehung but of Bildung, hence of Bildungssystem, Bildungspolitik. But the Bildung concept refers only to the “internal form” that the individual seeks and assumes. It leaves unanswered the question of the medium of this form – the medium in which and through which it can be formed; and the medium that is reproduced through the determination of forms. The broader question is whether we have to put up with this breach of theory on the basis of the child/adult distinction and manage without a general theory of education, or whether the medium of the education system can be described in more abstract terms instructive with regard to both children and adults.

III

In the months before his unexpected death, Karl Eberhard Schorr had been preoccupied by the question of the theoretical basis of adult education. One of his points of departure was the impact of the mass media apparent in all fields of societal communication. To use a popular term, the mass media produce a “knowledge society,” where all information is contextualized and offers other possibilities. There is nothing that is now certain in itself. Everything appears to be subject to comparison with other possibilities. This even causes uncertainty in people’s inferences about themselves. The question “Who am I?” remains unanswered – unless the individuals concerned make themselves into something and see themselves as their own products.

This was where the search began for a transformation concept tailored to individuals that can show what this means for the individual, and how and under what conditions people can find ways to orient themselves on themselves. Social role, the lead concept of the 1940s and 1950s, quite obviously no longer suffices. But “identity” is also an inadequate concept, because one is identical anyway and cannot become more identical than one already is. The concept is primarily disaggregated and recombined ¹⁰ in the social dimension and leaves no room for an open future; and if nevertheless interpreted as indeterminate, its semantic content is overtaxed. The resulting ambivalence merely conceals a conceptually unresolved theoretical problem.

At this point the concept of “life course” presents itself. Unlike “biography,” it still has a blank page to it. People’s life course may, it can be assumed, lead them constantly to rewrite their own biography (they realize late, if not too late, that they ought to have taken better care of their health; they realize at some point that they have embraced certain intellectual currents too enthusiastically and too publicly and can now only give themselves out as “postmodern”). This led finally to the idea we had discussed in depth in the weeks before Schorr’s death: that the life course could be the most general medium of the education system in very many different shapes (or sub-media), depending on whether children or adults are involved.

Schorr could pursue this no further. In what follows we attempt to at least outline such a project.

IV

A life course is – to start with a highly abstract definition – a description composed and revised during a person’s life as the need arises. The life course includes the future, dependent on the past but still uncertain; to this extent it is a conjectural biography. ¹¹ The unity of the life course has to encompass past and future without, however, displaying a teleological structure. It integrates the non-self-evident. It is a rhetorical performance, a narrative. ¹² A life course is composed of turning points at which something happens that did not have to happen. This begins at birth. It is declared to be a fact but, if we consider what led to it, it is also an extremely unlikely fortuity. It must therefore be mentioned. Everything else follows from this. One thing is certain: if one had not been born, there would be no life course to describe. On the other hand, practically nothing is determined in advance. The pattern repeats itself from event to event. Something specific always takes shape. One is given a name; gets to know one’s parents (or not); is impressed by this or that; works one’s way in play into the world; begins a career, experiencing success and failure – always pushing a still uncertain future before one. The basic pattern of conditional and conditioning updating can only repeat itself – at any rate where the life course is the chosen mode of description. The life course is itself a component of a life course. It enters into itself and produces itself as a framework that has to be taken into account one way or another. ¹³ The concept is to be understood as “autological.” Following Derrida, the life course is “writing,” for it carves distinctions into a world that has no need of them. Whether there is a written record or not, one forgets and recalls, fills and empties a memory to make room for new operations and, above all, for the unforeseen.

The outstanding characteristic of a life course is probably that it does not need to be explained but can be narrated. Strictly speaking, it cannot be explained. If one emphasizes only goals and successes, it will be immediately apparent that something is being omitted. As the copious literature tells us, narration is a functional equivalent of argumentation. If it can be shown how one thing arises (has arisen, will arise) from another, this provides a convincing presentation of order. Since the story is told at the level of forms and not at that of combinatorial options of the medium “life course,” an impression arises of tight couplings that could nonetheless be seen as fortuitous occurrences. The narrated career derandomizes its components. Whoever then asks for explanations, loses themselves in the infinite web of causal attributions, which are far too complex and far too doubtful to provide a secure footing for the life course as a whole. Neither as medium nor as form does the life course depend on proof.

A life course is the life course of a single individual. It differs from that of every other individual. For this reason alone, everything that makes up a life course is presented as contingent. It is the result neither of the nature of the human species nor, as we could now put it, of a genetic program. We are accustomed to seeing each life course individually, but it is nonetheless difficult to formulate the relationship between life course and individuality with any precision. It is neither a relationship of being (the individual “is” not his life course) nor a relationship of having (the individual does not “have” a life course). In their life course, individuals present themselves in their individuality, in their otherness, in their incomparability. Although all components of a life course can apply to other life courses, as well – everyone is born, everyone sins, many go to school, others even change sex – the sequential combination in each case is stylized as unique. This means not least of all that the life course circumvents all evaluation, registering it only as attribution. “Je ne suis fait comme aucun de ceux que j’ai vus; . . . Si je ne vaux pas mieux, au moins je suis autre,” proclaims Rousseau at the beginning of his Confessions. ¹⁴ And is proud of it. Neither virtue nor honor can compete. At first glance, it is all the more disconcerting to posit that the life course could have something to do with education qua Erziehung. All the more so, the vain search for education qua Bildung is a life course. ¹⁵

Every concrete life course is the result of a unique form-finding process, which must both presuppose and reproduce the condition of its possibility, that is to say, the conditions for the choice of forms. Possibilities are generally expected to increase in the course of life (as long as one behaves oneself and is diligent) and to decrease later with the loss of mobility. This picture needs to be corrected, which is not to say that it might well reflect reality. The past is not given once and for all. As new situations arise, the life course leads to redescription of a person’s past. Divorcees find themselves in the position of people who had attained their goal only to realize that it was not as good as anticipated. ¹⁶ They must then devise programs for resolving inconsistencies – for which models are naturally available. Professional careers end somewhere, and retirees are satisfied with what they have attained. The loss of options is also a description that fulfills sensemaking functions and can repeatedly be modified. For the future remains unknown and offers surprises. Degrees of freedom can also increase. People who make provision for old age can afford things. The descriptor “life course” suggests constant redescription with shifting compromises between continuity and discontinuity. It may explain why one has become the way one is; but it does not guarantee that this description will still be convincing on the morrow.

This understanding of the life course concept has no ideological structure. It formulates no educational objectives. It is coordinated with the distinction between medium and form. The life course, composed of turning points, is a medium in the sense of a combinatorial space of possibilities as well as the moment-by-moment determination of forms that reproduce this life course from the given position by opening up and closing further possibilities. The medium itself is by no means amorphous, even though it permits an incalculable number of possibilities and, above all, the unexpected. It is always the life course of an individual that is at issue, because it is “indivisible”: a person cannot both live and die, pass and fail an examination at the same time. And the life course must consist of moments that one can describe as developing out of one another, and recount how this took place. On the other hand, the life course is not an entity per se but only a schema for making sense of the forms that enable it. The two sides of this distinction, medium and form, can be realized only in relation to one another. The life course is this distinction. Or rather, it is the processing of this distinction. It is a form for the irrevocable contingency of the events of life –contingency that results alone from the circumstance that individuals are involved who have to both accept and shape their lives with only one natural end in sight, an unthinkable goal: death.

However, this alone does not explain how such a medium could come to be invented and imposed whether it suits the individual or not. This question needs the attention of social theory.

V

The semantic model of the life course is likely to have something to do with the printing press and the evolution of the special functional system of the mass media. However, this hypothesis requires at least two matters to be kept in mind: (1) the emergence of fictional literature and (2) the supplementation, if not displacement, of the direct experience of life by mass-media constructions of reality. Fictional literature (including modern theatre) gives training in the observation of life courses that themselves produce the conditions for their continuation. It supersedes the old model of the “fate” that the hero cannot escape. The reality constructions of the mass media produce such a complex world that the authority of the individual’s own experience is undermined; we grow accustomed to reality being conveyed as information, as always minimal but contextually plausible surprise. ¹⁷

Credit for the invention of fictional narratives (as opposed to narratives claiming to be true) goes not to the printing press, not even to writing. This distinction is already to be found in the oral narrative practices of societies without writing. And there are efforts, narratives, that do not claim to give an account of anything that has really happened, to lend it verisimilitude, for example by mentioning details known to everyone. ¹⁸ With the introduction of the printing press, a new problem arose, namely why people should take an interest in narratives and buy books containing only imaginary tales, which, while claiming to be new (and hence not refreshing social memory), also want to have nothing to do with the world and society as they really are. ¹⁹ As in the oral tradition, the primary solution is to garnish the purportedly fictional text with a semblance of truth. Richardson’s novels still overflow with detail quite unnecessary for the progress of the story; this is accommodated by the epistolary novel. Only slowly did the novel take on its classical form. Topics presumed to interest the reader – notably love and crime – are charged with suspense. The text lives from self-generated non-intentionality, which it then has to resolve.

Suspense operates, so to speak, as an equivalent of reality, and the underlying problem enables readers to draw conclusions for their own lives.

Obviously, a person’s own life does not unfold – and has not unfolded – as presented in novels. This problem, too, is taken up by the novel as the tragedy of confusing fiction with life. Literary life stories reflect this distinction – as a theme of novels. ²⁰ Although people can experience their own lives as self-generated non-intentionality, or would like to set out again in this direction, literature itself warns against copying literature into life. But if shaping one’s self on the novel is not to be recommended, how else is it to be done?

The somewhat idyllic world of life modelled on the lines of the novel has been lost in the course of the twentieth century in the vastly expanded world of the mass media. It has been replaced by a world of images that throws strong light day by day on what we are not and what we do not have. There is not much room in our own lives for cinema or advertising, news or reports, for self-confident gesturing, for interior decorating and fast cars, for sporting prowess or travel experience. Not only money is wanting. Above all, we have a home, we have booked our next trip, we have a car in the garage. Everything that belongs to us (the ancient Greeks spoke of phílos) could be replaced by other things; but to what end? Family and friends, work and profession are not so easy to exchange; but here, too, we constantly observe that others manage to do so. What we see becomes information about the results of a life course – this way or that. Sociologists might tend to discern an interest in prestige goods, but this does not capture the strangely modern structure of the phenomenon. ²¹ We see life courses that have taken shape against the backdrop of an inexhaustible number of possible combinations. We see possibilities for narrative and thus contingencies that offer possibilities for comparison.

VI

To the mass media we owe (if that is the right word) the life course as a person-perception schema. This provides a generally applicable societal medium in which individuals can install themselves as attained and established form – but with a guarantee of an open, as yet indeterminate future, promising constant re-encounter with their own past. This may well lead to redefinition of the concept “person.” ²² We shall not go into this here. What is more interesting is how this general medium of person perception can become a special medium of the education system qua Erziehungssystem. The question is why this system can appropriate a generally established form and use it as a medium for its own form-building. The answer is because we are dealing with a product of rhetoric and not with fact-based knowledge.

Specialization of this sort is not unusual. After all, truth (as opposed to falsehood) is also a general societal medium, which in the shape of scientific truth is given only special form. We ask our way of a passer-by and expect to be told the truth without bothering science. Nor does sympathy necessarily assume the passionate form of unquenchable love. Wherever special functional systems develop, the media are under particular pressure to meet demands. Moreover, they are conditioned. But even in functionally specific forms, one “understands” the media only as elaboration of otherwise current communication. We must therefore ask how the general medium of person perception – the life course – can be designed to allow education (including adult education and geragogy) to serve as a medium for building specific forms.

Regardless of whether children or adults are involved: education qua Erziehung always has to do with “individuals,” who are the way they are, and who behave the way they do. The “individuality” (indivisibility) of individuals guarantees that they are found to be the same individuals in other situations, too. Although they are dynamic, self-organizing systems that dispose over themselves, this means only that educators can above all expect to be surprised. And so it is. The social construct “Erziehung” can come about only where interaction systems form on the basis of the life-course medium. Situations are then described in terms of a schema both retrospective and open to future possibilities to build forms. The assumption that learning can offer other possibilities operates as a self-fulfilling prophecy, regardless of whether it is correct or not. It validates itself by motivating a behavior that creates new conditions for further behavior. Whether Erziehung attains the goals set or not is another matter, and both outcomes can occur. The first and fundamental question, however, is how the education system comes to see options in a combinatorial space of possibilities called the “life course.”

Since, as we have seen, media themselves contain no teleological information, specification can concern only the forms that take shape in the medium. It is therefore not a matter of teaching a life course to those that are to be, or want to be, educated. The problem lies in the relevance of certain forms for the life course. We shall call such forms “knowledge,” ²³ including knowledge about one’s abilities (for example swimming ²⁴ ). This concept of knowledge takes into account that the brain prepares the way for the consciousness, constantly creating states of affairs that need to be interpreted, for example emotions; that have to be given names and meaning. What is all-important in our context is that knowledge lends form to the life course and thus also reproduces it as a form-building medium. This means not only that we can use knowledge but also and above all that we can become involved in new, unfamiliar situations with a sort of certainty.

To a considerable extent, education qua Erziehung is now planned as training, that is to say, the acquisition of skills useful in furthering a career. And there is good reason for this: in modern society, career is the mobile form that integrates individuals and society. ²⁵ If education qua Bildung is also on offer, it is typically on special grounds, as if needing justification: as a “value” people are entitled to or as a “civil right.” In fact, Bildung serves as a convenient name for official endeavors that, given the age of the clientele, cannot really be described as Erziehung. But is it still Bildung (and in what sense) to teach older adults to dance? Nor is the distinction between Ausbildung (usually translated as “training”, R.B.) and Bildung still really convincing. Moreover, it certainly fails to cover all that is to be found in the education system.

The functional differentiation of the societal system has, as in other fields, led to a curiously modern combination of universalism and specification. ²⁶ Each functional system claims society-wide, universal competence for its own function and specific modus operandi. This combination would have to be visible in a theoretical language tailored to educational requirements – if the combination (or separation) of schools and universities, institutions of vocational training and adult education, and, finally, programs for older adults is to offer more than organizational expediency or the economic deployment of resources.

Building the medium/form distinction into the theory of the education system could be a first step in this direction. It would set consistency conditions for further steps. For example, the education system could then no longer be understood in teleological or adaptionist terms. ²⁷ Instead, it would be exposed to its own autonomy and thus rendered dependent on self-organization, self-description, or, more generally, on “sensemaking.” ²⁸ Values, goals, alternatives, ex post facto rationalization would have to be developed and, where plausibility fails, changed within the system itself, in the reflective establishment and in its organizations. External observers – sociologists, for example – would be well advised to exercise reservation when it comes to such “value issues.”

Furthermore, there would be consequences for what can be expected in the way of pedagogical “knowledge.” Erziehung is schema-based, not knowledge-based behavior. The prerequisites for the quasi technological application of knowledge are lacking – not least because the interaction system that engages in education qua Erziehung does not take the time to check whether the preconditions for applying knowledge are given or not (so that it does not really matter whether such knowledge is there or not). ²⁹ What counts is carrying out a self-fulfilling prophecy with the stubborn determination to satisfy one’s own expectations and learn what ought to have been done from what has actually been done. ³⁰ This is not to belittle what has been achieved but merely to point out that a medium other than science underlies Erziehung, and that the tight couplings it seeks lie not in technically applicable knowledge but in the forms of the life courses to which it contributes.