What and what for? Theorizing ontology and instrumentality of education. Introduction to the Special Issue

The questions “what” and “what for” in the title of this special issue of Policy Futures in Education announce that the intention of the authors of this collection is to distance ourselves from a fairly common way of thinking about education where what education is, is explicated by stating what it is for. This does not mean that we insist that ontology (what education is) and instrumentality (what it is for) are separate issues and that one cannot link them by defining the nature of education by asking what aims it serves or what functions it plays; a once-respected and extremely influential systems theory was based precisely on this functionalist approach. The dissection we propose here is, rather, a methodological gesture of separation by which we hope to re-open the question of relations between educational ontology and instrumentality, and thus to contribute critically to the long-lasting discussion that intensified recently in reaction to neoliberal reforms which subordinated education to economic objectives and “objective” measurement. Resistance to these reforms inspired a global discussion which calls for the defense of social aims and responsibilities (like the struggle for public values and social justice in critical pedagogy; Giroux, 2015), the return to cultural and personal values—in themselves, or linked to democratic values as in Martha Nussbaum’s “not for profit” agenda (Nussbaum, 2010)—as well as reflection that the problem lies with imposing on education external goals of whatever kind and value seem to be the dominant positions. The latter approach maintains that the menace is instrumental reason itself—a gesture that reminds of Max Horkheimer and the Frankfurt School (Horkheimer, 2012), even though critical pedagogy, a direct heir of that school, is itself put on the list of suspects by some proponents of the non-instrumental turn (Hodgson et al., 2018). In this non-instrumental perspective education is a good in itself, and any external logic imposed on it is treated as threat to its autonomy and unique quality. In some cases critique reaches the level of social ontology, where authors ask not only what is becoming of education in course of such subordination, but also—in a reversed gesture—what must have happened to society for its becoming dependent on “educationalization” of its political problems (Smeyers, 2008).

In spite of the pressing urgency of contemporary debates on education aims and policies, the discussion on the instrumental in education is worth reading in the context of its theoretical history as well. As it seems, this history still shines through its present articulations.

In 1762, Jean-Jacques Rousseau proposed a vision of education that, on the one hand, praises innate freedom and goodness of man (sic!), and on the other, it “denatures” that natural man (Rousseau, 1921) so that individual freedom can be transformed into collective totality: into body politic that acquires “its common identity, its life and its will” (Rousseau, 1920: 44). Aware of the paradoxes and tensions that the transformation of free individuals into collective totality creates, Rousseau postulates that the instrumental machinery of education is hidden from the eyes of those educated: Emil’s personal freedom must be respected apparently, while his desired dispositions are built through careful pre-arrangements of the milieu in which his formative experience appears “naturally.” Importantly, strategies of making the instruments of control invisible pertain not only to educational, but to political arrangements as well. Individuals guided by “natural” education must later be subject to invisible formation of their “morality, of custom, above all of public opinion” (Rousseau, 1920: 72) shaped “in silence” by the Legislator—a nearly divine imaginary agent needed to prepare ground for the shift from autocracy to the republic. To sum up, Rousseau proposes a modern design of pedagogical and political control whose efficiency depends on precise manipulation of its visibility and invisibility (Szkudlarek, 2016).

In 1806, Johann Friedrich Herbart published his groundbreaking Allgemeine Pädagogik aus dem Zweck des Erzhieung Abgeleitet—“General Pedagogy Deduced from the Aim of Education,” later known to the English-speaking worlds as The Science of Education (Herbart, 1908). His task—to propose the language and conceptual structure of Pädagogik that would meet academic criteria of conceptual clarity and rigorous argumentation—was undertaken in two theoretical steps. First, as the title suggests, Herbart defined the aim of education, founding it on the idea of subjective autonomy (“the inner freedom of man”). Second, he construed a complex theoretical project of the method of education, where we can find a project of “nearly fluid” discipline (external control that turns into autonomy) which evokes nowadays the Focauldian genealogy of power/knowledge (Foucault, 1995), and where a complex theory of mental representations foretells what we know nowadays as cognitive science (Herbart, 1891). The aim of education, Herbart says, is to build strong moral character in man (sic!) so that he is capable of following his will rather than that of others. As the child is born reactive, with no will or character, those dispositions must be built through the training of attention and the formation of interests which will structure the system of mental representations. Assuming that free will and character are educable rather than natural dispositions, Herbart adopts the method of natural sciences (he literally refers to chemical experiments) and seeks reliable translations of his explications of mental mechanics into pedagogical techniques capable of construing autonomous individuals. The instrumental dimension of this conception, unlike in Rousseau, is never hidden. On the one hand, it relies on scientific method. On the other, instead of hiding pedagogical intervention behind the scenes, Herbart says that we should start with direct control (“government”) over the child and gradually turn it into internalized discipline which would make direct interventions into individual behavior unnecessary.

Some time later, John Dewey (Dewey and Boydtson, 1980) criticized Herbart for focusing on teaching and neglecting learning, and construed a broad theoretical perspective where education is understood as growth in its biological sense as the renewing of life, as well as in its socio-cultural sense of including and expanding social context, culturally recorded historical experience, and individual needs and experience. Dewey understood instrumentality in a far more dynamic sense than Herbart or Rousseau, such that both teaching and learning involve not only that which is functional to the renewal of social life, but also an always provisional arrangement of means and ends open to the contingencies of what cannot be foreseen. Importantly, while Dewey opposes the idea that education is functional to society (society is itself a shifting “end-in-view” of education, so society cannot determine its aims), he maintains the instrumentality of education as a means to fulfill, even if provisionally, society as an end. Instrumentality appears both as ontological and provisional in his educational philosophy: we are always acting to solve some problems, but there are no final ends, only “ends-in-view” —what we label as ends are merely “means brought to full interaction and integration” Dewey and Boydston, 1984; see Oliverio's paper in this volume as well.

These three historical positions can be read as structuring at least some of the grammar of modern educational instrumentality. One (Herbart) assumes educability and plasticity of individuals, and in discipline it finds means to make those individuals independent. Another (Rousseau) assumes freedom and goodness of individuality, but takes it as a point of departure toward common will of the reformed commonality. Herbart’s pedagogy operates through discipline to arrive at human freedom, Rousseau’s manipulates freedom to arrive at discipline. While instrumental control is fairly straightforward in Herbart, with a clearly designed process of internalization of governance that gradually shifts control from the teacher to the educated person herself, in Rousseau we see tactics and strategies of making the instrumental invisible for the child and for the citizen. Both these positions can be read today as substantiating Foucault’s account on the genealogy of modern power regimes. Even though social ontologies are not outlined in either in these educational theories systematically (in Rousseau it has been done in other texts, and in his The Social Contract in particular), in both we see that educational ontology is strictly related to the social one. Risking some simplification, one may say that in both cases one needs to start with shaping the individual to arrive at the construction of the social.

The third of these positions—Dewey’s—speaks of the autonomy of education, but acknowledges that chains of instrumental relations create, as if, an endless core of the process of educational becoming of society. In other words, Dewey does not deny the instrumental nature of educating, but proposes a more complex instrumentality of education. It includes both learners and teachers, and the educative experience “identifies the end (the result) and the process” so “all education resides in having such experiences” (Dewey, 1915/1997: 72). In other words, for Dewey, the instrumental encompasses what education, teaching, and learning are. It is with Dewey that instrumentality, vital and dynamic, delivers the ontology of education (Carusi and Szkudlarek, this issue).

It seems that numerous manifestations of instrumentality in and of education nowadays still move around that space. One of the typical ways education is instrumentalized today concerns the provision of methods and technical means of education, of teacher training in particular, comparable to Herbart’s desire for a science of education. We often read that education should be based on evidence; that we should know “what works” and transmit that knowledge to teachers so that they know best practices for working with children so that their work “works” (while in fact it does not; see Biesta, 2010). In other words, researchers who through their observations “see” things (the ancient meaning of theoria) should guide those who “do” them, and mirroring Herbart’s vision, the knowledge of education is expected to produce blueprints for action and supply practice with methods and yardsticks for measurement. On the other hand, there are liberal pedagogies that follow the path traced by Rousseau; first, in their claims of natural freedom of child, and second, in how they refrain from direct intervention into child’s choices, behavior or motivation. From Montessori through the Rogersian humanistic pedagogy at the turn of the 1960s/1970s, to some of the contemporary movement of democratic schools—to serve liberal society means that schools should be based on premises of individual freedom, choice, and personal responsibility. Direct control over learners is pushed to the backstage, and the arrangement of learning environments remains the least questionable and nearly invisible instrument in hands of the teacher.

The Deweyan concern with linking education to democracy is also constantly present in powerful trends of educational debate, for example in critical pedagogy, which see education as capable of keeping the fragile project of democracy alive and persistently oppose subordination of education to economic interests. Education serving economic ends and promoting individual autonomy trimmed to the logic of economy is perhaps the most frequent object of instrumentality critique within this tradition today: when one questions the idea of education being instrumental, it usually means being instrumental to neoliberal education policy nowadays.

However, the calls for freeing education from economic rationality are not critical of instrumentality as such: freeing education from economic pressures may mean that we want it to serve other gods, like social justice, sustainable development, or individual betterment. Thus, under the guise of a critique of instrumentality, one often finds a critique of the wrong kind of instrumentality. Such complexity has been described accurately in a series of works on educationalization of social problems—both economic efficiency and social justice, if I may use such abbreviated labels for the strongest camps engaged in this debate, are political problems and they should be dealt with politically. Education, and schools in particular, have not been invented for such purposes, as some authors within the educationalization critique maintain (Smeyers, 2008).

Against this complex background there appears a trend in educational philosophy and theory where instrumentality as such is challenged, without then endorsing the right kind of instrumentality. Referring to thinkers such as Jacques Rancière or Giorgio Agamben, theorists work toward freeing education practice not only from administrative constraints and economic pressures, but from precise plans, operational aims and societal expectations in general. This approach has seen significant publications where education is theorized in radically non-instrumental terms: as scholè, or a place and time free from external pressure and daily obligations (Masschelein and Simons, 2013); as practice that is valid here and now, without future-oriented temporality (Biesta, 2013); as potentiality that has to remain potentiality (Lewis, 2013; Masschelein and Simons, 2013); or as creativity marked by inevitable, yet beautiful risk (Biesta, 2015a). Interestingly, this movement, in spite of its radically critical edge, refers to concepts close to conservative ideas. Some of these radical works are saturated with references to antiquity; in some respects they re-activate the tradition of artes liberales or monastic contemplation. If historical instrumentalisms mentioned before can be seen as cornerstones of the modern field of relations between education and society, the latter non-instrumental project seems to go beyond, or perhaps to detour many aspects of the modern project as we have known it. Or does it? Are we, or shall we ever be able to overcome the instrumental in education? Or have we ever moved beyond the modern project, however radical we were during the postmodern interlude? Is education ontology possible to think without its relation to the social and without the instrumental?

These questions lay behind the idea of the symposium What for and Why held at University of Gdańsk in June 2017, and the majority of papers presented in this volume of Policy Futures in Education had their initial versions presented at that symposium. Preparing the outline of that event, however, we focused on spatial rather than historical metaphors. If those historical cornerstones are still present in our contemporary discussion with and on educational instrumentality, we thought, we should perhaps “flatten” them into a surface on which their complex relations could be juxtaposed as present modalities, or perhaps layers, or loci of the instrumental in the debates on educational ontology. We decided to invite speakers by suggesting that contemporary debates on instrumentality might be represented spatially by a concentric metaphor where one can envision instrumentality shifting across three circles. Changing its locus within the suggested structure, instrumentality should change its ontological relevance as well. In the innermost circle, instrumentality is interrogated as intrinsic to educational practice: are, or should school-based teaching and learning be externally controlled by detailed techniques and procedures? Are they instrumental to pre-established goals, or is education, for instance, a matter of potentiality that cannot be translated into precisely defined means or planned beforehand according to some specified end? Moving to the middle circle, instrumentality concerns education in general, in its cultural and institutional shape, as instrumental (or not) in relation to other systems, or, more generally, visions of society. Is education functional to the market, or democracy, or national identity, sustainable development or anything else that is “not yet” but is expected to come by means of education? Or may it occupy a time and space free from competing drives for one or another future? In this second circle, one could perhaps divide the field of education into instrumental and non-instrumental activities, where, referring to a useful distinction proposed by Gert Biesta, instrumentality could be located within socialization and qualification practices, while subjectification appears as a rupture in such normalizing orders, transcending their instrumental logic (Biesta, 2015b). One can also speak of justified and unjustified hopes for education being instrumental to political problems (an issue also discussed in the debate on educationalization; Smeyers, 2008), which, similarly, leaves room for the non-instrumental—at least in terms of freedom from direct political pressure.

In the third circle, the question of instrumentality can be addressed in socio-ontological terms, as pertaining to education along with politics and culture in ways that speak to the very construability of society. In this outermost circle, education is a force in the ontology of the social, not only inextricably connected to politics in their instrumental dimensions, but also co-constitutive of “the political.” Here education is a condition of possibility of society (Szkudlarek, 2016), or, to put it in Laclau’s language, a force that operates between the impossibility and necessity of society (Laclau, 2005). At this level, the elements that are seen as non-instrumental in the previous two circles may appear as instrumental, or functional to some way, predictable or not, of social and individual becoming.

One could say that in the two inner circles instrumentality critique tends to assume a specificity of education in relation to whatever might be defined as non-educational, while in the third, outermost circle, the distinction between the educational and the non-educational is challenged, which does not mean overcome: in some articulations their separation can still be a condition of such “ontological functionality” (see Vlieghe and Zamojski in this issue). In other words, the inner two circles of instrumentality critique investigate an ontology of education premised on distinguishing between what education is and what it is not; they search for “the educational.” In contrast, the outermost, third circle assumes a position from which the educational can be seen as inextricable from the political: they are both momentums, or interconnected aspects of the ontology of modern societies. This means that even if we manage to imagine educational institutions as operating beyond the logic of instrumentality, or think in non-instrumental terms about the relations between these institutions and other social arrangements, on the socio-ontological level of modern societies instrumentality seems to re-appear as an inextricable aspect of modernization politics. Modern politics, or, in other words, the project of modernization, is difficult to articulate without the figure of “ends,” and their ever-receding provisionality only fuels the perpetual drive for progressive politics and progressively conceived pedagogy.

To sum up, through this spatial-concentric metaphor we wanted to propose a space in which the three historical, founding narratives of thinking of education instrumentally, as well as the fourth one that challenges them all and claims education beyond the instrumental, could be seen as modalities that jointly map the ground for contemporary instrumental–ontological relations in and of education. This was what we hoped the speakers would take as inspiration for their presentations. Did it work? In diverse ways and degrees, yes. In some papers the suggested structure of relations between the instrumental and the ontological has been taken up directly, even if incidentally; in others it has worked as a pre-text for investigating more detailed problems.

The concentric structure where we suggest that the instrumental may work in or through educational discourse in various ways, from technically practical concerns through social functionalism to being implicated in the very ontology of the social, was known to the authors before they started to prepare their papers for publication, and in some of those papers we see direct references to this structure. However, not surprisingly, it proved impossible to use it as a grid in which particular approaches could be inscribed fully. Still, each of these papers contributes to elucidating unobvious and often paradoxical relations between what education is and what it is for, between its ontology and instrumentality. Each can, therefore, be inscribed into the proposed structure and illustrate—as we have intended—shifts, transitions, and complexities of how the instrumental works in and for education.