Gavin Williamson, UK Secretary of State for Education, claimed in a speech last week, that there is a widespread snobbishness against vocational education with people often claiming that it is a good idea but only for 'other people's children' (https://feweek.co.uk/2020/07/09/gavin-williamsons-speech-on-fe-reform-the-full-text/). One reason for this is that vocational training is commonly opposed to academic education as if vocational means narrowing the mind whereas academic means broadening the mind. Many people seem to assume that learning something very abstract and obscure like algebra or post-modern literary theory must be more intelligent than learning something concrete and useful like cooking or computer programming. Research on how general thinking skills can be taught and learnt does not support this prejudice.
 
When the children of wealthy people all used to study Latin at school it was widely assumed that Latin must be generally good for mind. Rigorous research into this assumption by one of the first experimental educational psychologists, Edward Thorndike, found no such result (1923). Success in Latin did not translate into more general success in learning other subjects or measures of general thinking ability. The same results, or rather, a lack of result, have been found for maths, Logic programming, chess and any and all the other content areas put forward as offering a source for general thinking skills (Perkins and Salomon, 1992). Some have argued from this research that it is not possible to teach for general thinking skills at all. But that is the wrong conclusion. That is not what the research said. In fact, even the well cited Perkins and Salomon paper above pointed out that transfer of this kind is possible depending on the way that subjects are taught. Just teaching a logic programming language such as Logo in schools, for example, did not have an effect, but teaching this same content with dialogues bringing out the general thinking strategies involved and exploring how these bridge to help solve other problems in other areas of life does lead to transfer (Wegerif, 2002).  There is overwhelming evidence that it is possible to teach for general thinking skills such as critical thinking (Abrami et al 2008). And on the whole the evidence suggests that the teaching for general transferable thinking skills turns out to be not so much about what you teach as about the way that you teach it.
 
Despite the lack of hard evidence perhaps there was something behind the intuition people had that learning Latin was good for them. After all Randomised Control Studies are a very blunt instrument focussing on correlations and not always bringing out the impact of different ways of teaching and learning - or what could be called the causal mechanisms linking teaching to learning. In Thorndike's day those who argued in favour of Latin as a training for the mind focussed on the rigour of the grammar. This was shown to have no general impact but something else not looked at then might have had an impact - this was the way that Latin was sometimes taught with discussions around interesting ancient texts. Most people who study Classics in a traditional University, learn through talking together in small groups. They are not just taught facts and correct interpretations they are asked to question, to explore alternatives, to build on ideas, to challenge and to provide reasons for claims. This kind of 'dialogic' education in the Classics has a long tradition. Recent evidence suggests that it is precisely this kind of pedagogy that can help people learn to think in a way that transfers to support thinking in every area of life (Gorard et al 2015, Sun, Wang and Wegerif, 2020). By dialogic education I do not just mean education that transmits knowledge through the means of dialogue but, much more importantly, education that teaches students how to be better at dialogue, better at asking good questions, better at listening not just to what people say but also to what they might mean, better at comparing and better able to make creative leaps in order to see things as if through other's eyes (Wegerif 2017).
 
Research on teaching for thinking and creativity suggests strongly that general thinking skills, strategies and dispositions can indeed be taught and that the best way to teach them is by drawing students into dialogue in a structured way (Resnick, Asterhan and Clarke, 2015). This can be done in the way that you teach Classics or algebra, but it can also be done in the way that you teach almost anything at all. Design and technology (D&T) in schools, for example, could be taught in a very 'direct teaching' sort of way, showing students exactly how to make a functioning pencil case. Apparently this is still what happens in many D&T classrooms. It is this kind of teaching and learning that people seem to be thinking about when they assume that vocational education is somehow less intelligent than a more academic education. The alternative is that D&T could be approached in a more dialogic and creative way, drawing children into a participatory design process involving promoting empathy with users and collaborative creativity in order to solve real world challenges (e.g Bill Nicholl and Ian Hoskin's work on D&T here at Cambridge Faculty of Ed shown in a short clip here https://youtu.be/cW0OYpcE9tE see Nicholl et al 2013). 
 
Gavin Williamson claimed, in the speech referred to above, that we need a more 'German-style' model for vocational education. Superficially the German model does seem  better than the UK approach but this model also has its problems. It involves specifying occupations - 325 of them - many of which might be due for redundancy as growth in AI transforms the world of work (Seldon & Abidoye 2018). The way to overcome this challenge is to have a vocational education that focusses on general transferable skills such as learning to learn, team work, collaborative creativity and just, well, how to act intelligently both when alone and when working together with others. These kinds of skills, strategies and dispositions, now often referred to as 'future skills' teach how to thrive in a time of rapid change. They promote a culture of enterprise which is not only about fitting students into existing jobs but also about equipping them with the skills to see new opportunities and to create new jobs.
 
We are exploring ways to make this kind of vocational education work currently in a project funded by industry partners, BT and Huawei, to develop 'virtual internships' (https://www.educ.cam.ac.uk/research/projects/vip/). These Virtual Internships involve learners – initially in Year 7 or 8 from secondary schools in areas of low social mobility in England – working in small teams role-playing being ‘interns’. Students learn about the world of work while engaging in scenarios and activities designed to develop the kind of ‘complex competencies’ (or 'future skills') often emphasised as desirable by employers but also desirable for participation in citizenship and in lifelong learning. Specifically, they design and develop solutions that respond to real-world challenges proposed by the companies we are working with. Although currently we are just working with two companies, we think that this could offer a more general model for building bridges between schools and the world beyond school.
 
Teaching for creativity and general thinking skills can be done. I suspect that this has been done quite successfully in Universities like Cambridge for centuries. That was probably the real point of sitting around in seminars discussing different interpretations of passages from Herodotus or Horace. Now that we know that we can extract this way of conferring intellectual advantage from its location within the traditional class system, as a benefit only available for the children of the 'leisured class', and apply it more generally to provide an intellectual upgrade for all, including those studying vocational subjects that might more directly help us solve the many real world challenges that we face. The secret to teaching thinking lies in the way that subjects are taught and learnt and not in the content. This is not to say that content knowledge does not matter, you have to think about something and be creative within constraints (Phillipson & Wegerif, 2016). The point is that, in order to teach intelligence, it does not matter if you are discussing poetry or if you are discussing football, cordon-bleu cuisine or how to design a better Internet of Things, the secret lies in the quality of the dialogue.
 
 
 
 
 
 References
 
Abrami, P. C., Bernard, R. M., Borokhovski, E., Wade, A., Surkes, M. A., Tamim, R., & Zhang, D. (2008). Instructional interventions affecting critical thinking skills and dispositions: A stage 1 meta-analysis. Review of Educational Research, 78(4), 1102-1134.

Gorard, S., Siddiqui, N., & See, B. H. (2018). Philosophy for Children: Evaluation report and executive summary. https://dera.ioe.ac.uk/32011/1/EEF_Project_Report_PhilosophyForChildren.pdf

Nicholl, B., Flutter, J. A. E., Hosking, I. M., & Clarkson, P. J. (2013). Transforming practice in Design and Technology: evidence from a classroom-based research study of students' responses to an intervention on inclusive design. Curriculum Journal, 24(1), 86-102.

Perkins, D. N., & Salomon, G. (1992). Transfer of learning. International encyclopedia of education, 2, 6452-6457. Pergamon press. (PDF Online)

Phillipson, N., & Wegerif, R. (2016). Dialogic Education: Mastering core concepts through thinking together. Taylor & Francis.

Resnick, L., Asterhan, C., & Clarke, S. (2015). Socializing intelligence through academic talk and dialogue. American Educational Research Association.

Seldon, A., & Abidoye, O. (2018). The fourth education revolution. Legend Press Ltd.

Sun, M, Wang, M., Wegerif, R. (2020) Effects of divergent thinking training on students’ scientific creativity: The impact of individual creative potential and domain knowledge. Thinking Skills and Creativity, 37 Online   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tsc.2020.100682

Thorndike, E. L. (1923). The influence of first-year Latin upon ability to read English. School and Society, 17, 165–168.

Wegerif, R. (2002). Literature review in thinking skills, technology and learning. Nesta Futurelab. https://www.nfer.ac.uk/media/1838/futl75.pdf

Wegerif, R. (2017) https://www.rupertwegerif.name/blog/defining-dialogic-education

This is an edited version of an interview with Tina Kullenberg recently published in the EARLI SIG 25 (Educational Theory) newsletter 4/2020 (https://earli.org/node/140). The interview ranged more widely. Here I focus in on how dialogic education addresses the question of meaning in life.

[We begin the interview with Tina asking about how I began being interested in educational theory and I describe my quite critical reaction to reading Vygotsky when I began my PhD in 1992]

Rupert: Vygotsky and Piaget both seemed to share an essentially monologic – or single-voiced - view of rationality. The dialogic alternative is that meaning is always a spark across difference so it always implies that there is more than one voice in play. The aim of education, for Vygotsky and Piaget, seemed to be to draw children up from participatory contextual meaning into more systematic conceptual meaning – from embodied participation, creativity and emotion within time and space on the one hand, to an abstract rationality that is anemic, predictable and ultimately outside of time and space, on the other. [The same critique also applies to other cognitive psychology theories of education]

My objection to the rationalism of the education theory that I encountered [as a graduate student] was perhaps rooted in my personal history. I felt that this rationalist approach had the potential to damage a sense of meaning in life. Finding meaning in life has always been an issue for me and I think it is an issue that education needs to address.

Tina: Meaning in life? What, then, defines such a meaning for you?

Rupert: By meaning I suppose you could say that I mean ‘existential’ meaning but it is not a complicated idea. I mean simply the kind of meaning needed to be able to get out of bed in the morning and face the day. [Ikigai in Japanese] Although this might sound like a personal issue it is also quite general. Young people today, if anything, seem to have an even greater problem with lack of meaning than I found back in the 1970s.
​
Tina: I see, and how does this kind of existential meaning relate to educational theory?

Rupert: I put some of the blame for the lack of meaning that I experienced as a young man on my education. Like almost all children I began life with a rich experience of participatory meaning. I enjoyed life. I played unselfconsciously with other children. I was in love with my mother who in turn loved me and brought me up. Then compulsory state education in the UK intervened and I learnt to be depressed. I remember asking my mother why I had to go to school and she told me that if I did not the police would come round. It turned out that I was good at learning curriculum knowledge and doing well in exams but I had a problem understanding what the point of any of it was. The content of the education I received actively downplayed the idea that anything I learnt had any real meaning. In science they emphasised the mystery of how random soulless processes might produce life. In literature I was warned against ‘the pathetic fallacy’ of projecting meaning and emotion onto nature.  In history I was told there are no big patterns, no purpose, just things happening. When they taught me how to tie a tie in school I realised that the adults teaching me saw the purpose of my education as for me to get a job, earn money, buy stuff and so contribute to society. I was not convinced.

This personal story perhaps explains why I was disappointed when I found that the newly discovered intellectual hero everyone was quoting, Vygotsky, referred to ‘participatory’ thinking – the kind of thinking he said was shared by children, and, his words, 'primitives and schizophrenics' – as something to be overcome in education in order to teach conceptual thinking. For me participation is essential for meaning and the participatory bond between children and their worlds should not be broken.

Tina: You are right. I think this concern is very important to address. Vygotskian thinkers would perhaps counter with the argument that principles as ‘higher mental thinking’ imply advanced and situated conceptual knowledge that provides existential meaning-making as well, but I somehow doubt it. Although conceptual thinking for sure offers some kind of meaning in life, this tradition seems still too focused on mental development, from what I know…
I know you believe in the role of educational dialogues. How do you think dialogic education offers meaning for young people?

Rupert: In the late 1990s Jim Wertsch’s synthesis of Vygotsky and Bakhtin was very popular. In essence Vygotsky’s account of how children learn by ‘internalising’ or ‘appropriating’ cultural tools was being augmented by Wertsch with a Bakhtinian account of learning by internalising or appropriating cultural voices. This led me to read Bakhtin and, because I had already read Buber, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Derrida and others I realised that Bakhtin was a very different thinker from Vygotsky. Whereas Vygotsky seemed to me to be a rationalist of a Hegelian-Marxist kind, Bakhtin was working with a new ontology closer to what has become called 'post-structuralism' – this is an ontology of difference or what could also be called a relational ontology or even a dialogic ontology.  According to this ontology all meaning is a product of dialogue. So, for example, Bakhtin pointed out that the flow of meaning in a dialogue requires that there are different perspectives, if the difference between voices were ever overcome to reach unanimity then the dialogue, and therefore also the meaning, would reach an end. Meaning requires difference and without difference there is no meaning.

Tina: OK but that is quite theoretical. How does all this help young people find meaning?

Rupert: Well, meaning comes from relationship and participation. For the newborn child the face of their mother is experienced as everything, as the meaning of the universe. Later the child will learn that their mother is just one person amongst other people but early on the face of the mother is not just an individual but also represents otherness in general. This relationship to otherness in general - what Levinas refers to as the 'Infinite Other', is present behind all the others we engage with in education and in life, including, I think, the environment and natural beings. For the depressed person there is a loss of faith not only in this or that other but in life as a whole. A relationship of trust or faith with life as a whole is natural to childhood and is something education should work hard to enhance, not to destroy.

Tina: Yes, I think experiences of trust, faith and meaning are relational phenomena, ultimately, and should be treated so also in educational contexts.
Speaking about voices, Bakhtin also stressed the person’s – the speaker’s – own voice, which means finding and expressing individual opinions within bigger dialogues and polyphonic contexts. What do you say about this?

Rupert: I think the question of meaning for young people is also the question of how you find your own voice. Let us consider a limited example at first to understand the general process. A schematised and simplified version of my own experience. How does a young researcher find their voice in the field of educational theory? First they might read Vygotsky, because they are told to by their supervisor, and then they find themselves talking about mediated action all the time. They lose themselves in Vygotskian theory – they are possessed by that voice. But then secondly they also read Bakhtin and others and stand back from the field in critical mode comparing and contrasting all the different voices. Thirdly they find themselves called by the dialogic field to make a contribution, to say what needs to be said emerging out of the gaps they find between what Bakhtin says and what Vygotsky says in relation to the challenge of the time. If they have said something useful for the dialogue as a whole going forwards then they will find themselves being cited by others and – hey presto - there it is - they have found their own voice! Finding a voice then requires forming a relationship not just with this voice or with that voice but with a field of dialogue or what I often refer to as a dialogic space. 
​
This is true in any bounded field of dialogue like educational theory or, say, designing a new product in a manufacturing company, or engaging with a local political issue, but it is also true to what it means to find your own voice in general. Gert Biesta is very interesting on the important role of education in allowing students to find themselves, to become, as he puts it ‘subjects’. He writes that education has three purposes, socialization, qualification and also ‘subjectification’. I agree with him about the importance of becoming a self but I think that the process is dialogic and involves relationship with a field of dialogue. The self is always double-voiced, as Bakhtin put it, meaning it is always on both sides of the dialogue at once. This means that you can only find yourself by first losing yourself in participation. First you take on the field of dialogue as a whole, which is an open and unbounded field, you allow yourself to play, to be possessed by the voices and then you find that you are called upon to speak and –mysteriously – you hear yourself respond. In true speech it feels as if the field flows back to itself through you saying what needs to be said. That is what gives authority to your voice and is why others sometimes lend authority to your voice by listening to you and allowing what you say to guide them. It is not because of you it is because they hear in what you are saying something of what they also intuitively know needs to be said and they know this because of their participation in the same dialogic space as you. The authority of a voice in the dialogue comes from shared participation. But that does not mean that you lose yourself in the dialogic space. You are likely to experience yourself as at your most individual only when you find yourself speaking for the dialogic space as a whole.

This is why Bakhtin loved Dostoevsky so much. He claimed that he found Dostoevsky open to all the cultural voices of his time and yet able to express them in a uniquely personal way. No one could say that Dostoevsky did not have a personality but his personality somehow included all the voices and allowed them all to speak through him.

Tina: A lot to think about, really. Can you just outline the theory of education that all this leads to?

Rupert: Well I think that we can use these ideas from Bakhtin and others to develop quite a simple and straightforward dialogic theory of education that preserves the importance of participatory meaning while extending cognition. New voices are called into being by others, by specific others such as mothers or fathers, by cultural voices such as the voice of Mathematics or History mediated by teachers and also by the Infinite Other. This offers a theory of education as being about education into life as whole. It is about the whole person in relation to the whole cosmos. Cognitive development is now understood as just one aspect of this larger movement of being drawn out of oneself and into dialogue - a movement in which the dialogic space opened up is constantly expanding and deepening. At each stage of education meaning comes from participation and relationship. The initial participation and relationship natural to childhood is maintained throughout. The meaning, for example, of a child’s encounter with a tree does not need to be broken or lost by the child also being drawn into the long term global cultural dialogue of science about trees. Science can tell them more about how the tree draws sustenance from the sun and from the soil in a way that enhances the child’s experience of relationship with the tree, not in a way that destroys this.  

Much of the role of formal education can be understood as drawing children and newcomers into participation in long term cultural dialogues. This fits well with the claim that there is 'powerful knowledge' which has to be taught and learnt. It is just that this 'knowledge' is now understood as a long-term cultural dialogue and the aim of education is not to teach inert knowledge but to induct children into participation in these powerful dialogues in such a way that they can find their own voice within these dialogues. This also fits well with Michael Oakeshott's idea of education as joining 'the conversation of mankind'. However, Oakeshott saw this dialogue as limited to humans, probably mainly European humans in fact, and focused mainly on entering into a dialogue with the voices of the past. But science and technology are part of this dialogue and involve us in taking seriously non-human voices, the voices of things and of nature. In science there is not just induction into a cultural dialogue but also into a dialogue with voices that speak to us from beyond culture. The idea of dialogue with the Infinite Other is another way of saying that entering into science (science means ‘knowledge’ for me so refers not just to natural science but to any shared inquiry) through which we engage in dialogue with the realm of the as yet unknown is also very much a part of education. It is understandable that education in the Print Age focussed on transmission of past knowledge and some dialogue with voices of the past. The Internet Age offers a new possibility of inducting students directly into the living global dialogues that advance knowledge and technology in every area. The larger dialogue that children and newcomers can join, if we develop an effective global education system for the future, is a dynamic real-time shared inquiry through which we understand ourselves and the world and through which we can design and build our shared future together.

One implication of the idea of the Infinite Other is that the context of meaning, the ‘meaning of meaning’, is not something far away from us but is also to be found at the heart of each present moment. Dialogue with the Infinite Other is the idea, therefore, of a kind of creative experience that can be found by stepping back from the divisions that always already define our situation, divisions such as self/other, here/there, now/then, culture/nature in order to participate in the dialogic space of potential meaning that precedes and exceeds these divisions.

I would like to see an education that helps those who feel lost realise the true nature of their individual identity as being dialogic interconnectedness. In fact, following Levinas, it is possible that identity is not a separation but a kind of singularity in space and time or a point where the cosmos as a whole turns around and looks back upon itself making each person unique because they are unbounded – each of us is ‘everywhere and forever only by virtue of being here and now’ as Merleau-Ponty once put it. That phrase might sound a bit esoteric to some people but Merleau-Ponty's point is a simple one. We can look out and see space and think about many further spaces in the past and in the future only because we have eyes located in a body that is situated here and now so it is really just a statement of the obvious reality of our situation to say that we are  'everywhere and forever only by virtue of being here and now'.

Finding existential meaning for me was about being drawn, through various encounters, into relationship not just with this or that person or idea but into a deeper realisation of my pre-existing participation in the whole of life. This involved a shift in personal identification from feeling trapped by a bounded image of the ego to identifying more with the pre-thematic or pre-individual potential for meaning which is always there before the self-other split. I think that this relates to the educational goal, which we have found through research on successful group thinking, of identification with the dialogue which means identifying with the creative flow of emergent meaning making.

Perhaps our interconnectedness with the whole of life is obvious but it nonetheless seems that it is also something that it is always possible for people to forget and indeed, it seems, for whole cultures to forget. I hope that this dialogic educational theory and the dialogic educational practice linked to it, might be able to help people who are struggling with the question of meaning as I once struggled.

Tina: Thanks for sharing your own life experiences, it helps me to better understand your well-known dialogic visions in educational matters.
 
References
Wegerif, R. (2019). Towards a dialogic theory of education for the Internet Age. In Mercer, N., Wegerif, R. and Major, L. The Routledge International Handbook of Research on Dialogic Education. Routledge.

The dissertation on our Master's in Psychology and Education here in the Faculty of Education at Cambridge had to be based on empirical research. With the corona crisis many schools closed and access to empirical data became uncertain. In response the examiners said students could do a 'desk-based' research dissertation if they wanted. Many students who had been preparing an empirical research dissertation now had to face the uncertainty of a new way of writing. Empirical research writing in psychology has very specific guidelines drawn up by the American Psychology Association (APA)[i]. 'Desk-based' research, by contrast, is an open space. Since I sometimes write articles that are not obviously empirical, they turned to me asking for advice. I did my best at short notice. I hope what I produced, and re-produce here in edited form, is useful.

Why 'Desk-based' research?
 
The trouble with a strong guide on the correct way to write reports is that it tends to limit the vision. Perhaps that is OK when we think we have a good frame and there is much of value to be learnt incrementally. But I am not at all convinced that education is a field where we can afford to limit the frame in this way. Progress in any and every science requires not just findings from empirical studies but reflection on the significance of findings from empirical studies. This means we need articles that 'rise above'[viii] the narrow framing to compare, contrast, refine and reflect. Desk-based research writing is not the opposite of empirical research research writing: it is an essential component of empirical research.
 
I will argue, from the evidence, that there is much less difference between empirical research papers and conceptual research papers than people often think. Both require careful argumentation in order to ground claims on reasoning and evidence. In empirical dissertations the argumentation is used to justify the methodological choices and the interpretation of the data. In conceptual dissertations the argumentation is used to justify the theories employed and the interpretation offered of other studies. The greater freedom of desk-based research can bring with it the reward of exploring the bigger patterns that can be found emerging from numerous more narrowly focussed empirical studies.

The term 'desk-based' research sounds a bit dismissive. Calling it conceptual research might be better. Concepts are the essential units of the global dialogue of science. Developing, questioning and refining concepts in the light of reason and evidence is what the long-term cultural dialogue of science is all about. However, it would be a mistake to think of research in education as ever purely conceptual or purely empirical. Both need to go together -  it is common to separate them in different journals but  they can fruitfully be combined in a single article.
 
Everything is  rhetoric
 
Some people contrast 'rhetoric' to communicating the facts. This is nonsense. Rhetoric is the art of writing well and persuasively. This is as relevant to empirical as to conceptual articles. Every article has to establish trust in the methods used and in the interpretations of the findings. This can only be done through argumentation employing rhetorical devices. Imagine yourself justifying your research to a group of critically minded peers. You cannot tell them everything, there is never enough space, so you have to select. What is relevant and what is not relevant is not fixed in advance by the APA but depends on the questions the readers ask and this will, in turn, depend on the details of each study and also on the changing cultural context. If you have in fact done great research but you are unable to communicate this effectively to the audience then you will fail to get published or - in the case that prompted this writing - fail to get a good mark for your master's thesis.
 
'Though some practicing social scientists might wish to escape the uncertainties of human discourse by embracing a single, correct, and absolute way of writing science, any model of scientific writing embeds rhetorical assumptions.' (Bazerman, 1987)
 
Creating a Research Space (CARS)
 
I think of science as a dialogue, not a local face-to-face kind of dialogue but more a long-term cultural dialogue that is global in reach and supported by communications media like print journals and the Internet. Research on the structure of academic articles supports this. John Swales looked at a wide range of academic articles and found a general two-way funnel structure. First, in the introduction, they refer to field of debate in order to establish the relevance of their study. Then they do the particular research that adds a specific finding. Finally, in the discussion and the conclusion, they move back out to the field in order to claim significance for their finding. (Figure 1a and Figure 1b) 

​Figure 1a: Swales IMRD double funnel.     Figure 1b: the desk-based double funnel

In 1999 I ran a pilot course in academic writing to test out a new model of online peer-to-peer learning. To provide materials for this design-based research project I worked with Caroline Coffin, a systemic functional linguist, to analyse the structure of successful papers in educational research journals. We used this evidence to write a short guide to standard research articles with lots of detailed moves that you might find useful (https://education.exeter.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/inspire/pages/view/research_article).

Interestingly most of the moves we found are as relevant to desk-based research as they are to empirical research. Empirical research articles generally have an IMRD structure: Introduction (including lit review), Methods, Results and Discussion (including conclusion). Desk-based research replaces the Methods and Results sections with a main argumentation section but otherwise the pattern is the same.
 
You start off broad to hook the reader by explaining why the topic you are focussing on is important, then you focus in to describe the specific problem, your research design for tacking it and your claims, then you go out broad again to explain why what you have found from this research, your claimed contribution, is significant in the larger context of the field of research and perhaps to the larger context of cultural evolution.  
 
John Swales, another applied linguist, (Swales & Feak, 2004) refers to the funnel pattern of writing an introduction to a research article as 'creating a research space' or CARS. He found three main moves with associated smaller steps. These are described in detail with illustrative examples in Coffin and Wegerif (2000). Here is a summary of this approach as found on (https://libguides.usc.edu/writingguide/CARS):
 
Move 1: Establishing a territory

• Claiming significance -showing that the general research area is important, central, interesting or relevant by describing the research problem and providing evidence to support why the topic is important to study
• Reviewing literature -introducing and reviewing items of previous research in the area - providing statements about the current state of knowledge, consensus, practice or description of phenomena and also synthesizing prior research that further supports the need to study the research problem

Move 2: Establishing a niche (rationale)

• Counter-claiming - introduce an opposing viewpoint or perspective or identify a gap in prior research that you believe has weakened or undermined the prevailing argument;
• Indicating a gap - develop the research problem around a gap or area of the literature;
• Question-raising - presenting key questions about the consequences of gaps in prior research that will be addressed by your study.
• Continuing a stream of literature -extend prior research to expand upon or clarify a research problem. This is often signalled with logical connecting terminology, such as, “therefore,” or  “thus” or language that indicates a need. For example; “It follows these connections need to examined in more detail....” '

Move 3: Occupying the niche

• Outlining purposes  - answering the “So What?” question. Explain in clear language the objectives of your study.
• Announcing present research - describe the purpose of your study in terms of what the research is going to do or accomplish;
• Announcing principle findings/conclusions - present a brief, general summary of key findings, e.g “This study suggests that....”]
• Outlining article structure - describe how the remainder of your paper is organised]

 
Although these three moves refer specifically to the structure of an introduction section, they give a pretty clear indication of the argument structure of the paper as a whole. They are the same for both empirical and non-empirical dissertations. The main difference lies in the way that methods are described and the use of evidence. In desk-based research in the field of education the method and results section of the empirical research paper is replaced by argumentation. This argumentation often combines conceptual analysis with empirical evidence drawn from other studies. Sometimes the findings claimed by other studies are cited directly as evidence assuming trust in the validity of their methods.
 
This means that the introduction, the critical literature review, the discussion and the conclusion sections of the paper can remain pretty much the same as they would be in an empirical IMRD paper. In the discussion section you revisit the themes and the literature that you quoted in the introduction and you show how your new findings make a contribution by challenging some claims in the literature, adding to others or perhaps re-framing the debate in a potentially fruitful way. Descriptions of how to structure these sections in our 'writing a standard article' guide (above) might be useful (although this is a little old now and there are new guides to follow including, perhaps, the APA style guides) 
 
The 'research design' of a conceptual dissertation
 
There is plenty of scope for doing unconvincing desk-based research. As Jaakkola (2020) writes,  to be taken seriously any conceptual claims you make needs to be grounded in what she calls an appropriate research design. By research design Jaakola means the key components of your argumentation, the theories, concepts and streams of literature you draw upon to make your case and the way that you string them together into a narrative argument. In empirical papers it is necessary to justify your methods for the collection and analysis of data - in a conceptual paper it is similarly a good idea to justify your research design. Why and how are these theories, concepts and literature streams relevant? Why is the kind of argument you are advancing justified and appropriate in this context? This is not just about claims and evidence in support of claims it is also about their 'warrant' or establishing the trust of the reader in your methodology.  [ix]
 
It might help to formulate the central problem or question you wish to address at the beginning of your paper, and keep this in mind at all times. Make it clear what the problem is, and why it is a problem. Be sure that everything you write is relevant to that central problem or question or issue. In addition, be sure to say in each section of the paper why what you are including is relevant to your main argument and how this section takes it forward.
 
To decide how to structure a paper I usually start with the end, that is with the main contribution to knowledge (contribution to the dialogue) that I want to claim. Then I break this down into the range of smaller claims that need to be swallowed before the reader will be convinced by my big claim.
 
There are many possible research designs for desk-based or conceptual research dissertations. I recommend finding an article that you admire, breaking down its argumentation structure, and using that as a model. Jaakkola, writing in the context of conceptual studies in management, isolates a few types of conceptual paper that I think are equally relevant for education. I adapt and summarise Jaakkola in the following sections as this might give some ideas as to the kinds of dissertations that are possible:

Theory synthesis

A theory synthesis offers a new or enhanced view of a concept or a phenomenon by linking previously unconnected or incompatible bits of literature in a novel way. Often this does not so much develop a new theory as apply a theory drawn from one area to a new area, showing how it makes sense of things that previously seemed unconnected or in need of explanation.

This might look a bit like a critical lit review but there is a difference. While a well-crafted literature review takes stock of the field and can provide valuable insights into its development, scope, or future prospects, it remains within the existing conceptual or theoretical boundaries, describing existing knowledge rather than looking beyond it. In the case of a conceptual paper, the literature review is a necessary part of the study but the ultimate objective is a new way of seeing things. The synthesis paper is about revealing “big picture” patterns and connections rather than specific causal mechanisms

Examples of theory synthesis papers in educational research are:

Goldie, J. G. S. (2016). Connectivism: A knowledge learning theory for the digital age?. Medical teacher, 38(10), 1064-1069. Applies Siemens connectivist theory of learning to the field of medical education, showing its strengths and limitations

Wegerif, R. (2011). Towards a dialogic theory of how children learn to think. Thinking skills and creativity, 6(3), 179-190. Draws together disparate literature streams to argue that thinking is dialogue and learning to think occurs through induction into dialogue.

Theory critique and adaptation

While empirical research may gradually extend some element of theory within a given context, theory-based adaptation attempts a more immediate shift of perspective. Theory critique and adaptation papers introduce an alternative frame of reference - a new way of seeing - through challenging and replacing an existing way of seeing.
 
For example, the authors might argue that certain empirical developments or insights from other streams of literature challenge an existing conceptualization such that a shift of perspective is needed to better align the concept or theory to its purpose.

Examples of theory critique and adaptation articles in educational research are:

Zambrano, J., Kirschner, P., Kirschner, F., & Sweller, J. (2018). From Cognitive Load Theory to Collaborative Cognitive Load Theory. Builds on and adapts the now popular 'cognitive load theory' (no endorsement implied!)
 
Carr, W. (2007). Philosophy, methodology and action research. In The Quality of Practitioner Research (pp. 29-42). Brill Sense. Goes back to Aristotle to challenge and re-frame the whole idea of methodology in educational research.
 
Wegerif, R. (2008). Dialogic or dialectic? The significance of ontological assumptions in research on educational dialogue. British Educational Research Journal, 34(3), 347-361. Challenges the Vygotskian view of dialogue suggesting that a Bakhtinian view might be more fruitful.
 
Noorloos, R., Taylor, S. D., Bakker, A., & Derry, J. (2017). Inferentialism as an alternative to socioconstructivism in mathematics education. Mathematics Education Research Journal, 29(4), 437-453. Does what it says.
 
Typology

A typology paper offers a categorisation of a previously fragmented and confused area of discourse, offering a coherent and explanatory set of types. The researcher often accumulates knowledge of the focal topic and then organises it to capture the variability of particular characteristics of the concept or phenomenon.

Examples of typology articles in educational research are:

Sfard, A. (1998). On two metaphors for learning and the dangers of choosing just one. Educational researcher, 27(2), 4-13. Classic paper tackling the confused area of talk about learning and arguing it needs at least two main categorisations and cannot be reduced to either one.
 
Wegerif, R., & Mercer, N. (1997). A dialogical framework for researching peer talk. Language and Education Library, 12, 49-64. Offers a three-part typology for understanding small group classroom talk.
 
Paavola, S., & Hakkarainen, K. (2005). The knowledge creation metaphor. Science and Education, 14(6), 234-255. Offers three metaphors for learning.
 
This is not an exhaustive set of types of conceptual paper, nor is each type exclusive. In selecting examples I found it quite hard to distinguish which papers are theory synthesis, adaption, or typology. In practice these types of conceptual paper can overlap a lot. Some synthesis papers offer a taxonomy and build on a critique of other approaches. Many papers are not purely conceptual but advance conceptual contributions through small case studies or re-evaluation of data presented in other papers.

Concluding words

Empirical research papers in educational psychology often have a very narrow focus, adding to knowledge only incrementally within a theoretical framework without being able to question that framing. Teaching students to slavishly follow models of good research and good writing such as those offered by the APA is not really education, it is training.  In the field of education there is no single correct method of research since almost every concept or way of framing problems can and should be questioned. Good quality conceptual research in education is not only possible, it is essential. Teaching education students how to write should be about helping them actively participate in the long-term dialogue about how best to promote human flourishing. Learning how to apply genre conventions in order to write up modest empirical studies certainly has a place in educational research courses. However, if we want to produce creative researchers who can take the field forward we need to also teach how to question framing assumptions, connect findings to 'big picture' visions and participate fully in those powerful dialogues through which we build a future together.
 
 
 References

Bazerman, C. (1987). Codifying the social scientific style: The APA Publication Manual as a behaviorist rhetoric. The rhetoric of the human sciences, 125-144. https://wac.colostate.edu/docs/books/bazerman_shaping/chapter9.pdf
 
Coffin, C and Wegerif, R (2000) How to write a standard research article. https://education.exeter.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/inspire/pages/view/research_article
 
Jaakkola, E. (2020). Designing conceptual articles: four approaches. AMS Review, 1-9.
 
Swales, J. M., & Feak, C. B. (2004). Academic writing for graduate students: Essential tasks and skills (Vol. 1). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
 
Wegerif, R. (2013). Dialogic: Education for the internet age. Routledge.
 
Notes

[i] https://apastyle.apa.org/
[ii] Wegerif, R. (2013). Dialogic: Education for the internet age. Routledge. http://www.rupertwegerif.name/uploads/4/3/2/7/43271253/deiaproofs24thoct12.pdf
[iii] https://www.rupertwegerif.name/blog/oakeshott-on-education-as-conversation
[iv] Bazerman, C. (1987). Codifying the social scientific style: The APA Publication Manual as a behaviorist rhetoric. The rhetoric of the human sciences, 125-144. https://wac.colostate.edu/docs/books/bazerman_shaping/chapter9.pdf
[v] http://www.helga-nowotny.eu/downloads/helga_nowotny_b59.pdf
[vi] Lewens, T. (2016). The meaning of science: An introduction to the philosophy of science. Hachette UK.
[vii] Bateson, G. (2000). Steps to an ecology of mind: Collected essays in anthropology, psychiatry, evolution, and epistemology. University of Chicago Press.
[viii] https://www.rupertwegerif.name/blog/the-rise-above-button
[ix] Toulmin, S. E. (2003). The uses of argument. Cambridge university press. see eg  https://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/documents/toulmin.pdf
[x] Stronach, I. (2007). On promoting rigour in educational research: the example of the RAE. Journal of Education Policy, 22(3), 343-352.

​And what this tells us about learning

​Back in the 1980's Marlene Scardamalia and Carl Bereiter created a 'computer supported intentional learning environment' (CSILE) for a kind of learning that they called 'knowledge building'.  A more recent version of this software called called Knowledge Forum®, is being used all over the world. CEDIR (the Cambridge Educational Dialogue research group) are working with Carol Chan, Jan van Aalst, Cindy Tong and other members of the Knowledge Forum team in Hong Kong University (https://kbc2.edu.hku.hk/). This collaboration has reminded me of what a great idea Knowledge Forum is and how many of its features can be used to illustrate and exemplify dialogic learning. Marlene writes about this invention:
 ​
'The heart of CSILE/Knowledge Forum is a multimedia community knowledge space. In the form of notes, participants contribute theories, working models, plans, evidence, reference material, and so forth to this shared space. The software provides knowledge building supports both in the creation of these notes and in the ways they are displayed, linked, and made objects of further work. Revisions, elaborations, and reorganizations over time provide a record of group advances, like the accumulation of research advances in a scholarly discipline'. (https://www.ikit.org/fulltext/CSILE_KF.pdf)
 
Knowledge Forum is intended to be an educational version of science where science is understood to be a global networked shared inquiry or dialogue. Students work together in small groups to come up with questions and then inquire into these together by making hypotheses and supporting these with arguments and evidence. Although there are many face to face discussions the claims and evidence for them is uploaded in the form of 'notes' in the shared forum space.

Example of a Knowledge Forum map[1]
 
In building this shared knowledge map students are helped by guides or 'scaffolds' - the row of buttons on the left hand side of the screen. These can be customised depending on the topic and the age of the kids but are usually based around theories, evidence to support the theories and, of course, challenges with counter-evidence. What has always excited me about Knowledge Forum though is one special scaffold: the 'rise above' scaffold or button. Marlene writes about this button:
 
' ...the most constructive way of dealing with divergent or opposing ideas is not to decide on a winner or a compromise position but rather to create a new idea that preserves the value of the competing ideas while “rising above” their incompatibilities. In the simplest cases a rise-above may be simply a summary or distillation; in the most compelling cases, the rise-above presents a new idea that all the participants can recognize as an advance over their previous ideas.'
 
One aspect of rise above move is encapsulating an area of dialogue. Other contributions can be dragged and dropped into the rise above button such that it is seen to represent a whole network of nodes. This is useful to simplify an over complex map. But, much more than this, the 'rise above' button is used to express a new insight that integrates the debate so far by making sense of it.
 
CSILE/Knowledge Forum has been around for over 30 years and if you search you can find many examples of maps and 'rise above' moves online. The examples seem to be mostly about science topics with children exploring questions that they themselves ask such as 'why does it rain?' or 'why are leaves green?'. But this approach is not limited to stem areas. Recently in Hong Kong a class of high school students of 15 to 16 years old explored the question: 'what is design?'. This inquiry included dialogue, conducted within in the Knowledge Forum system, with design professionals and academics while these were physically located outside of the classroom. The students began focussing on the idea that design is about 'solving problems' but increasingly explored the overlap between design and self-expression through art. Their final 'rise-above' move was to recognise that good design combined both utilitarian problem solving and a more artistic expression of a point of view on reality realised in each of the little choices that were made in process of design itself.
 
Is 'rise above' pushed or pulled?
 
The idea that learning involves a 'rise above' move is not new. Piaget wrote about how learning involves the development of schemas or 'cognitive structures'. When the data do not fit with the existing schema this leads, he wrote, to 'disequilibrium' which is uncomfortable forcing a new more adequate schema to emerge. He called this process 'accommodation'. The problem with this account from Piaget is that he implies that 'rise above' is not creative but is necessary, pushed from below by logical contradiction. But his theory has not been well supported by the empirical evidence. We are all, apparently, quite capable of living with contradictions in different areas of our experience. The formation of more adequate schema does not happen automatically. It can happen, but only when these different areas are brought into conscious dialogue with each other.  Our capacity to rise above is not so much pushed from below by unconscious brain mechanisms as pulled from above by the promise of a new, more comprehensive vision that emerges only within dialogue.
 
So how does this work? In every dialogue there is not just my voice and your voice but there is also a third voice, the 'witness' which is the emergent perspective arising out of the dialogue as whole. When we 'rise above' we leave our initial position behind in order to inhabit a new more collective and more comprehensive perspective. Being able to rise above in this way is not just about logic it is also requires what could be called a virtue. To be able to rise above you have first to be able to listen to the voice of truth, or at least the voice of a perspective that is more true in the context.  
 
When I think of my own experiences of learning it is rise-above moments that come to mind. Moments when I was led to understand something after engaging in a shared enquiry with other points of view that challenged my original ideas and made me realise that I had been partial and limited and that there is a different way of seeing that makes much better sense of things. Understanding how the rise above move happens can give us insight into the essence of learning and so enable us to design educational encounters that can better support learning.
 
Rise above and science
 
Currently as I write, a great deal of collective learning is going on in response to the challenge of a global pandemic. This is a global shared inquiry mediated by the Internet. At the very end of last year the WHO spotted a new virus in Wuhan, China; by the end of January this year Chinese doctors had sequenced the whole genome of COVID19 and shared it on the Internet, by 16th March the first dose of a possible vaccine was developed and administered in the USA. Information and theories about how best to respond to the pandemic are being shared around the world. Most agree that we need to trust the science, including the science of crowd behaviour, but it is clear that science here is complex and uncertain, involving a debate between experts who have a range of views. What makes this debate 'science' is not just the reference to empirical evidence but also the motivation of the participants.  What defines science is never a fixed method, after all the appropriateness of any method also always needs to be argued for, but it is much more an  attitude - an orientation towards the truth which can best be seen when people change their minds and rise above egotism or tribalism to see the things in a new way, a way that better fits the arguments and the evidence.

As C. S. Pierce argued over 100 years ago, scientific truth is not a simple idea - it is an ideal - an ideal of the future - the ideal of what scientists will agree on after all the relevant research has been done and every possible avenue gone down. It is this future that calls to us when we find ourselves able to rise above.
 
Dialogic education with networked technology of the kind that is exemplified by Knowledge Forum® is not always the most efficient way to learn curriculum content. It can certainly do that but much more than that, it is a good way to teach children to have a passion for the truth. It is relevant that this essence of learning is not a brain mechanism or even a word, but a button on a screen enabling the creation of a new node in a shared network. Learning is not individual but collective, always indissolubly both human and machine. I wager that the perspective of the future will reveal that children learning how to use the rise above button is the kind of education that we need as a species if we are to survive and thrive in this complex, interconnected and highly unpredictable universe.
 
Some possible further reading
 
Chan, C., Tong, Y., & van Aalst, J. C. W. (2019). Progressive dialogue in computer-supported collaborative knowledge Building. In Mercer, N., Wegerif, R and Major, L (Eds) The Routledge international handbook on research on dialogic education (pp. 469-484). Routledge.
 
Kemple, B. (2019) C. S. Peirce on Science and Belief
https://epochemagazine.org/c-s-peirce-on-science-and-belief-9e1283348c2
 
Wegerif, R. (2019). Towards a dialogic theory of education for the Internet Age. In Mercer, N., Wegerif, R and Major, L (Eds) The Routledge International Handbook of Research on Dialogic Education, (pp 14-26) Routledge 
(PDF online)

[1] Figure from  Milinovich, S and Ma, L (2018) Promoting Student Engagement and Well-being through Community Knowledge Advancement. Rethinking Learning in the Digital Age: Making the Learning Sciences Count, 13th International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS)
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/329840876_Promoting_Student_Engagement_and_Well-being_through_Community_Knowledge_Advancement

Perez Linares, J. and Wegerif, R. (2019) Dialogar para pensar y aprender juntos en el aula. Mexico city: Porrua

Unfortunately, our face-to-face reading group about Stiegler scheduled at Cambridge for Monday 25th has had to be cancelled. The third and final face to face reading group on the 2nd December about Embodied Cognition is also cancelled. There is a strike. Tech-Cedir will look at these issues again next term.

In my previous blog in this thread towards-a-theory-of-ed-tech-introducing-simondon.html I proposed  developing a theory of educational technology together and introduced the first paper on Simondon. Today I am introducing this paper on Stiegler and explaining why I think that Stiegler might have something to offer our emerging new theory of Educational Technology.

The focus reading is: Roberts, Ben (2012) Technics, individuation and tertiary memory: Bernard Stiegler's challenge to media theory. New Formations, 77 (1). pp. 8-20. ISSN 0950-2378 .
http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/57022/1/roberts-nf-prepress.pdf
 
But the discussion is looking Stiegler in general including, for example, his recent comments on the Internet http://www.samkinsley.com/2013/11/21/bernard-stiegler-the-net-blues/

Stiegler builds on from Simondon.
 
Firstly he takes Simondon's account of the distinctive logic of technical objects and their individuation and goes further to focus on the individuation of the network that unites them. Technical objects individuate with their milieus, as Simondon put it and that milieu can  include a network without which they could not exist. Cars require petrol stations, roads, supplies of spares and garage mechanics etc. Whereas Simondon wrote about machines Stiegler is more attuned to the Internet and the emerging Internet of Things. Does this network have its own logic? It seems to have. Something to do with universalising, connecting everything and everyone.
 
Secondly Stiegler points out that what we think of as human is always already bound up with technology such that human development has been and continues to be a co-evolution between the organic element of human and the technical element. Simondon said something similar but he referred to the human element required in the evolution of technology as being 'anticipation'. In the iterative cycles of innovation human intelligence is needed to read the cues and anticipate what is required next for the concretisation journey of the technical object.
 
Stiegler looks at human evolution and spends some time establishing that this 'anticipation' is of technical origin. Or rather it is undecidably human/technical or what/who. So, for example, the frontal cortex grew at the same time as, and in slow conjunction with, the anticipation required to make tools like flint chipped axes. Tool making led to human capacity to anticipate as much as other way around. Part of this story is also communication. Language is also more than biological  human individual. Words are jointly forged artefacts. Their use implies anticipation. Thinking how others will respond. So what we think of as a who question - who are we? - is also a what question. We are technology on the inside from the beginning.
 
[Note: Donald Merlin and Tomasello cover similar ground but focus on communication in a more obviously dialogic way. Merlin points to the splitting of the working memory into two in mimesis or gestural communication to see oneself from the the point of view of the other in communication. Tomasello writes of the need for 'dialogic representions' to handle the joint attention needed by apes to understand their increasingly complex social lives.]
 
These two moves by Stiegler going beyond Simondon are  interesting for a theory of educational technology.  To be human is to be technological. What we are educating is not just the biological individual but the biological plus the technical. 'Person plus' as David Perkins puts it. But more than that the individuation of specific humans seems to be part of the individuation journey of a socio-technical network. Education is not just about human desires it is following a larger than human logic. So we try to expand literacy without worrying too much whether non-literate cultures really want this 'gift' because we are already literacy on the inside (e.g millenium goals). Now there are moves to promote 21st Century skills or 'Future skills' that are the needs of the emerging network society on the inside. Skills such as how to work together with tools on the internet to get things done even when not co-located. This contrasts to the still common view that ed tech are tools to serve separate education goals - now the ed tech becomes the goal in the sense of teaching how to participate in the tech and with the tech. (Wegerif, 2015).
 
For Simondon and for Stiegler, transindividuation is carried by cultural tools. Education is not just about individuation it is about transindividuation. Transindividuation is an open-ended ongoing process with multiple facets.
 
One way to understand this is to take Oakeshott's claim that education is induction into 'the conversation of mankind' through which we become fully human and to push this a little further. Oakeshott ignored the tech required for his vision as literacy was naturalised for him. Clearly the conversation of mankind as taught at Cambridge in his day did not include the voices of non-literates - he did not see the problem with that. With new tech we have to see literacy as not naturalised but as just one technical system of communication amongst others. Education is induction into the dialogue of all things, not just all people, mediated by a range of technics, not just literacy.  Through education we move in the direction of becoming most fully ourselves by becoming participants in an ongoing journey of humanisation that is also transhumanisation. In small-scale oral societies education had an endpoint  - you knew when you were fully human - it was when the ancestors spoke to you and welcomed you in. With literacy, globalising empires and capitalism a new vision of the fully human emerged - the global citizen. But if we acknowledge the independent voices of technics and things, this humanism is no longer enough - education becomes induction into the ongoing journey towards universal dialogue - all matter, all animals, all peoples, all gods etc. I see this emerging new post-human vision of education as linked to science in the broad 'wissenschaft' sense where science is understood as open-minded shared inquiry.
 
Stiegler, technics and time
 
Steigler's account of the role of technics in time is interesting for an emerging theory of ed tech. Roberts, in the reading, outlines this very well:
 
'Husserl distinguishes between primary retention or memory and secondary retention or memory. Primary retention is the kind of memory that is necessary to perceive a temporal object such as a melody: in effect the melody will not exist as an object of perception unless the listener retains or remembers the notes that precede the one that is currently heard. Secondary retention is, as it were, the more traditional understanding of memory where, for example, I remember a melody I heard last week. There is also a third kind of memory, which Husserl calls ‘image consciousness’ and Stiegler calls ‘tertiary memory’ where an external object, such as a picture or photograph, reactivates a memory. Now for Husserl primary memory can be rigorously distinguished from secondary or tertiary memory because it belongs to the act of perception itself, whereas secondary or tertiary memory involve acts of imaginative selection. Secondary and tertiary memory are thus derivative from primary memory, secondary memory or our perception of the temporal object. ' Stiegler reverses that order. Our experience of time, he says,  requires and is mediated by technics.
 
To put this another way, the Internet is not just a repository of our experiences, it constitutes them. When I click on a music video I have a unique experience.
 
This is also an account of how come we experience things in time. Historical time, the past that we have not lived, is embodied in objects, texts, videos etc and our experience of time emerges in a kind of dialogue between primary time (the resonance of now) with this tertiary or historical time which is the time of technics. We have conscious awareness of time because of technics.
 
One way to investigate education technology is in relation to its role in inducting students into time (http://www.rupertwegerif.name/blog/education-as-a-journey-into-time)
 
Alienation and ed tech
 
As we saw Simondon corrected Marx to say that the problem of alienation is not so much about ownership of machinery as about participation in the design of machinery. Workers or consumers who are not participating creatively in technology development have their individuation capped - they are truncated and unhappy - not part of the larger transindividuation flow process.
 
Stiegler refers to the Internet as a 'pharmakon' concept in this respect - pharmakon means both poison and remedy in Ancient Greek and was used by Plato to refer to writing in Socrate's dialogue with Phaedrus. Writing was offered by a god to the Greeks as a remedy curing their problems but Socrates saw it more as a poison destroying current  morality and education based on practices of face to face dialogue and memorisation. (http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedrus.html) (http://arsindustrialis.org/anamnesis-and-hypomnesis and also Bernard in a video https://youtu.be/SRNjImtIA0M Stiegler Keynote www2012 Lyons).
 
Anamnesis is 'calling to mind' without tech and hypomnesis is memory tech, photos, texts etc . The danger Stiegler sees is that of control of big data. The big data of the Internet is our collective life and our possibility of trans-individuation. Is the culture/data something experienced as opposed to us or experienced as something that we are part of? (http://www.rupertwegerif.name/blog/who-are-we-really-a-blog-for-christmas)
 
This is about our experience of time. Some forms of education separate the hypomnesis from the anamnesis - historical/cultural time from everyday time. Other forms unite the moment with the history/culture - hypomnesis and  anamnesis can be united in dialogue creatively and dynamically. This is the idea of dialogic education from Freire where the dialogue has no limits but includes dialogue between the moment and the culture or between primary memory and Stiegler's tertiary memory. Ed tech has a crucial role in facilitating that dialogue.
 
Wikis and peer-to-peer learning communities enable not only access to collective knowledge but participation in producing it. Tools such as 'tinkerplots'  give interactive access to understanding and working with collective data. Citizen science projects on, e.g, global warming or exploring the interstellar debris of the big bang, give everyone access to live participation in collective inquiry into reality both producing and consuming shared understanding.
 
So the Internet could be reducing us to isolated passive individuals, dumbed down and distracted, at the mercy of manipulation by big companies - or perhaps it has the potential to facilitate the emergence of a collective intelligence that is much more than human. Stiegler shares his concern about the danger of the Internet shaping our brains in a limiting way http://www.samkinsley.com/2013/11/21/bernard-stiegler-the-net-blues/ But perhaps this depends to some extent on us, our foresight and our use of ed tech. We could use it as a tool to deliver fixed high status 'knowledge' - a framework that locates each present moment in its place and each person in their place - or we could use it as a way to engage each moment and each person more creatively in constructive dialogue with every other moment and every other person - participating in a collective movement of transindividuation that is also a transformation - a turning inside out - of reality.
 
For Stiegler this is an undecidable question or an aporia. He is side-stepping the potential charge of technological determinism and teleology. But - according to Simondon - our role as researchers is much like that of any other creative engineer - to read the cues and participate in a process of innovation that is more than just our intentions or the intentions of the machine but a kind of synergy. The emergent logic of what needs to be done to take things forward. One possible reading of our situation - a reading inspired by Stiegler's developments from Simondon - is that a coherent human/technical/natural planetary intelligence has the potential to emerge in the next hundred years or so and that the use of education technology can be defined by the role that it can play in facilitating that process. 
 
 
A glossary of terms:
http://cultureandcommunication.org/galloway/pdf/Stiegler%20glossary.pdf
 
References:
http://arsindustrialis.org/anamnesis-and-hypomnesis
 
https://www.academia.edu/20136235/A_Summary_of_Bernard_Stiegler_Technics_and_Time_1
Dan Ross
 
Stiegler, B. (1998). Technics and time: The fault of Epimetheus (Vol. 1). Stanford University Press.
 
https://youtu.be/SRNjImtIA0M Stiegler Keynote www2012 Lyons
 
Donald, M. (1991). Origins of the modern mind: Three stages in the evolution of culture and cognition. Harvard University Press.
 
Tomasello, M., & Herrmann, E. (2010). Ape and human cognition: What's the difference?. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 19(1), 3-8.
 
Perkins, D. N. (1993). Person-plus: A distributed view of thinking and learning. Distributed cognitions: Psychological and educational considerations, 88-110.
 
Wegerif, R. (2015). Technology and teaching thinking: Why a dialogic approach is needed for the twenty-first century. In The Routledge international handbook of research on teaching thinking (pp. 451-464). Routledge.
 
Freire, P. (1996). Pedagogy of the oppressed (revised). New York: Continuum.
 

Some notes to introduce the Tech-CEDiR reading group sessions, especially the first one on Simondon.

Tech-CEDiR Reading Group (Session 1) – 6th Nov 11:30-12:30 – DMB GS4
Simondon
Dumouchel, P. (1992). Gilbert Simondon's plea for a philosophy of technology. Inquiry, 35(3-4), 407-421.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/291258917_Gilbert_Simondon's_Plea_for_a_Philosophy_of_Technology
​
Tech-CEDiR Reading Group (Session 2) – 25th Nov 11:30-12:30 – DMB 1S3
Stiegler
Roberts, Ben (2012) Technics, individuation and tertiary memory: Bernard Stiegler's challenge to media theory. New Formations, 77 (1). pp. 8-20. ISSN 0950-2378 .
http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/57022/1/roberts-nf-prepress.pdf


Tech-CEDiR Reading Group (Session 3) – 2nd Dec 11:30-12:30 – DMB 2S4 RECS
Chimero, A (2013) Radical Embodied Cognitive Science. Review of General Psychology © 2013 American Psychological Association 2013, Vol. 17, No. 2, 145–15
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.400.9177&rep=rep1&type=pdf


Rationale for reading group

I think that we need a proper theory of educational technology and I hope that this Tech-CEDIR reading group will help us to develop it. The idea is that, thinking about these papers and responding in face to face meetings, via twitter and on this blog, we might together begin to emerge a theory of the nature and role of ed tech. Part of that discussion might be suggestions for further readings as well as if and how the group should continue.

The three initial readings, on Simondon, on Stiegler and on radical embodied cognition are meant to stimulate discussions on three possible elements of a theory of ed tech.

Firstly, from Simondon, that technical objects or artefacts do have an essence that is different both from natural objects and from humans. Key to this is his account of individuation which suggests we should look at technical objects from the point of view of how they become what they are in a process of 'ontogenesis' that is not simply determined by human intentions or by material properties.

Secondly, from Stiegler, that what we think of as human is always already bound up with technology such that human development has been and continues to be a co-evolution between the organic element of human and the technical element. This is interesting because it potentially gives a special role to education and to ed tech in making humans and in any future project to make humans differently. Steigler shifts attention to the individuation of the network within which technical objects exist along with humans.

Thirdly the perspective of radically embodied cognition suggests how our technology can be understood as part of cognition. It follows that an education for thinking that is not only about the thinking of the organic individual (the brain?) but also a thinking of the human-technology network. This again potentially offers a role for ed tech at the heart of education.

Bypassing Heidegger

Other initial readings could have been possible. Inquiry into the philosophy of technology often starts with Heidegger. Winograd and Flores' seminal book 'Understanding Computers and Cognition: A new foundation for design' show how Heideggers philosophy is relevant to ed tech. Heidegger's distinction between the 'present at hand' (stuff we see in front of us as if independent of us in the theoretical attitude) and the 'ready to hand' (stuff we are always already involved with in doing things in the world in a practical way) is fundamental. It can be approached using the common expression 'a man with a hammer is a man in search of a nail'. 'Breakdown' is when the ready to hand become present at hand - when the skype call freezes and we move from a dialogue to looking at an image on a screen. This implies that technology extends the human body. But Heidegger's vision of technology seemed to stop with the 'techne' of the ancient greeks which referred to crafts such as weaving. Heidegger did not like modern technology very much. He preferred to spend his time in a simple hut in the Black Forest. He saw modern tech as embodying rationalism in a way that inevitably 'enframed' people, cutting them off from Being and turning the environment into resources to be exploited. I think that Simondon is a better place to start because he loved technology and liked to play with machines and engage with the latest hard science like de Broglie's quantum theory. Levinas's essay on Gagarin contains an excellent dismissal of Heidegger's view of technology.

'Technology wrenches us out of the Heideggerian world and the superstitions regarding place. From this point on, an opportunity appears to us: to perceive men outside the situation in which they are placed, and let the human face shine in all its nudity. Socrates prefers the town in which one meets people to the countryside and the trees.' (Levinas, 1990)

Here Levinas links Heidegger’s rejection of modern technology to his Nazi party involvement and his love of trees. Arguably Heidegger’s attitude to technology can still be found in Waldorf and Montessori schools and strands of the ecology movement. Human scale tech -good: big global networked tech - bad. But this attitude seems just not very relevant anymore and not very useful to help us forge a vision of education for the Internet Age so I suggest we just move on more rapidly leaving Heidegger grumbling in our wake.

Why Simondon is so interesting

Simondon was a Professor of Psychology at the Sorbonne who engaged traditional theory with modern science and technology. Merleau-Ponty was on his PhD panel. He had a big influence on Deleuze and on Stiegler. The paper we are reading introduces his philosophy of technology. (See also Steven Shaviro blog on this http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=298) Simondon is also interesting for his related account of psychic and collective individuation (see Steven Shaviro blog on this http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=471)

Simondon opposes the opposition of technology to nature that sees technology as a tool for controlling nature.
1) Tools are not just passively used: they are reconfigured, reinvented, extended and mutated in the process of use - this is the individuation of technical objects (consider design-based research on new ed tech tools - it is about iteration, resistance and contingency)

2) Technology is a network of relations: far from marking our alienation from the natural world, technology is what mediates between humankind and nature. Every technical object has some agency and every subject has some materiality.

All individuation,- natural forms eg crystals, organic life, technical objects, individual human selves and also trans-individual subjectivity - originates in the pre-individual. The pre-individual refers to the state of metastability that makes possible each individuation. Pure pre-individual actually exists ‘before’ any individuation – in an ‘anteriority’ that is not temporal, since time itself ‘develops out of the pre-individual just like the other dimensions according to which the process of individuation takes place’ (2005, p 34). Simondon’s inspiration for the pre-individual comes from thermodynamic metastability, and also from the famous wave-particle duality in quantum physics, in so far as this duality is ‘more than one’ and in so far as the particle is, strictly speaking, not an individual. (Barthelemy, 2012)

Simondon put forward an original theory of information as that which 'informs' - or has the capacity to inform - individuation. This is a bit like Bateson's idea of information as based on differences that make a difference. Transduction is one process whereby information can support individuation. Consider how a catalyst can lead to crystals forming rapidly in a super-saturated solution. Thought tends to work like that. Information technology has the potential to support the ontogenesis of transindividualities that are indissociably human and technical. Simondon wrote that the ‘value of the dialogue of the individual with the technical object’ is ‘to create a domain of the transindividual, which is different from the community’ (2005 p515).

This vision has inspired new form of Marxism (eg see Antonio Negri). Simondon's idea is that the alienation of the workers in industrialisation was not primarily about not owning the machines they worked on in factories - - but was more fundamentally about not being able to change those machines or to think creatively together with those machines. To be unalienated is to be creative and to be creative is not just to retreat to a hut in the Black Forest to write books and arrange flowers but is perhaps more fundamentally about being able to participate in transindividual collective activity which is supported by technological networks.

For Simondon technical objects always have a subjective as well as an objective side - they have a phenomenology. For example, think of the experience of using the internet which some refer to as being in cyberspace. Moving around cyberspace is not the same as moving around fibre-optic cable networks. Similarly using tools in education has a subjective side. We learn to understand at the same time as we learn to use our tools. Think of a slide-rule or an abacus. Now think of various software tools. This has become known as instrumentalization within ed tech (see impedevo et al 2017).

Before the next reading I will say something more about why Stiegler is interesting for our project, and then why radical embodied cognition might be interesting. Unless someone else volunteers to do this of course

Please post comments on the first reading in response to this blog or in response to a Twitter Chat that Genevieve Smith-Nunes will organise around the dates of the reading groups https://twitter.com/pegleggen




Barthélémy, J. H. (2012). Fifty key terms in the works of Gilbert Simondon. Gilbert Simondon: being and technology, 203-231.

Impedovo, M. A., Andreucci, C., & Ginestié, J. (2017). Mediation of artefacts, tools and technical objects: An international and French perspective. International Journal of Technology and Design Education, 27(1), 19-30.

Levinas, E. (1990). Heidegger, Gagarin and Us, in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism,

Winograd T, Flores F (1986) Understanding computers and cognition: a new foundation for design. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company Inc., Menlo Park
Simondon 2005 L’Individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information (Jérôme Millon, coll. Krisis).

Democracy is one of the fundamental British values that schools now have to teach children in the UK. But is it really such a good thing? Most people understand democracy as making decisions on the basis of counting votes. As a value this roughly translates as: if it is popular then it is right. But if a majority of people vote for a politician who denies the reality of man-made global warming that does not make this view right. Whether something is true or not cannot be decided by voting. Similarly, if a majority of people vote in favour of aggression against a religious minority, this does not make such behaviour ethically acceptable. It is a shocking but true fact that Hitler was democratically elected to power in Germany in 1933 when he was first appointed as chancellor after his party gained the largest share of the vote in an election. In practice democracy is often the moral equivalent of two tigers and a lamb voting about what to have for dinner.
 
A common response to criticisms of democracy is to quote Churchill from a speech in 1947: 'Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time'. Accepting this challenge, let us consider briefly another option one which is perhaps the most 'other' of other possible systems at the moment : 'theocracy' as championed by Iran, by the so-called Islamic State and previously by Tibet. If you look up the meaning of theocracy in the dictionary you will be told that it means 'rule by priests'. But this is a rather obviously motivated mis-representation of the kind that we commonly impose upon  views that we do not like and cannot be bothered to take the trouble to try to understand. Just as democracy means rule ('kratos') by the people ('demos') so theocracy means rule by God ('theos') and those who support theocracy are probably very well aware that their priests are not God.

For Theocracy
 
The superiority of theocracy over democracy can be brought out by considering the success of natural science. At the moment there is a competition between string theory and loop quantum gravity to see which offers the best account of the nature of matter. This competition will not be resolved by voting. Deciding on this issue requires dialogue and experimentation where the methods used and the arguments given are all open to public scrutiny. The expectation is that the relevant community of scientists will form a consensus around the claims that are best supported by the evidence. In this shared inquiry the voice that needs to win out is not the voice of one party or the other but the voice of truth. Implied in the success of science is the idea that there is a reality in itself that is not merely a human construction. For there to be knowledge there has to be a knower of that knowledge. The ideal of knowing the truth of things is also the ideal of a kind of perfect knower for whom all is revealed. Stephen Hawking was right when he wrote that science aspires to know 'the mind of God'.[i]

A problem with theocracy in science

The ideal of a God's eye perspective [the truth of things] is a necessary ideal for there to be progress in science. However, there are good philosophical reasons for not accepting the ideal of truth that science generates. Just as we only see the landscape in front of us because we are standing within that landscape so we only ever have knowledge from a perspective. We can improve what our eyes see with instruments like telescopes and we can expand our perspective with networks, for example communicating by mobile phone with other people standing at different positions in the same shared landscape. These efforts expand knowledge but nonetheless the ideal of perfect knowledge or knowledge from no perspective whatsoever does not seem to make much sense.  

This challenge does not undermine science since in practice we never need to claim to see things as they really are in themselves, we only need to claim that some hypotheses work better than others to explain observations in a context. For example experiments in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN might one day generate evidence that contradicts Gabriele Veneziano's string theory and fits best with Carlo Rovelli's quantum loop theory. But if this happens neither of these theorists will therefore imagine that they have really seen completely into the mind of God. They know that their theories are still imperfect and need to be developed but they have learnt that one of them fits the evidence better than the other at the moment. This is progress. Progress in science requires not only technical methods but also moral virtues. Science means really listening to other positions and being open to the possibility of changing your mind if necessary[ii].

For theocracy in politics

The same sort of argument that can be made for the  ideal of a Gods-eye perspective in science can also be made in the context of politics. When we say that a policy e.g caring for the elderly, is right and another policy. e.g abandoning the elderly to die alone, is wrong, we are not normally claiming that the correct view would get more votes, we are usually invoking a higher perspective. When judges, for example, have to make controversial decisions they do not think that it is acceptable for them to just follow their own opinion based on their background, they normally try very hard to put their own  prejudices to one side in order to discern what is right [iii] Discerning what is the right thing to do involves trying to recreate, as far as this is possible, a perspective that is closer to God. The ideal behind a good political decision is one of perfect wisdom including perfect knowledge, as with science, but adding to this ideals of infinite compassion and a fairness untouched by any partiality.
 
In English the word 'good' comes from the word 'God'. Etymologically a good decision refers to a more godly decision, meaning a decision which best reflects what God would do in this situation. When asked to judge you have to think: well if I was God and knew everything, and understood everyone and had infinite compassion then what would I do?

If we translate the idea of God to be the personification and embodiment of a point of view that combines total knowledge, infinite compassion and perfect wisdom - then theocracy or rule by God is a no-brainer - it is certainly a much more convincing ideal than democracy. 

A small problem with theocracy in politics

The question theocracy raises is: how can we best discern the will of God? Here again we can learn from how progress in science works. There are no single simple fixed methods in science, the case for the appropriateness of any given method always needs to be made in the context of the inquiry. However, what is consistent across all sciences is a set of communicative virtues and practices: making arguments clearly and publicly, listening with respect to counter positions, and, above all, being open to learning from the other and being able to change one's position on the basis of evidence plus argument regardless of prior prejudice and self-interest.
 
We can apply what has been learnt from the success of science to politics. We cannot start in politics from a Godlike or perfect perspective [iv]. People value different things so what might seem like justice to one might not be considered justice by another (dialogue-and-equality.html). However we can develop ways to decide what is more just and what is less just in a context. In practice, this can mean an open and transparent public debate exploring the different arguments backed by evidence. However, as with science, the success of this public dialogue approach depends not only upon procedures but also upon the moral character and communicative virtues of those participating.  Decision makers - potentially all of us - need to have the capacity to really listen to other points of view with an open mind such that we are able to learn new things and change our minds regardless of prior prejudices, self interest and tribal identity.
 
For dialogue

A dialogue is never just between people, it also always generates a kind of witness position [v]. Bakhtin refers to this as the 'superaddressee'. The term 'superaddressee' sounds a bit technical but this is not a very complicated idea but a simple truth of experience. Try listening to yourself speak when you have to explain yourself to someone you respect and care about but disagree with. You will find that you do not only listen to your own voice, you also find yourself concerned about how you think the other person is hearing your words. However, you do not know for sure how they are responding so in reconstructing their perspective you find yourself listening to your own arguments as if from the outside, as if you were a witness listening to the dialogue. Often you can see holes in your argument and correct it as you go along. Sometimes you might see, for the first time, what is really motivating you. As Bakhtin puts it, even if the other person does not understand what you are trying to say, the witness or 'superaddressee' does. This is why it is possible to come away from a dialogue feeling frustrated that you expressed yourself badly but nonetheless clearer in your own mind about what you really think and feel.
 
Science focusses on what is true regardless of what the majority of people think. In the same way, in politics we should try to make good decisions - not just popular decisions. In the absence of a God perspective the best way to know what is true in science and what is good in politics is through free and open dialogue between all relevant perspectives such that the position best supported by the arguments and by the evidence can win out. In politics at least this dialogue is not merely cerebral but includes feelings and intuitions that arise from the extended embodiment of reconstructing in oneself how it feels to be the other. Dialogue here is a kind of self-transcending machine. It might not allow us to reach directly into the mind of God but it can expand our vision and extend our sympathies. 

Dialogue, education and the future

Democracy, when understood as rule by the people, is vulnerable to being interpreted either as counting the votes of lots of individuals each of whom is said to be equally entitled to their own opinion however ill-thought through this opinion is or, sometimes even worse, it is the will of 'the people' understood as the community of those who speak my language and think just like me (the ideal of the one mind and one heart of the German 'volk' claimed as an authority to act by Hitler, for example).

Dialogue has been associated with democracy over the years but I think that it implies a very different idea of authority. In place of rule by the people, dialogue gives us the ideal of rule by what is true and right - not as absolutes or mere ideas but as the discovery of what needs to be said and what needs to done to take us forward in this situation that is here in front of us right now.

Implementing dialogue as a system of government is not easy. In some areas of science, over the last 250 years or so, real progress has shown that rule by dialogue is possible. In law courts and in parliaments there have been examples of rule by dialogue but also examples of the failure of dialogue. Recent experiments with 'citizens assemblies' suggest ways to inject more rule by dialogue into politics [vi]. Colleagues like Michael Hogan are exploring the potential of technology to support more effective collective decision making[vii]
 
Trying to improve the future through politics often feels like starting from the wrong place. The key players have always already been shaped in ways that mean that they often seem closed to the possibility of truly learning from others. Perhaps education, more than politics, is the discipline with the greatest potential to shape the future. Education for dialogue, especially when this includes global dialogue, is a way to teach children how to transcend egotism, tribalism, and prejudice. The key dialogic skill that we need to teach is not how to ask good questions or how to critically unpack arguments, important as such skills are, but the more fundamental ability to allow oneself to be led forward by the emergent voice of what is most true here and now in the dialogue and what is most right to do here and now in this situation. In teaching dialogue we can expand minds and expand hearts, but we can also lay the human foundations for a future where politics might one day reflect some of our highest  hopes and ideals instead of, as now so often seems to be the case, reflecting only our lowest common denominators.
 
 
References 

​[i] Hawking, S. (1989). A brief history of time: from big bang to black holes. Bantam.


[ii] McIntyre, L. (2019). The Scientific Attitude: Defending Science from Denial, Fraud, and Pseudoscience. Mit Press.

 [iii] Dworkin, R. (2013). Religion without god. Harvard University Press.
 
[iv]Sen, A. K. (2009). The idea of justice. Harvard University Press.
and also Smith, A. (2010). The theory of moral sentiments. Penguin.
 
[v] Wegerif, R. (2019) Towards a Dialogic Theory of Education for the Internet Age. In
Mercer, N., Wegerif, R., & Major, L. (eds). The Routledge International Handbook of Research on Dialogic Education
 

[vi] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/16/citizens-assembly-ireland-abortion-referendum
 
[vii] Hogan, M., Hall, T., & Harney, O. (2017). Collective intelligence design and a new politics of system change. Civitas educationis. Education, Politics, and Culture, 6(1), 51-78.
​
See also 
​Wegerif, R., Doney, J., & Jamison, I. (2017). Designing Education to Promote Global Dialogue: Lessons from Generation Global—a Project of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. Civitas educationis. Education, Politics, and Culture, 6(1), 113-129.​​


​

​Monologic is the idea that there is just one true perspective or only one correct way of looking at things. Dialogic is the contrasting idea that understanding the meaning of something requires more than one perspective or more than one voice.
 
It is easy to see why dialogue and dialogic teaching could be useful in subjects like literature and history where there are debates between competing points of view and often no certainty as to which one is right. But subjects like maths and science present themselves as essentially monologic, so why should we teach them in a dialogic way?. That 2+2=4 is simply a truth and not a matter for debate. That water boils at 100 degrees C at sea level is a fact not requiring argument and discussion surely? Nonetheless, I think that we do need dialogic education in both maths and science. This short blog explains why.
 
Last week I  gave a talk about dialogic education at a big education conference (EARLI2019 in Aachen).  I focussed on how dialogic education can expand awareness by opening up a dialogic space, widening that space by bringing in alternative perspectives and deepening that space by questioning any framing assumptions. Meaning is only possible, I claimed, in the context of dialogue between different perspectives.
 
The discussant in our symposium, Frank Fisher, said that, while this dialogue approach is obviously useful in citizenship and the humanities it might not apply so well to subjects such as maths and science where there are correct answers to be taught. Frank, a professor at Munich, is a leader in the field of argumentation research. His concern about the limits of dialogic education is probably widely shared.
 
Anna Sfard, a leader in mathematics education,  raises a similar challenge against my account of dialogic education. She quotes me writing that progress in dialogic education is 'not simply from A to B but from A to A + B' and  she points out that this does not apply to monologic subjects such as mathematics[i].
 
This critical challenge from Frank and Anna is really useful in motivating me to express what I mean more clearly and also, perhaps, to think it through a little more carefully - hence this blog.
 
When I came up with the line that Anna quotes about progress being not from A to B but from A to A + B I was pretty pleased with myself. It expresses the experience of learning by talking to people and seeing the world through their eyes. Each new voice is a new way of seeing that does not replace other voices but augments them. For example, I feel fortunate as an adult that I have not entirely lost the ways of thinking, feeling and seeing the world that I had as a child. In that respect I have not moved simply from A to B (child to adult) but from A to A +B  (from child to child plus adult).
 
But I can see that the idea that learning moves from A to A + B is a big problem if it is taken to mean that you do not just learn that 2+2=4 but also that 2+2=3 and 2+2=5. I see the problem. That does not make any educational sense at all! Let me explain myself with three short examples.

1) Seeing the pattern
 
With the direct teaching, or the A to B approach, there is a danger  that children can apparently learn that 2 + 2 = 4 without  understanding what this means.  Maybe they can 'count on' 2 fingers from an initial two fingers without understanding why 2+2 is always the same as 1+3 which is always the same as 3+1. To understand that they need to move from the procedural business of 'counting on' to grasp the concept of 'commutativity'.
 
I did some research on this with maths education specialist Carol Murphy by teaching early mathematics in combination with teaching dialogic talk. In one class we observed the children worked together in groups of three solving a simple form of magic square. They were given the numbers 3, 2 and 1 on cards and asked to arrange them in a 3 by 3 grid so that every row and column added up to the same.

Figure 1: Magic Square

Two of the group, Amy and Jack, worked industriously arranging numbers and counting them out while Judy, the third member, just sat to one side and  watched them.

‘Two, three and one’ Jack counted on his fingers, ‘that’s six’. ‘One, three and two’, Amy counted on her fingers, ‘six’.

They were succeeding at the task, finding the way in which the numbers could be used to make all the rows and columns add up to the same total but they did not seem to realise that 3 + 2 + 1 was the same as 1 + 2 + 3 and the same as 2 + 1 + 3 etc. Judy sucked her finger looking on then said: ‘They are all adding up to six, look they are all six’. Later the teacher affirmed the point that Judy had made and helped to lead the group away from procedural understanding - knowing how to go on - to conceptual understanding - knowing why. I am not sure how much teaching the ground rules of dialogic talk helped with this small breakthrough but in general dialogue in classrooms has been shown to help with the shift from procedural to conceptual understanding in maths and in science.[2]
 
2 Three voices are better than one

Working with Neil Mercer in the 1990s I first explored the impact of teaching 'thinking together' (a form of dialogic education) in the context of citizenship. We could show a development  in the quality of children's reasoning as a result of teaching Exploratory Talk (a form of dialogic talk) but this effect was hard to measure and quantify. We moved on to using standard non-verbal reasoning tests to measure the impact of dialogic education. We did this precisely because each puzzle had a right answer and so we could easily measure the improvement in problem-solving that resulted from our teaching. As a result of dialogic education many groups moved from getting answers wrong to getting them right. In this respect you could say that they moved from A to B. But our analysis showed that they often achieved this greater success through increasing the complexity of their understanding of the problem. Whereas in the pre-test they often got problems wrong by  seeing them only one way, in the post test they often got problems right by seeing them in several different ways and then discussing together which way was best.[3]

Figure 2 Problem A

Before the series of  Thinking Together lessons one group, Elaine, Danny and John,  did not talk together at all well. In the pre-test one person in the group, Elaine, worked out the answer to Problem A (above)  alone and wrote it down as number 5.  She fell into the trap of just looking at the puzzle from top to bottom. In the post-test we gave this group the same set of puzzles and they got it right. The video recording shows why. As before, it seems that the pattern of the top to bottom lines is noticed first and John offers number five as the answer. But this answer is only made as a suggestion preceded by 'I think'. Danny then put forward number two as the answer, apparently because he is looking at the horizontal pattern of the single lines. John explains (through words and pointing) that the vertical black lines have to ‘go out'. Danny in turn explains that it cannot be number five because the light lines have to ‘go in’. Each of the two boys has adopted a different perspective; John takes the side of the vertical lines, Danny that of the horizontal lines. Each can see enough to refute the position of the other but this does not yet produce the solution. Elaine then comes up with the answer which combines the vertical lines going out with the horizontal lines going in, that is number four. Once she has expressed this both Danny and John agree that she is right, nodding.

​There is a single correct answer here which they converge upon. This is monologic. But they only get it because they compare the right answer to the wrong answers. This is dialogic. Understanding the right answer means understanding why it is right which also means understanding the wrong answers in order to contrast and compare.

3 Darwin vs Lamarck

As a teenager I associated Darwin with the theory that humans had evolved from animals. I was confused when I discovered that lots of other people, Goethe for example, had suggested this same idea long before Darwin had published his 'Origin of Species'. This made me realise that I had not really understood Darwin's theory at all. Darwin had not only speculated on man evolving from animals but had offered a theory as to the mechanism whereby evolution worked. This mechanism is variation of organisms combined with selection by survival and reproduction. I really understood this more specific theory only when I saw Darwin's theory of evolution compared with Lamarck’s theory.  Lamarck’s theory is just as much a theory of evolution as Darwin's but it did not work as well to explain the available evidence. This theory is that organisms strive to adapt to their environment in their lifetimes and then passed on this adaptation on to their offspring. Giraffes that stretched to reach leaves in high trees grew longer necks and so their children inherited these longer necks.
 
Understanding the debate in the 19th century between these contrasting views of evolution helped me to understand what was special about Darwin's theory. It is also interesting that, although Lamarck’s view was 'defeated' at the time it has returned. Recent evidence has demonstrated that features acquired through experience in a lifetime can in fact be transmitted to offspring and so Lamarck's name is being referenced in biology articles once again [4].
 
My point is that, as with Mathematics, to understand a theory in science, it is not enough to just state it - it does not mean anything on its own outside of any dialogic context  - it means something in relation to the dialogue that spawned it and the ongoing dialogues that it is engaged within. To understand it then is also to understand the apparently 'wrong' theories that it contrasts with. But even these wrong theories do not really disappear from the dialogue - they remain around as resources to help us think and so to help us to be able to respond to new challenges.
 
It is true that some difference in pedagogy is required if the objective is for students to end up knowing a correct way as opposed to if the objective is to explore the range of ways. However, these different objectives and associated pedagogies can both be valued and combined in any subject area [5]. There can be convergence on a single truth in history and literature just as there can be discussion of a range of perspectives in maths and science. Arguing that progress is expansive and moves not simply from A to B but from understanding only A to understanding both A and B   is not meant to suggest that all points of view are equally valid. It is meant to suggest that understanding why one way is better than another (in a context) requires understanding the contrasting views and so requires mastering a dialogic space  [6].


[1] Sfard, A (in press for 2019) Learning, discursive faultiness and dialogic engagement. In Mercer, Wegerif and Major (eds) The Routledge international handbook of research on dialogic education.
[2] Wegerif, R. (2010) Mindexpanding. McGraw Hill
[3] Wegerif, R., Mercer, N., & Dawes, L. (1999). From social interaction to individual reasoning: An empirical investigation of a possible socio-cultural model of cognitive development. Learning and instruction, 9(6), 493-516.
​[4] West-Eberhard, M. J. (2007). Dancing with DNA and flirting with the ghost of Lamarck. Biology and Philosophy, 22(3), 439-451.
[5] Scott, P. H., Mortimer, E. F., & Aguiar, O. G. (2006). The tension between authoritative and dialogic discourse: A fundamental characteristic of meaning making interactions in high school science lessons. Science education, 90(4), 605-631.
[6] Phillipson, N., & Wegerif, R. (2016). Dialogic Education: Mastering core concepts through thinking together. Routledge.

​Metaphors are powerful. There are many detailed complex and subtle-sounding arguments made about education but if we clear away all of this verbiage to look behind then I think that we find only a few basic metaphors. These metaphors shape how people think about education and  how teachers teach.  

​Metaphor 1: Construction.
 
The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget published 70 volumes between 1915 and 1990[i]. Only one of them contained the word construction in the title, The construction of reality in the child written in 1937. (La construction du réel chez l'enfant). However, it is this metaphor of construction that has been taken up.

​
​When I was at secondary school in the 1970's I recall long double periods of science where we worked in small groups to do experiments using equipment such as Bunsen burners and test-tubes.

  To my adolescent self, much of this seemed to be a waste of time. We often spent ages struggling to set up the equipment and then ages putting it away again, we routinely got the wrong result and it often seemed mysteriously difficult to find out from the teacher what the result was supposed to be and why it was significant. I am sure that there was some value in role-playing research scientists in this way but at the time it certainly seemed an oddly inefficient way to teach science. I preferred to read about the experiments and the results we were supposed to obtain in a book that I got from the local University library. The results in the book seemed more reliable! (And yes, perhaps I was a nerd). There were, however, odd moments of inspiration with this hands on discovery approach. I was amazed by the double-slit experiment that reveals particle-wave duality - and the halo-of-hair effect obtained with the use of Van de Graf generators was totally awesome.
 
I recently observed a lesson where, after an initial story input and some discussion about the complex idea of being wild or tame, 6 year old children were asked to create their own understanding of the idea working around tables which were laden with pens, scissors, glue and bits of coloured paper. I listened to their talk. Like our talk years ago in my school when doing practical work, this was not about conceptual understanding but about practical procedures. 'Where is the ruler?', 'can you pass it?, 'No! That is mine! get off!' and so on.  There was also some discussion about which teacher was nicest and who had the biggest house. I think that time for art work is good and mucking around together in an unstructured sort of way is helpful for learning social skills like resilience when someone steals your ruler. But I did not see much connection between the reality of how the children performed the task and the learning objective. I wondered if the metaphor of construction influenced this  teacher to want to want see  children drawing, cutting and gluing.  
 
When I did a PGCE at Bristol university back in 1990 we were asked to record lessons and compare how many teacher turns at talk (ttt) there were compared to student turns at talk (stt). It was made pretty obvious from the feedback that having the least ttt and the most stt was best. The reason for this was, of course, 'constructivism' and Piaget was referred to as an authority. Constructivism, I was taught, says that children do not learn by being told stuff but that they always have to construct meaning for themselves. In fact, according to this theory, teaching ideas to children before they are ready for them can often be harmful to learning. On the whole, rigorously applying the metaphor of construction, the teacher's role becomes not to teach at all but to get out of the way in order for the children to learn for themselves.

Metaphor 2 transmission
 
Some years ago I observed a science class in a primary school in a middle-eastern country where there was little or no teacher education. In the class the students, aged 6 or 7, sat at individual desks chatting together. When the teacher, a young man, walked in, they all stood up and greeted him formally. The lesson consisted of him talking them through examples in a text book and writing things on a blackboard that they then wrote into their exercise books. The children were silent throughout unless called upon by the teacher when they answered questions and sometimes recited responses together in unison.
 
Why did this teacher think that this was the best way to educate children? I wondered if it was simply that the dominant metaphor for education is transmission. If you ask anyone, anywhere, I mean anyone who has not done teacher training in a UK university obviously, then they will probably say that education is about the transmission of knowledge across generations. Perhaps, when he got the job as a teacher, he stood in front of a class and he asked himself ‘what am I supposed to do now?’ then he thought ‘I know, teaching is the transmission of knowledge, I will transmit what I know’.
 
This kind of teaching as transmission also happened to me in most of my lessons at state schools in the 1970's. While science was taught with a lot of hands-on discovery learning other subjects were taught through transmission. In geography, for example, I recall that the teacher would get us to open our text books, he would explain something like the formation of ox-bow lakes, then he would write key text on the board for us to copy in our exercise books.
 
Although I was often bored in geography, I did learn some things. I found the story that the teacher told to explain ox bow lakes quite fascinating. Looking back now I think that it made sense to me through a sort of inner dialogue where the teacher’s words were met with my own inner answering words, asking questions and making sense of what he said by relating it to other areas of my experience. Playing around with water and mud in the backyard certainly helped my understanding of how rivers impact on landscapes but the story also had resonances for me with the many more general patterns one finds in life. I could relate to the young stream gurgling along fast and happy cutting through the rock and then becoming slower and sluggish as it got older, forming great loops, even apparently flowing backwards away from the ocean at times until it cut new more direct paths towards the ocean leaving stagnant pools of water (ox-bow lakes) behind in its wake. I mean life is a bit like that isn’t it? Certainly lots of institutions like Cambridge University seem to be like that. So I got this explanatory story but not everyone in the class did. The tests we had every term and again every year were not formative but summative. They seemed to mainly serve the purpose of separating the good students from the bad students without any apparent pedagogical purpose. Perhaps because of the dominance of the metaphor of transmission students in the geography class were not helped to develop their own inner dialogue through asking questions, testing out explanations and learning from each other.
 
The two basic metaphors of transmission and construction seem like opposites but they are related. The one is the shadow of the other. The perceived failure of the transmission approach in education to teach for thinking led to the construction metaphor. Now that the construction metaphor is itself being increasingly challenged some people seem to want to return back to the simplicity and security of the old transmission metaphor or what is now referred to as 'direct teaching'. [ii]
 

​Metaphor 3: dialogue
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A recent large study in UK schools found that in classrooms with more key indicators of dialogue students learnt more effectively. 'So long as students participated extensively, elaboration and querying of previous contributions were found to be positively associated with curriculum mastery'[iii].

​When I first started out researching classroom talk for my PhD with Neil Mercer, dialogue in classrooms was often associated with constructivism, more specifically 'social constructivism'. Knowledge was being constructed but not just by students working on their own but by students working together in small groups, asking questions, giving reasons, developing understanding[iv]. However, I came to realise that dialogue as an approach to education offers us a metaphor that goes beyond the construction versus transmission binary.

Oakeshott described education as drawing students into participation in what he termed 'the conversation of mankind'. Conversation is a good word but can be used for some social interactions that have no educational aspect. Dialogic educational theorists often quote Bakhtin's definition of dialogue as essentially educational. Dialogues, Bakhtin wrote, involve a tension between different perspectives that is mutually illuminating. In a dialogue, for Bakhtin, each answer gives rise to a new question in a potentially endless chain of shared inquiry.
 
Whereas the transmission metaphor tends to treat knowledge as if it was physical stuff, the kind of stuff that can be moved around, stored in books and poured into brains, the dialogue metaphor claims that knowledge does not exist outside of a dialogue where people are asking questions. What we know is always the answer to a question. The questions we ask move on as the dialogue develops over time. The dialogues, or shared inquiries, that construct knowledge are not just small group dialogues but collective social dialogues, dialogues between scientists united within a global community of practice for example.

​The role of the teacher in the classroom is to induct children into participation in these larger dialogues. Through the role of the teacher, subjects like mathematics, science and history have a voice in the dialogue. This is not just about construction. It is also, at times, about transmission. Some long-term dialogues of culture, mathematics, science or history are good examples, have already been going on for thousands of years. If you enter a room where a dialogue about a topic has been going on for thousands of years and you immediately tell everyone what you think; well that is just a bit rude - and collectively it is pretty unproductive. It is better to spend time listening first. If newcomers are to learn how to participate in long-term cultural dialogues, they need to know something of the story of the dialogue so far. Telling the story of the dialogue so far is not the transmission of a fixed and settled body of facts but is about engaging students in an ongoing dialogue where the only certainty is that almost everything that we think is true and important now will be proved either wrong or largely irrelevant in the future. Teaching knowledge rich subjects as a dialogue means teaching ideas as fallible and equipping students with the ability to challenge them. Learning science, history or any other subject is not just learning a body of knowledge more importantly it is learning how to think in the area, how to take a position and argue for it understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the all the alternative positions.  
 
Dialogues combine active talking with passive listening. The construction metaphor of education focuses on students actively talking to build their own ideas. The transmission metaphor of education focuses instead on the need for students to passively listen to the collective knowledge of the past that is being passed down to them by teachers. Both metaphors can grip the imaginations of teachers because they both have some truth. Each  metaphor reflects a necessary but insufficient aspect of education. Alone each one is limited because it is one-sided. Education occurs only when there is a dynamic interplay between talking and listening, teaching and learning, construction and transmission. Small group dialogues where students learn to ask insightful questions, elaborate on their reasoning and build knowledge together have a valuable role to play but only as one technique within a larger repertoire that includes the importance of lectures from the front, telling good stories and the kind of live exciting student-teacher dialogues that exemplify the exploration and creation of knowledge.
 
Many complicated things can be written about 'dialogic education' but at root, like construction and transmission, dialogue is a simple, easy-to-grasp, metaphor. My hope is that in the future, when new teachers find themselves in front of a class and are not quite sure what to do next, they will think to themselves 'I know, this is education and education is all about dialogue' so they will begin by asking the students what they already know about a topic and what they think about it in order to engage with them and share their own knowledge in such a way that the students are drawn into participating in the global, long-term, open-ended collective inquiry that is education.

References

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[i] http://www.fondationjeanpiaget.ch/fjp/site/bibliographie/index_livres_chrono.php
 

[ii] Kirschner, P. A., Sweller, J., & Clark, R. E. (2006). Why minimal guidance during instruction does not work: An analysis of the failure of constructivist, discovery, problem-based, experiential, and inquiry-based teaching. Educational psychologist, 41(2), 75-86.
 

[iii] Howe, C., Hennessy, S., Mercer, N., Vrikki, M., & Wheatley, L. (2019). Teacher-Student Dialogue during Classroom Teaching: Does it Really Impact upon Student Outcomes?.
 

[iv] Wegerif, R., & Mercer, N. (1997). A dialogical framework for researching peer talk. Language and Education Library, 12, 49-64.
 
Based on the argument of: Phillipson, N., & Wegerif, R. (2016). Dialogic Education: Mastering core concepts through thinking together. Routledge.
 
My focus on the role of metaphors in this blog is inspired by
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (2008). Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago press.
And also
Sfard, A. (1998). On two metaphors for learning and the dangers of choosing just one. Educational researcher, 27(2), 4-13.

The Matrix is playing again in cinemas today to mark the 20th anniversary of its original release. This re-birth of interest in the Matrix may offer an opportunity for educators who want to stimulate a bit of thought in the classroom. 

How do we know it is real?
In the fourth century BC, Plato wrote that we are like people sitting in a cave looking at shadows cast by the light of the sun and mistaking these for reality. Chung Tzu, a contemporary of Plato in China, wrote that he dreamt he was a Butterfly and that when he awoke he no longer knew if he was a man dreaming he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was a man. In the film Morpheus prepares Neo for a new awakening with the same sort of argument:

Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real? What if you were unable to wake from that dream, Neo? How would know the difference between the dream world and the real world? 

The idea of the Matrix, that we inhabit a computer simulation controlled by malevolent machines, is very similar to one of the doubts proposed by Descartes that all that we take to be real is a trick played upon us by a powerful demon. Descartes’ way out of this doubt was to provide a rational argument for the existence of an omnipotent and benign God who would not allow the demon to get away with it. Bishop Berkeley, the 18th Century British Empiricist philosopher, continued in this direction to argue that everything exists only as an idea in the mind of God. Dr Johnson, the English wit and man of letters, famously responded to this theory by kicking a stone as hard as he could and claiming: ‘I refute him thus!’

But is that really a refutation? What argument or evidence, if any, would count against the claim that we inhabit a simulated reality? 

So what if it is not real?

When I put forward the idea that we might live in a simulation created by an alien civilisation people commonly respond: 'So what?'. If everything remains exactly the same why should our interpretation of it matter? The Matrix addresses this question and shows that, whether they articulate it or not, everyone really has an interpretation of the ultimate nature of reality and that this really does matter a lot. The common desire to fight social injustice and alleviate poverty, for example, seems hard to question and yet it rests upon an assumption about the material reality of the human condition.

In one dialogue, agent Smith, a personification of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) that now rules the Earth, tells Morpheus that the Matrix was originally modelled on human descriptions of paradise, but that this had not been accepted by their human ‘crop’, many of whom had died as a result. In response the machines created a more historically accurate simulation of human life full of pain, poverty and struggle. Humans responded well to this world because it was a world that they could believe in. The everyday struggles of life gave the humans a necessary sense of purpose. In the context of the Matrix, fighting injustice or poverty becomes absurd. Morality and compassion in the Matrix consist in calling people to awake from the dream, even if this awakening is at some cost to their apparent material comfort and health.
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Contemplating the Matrix shows how different morality might look if we interpret the material world as a dream. Perhaps this can offer insight into the moral perspective of religious/philosophical traditions that teach that the world we experience is a kind of illusion. Buddhism, for example, has, in the past, been criticised by Christian commentators for a lack of practical action on injustice and poverty. However, Buddhism clearly teaches that we have a moral duty to help ourselves and others attain ‘enlightenment’, which roughly translates as 'waking up from the dream'. 

Who is 'Christ'?

Although the theme of awakening from illusion fits well with Buddhist and Hindu traditions the most obvious references in the film are to the story of Christ. Morpheus is a John the Baptist figure, preparing the way for the expected messiah. Neo’s official name in the film is Anderson, meaning ‘son of man’. Early on someone describes him as ‘My personal Jesus Christ’. When Neo is converted and reborn in the real world he is submerged in water and pulled out by Morpheus - an image of Christ’s baptism by John the Baptist. ‘Trinity’, the black-leather clad woman who originally contacts Neo, plays the Mary Magdalene role. Cypher, a member of Morpheus’s band who betrays Neo to the enemy, plays the role of Judas. The sign that Neo is ‘the One’ is that he can perform true miracles, not just virtual reality effects.

Early in the film Neo, or Mr Anderson, is late for his job and is called to his boss’s office. The boss tells him, in words that must surely be familiar to all of us, that his problem is that, like everyone else, he thinks that he is special and that the rules do not apply to him. The boss is asking Neo to conform to a system that is ultimately pointless. But Neo’s role in the film is as the person who really does have something special, something that transcends the rule-bound nature of the system, and not just this particular system but any system. This is also what was said of Jesus Christ. He is described as ‘the stone that the builders rejected’, or the man who did not fit in.
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What is this special quality of freedom that goes beyond the rules? Is it something that only a few exceptional individuals have, or do we all have access to it? Is Christ a person or a principle?
 
Of course, there are also some differences between Jesus Christ and Neo. Christ might have ‘kicked arse’ in the temple when he threw out the money-lenders but he is not usually portrayed wearing shades and a long black leather coat whilst spraying the crowd with a sub-machine gun. 

A double identity

The hero of the Matrix begins with two identities, by day he is the law-abiding office worker, Thomas Anderson and by night he is the law-breaking computer-hacker searching for truth going by the name of Neo. In the film Thomas Anderson dies and the identity signified by Neo is transformed into its anagram meaning of the 'One’. Are there examples from life where an apparently virtual or fantasy identity turns out to be truer than the officially given identity? What do we make of many examples in religious traditions where one identity is said to have to die for another identity to be born? 

Time out of mind
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Neo and his friends enter the Matrix from outside and so they can break some of the rules that the normal inhabitants are bound by. In the fight sequences, for example, Neo can slow time down to ‘bullet-time’ – the time in which bullets can be seen as they fly and picked out of the air. Time in the Matrix is a constructed experience. God is described by Augustin as outside of time and space because he created time and space but what would time then be like for God? If our experience of time is constructed then, assuming that we are not really batteries in some future world, what would it be like to be outside of that time looking in? This is also the question of what Nirvana, the Buddhist state of awakening, is like. In the Matrix there are signs that indicate the constructed nature of time such as ‘Deja vue’ experiences, is there anything like that in our experience that might suggest that time and space are not as real as we usually think? Can experiences of eternity, described in spiritual writings but also in the psychological investigation of 'peak experiences', be explained as in some way stepping out of a virtual reality to try to view it from the outside? 

The choice
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The choice that Morpheus offers Neo between the blue pill, return to a comfortable sleep-walking existence in the collective dream, and the red pill, awakening to an uncomfortable reality outside of the dream, is not new in literature. This is also the theme of the trial of Socrates, where Socrates is accused of disturbing the peace with his questioning and in the end chooses death rather than a lie. In the film Cypher regrets choosing the red pill and seeks a return to ignorant pleasures such as eating steak even though he knows these to be illusions. Can ignorance be bliss? Is knowing the truth worth the sacrifice that Neo pays for it? 

Virtual reality and social control

As well as religious and philosophical themes, Neo’s awakening in the film has many parallels with a more political vision of liberation. The virtual reality Matrix is a massive system of social control designed to distract humans from becoming aware of their true situation, which is that they are being oppressed and exploited by hidden masters. The band of free humans Neo joins in the sewers are an underground guerrilla movement engaging in hit and run acts of violent sabotage against the system, whilst broadcasting a message of freedom from their ‘pirate ship’.

In the film Neo is shown hiding a stash of money in a hollowed-out book with the title ‘Simulacra and Simulation'. This is the title of a book by the philosopher Jean Baudrillard. Baudrillard's main argument is that, whereas in the old days we thought of simulations as a simulation of an underlying reality, now they have taken on their own reality. Banknotes for instance, used to contain a promise to pay the bearer with real gold that was held in a bank vault. Now this promise that there is something real behind it has been dropped and money just exists free-floating as a kind of collective illusion that works only because we all buy into it. 
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It is common to argue that education should serve the needs of ‘the economy’, but what is now ‘the economy?’ One plausible answer might be billions of people working hard to produce, distribute and consume virtual reality. If young people are motivated to go to work in order to earn money to buy goods that advertisements have programmed them to want, then are they not as much part of a fake system as Neo was in the Matrix? If so, is it possible to ‘drop-out’ of this system as Neo dropped out of the Matrix? 

Is the Matrix itself just another part of the Matrix?

Was bringing a Baudrillard reference into the film an ironic commentary on a big-budget Hollywood movie with a plot-line about escaping the system? Warner brothers, who made the film, are part of Time-Warner who, at the time it was made also owned ​the world’s largest internet provider, AOL and the world’s largest global news service, CNN. Time-Warner, now WarnerMedia, stand accused of using their multiple media interests to manipulate public tastes and opinions in order to create a market for their products. Were we all carefully programmed to find the Matrix theme interesting and to write about it in journals and blogs like this one simply to boost the profits of Time-Warner? Is the film, the Matrix, and all its sequels and spin-offs, itself just part of a Matrix- like system of distraction that fuels the profits of multi-nationals (read, perhaps: 'inhuman money making machines' ?) whilst maintaining social control? 

The search for meaning

The success of the Matrix suggests that many share a dissatisfaction with the comforting illusions of collective social life and feel driven to find underlying truth whatever the personal cost. This is not new. Supposedly written by Lao Tzu around 500 BCE, the Tao te Ching contains similar sentiments:

[Edited extracts from verse 20 of the Tao Te Ching translation by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English]

Is the role of education to sell students versions of the comforting blue pill or is it not perhaps to provide a protected and supportive environment where they can experiment with the red pill?

References:

St Augustin, (400) Confessions. Online at https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3296
 
Baudrillard, J. (1995) Le Crime parfait. Paris: Galilée online at https://monoskop.org/images/a/ab/Baudrillard_Jean_Le_crime_parfait_1995.pdf page 146

Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu is online in many places including https://terebess.hu/english/tao/gia.html

Further reading:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/mar/28/the-matrix-20th-anniversary-sci-fi-game-changer [Article in the Guardian newspaper in the significance of the Matrix]

http://www.simulation-argument.com/ [Philosphical papers on the implications of virtual reality]

https://journals.uvic.ca/index.php/ctheory/article/view/14846/5716 [Disneyworld Company: a Baudrillard essay on the economy as virtual reality]

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/22/what-if-were-living-in-a-computer-simulation-the-matrix-elon-musk