Agency in education﻿

Agency in education

7/8/2016

Leonard Cohen was once asked by an interviewer why he had moved into pop music after making a career as a serious poet. He said ‘I thought that I would get more girls’. ‘and did it work?’ responded the Interviewer. Leonard Cohen simply said, ‘yes’.

I thought of this when I heard a science type on ‘The Infinite Monkey Cage’, a science radio show, saying that birds do not really make music like humans do - they sing only to get mates. He conceded that they got pleasure from singing as serotonin was released in their brains but he insisted that, unlike humans, they just did it because they were programmed to do it.

But if even Leonard Cohen conceded that he made music to get mates I wondered if the sharp distinction we tend to draw between humans with agency and animals without agency is quite so clear-cut.

We get pleasure from making music and do this for fun but we do not know why we do it anymore than the birds know why they sing. Do we really have agency? If so where does this come from?

Matosov argued that for a teacher to force children to learn Maths when they do not want to learn Maths is wrong. This is not respecting their agency. People do enjoy Maths, of course, but it does not seem as natural for most children as enjoying making music. It more often seems like a culturally mediated pleasure that people have to be taught first and might learn to enjoy later. In response to this challenge I tried to argue that the issue is not just about the agency of the children but also about the agency of the Maths. Maths is a long-term dialogue bigger than any individual that wants to survive and that can only survive by recruiting individuals.

Why we should teach Maths is also one of the issues addressed in a very practical new book I have co-written with Neil Phillipson. The answer we gave in the book was about the role of education as inducting children into the long term dialogues of culture. The idea is that these long term global dialogues are more powerful in many ways than the short-term and local dialogues that tend to influence whatever it is that children might think that they want to learn right now like how to be a better football player or a pop-star. You cannot really force children to learn what they do not want to learn but you can offer an invitation and help them to engage.

Our point was also that participating in these powerful long term dialogues of culture and, more generally, in what Oakeshott has called ‘the conversation of mankind’, is a way for children to become fully human. While some aspects of culture can seem alien to children, humans do not exist apart from culture and it is only by engaging with a culture, internalising it and living it, that we become fully ourselves.

Gilbert Simondon argues that we should not look at individuals as if they were fixed and finished final objects but always in terms of the process of individuation that formed them and that continues to form them. His focus on individuation reveals a continuity between nature and culture. Natural processes of individuation, like the way that individual snow-flake crystals precipitate out of the water vapour in a cloud, become doubled in on themselves in biological life: “The living organism conserves within itself a permanent activity of individuation”, he writes in L’individuation psychique et collective. The bird looking for a mate, or just enjoying herself by singing, will produce hundreds of songs each slightly different. In human cultures individuation doubles again. Our thoughts are like the bird song, called out as a response to the world and themselves actions in the world, formations of new patterns of neurons in the brain, or patterns of sounds in the air or ink on the page. But there is a difference. We do not just make music – we ask why. We do not just think, we also reflect on our thinking. Reflective thought is not individual but cultural. By using shared technology such as ink and paper, we are able to exteriorise ourselves and look back as if from other points of view. Humans depend on technology, tools, words, footballs and music recordings, that helps build something collective beyond the biological individual. We could call this culture. Simondon refers to the trans-individual. Extending Simondon’s quote about the shift from the physical to biological you could characterise the shift from the biological to the cultural in much the same way but up one level: human culture conserves within itself a permanent activity of trans-individuation.

Children’s desires are not fixed in time but evolve as part of a larger never finished journey of individuation and trans-individuation. Disciplines like Maths might not be what a child want to learn right now but they are part of what a culture wants to learn and cultures learn by co-evolving with biological individuals - sometimes possessing them and sometimes possessed by them. We are never just an individual, never just a culture – but we dance between these two extremes.

Socrates seems to be describing a similar understanding of his role as an educator inducting students into the long-term dialogue of culture when he is reported by Plato in the Phaedrus as saying:

The dialectician chooses a proper soul and plants and sows within it discourse accompanied by knowledge - discourse capable of helping itself as well as the man who planted it, which is not barren but produces a seed from which more discourse grows in the character of others. Such discourse makes the seed forever immortal and renders the man who has it as happy as any human being can be.

Biological individuals have a certain agency, they want to sing, they want to get mates, but, as even Socrates knew, discourses - or trans-individual dialogues - also have agency and they want to survive too and the only way that they can survive and grow is through implanting themselves in biological individuals. Education is motivated by the agency of long-term dialogues. For birds singing for a mate brings joy. For teachers and learners participating in the long-term dialogues of culture brings joy and also the immortality of a trans-individual life.

6 Comments

Eugene Matusov link

8/8/2016 02:25:05 pm

Dear Rupert–

Thanks for your interesting essay about agency. I make several observations on your short essay about agency and I wonder whether you consider my observations fair or they need some corrections from you:

1) You seem to define agency as the emergence of new things, as innovation;
2) You seem to argue that survival is the other of all innovations and, thus, the agency;
3) You are interested in the continuity between the humans and the rest of the world – organic and physical;
4) You seem to ontologically be committed to the Materialist Organic Holism (i.e., Monism).

If my observations on your position and world perception are more or less accurate, I want to express my (partial) agreement with them. I think that is true that the human agency inherently defined by the emergence of new things. I agree that survival can promote agency and innovations. I agree that there is a certain continuity between the humans and the rest of the world – physical, chemical, organic, biological. I agree that humans are a part of the Universe.

However, I see all these listed truths as half-truths – not full truths. Human agency is not just the emergence of new, but transcendence of the given (i.e., the necessity, the urges, the needs, the survival, the logic, the culture), dialogic recognition of it, dialogic meaning making, dialogic and ethical taking responsibility for the transcendence.

Of course, survival or sexual urges can promote the human agency in some cases. But I believe that the essence of the human nature is not to follow survival but to transcend it. At best, survival and necessities create conditions for the human agency. Humans have a long aspiration to live not by survival, but by dialogic self-actualization. People can be thrown in arts because of their sexual urges in search of mates but their arts can to be reduced to it. Each human activity can serve to other human activities and to human needs, urges, and survival. However, each human activity has its own autonomous domain, it is own “final cause” (using the Aristotelian term) that cannot be reduced to its instrumental functions.

Of course, it is true that human is an animal. But the human’s animal nature does not exhaust and does not cover the entire or even the most of the human phenomenon. The continuity does not define the human distinguishness – discontinuity does.

In contrast to yours, my ontological commitment (my ontological project) is to investigate the distinct human nature that is discontinuous from the physical, chemical, organic, biological world. I’m interested how humans transcend the given of the natural, social, and cultural. I’m interested in how humans transcend the conditions, in which they are thrown by the nature, by the society, and by the culture and in which they have found themselves. I’m interested in what they humans do with their conditions: do not only intellectually and axiologically but also ethically, through their postupoks (deeds) and responsibility. I’m interested in how humans humanize, thus, dialogize the conditions they found themselves.

Finally, you wrote, “Matosov argued that for a teacher to force children to learn Maths when they do not want to learn Maths is wrong. This is not respecting their agency. People do enjoy Maths, of course, but it does not seem as natural for most children as enjoying making music. It more often seems like a culturally mediated pleasure that people have to be taught first and might learn to enjoy later. In response to this challenge I tried to argue that the issue is not just about the agency of the children but also about the agency of the Maths. Maths is a long-term dialogue bigger than any individual that wants to survive and that can only survive by recruiting individuals.”

Of course, people can learn and do learn many things despite their will. This is unavoidable and in many cases very desirable (e.g., learning native language). However, I do not consider that Education. For me, education is a leisurely (not survival!) endeavor of critical examination of the life, self, society, and the world, including education itself. It is a primary deconstructive and not constructive practice (construction happens as a by-product of this deconstruction and is always temporary). I’m talking here about the autonomous sphere of education, not its instrumental one, common in conventional and some innovative schooling. The Greek word “school” means leisure and school institution must return to its origin.

Yes, Education as I see it cannot be forced on people. But even more, I think one of the historical human projects is to humanize the human existence and life by respecting human agency as much as possible and by promoting human leisure and dialogic self-actualization. However, I am aware that we, the humankind, is far-far-far away for more or less full realization of th

Rupert W

14/8/2016 12:23:54 pm

Thanks again Eugene for this response. I do value your willingness to challenge my ideas - I have found it stimulating! I replied to some of your points below in partial response to Rupert Higham. I am talking about discontinuity within continuity - like a folding back upon itself of nature that reflects back upon nature while remaining part of nature. But I want to add a concern about your definition of education. I think it too radical. For most people most of the time some sort of transmission of the culture of the past has to be part of what education does.

The contrast indoctrination/education or training/education or transmision/deconstruction can be too binary.

Let us take an example. I am interested in learning about quantum theory (see next blog). If I were to sign up to a course with a tutor I would expect to be taught and knowledge to be transfered. Yoiu might say - well I want to learn about quantum theory so that is not forced on you. OK but let us say that in order for me to learn about QT I need to learn maths in a way that involves exercises that I do not want to do. The thing is I might think I know what I need to learn but I do not - the teacher knows better. I might think I do not need the maths of imaginary numbers to understand QT but he might know that I do and insist that I learn this.

Children are often in a similar position. I did not think I needed to learn about Blake and the romantic poets at school but the curriculum said that I did so I was forced to learn it - and it turned out that they were right!

What you describe as education I would see as a small, if important, part of education.

Rupert

8/8/2016 05:27:02 pm

Thanks for this interesting response Eugene. I can see your point. I will think about it!
I too was struck by the problem off the apparent aim at survival of processes. To respond to this I would look in the direction of Spinoza. We do not combat 'lower' desires - we integrate them in higher desires. There are bigger survival loops. I mentioned the long-term dialogues of culture. For Spinoza these are embedded within an even larger loop through which the universe (Deus sive natura) comes to know and to love itself through us. Perhaps the humanising of nature is the naturalising of the human.
The whole by the way is not here an organic whole but more an kind of potential for everything - a background and context within which cuts are made and worlds formed - like the concept of Tao

Eugene Matusov

8/8/2016 08:06:34 pm

Thanks, Rupert, for very good leads. At some time, I want to find time to write critique of Spinoza. Recently I was invited to write for Spinoza but when they learned about my critique they back off their offer. :-)

Also, please excuse my (and my computer!) typo: it should say, "2) You seem to argue that survival is the MOTHER of all innovations and, thus, the agency;".

I'm looking forward for your reply, Eugene

Rupert Higham

13/8/2016 07:21:58 am

Thanks for this, Rupert - and to you, Eugene, for an interesting debate. It's interesting that this blog started with Leonard Cohen, whose sexual desire drove him to songwriting and poetry... and also to taking his vows as an abstaining Buddhist monk (who continued to write erotic poetry and lapse occasionally in his nearby Land Rover). His work has been hailed as some of the most profound reflection on longing, both physical and spiritual, of modern times. His would seem to be a prima facie case of a biological urge being harnessed and dialogically mediated through conversation both with the wider culture and (in whatever way he experienced it) with the divine. So, he was both being driven and transcending, and reflecting on the relationship between these two processes in poetry at the same time.

Rupert

13/8/2016 12:21:44 pm

I used Leonard Cohen as an example precisely because he can be so wise. Phrases from his songs have stayed with me. 'there is a crack in everything - thats where the light gets in' is one and another is 'love is the only engine of survival'. He is a good example of how the self is a dialogue of mutliple voices sometimes in harmony but more often competing. To have a single coherent 'responsible' self is a constant struggle - well for me anyway!

But the value of having cracks - of not being coherent - is the possibility of participating in other - higher level - flows and dialogues. After all that is where the light gets in.

My response to Eugene is that I meant to describe discontinuity as well as continuity between human and nature. Biological life is a turning back or fold of natural individuation processes such that these become internal within a body and are continuous. Cultural life - and the individuated human self is not biological but essentially cultural - a dialogue in dialogue with other dialogues - is a further folding or turning back of biology to be able to reflect upon itself in a continuous process of trans-individuation or cultural life which is as much carried by tech as by dialogues with 'other people'. But there are continuities - there is also life and learning in natural processes - stochastic evolutionary processes for example. I do not think we can transcende these processes - I think we work with them and co-evolve in dialogic relationship with them.

Selfness is embodied all the way down and all the way up. Try touching your left arm with your right hand - experience the touching- experience the being touched. Both are mini-selves of the one self. Try closing your eyes and using a stick to explore the environemnt around you. Now hold p the stick. It was subject - part of 'me' - now it is 'object'. What is me and what is not me depends on the cut we make in observation. I love the picture of earthrise from space. I do not recall who took it or what camera they used - I think we went up there and looked back and that 'we' includes all the tech involved. It is all me - all part of my larger body.

Meaning seems to come to me from outside - from larger systems. The same as hunger or sex drive - it is not really me who desires - an anonymous desire takes possession of me - I become me only when I own this desire. In the same way love - 'the only engine of survival' - grabs me from outside. In loving the world I participate in a larger flow of meaning that is both quintessentially human and humanising yet is bigger than me or than culture.

Meaning - like sex and hunger - does not arrive fully formed but is shaped in a kind of dialogue with culture and with my own inner dialogue. Co-constructed one might say. For me the dialogic stance is being open to that meaning and that co-construction.

Dialogue with nature is not dehumanising but takes us beyond the human.

I am sure that Leonard realised that sometimes - but not all the time! Like the humblest atom or sub-atomic particle he was not one thing but a whole host of things - a whole host of voices participating way beyond his apparent physical boundaries with everything - 'everywhere and forever by virtue of being here and now' Maurice Merleau-Ponty