In my last blog-post I described how Michael Gove, the previous conservative education minister in the UK, has contributed to the educational debate by bringing in the voice of Michael Oakeshott. I reproduce below a famous extract where Oakeshott puts forward the idea of education as participation in the 'conversation of mankind'. I have highlighted a few points that I think that Michael Gove and other supporters of what they call 'traditional' education might find surprising, scepticism towards the idea that there are 'facts', rejection of hierarchy, rejection of the idea of any fixed canon, and affirming the need for a diversity of voices. For Oakeshott education is not the transmission of facts - it is drawing students into open-ended and on-going dialogue.
“In conversation, ‘facts’ appear only to be resolved once more into the possibilities from which they were made; ‘certainties’ are shown to be combustible, not by being brought in contact with other ‘certainties’ or with doubts, but by being kindled by the presence of ideas of another order; approximations are revealed between notions normally remote from one another. Thoughts of different species take wing and play round one another, responding to each other’s movements and provoking one another to fresh exertions. Nobody asks where they have come from or on what authority they are present; nobody cares what will become of them when they have played their part. There is no symposiarch or arbiter, not even a doorkeeper to examine credentials. Every entrant is taken at its face-value and everything is permitted which can get itself accepted into the flow of speculation. And voices which speak in conversation do not compose a hierarchy. Conversation is not an enterprise designed to yield an extrinsic profit, a contest where a winner gets a prize, not is it an activity of exegesis; it is an unrehearsed intellectual adventure. It is with conversation as with gambling, its significance lies neither in winning nor in losing, but in wagering. Properly speaking, it is impossible in the absence of a diversity of voices: in it different universes of discourse meet, acknowledge each other and enjoy an oblique relationship which neither requires nor forecasts their being assimilated to one another.
This, I believe, is the appropriate image of human intercourse, appropriate because it recognizes the qualities, the diversities, and the proper relationships of human utterances. As civilized human beings, we are the inheritors, neither of an inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation, begun in the primeval forests and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries. It is a conversation which goes on both in public and within each of ourselves." Oakeshott., M. (1959) The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind. London: Bowes and Bowes.
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