Economics and the Educational Imagination

[Previous posts: I. Economics and the Vocational Imagination; II. Economics and the Political Imagination]

The etymlogy of education (educere) describes education as a form of “drawing out.” The history of pedagogy reveals a dramatic shift in how this drawing-out happens. While schooling has existed in many different forms throughout human history, the past two centuries reveal a vastly different vision of schooling: compulsory schooling.

This is a complicated evolution that has beautiful and ugly aspects. Nonetheless, what is remarkable about the rise of modern schools is how they have monpolized the educational imagination—the imaginary of the “how” and “what” to draw-out of the human person. This educational imaginary, in turn, has itself become captured by macro and micro economics.

In its macro form, schooling has become a tool of nation-states to promote self-interest. Among these self-interests, economic self-interest prevails. This is why we emphasize particualr subjects (like reading, math, and science) at the national level, why we have a curriculum of the head with very little left for the heart—and nothing for the soul.

In its micro form, schooling has become a pathway to responsible jobs that offer purely economic goods. In fact, many of these jobs are toxic for persons, but their pay-grade makes them even more desirable than others that might enrich a person’s life and the lives of others.

The very idea of “learning” as an end of pedagogy ignores the person who is constituted by the knowledge selected for the curriculum.  That is to say this: education has lost its form as a way of becoming and has given way to a way of merely getting informed, all for the sake of getting access to money and capital.

Here, again, we see the inversion of values that has disfigured our “life-ways” into “money-ways.” Economics drives the engine of modern-day schooling and, since so few recognize the difference between schooling and education, has also captured the near-total imagination of educational possibility, the possibility of what education might be in the first place.

Need a good example? Consider this: Nowadays, teacher-education—the entryway to aquiring certification to teach in a public school—has progressively removed the need for teachers to major in their field of expertise and consists of teaching “methods” for instruction with no attention to the meaning and history of education or schooling. Here is an even better one: It has become “common sense” that you get an education by going to school; and you go to school to get something—and that “something” is a career.

By the way: Middlesex University has recently closed its philosophy department.