In some sense, the debate initiated by Kant [with regards to education] has continued ever since. Johann Friedrich Herbart's reformulation of the issue, outlining that philosophy should give us the aims, and psychology the means, to achieve them, reconceived the place of empirical facts, but left the over-all design almost untouched. It will become radicalized in the positivistic blend where a science of education is seen as only able to deal with the means in relation to achieving certain ends, not with the ends themselves. Such an empirical approach, which finds itself within the idea that we can control reality, is strikingly argued for by Wolfgang Brezinka in his Von der Padagogik zur Erziehungswissenschaft [From Educational Theory to the Science of Education] published in 1972. In this kind of positivism, educational science is defined as that approach in which one looks for general laws and thus tries to explain, predict, and use technology. Hypotheses are seen as only temporarily valid and are carried by intersubjective repeated observations. He accepts that it is not possible to discover "real" laws, that one has to content oneself with statistical regularities; but value judgments can never be scientific, as they involve, in his opinion, subjective decisions. His idea of education is well known: the educator exerts influence on the child with the aim for him to achieve certain mental dispositions. The main problem for an educational science is therefore to work out which conditions have to be fulfilled in order to reach particular aims. It is therefore a teleological, statistical (or casual), analytically-oriented science. Brezinka's idea about education is the paradigmatic way in which activities in the context of education and child-rearing are conceived. Indeed, teacher as well as parent often infer their successfulness from the effect of their investigations, and so does society in its preoccupation with output, performativity, and effectiveness, and thus do educational sciences in general as well.

Though the Kantian rationalist presuppositions would soon have to be given up, the development of the natural sciences, and of social sciences mimicking the methods of the natural sciences, will radicalize the distinction between the a priori and the a posteriori on the one hand and between facts and values on the other. Among other reasons, this too contributed to the emergence of a wider crisis of rationality. The question of whether reason, and reason alone, can decide what should be done, and if, moreover, rational thinking is even possible at all, are at the heart of the matter. This can be made clear particularly with the use of two key ideas: performativity and nihilism. The quest for efficient solutions to problems is characteristic of modernity[...]. Under performativity, deliberation over ends is eclipsed and all kinds of business and activity are measured and ranked against each other, with ever less concern for the rationale for doing so. Thus performativity obscures differences, requiring everything to be commensurable with everything else, so that things can be ranked on the same scale and everyone can be "accountable" against the same standards. This in turn entails the devaluing, and perhaps the eradication, of what cannot be ranked[...]. Education nowadays is characterized by a [...] nihilism, by a lack of commitment which we conceal with the reduction of complex educational aims and purposes and with this a positive refusal to devote real thought to questions of the aims and purposes of education. The only sure value of education lies in the maintenance and extension of the system itself, in "efficiency" and "effectiveness," the service of government in the quest for "what works" [...].

-- from "The Origin: Education, Philosophy, and a Work of Art" by Paul Smeyer

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In more than one aspect, education is an Enlightenment notion. It is the result of the modern idea that man and society to some extend can be "made"[...]. For Kant education was seen as the "means" to become human, for example, rational; the person is nothing but what education makes him. This was itself a reaction to an earlier period, characterized by the inculcation of values, the uncritical learning of facts or bodies of information, and a concern with discipline understood as obedience to (persons in) authority. With the Enlightenment, rationality becomes the proper end of what a human being is. This does not result in a means-end reasoning: in becoming free from one's inclinations and passions, one realises one's true nature, for example, to put oneself under the guidance of reason. Because of his freedom, man is a task to himself: he has to realize himself at a rational level which implies the need for a morality. Man has to realize himself as a subject of practical reason, and he can do that in as far as he binds his acting to the law of his powers of judgment, for example, his rationality. As the ultimate aim is to become moral, education is shaped according to moral understanding. Thus, liberal education is concerned with the initiation of the learner into forms of thought and understanding which are part of the cultural heritage. In the German tradition, where at least initially this academic endeavor particularly flourished, the concept of education also encompasses child-rearing as well as more formal schooling.

The primary aim of the educational relationship between the adult and the child undergoing education is for the child to become an adult. The influence adults exert on children will bring them to the point where they can take up for themselves what is called a dignified life-project. Adults, supposedly being a representation, though certainly not the ultimate embodiment, of what is objectively good, are in a position to educate, since they themselves have already achieved adulthood. Responsibility for realizing one's life-project is dictated by reason. Adulthood shows itself by being in command of oneself, able to bind oneself to a law of one's choosing, to maintain steady relationships both morally and practically and not being reliant upon the judgments of others; to put this more positively, having personal access to objective standards of value and being able to place oneself under a higher moral authority. This will show itself in the adult's taking part in societal life in a constructive manner. The child, on the other hand, is helpless in a moral sense. He does not know what is good and therefore cannot take responsibility for his own actions. He cries out for guidance, and only if such guidance is offered, if adults (first the parents, and subsequently the teachers) make the necessary decisions in relation to the child, will he be able to reach adulthood. Central to this traditional concept of education is this intention on the part of the educator, and it is that which makes an activity educational. What the educator undertakes can only be justified as education in so far as it aims and contributes to adulthood and to the autonomy of the young person. The educator is, thus, responsible by proxy, and his relationship with the child is based on trust. This is no simplistic reasoning of a manipulative kind. The adult decides on behalf of the not-yet-rational child and in his best interests. By confronting the child with rationality in this way, the adult seeks to awaken the child's potentialities to become a rational human being. Such a view of the justification of parental authority belonged to the conception of a just, well-ordered society.

As indicated, the Enlightenment tradition is being concerned with the initiation of the learner into forms of thought and understanding which are part of a critical cultural heritage. Here, discipline is primarily an attuning of the mind to the inherent norms of these forms of understanding. The learner is initiated into forms of thought which are public but as yet beyond the child's understanding. In their strongest formulation these norms of rationality were thought to be stable and valid for all cultures. Such a view necessarily implies a transmission model of education and upbringing. The child may be conceived of as a passive recipient of rationality and culture or as recalcitrant material to be molded and inscribed. Alternatively, he must, like the barbarian outside the citadel, be lured in and skillfully initiated into the stock of worthwhile knowledge, sentiment, and inherently valuable activities and practices of civilized life.

-- from "The Origin: Education, Philosophy, and a Work of Art" by Paul Smeyer

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Normalizing education has many faces. At its best it is power realizing its responsibility for the efficient subjectification of the subject and its pleasures. Within the process of subjectification it produces the "I." In the course of its production, the "I" is constituted as a focus of selfhood in a manner that ensures the identification of the subject with the present order of things, reinforces its justifications, and makes possible the invisibility of the violence which construct and represent it as "reality." Normalizing education guarantees efficient orientation in the given order of things, perfects competence in its classification and representation, and allows communication and functional behavior, success, security, pleasure, and social progress. It distributes these competences, knowledge, and powers in a socially uneven manner, creating or reproducing social and cultural asymmetries and violences within the system. It not only permits human social life and its normalities, it even constitutes its telos. This success, however, has its price: it opens the gate to reflection, resistance, alternative orders, and unexpected new versions of normalization and standardization. Even in such situations, not solely in situations of stability, it must ensure the constitution of the normalized subject as a false not-yet-"I"; as an unproblematic product of the subjectification processes. As long as normalizing education is unchallenged, the human comes upon her relation to the Other, to the world, and to herself while imprisoned in the framework of never-fully-deciphered representation apparatuses. Even if unconsciously, she faces the full toll of the efficiency of the representation apparatuses in the form of "the given" limitations and possibilities. As existential, political, and theoretical "realities," these horizons actually manifest her very existence as a constant downfall. This is so since "reality" and her own self are constructed by the manipulations, traditions, structures, and powers that she can reflect on or challenge only through the ways, tools, and manner imposed on her by the very system whose logic and "vocabulary" are to be questioned, resisted, and overcome. Normalizing education does not "influence" or "limit" the self: it actually produces the "I" and the self-evidence of the self. In this respect, normalizing education produces the human subject as some-thing and prevents her from becoming some-one, a true subject. Normalizing in education achieves this by internalizing in the subject from "outside" the conceptual apparatus, the moral yardsticks and ideals, the consciousness, and the main actual possibilities for reflectivity and social behavior. It governs even the human possibilities for encountering the otherness of the Other and knowledge about knowledge. Even knowledge and evidence about the otherness of the "I" are fabricated by normalizing education. The annihilation of the subject's otherness is a bona fide manifestation that the human subject is more than the product of the powers that fabricate and control her, that reduce her to an object of care, education, salvation, and oppression. She is much more than what she was directed to become.

-- from "Heidegger, Transcendence, and the Possibility of Counter-Education," by Ilan Gur-Ze'ev

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The teacher's role in the pedagogic exchange is to represent the general equivalent, administering equivalences among the students, who participate in his [or her] unity by subsuming themselves under his [or her] generality. Before the teacher, there is formal equality within the collective of students. Instruction is thus modeled on exchange: to teach, the teacher disregards the differences and distinctions within the concrete student manifold and addresses [her or] himself to the faceless, abstract student that is [her or] his counterpart. Likewise, to learn, the student abandons the idiosyncratic expressions of his [or her] life for a generic way of thinking that raises him [or her] to the level of the teacher.

-- from "Heidegger on the Art of Teaching", excerpt from transcript of the Deposition of Professor Dr. Martin Heidegger, submitted before the Committee on De-Nazification, 1945.

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And of moose, speak no more the brawn,
the blunder, the old oaf-of-the-woods
with the glum dumb glare and oversized rack
galumphing through the swamp toward his supposed telos ---
to be fixed in final moositude above some fireplace.
Not that.
Write instead this delicate huge
reticulated hind leg lifted---sandhill crane
crossed with industrial crane---over the fallen
log, held there like a hieroglyph then,
knee and hip unlevering, slowly
lowered. All the while his head, five yards away,
browses the bottom:



adrift, paddle in the air:
nearby
among the reeds a she-moose
feeding:
droplets---this,
this, this, this---
ellipses
dripping into no-name lake.


-- from The Muskwa Assemblage, by Don McKay.

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