Unfinished Business: Education Without Necessity

Abstract

Education itself from time to time stands in need of therapy, as we noted in the Introduction. One current sign of this is that the various kinds of language that we use for talking and writing about teaching and education show signs of strain. In the UK for instance there is a technical language largely spawned by the National Curriculum for schools and all its works: Key Stage 3, benchmarking, value-added, baseline assessment — a mechanistic language which seems to long to be put into bullet-points. Higher education has been less affected than schooling, but there are ominous signs: the language of aims and learning outcomes that regimes of quality assurance have brought with them, and the very idea of quality as something that might be controlled as if a seminar were an item on a production line. Then there is the language of management: empowerment, ownership, accountability, targets going forward. The urge to control and to eliminate contingency seems central here, as we have noticed elsewhere (cp. Chapter 9), and the argot of ‘risk management’, a new discipline and a new career for the bureaucrats, has consequently evolved as if to ensure that nothing, not even chance, is left to chance.

You enter; they are waiting for you. You have nothing in particular, nothing set to say, which is the general condition of philosophical discourse. But here, in addition, you have no long- or short-range aim set by an institutional function… There you are, given over to indeterminate requirements.

Does this mean that each teacher in your department speaks of what he or she likes? — No, it means that no one is protected, and above all in his or her own eyes, by prescribed rules. And all must give their names to what they say, without pleading necessity; and all, like stutterers, must head toward what they want in order to say it.

(Jean-François Lyotard, 1993, pp. 70, 71)